[Listen] BAD RELIGION: Age of Unreason NEW ALBUM! not anymore oops

AS;OIFH; AIE I HAVE THOUGHTS.

Which, on the surface, is a statement indicating nothing more than that I have strong opinions on this album.

BUT if I were Bad Religion it would be a defiant assertion of my rationality in the face of this AGE OF UNREASON.

Badreligionageofunreasoncd

So this came out May 3, 2019, must have been at like midnight or something because I was up into the witching hour trying to finish a report of some kind and I’d been drifting between albums and artists and genres for the last TWO DAYS because I was in that awful limbo period where everything is BORING and I’d have killed a man to have something NEW but luckily it didn’t come to that because this popped up in my feed and I downloaded it instantly.

First impression on my fatigued brain: Meh. Sounded way too poppy, way too Green Day, way unlike their past efforts, and therefore awful because everyone knows that different = BAD. But that’s because it was 3 AM and I was hungry and exhausted and more importantly an IDIOT.

The second listen was a more positive experience. It struck a chord with me. I heard the disillusionment. I heard the dispossession. I heard the dis-in-fat-u-a-tion.

I also heard Chinese Democracy just before this album, whoops.

With Bad Religion being Bad Religion, and the whole album being called Age of Unreason, I guess it’s obvious (to Americans, anyway) that it’d be about American politics. See, with Bad Religion you never really have to guess what they’re singing about. Track 3, “Do the Paranoid Style”, has “American politics” in the lyrics of its chorus. They have an ode to one’s sanity, entitled “My Sanity”, featuring a short vignette in which the narrator is in a rocky relationship with his sanity, plagued by the homewrecker that is alternative facts. Cute, right?

But then they also have another song called “Lose Your Head” in case that wasn’t enough of an assurance to you that there’s some crazy shit going down in this country right now, and that you are perfectly sane for suspecting that . Honestly though, I do need to hear that. As many times as I can hear it.

So the lyrics are bold and brazen, as always. I can’t think of how better or more efficiently to support this than simply copying their lyrics here, so here are some of my favorites:

“Believers, dupes, and clowns, I want you all to gather ’round, to glorify ignorance and fear/I dispense misinformation to a post-truth generation. My darlings, don’t shed a tear/For I am your candidate” – from “Candidate”

“Just to think that not so long ago was a man who received the seal/He peddled blatant lies and brought back tyranny to divide his people with zeal” – from “Age of Unreason”

“Big cyber weapon, little traitor-in-chief/He’s got a big black dog on a leash” – from “Big Black Dog”

“Since when was it just a fallacy of tainted memory/(Since when?) To believe that things were really all right/Since when were the qualities of wisdom and knowledge/(Since when?) Equivalent to mere facts online?” – from “Since Now”

What’s also impressive (and was utterly overlooked by my sleep-deprived senses) was the spread of genres they managed to incorporate here. You’ve got the classic short-and-sweet speed-punk bangers like “Chaos from Within” and “Do the Paranoid Style”, some poppier melodic tunes like “Downfall” and “What Tomorrow Brings”, straight-up ballads like “Lose Your Head”, and whatever kind of swingy jam “Big Black Dog” is.

All wonderfully energetic, supplying their charged lyrics with the requisite momentum to penetrate the listener’s understanding. Their polysyllabic verbiage is never easy to catch on the first listen, but the urgency with which Greg Gaffin unloads them into your ears is enough to let you know that they’re Very Important.

Overall, cool album! Definitely topical, but I guess that’s only to be expected of a band like Bad Religion. What’s way more important is that it actually sounds good, and is one of my new favorites by the band. So there’s one good thing that the Trump presidency brought us.

ALSO they’re on tour in support of the album right now!! Yay! Go look it up here.

Oh, and don’t lose your head.

-Mans

[Listen] FUGAZI: “Never mind what’s been selling, it’s what you’re buying”

BETO O’ROURKE’S #1 FAVORITE BAND

Image result for fugazi

AND I LIKE THEM A LOT TOO, BUT IT’S NOT LIKE ANYONE HERE CARES FOR MY OPINION.

