Hardcore for Nerds

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The Radiators from Space - ‘Head for the Sun’ from Sound City Beat (2012) - originally by The Movement (1968)

This is the opening track of the Radiators’ new album of covers from Irish ‘beat’ groups, between 1964 and 1971. It’s a really good record, that combines the band’s own versatility and musical strengths with a wide variety of styles from their formative era (being a late-70s punk and post-punk band). Indeed, as singer and guitarist Phil Chevron remarks in the liner notes which give a track-by-track guide to the history, of those bands “who got to cut whole albums and not just a smattering of singles…. [t]heir eclectic impulses are often striking, as they used the album format to commit as much of their musical DNA as possible to vinyl.” Yet in turn the Radiators add their own interpretations of what the music should sound like, often drawing on their, later, punk influences in order to bring out the protean character of the music, or simply to have fun - as in the case of this song: “For no better reason than it seemed to work and that we were big fans of da bruddas back in our garage days, our version channels The Ramones in surfin’ mode…” (which is slightly bizarre in the damp Irish context, as I’ve mentioned before in relation to the Undertones’ similar ‘Here Comes The Summer’, but that’s the genius of cultural influences… they’re not limited to the one situation).

So Sound City Beat isn’t an exactly faithful transcription of past music, and all the better for it (it also means you can dig out the originals on YouTube - full list here - and expect them to be somewhat different). Neither is it a rendering of certain ‘classics’ into a single recognisable style - I can imagine the band had a lot of fun working with the various styles on show here, and at its best it echoes the diversity of their own great eclectic masterpiece, Ghostown. The only song I did know before (admittedly my pre-1970s, or non-punk, musical knowledge is pretty terrible) is one of the best, the inestimable ‘Gloria’. Which I first encountered through the Patti Smith version on Horses, but was originally written by Van Morrison in the band Them, in 1965. I like to think of this as rediscovering an Irish treasure - after having it exported back to you in Americanised form - but the truth is it was a UK hit and a global song, so it’s kinda churlish to be too possessive of something just because the author was from Belfast. There’s something simple and effective but inherently transformative, or adaptable, about the song, that seems to suit its role in both proto-punk and Irish rock:

“it was, as it happens, the first song ever played by the Radiators. Taking our cue from Morrison’s own performances - at the Maritime Hotel, he is said to have stretched the song to fifteen minutes or more on occasion - we found it useful for extended arrangements, especially in venues outside Dublin where the standard thirty minute sets favoured by punk bands would have been profoundly frowned upon.”

It’s not all obscurities otherwise, though, at least in terms of authorship - there’s an early Rory Gallagher track from his Taste days, an early Thin Lizzy, and a (literally) lost Horslips debut single. But the real fun is in the miniature Nuggets-like quality of the rest of the album, from excellent band names (Eire Apparent) and predictable song titles (“Yes, I Need Someone”), and sounds expanding to folk and psychedelia, to some thrilling pop hooks. Throughout it’s possible to recognise large elements of the Radiators’ own sound, but depending on the vocals and the style of the cover, it can be sometimes hard to remember that it is all just the one band playing the songs. Or sometimes, bizarrely, to remember that this is music that existed in its own time and place and isn’t totally the reimaginings of contemporary punks - not to deny the adherence in spirit to and difference of the styles used, but hearing this music mostly as a blank slate, the Radiators definitely place their own modern (or at least post-‘77, which is not very new after all) stamp on it.

For example, the atypical “stone solid Mod groove” of showband The Blue Aces (a central theme of the album’s historical revisionism is the distinction between the popular history of 60s, “in which the conventional wisdom habitually depicts the secular pulpit of Gay Byrne’s television show set against a soundtrack of Showband Scene mania”, and the underground of Beat Clubs - although one of my parents describes it as more of a straightforward rural-urban divide between the showbands and the tennis pavilions) is given a take that “acknowledges its kinship with the spirit of the punk bands of a decade later”; but which sounds to me very much like Rancid’s early 90s album Let’s Go. Of course, some bands are always arch-revivalists, but it’s fascinating to hear everything connected on a long line and collapsed together into one asynchronous celebration of a past. To quote an American band (if only because I can’t think of similar lyrics from an Irish one), Drink deep, it’s just a taste, and it might not come this way again…

