Punk and grind are hyped up music and it takes a lot to keep the adrenaline flowing to blast a beat and keep a mosh pit turning. It's something of an open secret that many of your favorite bands lean on the chemical crutch to keep them amped album after album and show after show. Despite Nancy Reagan's best efforts, drugs are just a part of the lifestyle. I'm referring, of course, to that black bitch, coffee.
Is it really any surprise that Hank Rollins would extol the virtues of the caffeinated life, especially when you realize that excessive coffee consumption is linked to aggression and irritability? Nobody was more aggressive or more irritable than Black Flag and they delivered many of their finest tirades with coffee cup in hand. And they take it black. None of that sugar or cream bullshit. Come to think of it, that's pretty much how they delivered their screeds: no sweeteners. The Young and the Restless
It's never too early to start a lifelong addiction and the smart ass punks Descendants were the '80s' best ambassadors of the caffeinated lifestyle. They advocate kids taking up the cause early and often. The Descendants' motto was "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll minus the sex and drugs." Fortunately for us, caffeine slipped past their definition of drugs somehow because they have multiple excellent songs singing the joys of coffee. Thanks to modern chemistry, sleep is now optional. Kickass punk rock is mandatory.
Friends Without Benefits
Mocking coffee house culture during the mid-90s peak of Friends' inexplicable popularity is not exactly stretching your satiric muscles, but Operation: Cliff Clavin, who piggybacked on Propagandhi's wave of political skatecore, would like to express their displeasure with the ubiquity of pretentious assholes lounging around their favorite espresso bar with poetry in hand while trying to out-cool each other. Operation: Cliff Clavin were hating on hipsters before it was popular.
Playing Favorites
Sete Star Sept want you to know that this is how we sound when we don't get our vital caffeine. So fill the fucking cup, shut the fuck up, and the back the fuck away slowly.
Have you ever had this experience? You're rocking out to a killer punk song and then you start to catch the lyrics and you shudder because they're full of the most ignorant garbage imaginable. Suddenly, what was once a great musical moment becomes tainted. My first experience with punk was finding a group of open minded people who were inclusive and cool. That's colored my expectation of what punk should be my whole life. So it disturbs me when otherwise intelligent bands writing songs that seem primed to insult large chunks of their audience. I've mentioned before I'm the kind of person who has a hard time separating my music and my politics, especially when the lyrics are insulting large chunks of your audience. I have a really hard time getting back into a song once the ignorant lyrics come to light. Here's what happens when three respected bands lose their fucking minds for a minute.
Slip Up
What makes this doubly frustrating is, from a musical standpoint, "Slip it In" is a fucking great song. Black Flag never sounded better than they did on the album Slip it In and the title track is one of the best of an overwhelmingly strong lot of songs (minus "Rat's Eyes" ewww). The band was tight and taking stolid, stale punk into new and incredibly exciting places. However, it starts with one of the most ignorant songs ever penned by a revered punk band with "Slip it In." Black Flag is better than this. The sexual politics of this one are particularly noxious. Just because she says she "don't want it," that doesn't mean you can't fuck her any way, amirite guys? Even though the young lady in question tells us she "kinda [has] a boyfriend" and Hank opines she's "had too much to drink," he still fucks her. Ladies and gentlemen, that's called rape. And even though our narrator is whining and cajoling the girl to have sex with him, he still accuses her of being "loose" and a "whore." The rancid cherry on top of the shit sundae is the pathetically sexualized video that trades in just about every obnoxious jailbait stereotype you can name. If it's meant to be satire, it's failing spectacularly. And I can already here the excuses: blah blah blah Kira Roessler played bass (and she kicked ass) blah blah blah a woman helped sing the song blah blah blah they tackled the obnoxiousness of the aggressive male libido next album with "Loose Nut." Doesn't change anything for me. It still comes off as obnoxious slut shaming and Black Flag should be better than that. Mount up? More like fuck off.
White Whine
As far as I'm concerned, those preachy, self righteous fucks in Minor Threat have exactly one good song and that's "Filler." Maybe they would have had more if they hadn't spent the otherwise rocking "Guilty of Being White" spewing self-pitying whiny garbage. Oh noes! A minority was unjustifiably mean to me. My hurt feelings are just as bad as 500 years of slavery and systematic cultural oppression. Oh wait, no they're not. I got news for you, cupcake, some members of minority groups can be assholes. That's not because they're minorities. It's because they're assholes. That doesn't excuse them being a dick, but, dude, let it fucking go. So even if some random black person tried to make you feel bad for being white and unfairly accused you of being complicit in slavery, their assholism doesn't mean to you doesn't mean you get to run around shouting "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" Because, at the end of the day, you're still going through life on the lowest difficulty setting. To be honest, I've never been quite fucking sure what exactly Black Flag was trying to get at with "White Minority," even after hours staring at the lyric sheet. If it's satire, it's not coming through and let's all agree that any song that screams "white pride" during the chorus without any palpable sense of sarcasm or irony is open to bad interpretations.
Blow Me Down
Speaking of minorities who stand convicted of assholism: Bad Brains seemed to have scrubbed all the videos of the infamous "Don't Blow No Bubbles" from the internet, so take a moment, if you will, to peruse frontman H.R.'s less than enlightened thoughts on the '80s AIDS crisis and homosexuality. Let's just say he briefly lost his PMA.