“Burning Too”, from 13 Songs (1989)

“Blueprint”, from Repeater (1990)

“Rend It”, from In on the Kill Taker (1993)

They know just where to prod you, how to jar you, capture your ear and hold it hostage. Their rhythm section is tight and relentlessly heavy-hitting, and their guitar never fucking sounds like one. And they’ve got not one but TWO singers that BOTH scream but one yells in tune sometimes. Besides their rhythm, though, what gets me is their lyrics. Each of these songs has brilliant lyrics, mostly centering around one’s inherent moral duties as a human being. As an artist. As a citizen of this planet.

As A mEmBeR oF sOcIeTy.

It’s not surprising, considering the lifestyle they lead and the community they support – being celebrated musicians that refused to sell merch or charge more than $5 for tickets, living simply, DIY-ing their shit. Not to get all utilitarian and anti-art and that, but it’s inspiring to have music that stands for something. That isn’t absolute shit.

It’s hard to write individual descriptions for each song, because even as a fan freshly infatuated by Fugazi’s ethics and philosophy and eardrum-busting jams, I have to admit that their songs all follow a similar format.

More like, they can be broken down into their constituent captivating parts, which of course doesn’t make them any less captivating. Also, I’m lazy.

So besides the head-jerking grooves and tear-jerking lyrics, each song’s got these one or two lines or phrases that repeat, like a chant, so that you, as a member of an audience at some show in 1998, can scream along to the very much active band performing very much live, very much in front of you.

Sigh.

But don’t despair, they’re just as addicting to sing along to these twenty years later, only you have to do it under your breath because you’re on the subway and there are decent folk about. Rhythmic body jerks are OK too, but don’t do it too much.

I said what I said.

-Mans

P. S. No, goddammit, I feel bad for saying what I said (guess I’ll rend it) about their songs all sounding the same. These three kinda do, but you know what THAT means.

Fugazi pt. 2 coming soon.

[Listen] FEARLESS IRANIANS FROM HELL: “Monkey in the White House”

Who the hell are these people and where did they go????????????????#$#@

Image result for fearless iranians from hell

All I could find was that they’re from Texas and that they’re Iranian and possibly fearless but don’t quote me on that.

They were and then they weren’t, all in the decade that starts with an 8. Except they bled into the 2000’s by accident, it would seem, when they released an EP called “Peace Through Power”, and it turned out to be a bunch of demos of old songs and ONE new one.

“Burn the Books”, from Holy War (1988)

“Special Delivery”, from Foolish Americans (1990)

“Die for Allah”, from Die for Allah (1987)

These Iranians really were fearless, in that they did the same thing the Kominas are doing now, except instead of playfully wagging a finger at Americans that don’t like that they’re all that Iranian or Hellish or whatever, they go all the way and condemn them as… well “ignorant” seems like the worst thing they say. They devoted a whole album to it! Their last one, Foolish Americans.

But they (implicitly) condemn other people too! Like Iranians. Overall, though, they just seem to hate war and death and how it (alongside fundamentalist Islam) has come to define certain areas in the East, in the eyes of the West. The best part is that all those lovely messages are conveyed exclusively in the form of hyperbolic satire, with lyrics featuring a whole lot of bloody war imagery and extremist rhetoric. I mean, they have a whole song called “A Martyr in Every Home”.

Wait wait no, let me try that again.

I mean, they have a whole album called Holy War. No wait no there’s an even better one.

I mean, they have a whole album called Die for Allah. Wait no no no wait.

I mean, they have a whole song called “Dogsperm”. Yeah, I think that says it best.

But even besides their lyrics, these guys are just really good at writing catchy riffs. There’s an average of like three per song. And they’re aggressive as shit! Shit’s aggressive! Aggressive shit! Angry poopies!

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmusic.

“Burn the Books” will come back to you in all these fragments that you think are from different songs but then when you listen again you’re like OH SHIT IT’S ALL IN HERE and pure aural ecstasy ensues. Its form is really interesting, where it starts slow and builds up to neck-breaking speed-chorus, predictably, but then it… cycles? Like Black Sabbath to Slayer and then back again. It was weird to listen to at first, but these guys pull it off really well. And it lets them cram like twelve distinct riffs and motifs into less than three and a half minutes. The weakest aspect for me, personally, is the lyrics, I think. Perhaps it’s just hard to hear what the guy’s saying, but I can’t quite tell what books we’re burning and who’s “the sore loser at the end of the line”. All that being said, “God gave up on you, so did I” still hits hard, despite its context-less-ness. Heh.