2012 60s 70s NO PAST irish punk radiators HFN

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“ This means that common sense is quite wrong in thinking that the past is fixed, immutable, invariable, as against the everchanging flux of the present. On the contrary, at least within our own consciousness, the past is malleable and flexible, constantly changing as our recollection reinterprets and re-explains what has happened. Thus we have as many lives as we have points of views. We keep reinterpreting our biography very much as the Stalinists kept rewriting the Soviet Encyclopedia, calling forth some events into decisive importance as others were banished to ignominious obliivion.

—

Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective - ‘Digression: Alternation and Biography’

At first, when I read this, I thought ‘well there goes my chosen discipline’, but historians already incorporate revision and reinterpretation into their work, and largely distrust ‘remembrance’ and the use of the past for direct ends in the present. It fits more with my distrust of the history of the self, the interrogation of one’s own past: for one cannot be one’s own historian. Biography is fine, if a little narrow; auto-biography is merely a specialised, if interesting, form of fiction.

NO PAST history fiction berger sociology

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» Michael D Higgins: Inaugural Speech

as the 9th President of Ireland.

[…]

“In preparing for my Presidency, I recognise that our long struggle for freedom has produced a people who believe in the right of the individual mind to see the world in its own way and indeed that individual innovation and independence of mind has given Ireland many distinguished contributors in culture and science, often insufficiently celebrated.

However, in more recent years, we saw the rise of a different kind of individualism – closer to an egotism based on purely material considerations – that tended to value the worth of a person in terms of the accumulation of wealth rather then their fundamental dignity. That was our loss, the source in part, of our present difficulties. Now it is time to turn to an older wisdom that, while respecting material comfort and security as a basic right of all, also recognises that many of the most valuable things in life cannot be measured.

Our successes after all in the eyes of so many in the world have been in the cultural and spiritual areas – in our humanitarian, peace-building and human rights work - in our literature, art, drama and song – and in how that drama and song have helped us cope with adversity, soothed the very pain which they describe so well, and opened the space for new possibilities.

Our arts celebrate the people talking, singing, dancing and ultimately communing with each other. This is what James Connolly meant when he said that: “Ireland without her people means nothing to me”. Connolly took pride in the past but, of course, felt that those who excessively worshipped that past were sometimes seeking to escape from the struggle and challenge of the present. He believed that Ireland was a work in progress, a country still to be fully imagined and invented – and that the future was exhilarating precisely in the sense that it was not fully knowable, measurable.

The demands and the rewards of building a real and inclusive Republic in its fullest sense remains as a challenge for us all, but it is one we should embrace together.

A decade of commemorations lies ahead – a decade that will require us to honestly explore and reflect on key episodes in our modern history as a nation; that will require us to draw on the ethics and politics of memory in such a way as will enable us not only to be sensitive to differing and incomplete versions of that history, but also to remain open to the making of reconciliation or to the acceptance of different versions of aspects and events of memory if required.

[…]

It is my wish to be a President for all of the Irish at home and abroad. We Irish have been a diasporic people for a great part of our history. The circumstances that have impelled – and that continue to impel – many citizens to seek employment and a better life elsewhere, are not ordained by some mysterious hand of fate. They challenge our capacity to create a sustainable and prosperous economy and an inspiring model of the good society. We, in our time, must address the real circumstances that generate involuntary emigration, and resolve that in the years ahead we will strive with all our energy and intellect, with mind and heart to create an Ireland which our young people do not feel they have to leave and to which our emigrants, or their children, may wish, in time,to return to work and live in dignity and prosperity. I invite all of the Irish, wherever they may be across the world, to become involved with us in that task of remaking our economy and society.”

