Good Reads: A Man Chooses; a Slave Obeys

 The book: Sewer, Gas & Electric by Matt Ruff

Matt Ruff’s Public Works Trilogy is many things. It’s a screwball near-future sci-fi freakout about looney pacifist eco-warriors trying to preserve endangered species against the onslaught of unchecked industrialization. It’s the tale of a racist computer’s final solution. It’s the story of a vicious mutant land shark on the rampage through the sewers, streets and Cub Scout hiking trails of an unsuspecting city. It’s also the life story of a nigh-immortal Civil War veteran who just refuses to die. But most of all Sewer, Gas & Electric is a pretty brutal takedown of Ayn Rand, who appears as a holographic head in a hurricane lamp. With Objectivism currently enjoying an undeserved renaissance among political leaders who should probably know better, it’s as good a time as any for Rand’s flawed thinking, sloppy suppositions and blatant hypocrisy to get a well deserved literary smack down as thinly veiled avatars of Rand’s own creations skewer her philosophy by injecting sloppy, random humanity into her clear cut worldview.  Mercifully, there are no 60 page speeches to slog through.

A representative passage:
“Jesus,” Joan said, as John Galt gave the novel’s closing benediction and traced a dollar sign in the space above the desolate earth. She laughed, and shut the book, and spent a moment studying the portrait on the back cover. “Who is this woman?”
“Well?” said Archie. “How was it?”
[…]
“Pinch me if I missed a punchline somewhere,” Joan said, “but this book is not intended as a spoof, correct? It’s not an incredibly understated parody?”
Archie shook his head.  “Rand’s an ex-Russki, pre-glasnost, and they don’t kid much. They’re not much into understatement, either. … When she says, ’And I mean it’ in the afterword, you can bet money she means it.”
“Jesus …so it really is then…”
“Really is what?”
“The anti-Communist Manifesto,” Joan said. “Das Kapital for capitalists, with chase scenes and heavy petting…”

The album: Withering Strands of Hope by Benumb

 

For all of grind's political sloganeering about the mechanisms of power being turned on the poor and the disenfranchised, nobody zeroed in on the economic concerns of the working class better than Benumb. Like some lame political functionary once said, "It's the economy, stupid." The California grind-violence collective had a financial reporter’s eye for the way the changing 21st Century economy was filling Wal-Mart’s shelves with cheap crap to buy at the expense of American jobs being shipped out to third world shitholes where impoverished populations would work for pennies on the dollar without the protection of labor laws or workers’ unions. Since the Clinton administration, free trade has meant many blue collar middle class families were free to watch their jobs get traded to Asia and South America. Benumb gave voice to their angst.

A representative song: “WTO: Disintegration of the Working Class”



Workers of the world unite!

It's the Economy, Stupid

Separated at birth?

Political maestro James Carville shepherded Bill Clinton to two terms of balanced budgets and relative world peace with his simple insight that in a post-Cold War world it was the economy that would be the electorate's overriding concern. Just to make sure campaign staffers stayed on message, Carville posted a note on the office wall: "It's the economy, stupid."

Tapping in to its punk and hardcore roots, grindcore is preoccupied by social and political topics. While it does its best to spit bile in the direction of religion, politics and other easily identifiable villains, grindcore does not do a good job of addressing thornier, more complicated issues like the economy. Granted, there's only so much you can say in 75 seconds, but it's a topic -- especially in the depth of the worst global downturn since the Great depression -- that's ripe for some angry discussion.
Here are four artists who keep their mind on their money and their money on their mind.

Tools of the (Free) Trade

No other band has ever been as attuned to the economic unease of modern blue collar workers as Benumb. Where other grind bands were content to choke out vague denunciations of The System and how it needs to be Taken Down, Benumb penned factory floor ditties about offshored jobs, disappointing unions and lives spent paycheck to paycheck with none of Bruce Springsteen's bullshit romanticism. One of the best examples is Withering Strands of Hope's "WTO: Disintergration of the Working Class," which detailed the aftershocks of the Clinton administration's obsession with international free trade deals. The treaties that ultimately tied the world together more tightly economically came at the expense of blue collar wage earners.