“Special Delivery” is just so ANGRY! Aw it’s SO angry! At America! Americans. “Another monkey in the White House because of you!” This is from 1990 though so they’re still going on about Bush. The FIRST one. It’s pretty easy to forget that, though. ‘Cause y’know. Trump, and that. Anyway, it starts out all heavy with a coupla different riffs and fun lil’ rhythm changes and then rises a little bit with all these happier-sounding power chords while the singer’s screaming at you before breaking again into instrumental riff-town. It’s amazing, how much they manage to do in just two minutes. The singer’s got a great scream, too, and the rhythm in the lyrics is extremely gratifying. And so simple!

“A mis-sile aimed di-rect-ly at the ass-hole of the Earth!”

1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4. Love it.

“Die for Allah” has this incredible opening showcasing the drums. I don’t usually give a care for drums, just because I, personally, severely under-appreciate their role in making literally every amazing song I know as amazing as it is. But this song’s got drums that even a dumbass like me can’t ignore! And the guiTARS. You’ve got all these tappy light melodic scalic passages that get beaten back down with an onslaught of monotonic sixteenth notes and the singer commanding you to DIEEEEEEEEEE FOR AAAAALLLAAAAAAAAAH. It’s so CATCHY. j-j-j-j (that’s the sound it makes) j-j-j-j j-j-j-j j-j-j-j-j. My favorite part is what I think is the chorus. And I’m only calling it that because that’s where he actually says “Die for Allah”. Just good. Fast. Headbangin’ shite.

Really though, with only three short albums left to us by these intrepid Persians of the inferno, there’s no excuse not to just listen to the whole fucking-brilliant catalog. And I say this because goddamn was it hard to pick three songs. I had to leave out “Forced Down Your Throat”! “Martyr in Every Home”! “The Trinity”! “What’s in the News”?!?!!?!!

Go listen or go to hell.

-Mans

[Listen] COWS: Cunning Stunts (Part 2)

This is the recommendation part of the recommendation.

Image result for cows band

I suppose I owe you that much. You’re too busy to listen to the brilliance of a whole twelve-track experience. A 38:56 masterpiece. Philistine.

Nothing in this world could make me butcher such genius, hack it down to a paltry “top three”, just to accommodate your laziness, to tolerate your irreverence.

My own stubbornness, though, that might do it.

Here goes:

“Walks Alone” because I can’t resist the speed, the sheer energy, the adrenaline that it instills in me. It never gets old. Hey why are the fast songs never considered “the best” of an album?? Anyway- the song has no brakes. It just goes, verse after verse after verse with no real chorus or even a guitar solo – besides a four-bar, four-note guitar break between verses. And the lyrics are about some vagrant or something. A street rat. And how heeeeeeeeeeeee walks alone.

What’s great about this song, and about the Cows in general, and about their singer Shannon Selberg in general, is that despite their (self-imposed???) restrictions on their musical abilities, and their lyrics being similarly pedestrian (on this album especially: “He sits alone/In a park/’Til after dark/ etc. It’s not exactly poetry, y’know?), Shannon’s delivery still makes them hit the mark, catch the listener’s ear with patterns in meter rather than in melody, or measured, exact rhyme. Like spoken word, almost. OK wait so I guess it is like poetry. The Cows are poets now, I have declared them as such.

“Mine” just because it’s got this one line that goes “if you’re some commie scum that wants to share it all, remember, IT’S MINE”. HEH. The guitar’s going in both ears, constantly, in a heated argument with itself, with the bass and drums playing a comfortable and simple enough pattern to keep you grounded through that chaos. And Shannon isn’t screaming, but he’s definitely pissed about this thing that it’s imperative you know is his.

Let’s talk about the next song.

“Everybody” because it captures that feeling of being left behind by everybody because everybody is doing something and you’re not and you don’t know why you’re not or why everybody is doing whatever it is they’re doing but you suspect that it might just be because everybody else is doing that thing. Right? Well, the brilliant thing about the song is that it says all that and more clearly too but in only six words total, two of which are “everybody” and “something”. All the frustration, the derision, the circular reasoning, the bafflement, are conveyed by the simple repetition of these lyrics, in a melody that oscillates between like, four notes. It’s mocking them. Who? Everybody.