Michael D. Higgins NO PAST art history irish politics socialism

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“ The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the greater majority do not want to abandon it. Far from always wanting to forget it, they suffer, on the contrary, from not being able to possess it completely enough, strangers to the world they live in and exiled from their own country. Except for vivid moments of fulfilment, all reality for them is incomplete. Their actions escape them in the form of other actions, return, in unexpected guises, to judge them and disappear like the water Tantalus longed to drink, into some still undiscovered orifice. To know the whereabouts of the orifice, to control the course of the river, to understand life, at last, as destiny – these are their true aspirations.

—

Albert Camus, The Rebel

I wasn’t going to write anything about 9/11, since I’m not American (yet I instinctively give it its very American name) and any thoughts I do have are conflicted between respecting a national, public tragedy - albeit with its regional and private emphases - and representing the global effect of the reaction to it, the external consequences of American insularity. What does this one event, or small set of events, measure against a decade of destruction with its epicentre in the Middle East, not Manhattan? What does the fact that roughly the same number of people died over three decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland as died in one day in New York mean for our relative understandings of terrorism? That the war on terror is a war on the proxy for war, which is itself a proxy for politics. That there are no easy answers; less so when it involves standing up to jingoism or insane ideology, than when it involves bridging the gap between personal hurt and a global callousness, a national self-image and a remaking of the world in that image, a premium of suffering and a deficit of understanding or sympathy - all of which we’re all guilty of in the West, and to arguably equal extents, but some of us suffer some of the pain, some of us look on in despair, while others suffer greatly. That 9/11 is both a local tragedy and a global one, at the same time.

What changed my mind was seeing the quote above again, which I had previously noted for other, more philosophical, reasons - Buddhist ideas of grasping and karmic causality - but this time I was struck by the resemblance of the description of the waters of Tantalus to the “large voids” of the pools in the ‘Reflecting Absence’ memorial at the World Trade Center site, where water endlessly cascades into the negative shape of the towers. I doubt they were meant to be considered ‘tantalising’, but as “open and visible reminders of the absence” they are designed to keep a memory present and, in a way, incomplete. Which makes sense - it is, as one Irish poet remarked after political zealots took over key buildings in Dublin in quasi-terroristic act resulting in the destruction of large parts of the city centre, a “terrible beauty” - not to give complete closure, for not only are bodies still unidentified and the threat of terrorism uneradicated (and uneradicable), but there are psychological and political effects still rippling out from New York and America and across the world. It’s also important to point out that what Camus describes above is not karma in the commonly understood sense of retribution or poetic justice, but rather an unpredictable and all-encompassing interconnectedness. Incompleteness, in turn, brings us closer to closure, as we cannot hang on to a moment forever. As Camus says on the next page,

“Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.”

The implication is that destiny - whether manifest or otherwise - is false. Our desire for it, often painfully, is not; but one day, like any other, we may be able to overcome it and live like human beings in the present. I don’t often agree with what my nation’s leader says, but Enda Kenny gets it right here:

“New York, the world, endured. Today, we remember and we honour. I suppose in the best way we can, simply by living as mindfully, kindly as we can.”

Reflecting on the absence left by 9/11 allows us not to see into the ‘orifice’ of history, but into the incompleteness of human life - which is the closest thing we have to a destiny, and which should be taken as a reason for encouragement, for living happily and to our fullest, rather than despair.

9/11 art camus politics NO PAST

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“ Total negation only justifies the concept of a totality that must be conquered. But the affirmation of a limit, a dignity, and a beauty common to all men only entails the necessity of extending this value to embrace everything and everyone and of advancing towards unity without denying the origins of rebellion. In this sense rebellion, in its primary aspect of authenticity, does not justify any purely historic concept.

—

Albert Camus explaining punk rock (in The Rebel, of course). Followed by ‘Rebellion and Art’:

“In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it and the construction of a substitute universe. Rebellion, from this point of view, is a fabricator of universes. This also defines art. The demands of rebellion are really, in part, aesthetic demands. All rebel thought, as we have seen, is either expressed in rhetoric or in a closed universe.”