Exhume to Consume

Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of chatting up Kill the Client's Champ Morgan will tell you that dude is not shy about sharing his libertarian outlook on life. The guy's caustic outlook on life is perfect for a "pox on both their houses" approach to America's useless, bifurcated political landscape. And like every true Ron Paualite I've ever met, Morgan is also attuned to the modern economic landscape. Cleptocracy's "Consumption is Intoxication" could have been just another "buying shit is evil" song. What elevates the tune is that Morgan zeros in on the debt and funding mechanisms that make our consumption-driven existence possible. It's that extra perceptive step that makes Kill the Client such a force.



Occupy Everywhere

Matthew Widener's impending revolution will begin at the banks. The rabble rousing Liberteer ringleader can be found philosophically camped outside of Wall Street's rapacious halls. The avowed 99 Percenter has been pretty clear about his social/economic philosophy. So it's no surprise that a song like "Usurious Epitaph" takes on the economic chains that bind us. That loan you took out to get ahead in life ultimately only holds you back, Liberteer says. A lifetime of scrimping and saving and living paycheck to credit card only to be wiped out in a catastrophic economic collapse would make even the most mild mannered middle class consumer into a frothing Marxist revolutionary.



Candy Land

Harry McClintock's "Big Rock Candy Mountain" may just sound like a goofy Candy Land tune about a pancreas-crushing paradise of diabetic delights. But if you pay closer attention to the lyrics and put the song into its proper context, suddenly it becomes a snapshot of the economic instability that led up to the Great Depression. In the hands of The Oily Menace, the song also takes on a fierce new urgency, getting a 21st Century update for a new era of bankruptcy, both moral and monetary.

A Blogaversary and a Bedtime Story

Happy blogaversary to me.

So one year and about a dozen thoughts of quitting later, it’s time to pull aside the curtain and reveal G&P’s s33kr1t, mystical origins. Gather ‘round, kiddies, Uncle Andrew’s gonna tell you a story.
Oddly enough it all starts with my brother, who, despite his H.I.M. tattoo fetish, really ain’t that that bad of a guy. Usually. The thing is, dude, a single father of two, is currently serving his third rotation in the Middle East as we speak (two tours spent in Qatar, the first in Baghdad). Briefly excusing his horrifically bad musical taste (again, H.I.M. tats), while he’s been gone we’ve actually bonded had some fairly interesting convos re: music, insanely violent Asian action films and, natch, the war, which tends to generate some all around mixed feelings in everyone involved.
But what has all this to do with blogging, you ask, impatient as I waste both pixels and your time navel gazing. Like I said, mixed feelings about the war. While I’m a little to the left of Kropotkin, myself, I do tend to find it annoying that my beloved punk and metal tend to be a tad lazy in addressing the complexities of political life in the 21st Century. Instead we’re usually left with stale ’80s sloganeering and lazy, reflexive attacks on the usual suspects: generic politicians, generic bankers, generic businesses and theo old standby, the military, usually with no appreciation for subtly, nuance or just generally taking more than 10 minutes to pen an original thought to anchor generic grind song about how the system sucks No. 12,342,479,987,498,374.
So, knowing there were a couple of guys who actually had combat experience working the grind scene, I hit them up for interviews, thinking I could just shop the story to some webzine for $30 and call it a day. And while just about everyone I approached graciously agreed to do interviews with some no name guy in D.C. without a magazine or even a lousy Blogspot account to his name. Writing the story was a snap; that’s what I do for a living. But after a few months of absolute fucking silence on behalf of every zine editor and web site manager I approached, I got pissed and the blog was born. I had a story I believed in, just nowhere to get it out. So after dashing off a regrettably lame blog name (I’m a huge Dostoyevsky devotee but Notes from Underground was already taken), voila, G&P became unnecessary music blog No. 34,329,238 to grace the intertubes.
Here I am a year later, and once again my brother is working 12 hour shifts six days a week in the desert, facing the possibility of being stop lossed, missing my upcoming wedding, missing Christmas with his kids, possibly missing his son’s fifth birthday, leaving my parents – who should be planning for retirement but instead have been potty training yet again – to watch one of his kids for him.
Given America will be hitting the polls in about two weeks and the frenzy of the final days of election ’08 is all but guaranteed to suck any substance out of our political discourse, I wanted to revisit what metalheads who have served on the front lines in Middle East wars current and past actually had to say about war, music and making the two mix.