Aaand YouTube links:

Here’s the whole album again

And here’s my selected three

Now, my disciples, go forth and spread the good word of the Cows.

-Mans

[Read] COWS: Cunning Stunts (Part 1)

The best cacophony ever to shatter your ossicles.

The Cows made nine full albums during their decade-long existence, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that every single one is sheer perfection, impeccable artistry the likes of which you’ve never conceived.

They lived in Minneapolis, and for the majority of their recording career released their music through the equally Minneapolite Amphetamine Reptile, with the exception of their debut (Taint Pluribus Taint Unum, 1987) which was made by uhhhhhhhhh Treehouse something. Doesn’t matter. I’ve got an album to talk about.

Cunning Stunts, made in 1992, only just beats out Peacetika and Orphan’s Tragedy as my favorite by the very narrowest of margins. I’m sure I could find some dud tracks somewhere in the Cows’ catalog, the not-brilliant, the less-good, the more-forgettable, but I could listen to these tracks all day and not really need to skip any. In fact, I do! For weeks at a stretch. It used to take conscious effort and much pain to tear myself away to listen to someone else for a while. And with me being a person who compulsively skips potentially incredible songs for fear of wasting a couple of minutes being bored, this means something, alright? Believe me.

Please?

This album is kind of an anomaly in the Cows’ discography, since it feels like, for the first time after four years of (almost) tuneless screeching on their respective instruments, the band spared a thought on palatability. And, for once, this wasn’t a catastrophe for their identity, a torpedo to their unique sound. Past albums were all about flooding your brains with noise, melodies that were more like anti-melodies that sort of dropped off halfway through or were just barely discernible, filtered through layers and layers of guitar-fuzz, or that didn’t give a solitary fuck about what you, with your innate human ability to detect concords and cadences and intervals and such, about what you expected.

Cunning Stunts, in contrast, decides to throw your ears a bone every now and then and not be so damn confusing. The melodies are there, they’re simple, they’re predictable, and they’re still dripping in electric noise, but not to the point of being obscured. Like “Mr. Cancelled”, which for the first thirty horrifying seconds, is tame and repetitive enough to be reminiscent of some kinda zeitgeist-conforming pop-punk TRASH, but just when you’re about to give up on life in general and your finger hovers over the skip-forward icon, the song accelerates for a little bit to give Thor (that’s the guitarist’s name!!! Thor!!!!!!) a designated space for his crazy little guitar flourishes instead of having them wailing in the background of the whole song, before returning to the comfort of predictability for a while. It makes sense, see? The songs just feel more constructed that way, more finished. There’s space, here. Parts left quiet or half-empty, where every instrument isn’t going off at once. “Down Below” is a favorite of mine for that alone. “Ort”, too.

The whole thing’s a pleasant listen, start to finish, though I should give prospective listeners a heads-up for “The Woman Inside”, the one track where Shannon decides he likes screaming too much to ditch it for a whole album. Of course, I still think it’s a brilliant song, though I would concede that it’s more of an acquired taste.

Now how do I link this album. Have they got a Bandcamp too or do I have to go hunt for legal YouTube uploads and painstakingly stitch together a playlist of my own? Why the fuck can’t these bands that don’t exist anymore make anything of theirs easy to find?

Alright, this looks legit enough. One o’ them YouTube “Topic” channels. Someone somewhere is getting paid for clicks, I assume. I hope it’s the right someones.

Fuck I forgot to address how stunning the cunts are. Or how cunning the stunts? What?

– Mans

[Read] THE KOMINAS: Stereotype (Part 2)

Vagabonds.

Image may contain: one or more people, text that says 'THE KOMINAS'

OK, now the music

Being a (very) small Desi girl born in America at the tuft-ended tail of the 90s, and despite all those things, a hard rock fan, I’ve grown quite accustomed to the psychological acrobatics necessary to find myself in the music of very old white men. Usually it’s that unfortunate offshoot of hyper-masculinity that sometimes crosses a line for me – namely, the anti-femininity (looking at you, Axl Rose). The other exclusivities of the genre, those of race and sexuality, forever lived in the shadows of these most heinous offenses to my gender. In other words, finding a South Asian-American band like the Kominas was a faraway dream. I never even thought to look.