“Who looked at the hands of the executioner during the Flaggelation and the olive trees on the way to the Cross? But here we see them represented, transfigured by the incessant movement of the Passion and the agony of Christ, imprisoned in images of violence and beauty, cries out again, each day, in the cold rooms of museums. A painter’s style lies in this blending of Nature and history, in this stability imposed on incessant change.”

NO PAST camus philosophy punk art odd future

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“ If the mind is only a reflection of events, it cannot anticipate their progress, except by hypothesis. If Marxist theory is determined by economics, it can describe the past history of production, and not the future which remains in the realms of probability. The task of historical materialism can only be to establish a method of criticism of contemporary society; it is only capable of making suppositions, unless it abandons its scientific attitude, about the society of the future.

—

Albert Camus, The Rebel

“How could a so-called scientific socialism conflict, to such a point, with facts? The answer is easy: it was not scientific. On the contrary, its defeat resulted from a method ambiguous enough to wish to be simultaneously determinist and prophetic, dialectic and dogmatic […] Moreover, is it not for this reason that its most important work is called Capital and not Revolution? Marx and the Marxists allowed themselves to prophesy the future and the triumph of communism to the detriment of their postulates and of their scientific method.”

cf. (on psychology/Freud)

NO PAST history politics socialism camus books

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imathers:

theremixbaby:

“It’s worth mentioning that twenty-first century incarnation of this term [emo] has little do with the ’80s hardcore scene from whence it came, and now seems to mean something like “unfortunately sincere hipster”—a usage I’ve also found quite a kick in the face (especially as hyphenated to its partner in irreverence, “fag”). As emo’s bonds to hardcore music have dissolved, little has been left but a cheap insult to any of us who dares to have and show emotion. Which: isn’t that what music is kind of about? Taking all that formless, inexpressible human feeling and funneling it into something we think we can understand marginally better? Fuck anyone who uses “emo” as an insult, and fuck doubly those who use it as a noun.”

—

Jessica Faulds, on ‘emo’ as a prejorative, in a footnote of her review of EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints (via CMG)

Fair enough, but now what do I call annoying dipshits who pretend to be sensitive in order to cloak their rampant, unquestioned misogyny (to be clear, I wasn’t sure what to call them in the first place, but for a while there “emo” seemed to fit)?

Edit: Actually, having read the review, I think I have an actual issue here. Ever since “emo” got divorced from hardcore, it’s been used* not to slam expressions of emotion or tortured inner states (look at the music collection of someone using emo pejoratively and tell me you won’t find something like EMA, or Joy Division, or Leonard Cohen, or or or or), it’s to slam expressions of the emotion that the speaker thinks are insincere, self-centered, privileged (including misogynistic) or in some other way problematic (Faulds herself admits this when she says, basically, that EMA’s album would be emo if it wasn’t awesome). Let’s be clear, I’m not trying to somehow reclaim or rehabilitate emo (nor do I use it or plan to use it), but turning everyone who’s ever used emo in a strawpeople members of the Anti-Emotion Brigade is not only unhelpful, it ignores the actual problem that at least some of them were trying to point, however shitty their terminology was/is.

*Leaving aside the teenagers and other trolls who call people “emofags” and whatever, which is something else and obviously loathsome.

1. This is a good review, but it seems peculiarly possessed by historicism. Including this interesting twist on the Bo Diddley reference in ‘California’:

“The track later celebrates the arrogance of youth, with the refrain, “I’m just 22 / I don’t mind dying”—a line which seems like a turn on a Daniel Johnston line (“I’m only 22 / I’ll live forever”) but is actually lifted from a Bo Diddley song. Which ultimately means just about nothing, but seems worth noting because of the roles all three artists have had in relation to the genre of rock ‘n’ roll: Bo Diddley helping to birth it, Johnston trying to play into its conventions and failing gloriously, and now EMA, the next generation, pushing and stretching out its skin from within its womb.”

Ahem. Now that’s an unexpected image (maybe that’s what we’re missing from not having enough female music criticism?). But as a whole what EMA does on the album “isn’t brand new, but it’s not same-old, either”; followed by the hoary old chestnut of “a world […] seemingly out of genres: she reimagines”. Well, don’t most artists do - the creative ones at least?