Don't blow no bubbles Don't blow no troubles
In time before there was no cure Now through his will it's healed for sure (TRASH PITS, TRASH PITS, TRASH PITS) Away! It's not the weather, we've got P.M.A.
We know you can do anything And no thought withheld from thee So here I beseech thee To always request and declare
Don't blow no bubbles Don't blow no troubles There's got to be a better way Don't blow no spikes Ask Jah and he'll make the change
We know you can do anything And no thought withheld from thee So here I beseech thee To always request and declare
We know you can do anything And no thought withheld from thee So here I beseech thee To always request and declare
Don't blow no bubbles (and we can stop the AIDS) Don't blow no spikes Don't blow no fudge buns Ask Jah and he'll make the change
We know you can do anything And no thought withheld from thee So here I and I said to thee To always request and declare
As you can imagine, that didn't go over so well with gay-positive contemporaries like MDC, the Big Boys and the Dicks and caused a huge rift between those bands. It's a real shame because, like "Slip It In," it's, musically, a very interesting song. With the album Quickness the Bad Brains were getting more metallic and experimental. They were taking their hardcore into new and more adept directions. Basically, everything Living Colour got praised for the Bad Brains did better. It's just a shame they wedded that open minded musicality to some of the most bigoted ignorance spewed this side of a Nazi skins show. However, the band has grown since then and bassist Darryl Jennifer copped to his bigotry and apologized in a recent interview [thanks, Bill, for the heads up on this one]: " You’ve got to understand that I’m a young man growing, getting into something. Now I’m 46 years old and I’ve learned that that’s ignorant. I’ve learned through the years that we’re all God’s children, regardless of your race, creed, color, sexuality, any of that."
I guess I was never what you could call a very orthodox punk. There were plenty of bands that were considered canonical that I just never could get into. Cases in point: though many would have dubbed me straight edge throughout high school and college, I despise Minor Threat (though “Filler” is a damn fine exception) and think Ian MacKaye is a self righteous prick. I also hate the Misfits and take an immediate loathing to the kind of toothless meatheads you see in pretty much every mall Hot Topic sporting that goofy skull logo. Likewise, Black Flag was a band I struggled with for many years. A lot of it is because the whole Henry Rollins persona irritates the shit outta me for reasons I can’t quite articulate. I eventually made my peace with Black Flag much later in life, backing my way into the band through the music of those they influenced. But I still thank Damaged is painfully overrated, particularly in light of Greg Ginn’s later masterworks. Ginn is simply the greatest punk to ever sorta tune a guitar and it was hearing his atonal template trickle down through the next few generations that brought me back around to the original. Here are three bands that radically altered by thinking about Black Flag.
Sick of it All If anybody can claim Rollins’ caterwaul/catharsis crown, it would be hardcore stalwart Tim Singer. Dude had a band called Family Man, f’fuckssakes, but most of you probably know him as the guy popping forehead veins in Deadguy. Now I loved Deadguy just as much as the next 'banger, but, for me, Kiss it Goodbye was always the most interesting and cathartic of Singer’s bands. And if I’m going to reach for one song by Singer, it’s going to be the titanic drone of “Sick Day,” which has helped me come to appreciate the B-side of My War more as I get older. In fact, I doubt this amazing song would even exist without that polarizing Black Flag album and the sepulchral misery of “Nothing Left Inside.” It defied the “play faster” ethos of the era by daring to get down with the doom. Hell, this was an era when Saint Vitus and Black Flag shared a label, something that still astounds 20 years later.
Fuck Yeah If any band in recent years has fully embraced Black Flag’s proposition that punk is a process and not a product, it would have to be Canadian audio provocateurs Fucked Up. With a swing like Class of ’77 Brit punk band, Fucked Up also channeled Black Flag’s unique blend of down and dirty punk and elevated aspirations from the transitional Slip it In and Loose Nut albums with a toe tapper like the scorching “The Black Hats.” It sends a shout out to that era when Black Flag was coming out of a crippling lawsuit that essentially sidelined their efforts but gave them the space they needed to nurture a sound that just couldn’t be contained by the strictures of what passed for punk at the time. A song like “Bastard in Love” still had one Doc Marten firmly planted in Los Angeles’ grimy underbelly, but Ginn and (sigh, yes, even) Rollins were beginning to grapple with the expanded possibilities of lyrical narrative and sonic dynamism.
Harmonic Convergence As I said, Black Flag’s more e/in-volved later albums are far more interesting to me than their early generic punk works, and nobody in hardcore has really pushed the songwriting aspect as much as Kurt Ballou and his co-conspirators in Converge. Converge’s quiet mastermind has fully embraced the notion of abrading traditional song structure with a scouring pad of atonal awesomeness filigreed with amazing single note runs that jolt me into immediate attention. In fact, it was songs like album of the decade contender Jane Doe’s opening “Concubine” that lead me back to late catalogue goodness like In My Head’s title track, which shames all of the Flag’s narrow minded three chord contemporaries for its shifting tempos, textures and trills.
Here’s a quick comp of the songs that lead me back to an appreciation of one of punk’s finest practitioners. Enjoy. Meanwhile, this is my list of other supposedly classic bands that don’t do shit for me. What classics can’t you stand?
The Beatles Black Sabbath without Ozzy Cannibal Corpse Death Deicide Dio The Exploited The Germs Judas Priest King Diamond Led Zeppelin Minor Threat Misfits Morbid Angel Ozzy’s solo material Pantera Venom