This is the first time that I’ve found a band that’s so close to home, for me, not just in ethnicity, but in sound. I’ve listened to some Bangalore-produced heavy metal before. It’s good, but not something I’d listen to every day. The Kominas just hit the right spot. Maybe it’s because they’re hyphenated-Americans too, like me. Maybe it’s because they’re punk rockers and that just really seems to jive with me right now.

Whoops I lied, NOW I talk about the music

The overall impression is very surf-rock, but with rigid, rapid guitar rhythms that keep the mood persistently heavy. The Bollywood aspect really isn’t too noticeable in this album (though a cursory look into their back catalog revealed songs entirely in Urdu/Hindi and even Bollywood song covers), but appears in subtle forms. Maybe in their modes. Maybe in their penchant for repeating lines over and over, with slight variation. Maybe I’m imagining it entirely.

Honestly though, what I like even better than this unique blend of genres and relaxing oohs and catchy motifs is their lyrics. They’re serious, and they’re heavy (regardless of what music videos seem to suggest), but delivered with upbeat rhythms and melodies – the aural equivalent of a smile.

Some of my favorites from this ‘un:

“Again and Again” – hearing is not believing/ you’re here but we all know you’re leaving

“Banana” – I’m a believer, in my own way, rip my T-shirt, give my heart away

“4 White Guys” – ‘cause y’all been messin’ with my mojo/ y’all been messin’ with my mind

“Freedom” – dirty scab fox-hunting wankers – Just sounds like a stereotypical Anglo-Indian (Anglo-Pakistani? Is that a thing? I don’t know!) dad going off on some guy he doesn’t like.

“Pigs are Haram” – The whole song. All of it. Pls listen.

Here’s their Bandcamp again.

I’m gonna go back to working on not going Bananas.

-Mans

[Read] THE KOMINAS: Stereotype (Part 1)

Rapscallions.

Let’s talk about the Stereotype.

By which I mean, of course, the 2015 album by Desi-American rock band The Kominas. If I had to describe it, I’d call it reggae-infused Bollywood-punk, but they call it taqwacore, so we’re going with that I guess.

There’s a lot I have to say about the album’s music, but I’ll take a while to get to that, so I should say up front that I’ve been listening to nothing else this past week and my ears very much enjoy the pleasant beachy bounciness of these lil’ tunes, especially since there’s little beach or bounce to be found anywhere in lil’ ole Manhattan at any time ever, and it certainly doesn’t help that the lil’ ole Hudson’s frozen the fuck over and fully within my view for eight hours of the day.

Great album.

Unnecessary intro that’s just about my misconceptions prior to actually listening to the album

I wasn’t expecting much when I stumbled upon this album. In fact, I found the name pretty predictable, coming from a predominantly Pakistani-Muslim but technically also featuring Hindus (hyphen) American band. I probably wouldn’t have given it a second look if the cover art didn’t LITERALLY snatch my eyes out of their sockets.

OK, figuratively. How can one not be expected to double- or triple-take at a line-drawing of a balding Desi uncle in women’s underwear with his hands tied behind his back being fed laddoo by a sari-and-very-toothy-smile-sporting auntie?

But don’t let that “edgy AF” album cover fool ya. The Stereotype is every bit what you’d expect, fittingly, and the album cover seems to be nothing more than a non-sequitur. A red herring. A flibbertigibbet, a will-o’-the-wisp, a clown.

So it’s about being Muslim in America. And being suspect in the eyes of every white American around you, even when you’re doing “just Desi things” like eating kaati rolls on the subway and transporting one of those stackable steel tiffin boxes in a seat of its own on the subway or reading “The Urdu Times” on the subway.

That’s pretty much what happens in their video for “See Something, Say Something”. But in case having a camera follow around a paranoid white man as he repeatedly shifts seats in attempts to avoid Brownness-turned-up-to-eleven was too subtle for you, there’s a totally unambiguous alien in the video too! An alien that dogs the footsteps of this paranoid white man that switches between its tentacular form and the form of four different Pakistani dudes. Because THEY’RE ALIENS.