Likewise ‘Milkman’, “the album’s one bona fide rocker, is possibly about being seduced by the milkman (which may just be the one cliché that distortion can’t help)”. That’s a more direct, and possibly sensible, interpretation than what I went with, but again the idea of a cliché is another sign of obsession with the past. Which sets the context for worrying about the changing meanings of the term ‘emo’; although I do like this redefinition:

“For her [EMA], it seems, engaging with all of the shameful, bloodlusty, raw emotion of pain is a necessary part of understanding identity. For her, emo is nothing less than an act of necessary violence.”

Except, politically if nothing else, the idea of “necessary violence” is quite terrifying and has led to a lot of debased justifications and not many understanding identities. Violence as musical catharsis is - kinda? - a different thing, but I’ve always been happier to listen to it than to encourage its performance.

2. The two times - before now - that I’ve tagged posts with both ‘EMA’ and ‘emo’ (in spite of this opening line to the review, which gives rise to the above footnote: “It’s a testament to Erika M. Anderson’s skill as a soundsmith that I have yet to see Past Life Martyred Saints, her unabashedly bleak solo debut, saddled with the “emo” tag*”) have been this GPOY/VS and this early post on ‘Marked’.

EMA emo NO PAST

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Hot Water Music - ‘220 Years’ from Fuel For The Hate Game (No Idea Records, 1997)

Even though I spent four years in college studying history, I’ve never been great with dates. Of course, I know all the iconic ones, in a general-knowledge sort of way; but it’s the ones in between, the ones that aren’t really expected of anyone other than history students or scholars, that I’m not good with. Obviously, I appreciate the importance of their exactitude, and I’ll go and source them and reference them when necessary, but I don’t know them. As far as chronology goes, I think it’s essential to have everything in the correct order (both as we know it now, and as it was known then, which may not be the same thing) but the exact spacing out and numerical sequencing of events is not something I regard as particularly important or even worth remembering. More useful, to me at least, is the ‘feel’ and pattern of events; history is not a ruler, to be defined by its regular markings, but rather a river, defined by its currents - albeit frequently neither progressive nor direct - its actions of deposition or erosion, and the geography of its gradients and profiles.

Which puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to expression of the ‘past’ as longitudinal distance, a regular extension backwards in time - time composed of lengthening human lifespans, of rapidly accelerating technological change, of sometimes abrupt cultural shifts - to points comparable with today. To be fair, many historians prefer to think in larger (and more flexible) blocks than the nitty-gritty details of political history usually allow: the longue durée, ‘long’ and ‘short’ centuries, even the whole idea of modernity, which starts a lot earlier than most people believe. Generally, in this view the decade is the minor unit, and the century the major. But even still, they’re markers on the passage of time, not measurements.

This makes the rhetorical, popular phrase of ‘x many years’ something of a mystery to me. Of course it’s a simple matter of subtraction - and approximation - to discover the original meaning, but the factor of length doesn’t carry much intuitive import for me. This is the same with Bob Marley’s ‘400 Years’ as it is with the Irish catch-cry of ‘800 years (of oppression)’, our poor mouth and partially also our white-black-people sense of victimisation - which in its appearance in the 1970s IRA training manual neatly enough matched the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 - since surely one or several lifetimes of subjugation is as bad as many, until you turn it into a political grievance. Or you could get on with trying to change the present and shape the future, by leaving history largely to itself and taking its lessons with a healthy pinch of post-modern, post-structuralist salt.

Thankfully, this song is more about the now than the then. It’s not immediately obvious to a foreigner, but the period extends from the song’s recording (spring ‘96) to the American Declaration of Independence in, of course, 1776. In other words, it’s twenty years after the bicentennial. Yet the opening lines of the lyrics are about never wondering, never bothering, never caring “what I wanted to be about”. Thus it is not just a rejection of history, but of politics and meaning also. Out of such nihilism, however, comes first the cryptic but essentially positive statement, “I have more truth than lies to me”; which reads rather like an assertion of humanity, of the almost inalienable rightness of man. Then comes the plea, to “show me and help me fight it”; the system, oppression, whatever you want to call it.