I hope to hell I have no reason to post it again next year. Meanwhile, Mr. I-Know-How-to-Win-Wars-But-I-Won’t-Tell-You-How, go fuck yourself.

Next on the Agenda: Pete Benumb Back with New Band

When last we heard from Pete Pontikoff, he regaled us with tales of his time in Iraq, but on the musical front, the mighty Benumb had called it a day and his latest outing, Agenda of Swine, had yet to find a label home.
Fast forward about six months and Agenda of Swine are about to drop their debut album for Relapse, home to Pontikoff’s last collective of musical miscreants.
“Agenda signed to Relapse! Major sweat off my brow,” Pontikoff said when we checked in. “We just finished recording and submitted additional tracks to Relapse to add to what we already have to make a full length. Title will be Waves of Human Suffering.” The lone, self titled track on the band’s MySpace page is a longer, thrashier outing than you might expect from the participants’ past work. Clearly, these guys are not content to rehash the past and are crafting a new identity for the new project.
“As far as Benumb/VP 2.0 [Vulgar Pigeons, the band started by Pontikoff’s bro, Paul, and Benumb/Swine drummer John Gotelli], yeah, we might have a little similarity (same members thing), but there’s far more time put into this were looking at twelve songs over the last two years. We really didn’t rush and tried to weed out the stuff that was too VP/Benumb. Still fast.”
How about Pontikoff’s contribution, when last he graced us with a full length, 2004’s By Means of Upheaval, he had swapped out his roar for more of a hardcore style bark, one that unfortunately, could stray into the monotonous if you weren’t mentally prepped for it.
“Vocally, I leaned more on Jeff [Lenarmond, guitarist] to show me how to do new stuff, might not be new to the world but new to me. I really tried to just to make the vocals good with the help of those around me lets make no mistake. No don’t worry no more Upheaval. If it sounds anything like Upheaval to you, I will quit.”
(Lately, I’ve been spinning it and loving it, so go figure.)
Given they are clearly moving forward musically, how should we address Mr. Pontikoff, who worked under the nom de grind Pete Benumb for the better part of the last decade.”
“Pete 2.0 would be just fine lol! Just kidding. Pete Benumb is awesome.”

Metal Militia: Inside the World of Headbangers in Uniform

Behind the wheel of a giant rolling bomb in late 1990, a then 18-year-old Morgan, future vocalist for Texas grinders Kill the Client rolled across the Iraqi border as part of Operation Desert Storm to the sounds of Slayer.
“I was listening to Seasons in the Abyss when we crossed into Iraq,” he remembered, laughing.
Even driving a fuel tanker into a war zone was preferable to life in the small Texas Panhandle town that had driven a young Morgan to sign up for a stint in the Army.
“I had nothing else,” he said. “There’s nothing there unless you’re a redneck or a jock. … There’s nothing wrong with the military, especially when you’re younger and got nothing. There’s nothing wrong with giving up four years to your country. At the very minimum it’s a job that’s very hard to get fired from,” he joked.
With the exception of the armchair ubermenschen massing their armies to crush Christendom, war -- and by extension the military-- has been on metal’s shit list since Ozzy wailed his way through “War Pigs” 40 years ago.
But three centuries after British gadfly Samuel Johnson dismissed patriotism as “the last refuge of the scoundrel,” even some of the most vocal critics of the political status quo felt the need to give back to their country in uniform.