Oh oh oh oh and then, there’s a twist. At the end of the video, the alien traps Mr. White Man, and he finally confronts it and knocks it down and takes the mask off and Oh My God it’s HIM in the shitty alien costume, Mr. White Man himself, because do you get it yet we’re all the same.

I’m not trying to criticize them for being over the top. I like hamfistedness in my satire. It’s humorous, usually. It’s entertaining. And I honestly like the lyrics to the songs too, I think they explore the nuance of being proud of your heritage and a believer in your faith in the face of miscast stereotypes that are indeed very real in post-9/11/post-Afghanistan war/post-ISIS terror/post-Trump’s election America, like:

“Just because of his beliefs, they call him a liar and a thief” – Again & Again

“Now I’m invincible/Feel the vibe/It’s so nice to lead/A foreign life/That’s just for white guys” – Four White Guys

BUT

Where the hell did they get that tiffin box?? Did they get one of their moms to send it to them or something? I literally have never seen one of those outside of India, and seeing it on a subway just felt surreal.

But the real BUT is that it’s all a little too nonchalant. The white guy in the video gets off a little too easily, just seeing himself in the alien costume. His behavior a little too passive. As much as they decided to ham up the metaphors and the anti-Islam, anti-brown behavior, it comes off like a joke and nothing more, because none of the true horrors of being treated as “the Other” are even showcased as horrors. They’re comical distortions, I understand, and they definitely succeeded in being comical (“Urdu Times”), but the videos seemed to undermine the more cutting critique that the band clearly intended to convey, by the sound of their lyrics. They make me feel stupid for even taking the lyrics seriously.

OK, I’m done nitpicking.

Here’s their whole album, free to listen, on their Bandcamp:

And that one music video I couldn’t shut up about, from their YouTube:

More to come on the actual, like “music” part.

– Mans

[Listen] COWS: Sampler

No “The”.

I mentioned the Cows in my first post, because in their song, “The Man”, they have this line:

Then he called me a fucking punk, I said “Yeah, sure boss, you bet”

It was one of those lines that obsessed me for a while. Maybe it’s just the way he said it, but it certainly also fit the topic of whether our taste in music must define us. What made the Cows punks? It’s not a term frequently associated with them. Maybe they listened to punk. So they’re one degree removed from it. And what does that make me, a listener of the Cows? A tertiary punk?

Anyway, I’m mentioning the Cows again, because I love the Cows, and I don’t care what that makes me. I adore every single one of their albums, but I’ve chosen three songs to help orient a new listener to their catalog, and hopefully pique enough interest to inspire further exploration.

“Down Below” from Cunning Stunts, 1992

“Hitting the Wall” from Peacetika, 1991

“No, I’m Not Coming Out” from Sorry in Pig Minor, 1998

The most specific descriptor I feel comfortable applying to their decade-long discography is “noise”. It’s pretty apparent, upon a minute of listening, why that is. Cows was the first band I came across whose music wouldn’t just fill your ears to bursting, it would plant itself in there and shred them apart from the inside. Each song revolves mostly around whatever rhythm they’ve come up with, invariably played at breakneck speed, and a matching bass melody. The only other structural element is a hook, in whichever instrument, always very short, hardly greater than four bars in length and four notes in range. And the rest is madness.

“Down Below” is the first song I usually recommend, because it’s the most “palatable”. The guy isn’t screaming in your ear in this one, nor is the guitar, so that’s good. The song also opens straight away with the guitar hook, so you know what to expect. It’s by far one of their more melodious songs, too. “Noise” is the only appropriate descriptor that can be applied to a considerable portion of Cows’ music.

“Hitting the Wall” is a full 180 from “Down Below”. This is the deep end, opening with jarring, frantic, atonal electric jangling in both ears, a barely discernible melody played way down in the lower register, and the singer’s vocals way up the other way (yes, screaming), that lasts almost uncomfortably long, before switching back to the main melody. Then he screams again.

“No, I’m Not Coming Out” is a good change of pace. The quality’s been cleaned up a bunch so it no longer sounds like it was recorded on a 90’s cellphone and then played to be recorded by another 90’s cellphone and then put on an album. And, the guy is whisper-singing most of the time, so there’s no hidden jumpscares. Even the instrumentals aren’t super in-your-face, which was generally the case with this last album of theirs. Sorry in Pig Minor, their last album, is a significant departure from the eight that precede it, but the songs’ structure and what can be inferred of their composing process seem very much preserved. In “No I’m Not Coming Out”, there’s still one repeated hook, in the form of a looped and layered sample of the singer groaning, and of course the guitar still sounds kinda out of tune. Wouldn’t be Cows if it didn’t.

Moo.

-Mans

[Think] MUSIC AND THE LISTENER: He called me a fucking punk, I said “Yeah, sure boss, you bet”

So this has been bothering me. I’ve brought it up in nearly every conversation I’ve had for the past week.

https://ricochet.com/186533/archives/what-are-the-six-songs-that-define-you/

That links to a music “questionnaire” that’s supposed to help you define yourself with six songs. My guitar teacher showed it to me last week. None of the questions were particularly stimulating, in my opinion. I mean, can you get more basic than “What song always gets you dancing?”

Yes, you can, as it turns out. Question 6: “A song that makes you, you.”

Bullshit. How can a song make me? How can I make a song? That I didn’t literally make, of course. The song and I would both have existed on our own independent paths until we happen to cross once. And of course we don’t remain intertwined, forever. I listen to a ton of songs in a day. And songs tend to be rather promiscuous themselves, being publicly available for anyone else to share in. How, then, can I call one mine? And in doing so, am I trying to impose my own experience/interpretation on a song made by some people some time who never knew me, or am I pigeon-holing myself to whatever the fancy of those people was at the time? And given the music I listen to, whoever wrote the song was probably high when they wrote it. They could be alcoholics. That’s not me. They could be assholes. They might hate me, if they knew me. There’s a 90% chance they’re white men, too. All of which is fine. But’s not me.

I’m not saying I’ve never felt defined by a song. And I mean, defined perfectly. Where it’s in my ears and the whole rest of the world seems to fall away, and I’m simply lost in whatever melody (or anti-melody) is tickling my eardrums.

It’s just that it’s never a full song, and it’s never fully me. It’s a song fragment, a hook, a particular nuance that happened to catch my attention this one time and momentarily obsesses me. I listen to it over and over, the same song, waiting for the one motif.

It’s never lasted more than a day. I’m a different person the next day. Or the next hour. How can a song make me, me?

Punk. 60’s garage rock. Noise rock. Anarcho-punk. Hardcore. Feminist punk. Alternative rock. Alternative metal. 80’s/90’s Indie rock. Grunge. Industrial rock.

All words I’ve heard used to define whatever I’m into right now. Does that mean they define me, too?

I’m even more hesitant to plaster myself in these labels (or is it on these labels?) knowing that I only discovered this little sub-culture/genre a mere few months ago. Before that, I was all metal. Now I don’t know the difference. Does that make my love, my feeling defined by this music, any less real?

It started with a Minneapolis band called (the) Cows, for me. Last September. I quoted them in the title. I’ll write more about them later.

A lot of the 80’s punk culture was sustained and propagated by underground, independently published “zines”. I don’t know when “zine” culture died out, but it certainly happened before I was born. My source for this information is Michael Azerrad’s “Our Band Could Be Your Life”, from 2001, wholly centered around documenting these mechanics by which punk lived and died under the noses of well, the rest of America, I guess.

All this to say that zines sometimes gave rise to music labels, and that for this reason fanbases were centered not only around bands, but around these labels and zines too.

All that to say that Amphetamine Reptile, or AmRep, responsible for “launching” the careers of many bands that I feel currently constitute my persona, is run by a super cool guy named Tom Hazelmeyer that to this day occasionally puts out little compilation albums featuring some of the artists he produced, affectionately titled Dope-Guns-‘N-Fucking in the Streets. There’s a compilation of these compilations, DGFITS 1-11, that I think summarizes pretty well the kind of stuff I intend to talk about, at least presently.

Because who knows what I’ll wanna talk about tomorrow.

So try the album if you want. Oh and the questionnaire, too. Maybe I’ll post my answers sometime (SPOILER: they’re not real answers, just rants).

-Mans

P. S. Say it like Hans, with an M. Or don’t. Fuck you.

P. P. S. The Cows song I quoted is called “The Man”, and is off their 1991 album Peacetika.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2dstRya21w