Honor--Valor--Pride

Sgt.Pete Pontikoff had retirement on his mind when signed up for his final six year stint in the California National Guard in August 2001.
“I had reenlisted and all I’m going to do these last six years is smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and get extremely fat. These are my twilight years,” the Benumb/Agenda of Swine singer said.
A month later the World Trade Center was gone and the Pentagon had a gaping hole in its side. Instead of its scheduled training in sunny Hawaii, Pontikoff‘s unit was waiting for the inevitable call up to war.
In a transportation unit at the time, Pontikoff volunteered to join an infantry group for a deployment to Iraq in 2005, much to the dismay of bandmate and brother, Paul.
“I thought I was pretty adamant about (his military service) in interviews. Yeah, this is what I want to do,” he said. “But people were surprised.”
In its formative years metal, especially grind, cribbed its politics from anarchists and peace punks, and that skepticism of anything that involves the government and the military still permeates the scene.
Benumb’s friends list in the liner notes of their albums have given shout outs to some of the most vocal opponents of military aggression. Crusty fellow Californians Capitalist Casualties succinctly summed up their thoughts on the military industrial complex with “My Dad Kills for the USA.”
His retirement papers processed this summer, Pontikoff has no regrets about his 20 years in uniform, but his military background raises eyebrows in a California scene know more for protest than patriotism.
“What people don’t understand about Iraq is it’s a multifaceted issue,” he said. “It’s a mirror of America. Personas change from neighborhood to neighborhood. It’s just not a black and white issue.”
Pontikoff’s year in the desert was largely spent supervising local crews as they tried to rebuild the country’s shattered infrastructure, from playgrounds to plumbing. But he also did his share of patrols through Baghdad.
“For my own conscience, so I could look myself in the fucking face, I made sure I did some patrols and some checkpoint time,” he said.
But the self appointed scene police took issue with Pontikoff’s military service while fronting a band that‘s collective politics trend lefty.
“There were a lot of attacks on Relapse saying it was Republican propaganda because I didn’t read Chomsky,” he said. “… Nobody said anything to me directly. You get some glances from the trendy newcomer kids. To hell with them. I’m 39.”
While Benumb’s politics had dealt primarily with issues of economic justice, the band did do the obligatory “fuck war” songs on occasion, and Pontikoff is more then willing to cop to the purported hypocrisy of it.
“There’s a lot of people that gave him a lot of crap for being in the military,” Morgan said with disgust. “A lot of these people don’t know him from Adam. He’s a real person. He’s a real guy.”
Though he’s been discharged for a decade, self described political moderate Morgan still tries to uphold the oath he swore when he enlisted -- protecting the country from “all enemies foreign and domestic.”
Especially that part about enemies domestic.
“I’m a very patriotic person,” he said. “I love this country. I hate the government. People need to learn there’s a difference.”
Though he looks back with pride on his part liberating Kuwaitis from Saddam Hussein, the guy who belts out songs like “Killing Fields” and “Commander in Thief” has concerns about the current Middle East imbroglio.
“Now we’re protecting our oil interests and taking back the poppy fields from the Afghans,” he said.

War Ensemble
Four years on, the ubiquity of the war in Iraq is forcing some bands that have historically shied away from politics to address the ongoing conflict and the men and women on the frontlines.
With a cousin who served overseas, Demon Hunter frontman Ryan Clark and the his bandmates wanted to pay tribute to the men and women in uniform with “The Soldiers Song.”
“Essentially, we just wanted to give them something to pump them up and make it clear that they were appreciated,“ Clark said. “We thought, with all of the negative energy being projected over there by popular musicians, we would do something to counter attack that. Not as a political stance for our band, but more as an encouragement for the people who were doing a hard job on our behalf.”
The response to the tune from soldiers has been overwhelmingly positive. The Demon Hunter logo popped up in tattoos and painted on the sides of tanks in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“They’ve been very appreciative of what we do and we do our best to show that appreciation right back for their work,” Clark said.
The metalcore quintet is not the only one getting fan mail from the war zone.
“We get a load of e-mails off servicemen who have served in the Middle East, both British (and American) forces but mainly U.S.,” explained Bolt Thrower’s affable mouthpiece Karl Willets. “It is strange to hear the tales of them playing our music whilst out on patrol.”
After two decades spent replicating the sound of panzers on the move and meditating on the meaning of battle, no one in death metal can challenge the Coventry warmasters’ crown.
But the band has shied away from current events, preferring instead to address warfare from the perspective of history, fantasy and metaphor.
“We have tried to cover the issue of war from a participant observer perspective, not moralising on the good or bad of it,” Willets said. “We specifically kept away from the politics involved, although we where influenced by the political posturing of punk bands such as Crass, Antisect, Flux of Pink Indians, Discharge etc.”
Willets may have inherited the band’s lyrical themes from predecessor Alan West, but he quickly made them his own, adding his own perspective on the clash of armies.
“I toyed with doing some lyrics about global terrorism, but they got put to one side for the last album,” he said. “… My personal view on war is that it is the failure of political argument that often leads to conflict. It is a necessary evil. I am strongly opposed to any form of fundamentalism.”
While Bolt Thrower has toyed with addressing the Global War on Terror head on, others who have served, like Pontikoff, struggle with how or if to convey their experiences musically.
Serving his time in the relative comfort and security of Baghdad’s Green Zone, Pontikoff said it would be “almost kind of phony” to write about the war with his new project, Agenda of Swine.
“Saying ‘screw the war’ is really hypocritical. Everything I did was for the buddy next to me and a clear conscience,” he said.

Realities of War
“I think that the conceptualisation of modern warfare has changed somewhat from the traditional two armies (in different colored uniforms meeting on a battlefield),” Willets mused. “The last album (Those Once Loyal, Metal Blade, 2005) worked with some of these issues. For example, ‘The Killchain’ is about technological warfare and the digital battlefield.”
Rather than the soldiers in different colored coats of yore, the latter half of the 20th Century and the first seven years of the 21st have seen large chunks of the Western world mired in increasingly protracted conflicts where the enemy and the objective are increasingly murky.
Ideology has increasingly replaced nationality as the boogie man, and the semantic wars on the home front can be just as bloody as skirmishes on the front line.
Those on the home front have not been asked to sacrifice for the war effort, but each side is eager to score political points, shouting “Support our troops,” like a mantra.
“It means different things to different people. It’s like ‘Go Cowboys.’ It’s a gymnasium thing,” Morgan said philosophically. “There’s a lot (of soldiers) that believe in what they’re doing. There’s a lot who don’t want to be there.”
No matter how many or few yellow ribbon magnets adorn the back of your car, Americans seemed to have learned some lessons in the past 30 years.
“We got better treatment than the Vietnam vets,” Pontikoff said. “I’m happy that people can be against the war and still support the troops. That’s all we ask. Any support’s good considering we’re not being spit on or called baby killers.”
If nothing else, Pontikoff and Morgan say their experiences and the current political climate are fertile breeding grounds of aggressive music.
“A Republican administration is always good for grindcore and punk rock. It gives us plenty to write about,” Morgan said with laughter.
But mulling the complexities of life in a war zone, even Democrat Pontikoff can even muster a level of sympathy for President Bush.
“In any team structure, if the coach doesn’t have the greatest people underneath him, he’s going to appear like a shitbag,” he said. “I know. I’m a Raiders fan.”
For good or ill, Pontikoff knows the war will be won and lost by the individual soldiers walking the streets of Fallujah and Baghdad.
“It’s the troops on the ground who are making the difference, and it can go both ways even with that,” Pontikoff said. “You’re also dealing with the baggage the last unit left you. How did the last unit treat people?”
But those kinds of lessons aren’t limited to war zones.
“Thinking things through, that’s where real citizens are made,” Morgan said. “People have to make a decision and stand up. The time for talking will be over. That’s when we’ll see who the real Americans are.”