“I can’t see to break this” - doubt, incapacity - returns to the initial theme; while the image of breaking the bottle - that “rests in my hand” - is rather too close to just reflecting dumb violence. “Who’ll start the riots?” the same, yet for those of us who are too moderate in practice and in ethics to actually advocate violence, it’s hard to condemn it as a response to the breakdown of trust in society. In fact, “who’s gonna break this” becomes “who’s gonna learn to break it down”. Yet the “breakdown” is not only an emotional or societal factor for HWM, it’s a musical one as well. The breakdown is where the solid, fast, aggressive sound of punk and hardcore falls apart into a less certain, more spacious structure, which nevertheless serves to provide a heavy emphasis for the tone of the song. Different instruments drop in or out, sometimes leaving the vocals momentarily unaccompanied, or lock into grooves of their own (the benefits of having a jazz-experienced rhythm section).

“This makes me whole” is the bridging refrain from the first part of the song to the second, which repeats the lyrics from before, but in a slightly more frantic fashion. Just as in this middle section the music is broken down almost to quiet instrumentation, absent of heavily distorted guitars, the phrase represents a contrast of construction and destruction. The song isn’t about destroying things, or remembering their creation, but knowing what they are, and wanting to know what to do with them: consider the asides “always wondered how to walk away”, “always wondered how we fell this way” - in this spirit of inquiry into life there can be no nihilism, but something far more dangerous, a self-validation through questioning. A liberty of eternal vigilance, and underneath it all, the beat, the rumbling bass, keeps going.

NO PAST history hot water music post-hardcore punk american exceptionalism HFN

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overheard in Tower Records, vinyl section

“this is just all the remixes of [Lady Gaga’s] ‘Paparazzi’ - why would you want to pay ten euro for that?”

it’s midterm break, so there were lots of teenagers in town; maybe that it is too much for a 12” single, but I get the sense anything is too much for any format.

also, in another, smaller record shop nearby, “who would you most like to have on vinyl? The White Stripes … or the Eagles?”

in other news, I saw an Arcade Fire album and almost didn’t recognise it for a moment.

dublin indie vinyl hipster runoff NO PAST

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“ If the Sex Pistols struck a blow for freedom by swearing on television and actually offending people, Odd Future work within the subversive parameters of our time by merely being impolite in a way that mostly bothers people who are already bothered by the culture at large. You can be rude and still be safe, their message says. You can be offensive without offending, scary without scaring. You can represent an Odd Future rather than No Future.

—

Odd Future Get Freaky on “Fallon” - Popdust

I don’t agree with a lot of what Mike Barthel says about things, and I don’t agree with a lot of what cultural commentators say about punk in general, but this last paragraph on OFWGKTA makes a lot of sense. Remember when people wore swastikas on their jackets and wrote songs that were “effectively anti-abortion, anti-woman, and anti-sex”? (Well, I don’t, because I wasn’t born for another ten years, but don’t let that get in the way of a good point) Punk was deliberately nasty, and in fact - this is where I start disagreeing again - I think Barthel is rather underselling Odd Future by describing them as “merely being impolite” or “offensive without offending”.

Partly because that comes across as wilful apologism for lyrics and attitudes that genuinely do offend and do concern those who are “bothered by the culture at large” for good reasons, as someone else says, “especially when that means things like institutionalized sexism and homophobia”. That point comes from this thread in response/elaboration to Barthel’s piece, but although I share the opinion of “gangster rap” as a Hobbesian reading of capitalist society, I’m also not sure if Simon Reynolds is the person I want explaining hip-hop to me, nor if that reflection of capitalist realism is not potentially without value of its own. But ultimately what emerges is the possibility that what appears as unsophisticated boorishness can yet yield to a more sophisticated interpretation of transgressive art.

There is a very relevant paragraph - at least in how it mirrors the quote above - from that essay on punk that Tom Ewing linked to yesterday, despite his assertion to the contrary:

“For part of what they wanted was no longer to be noticed. Dressing-to-shock (zips, rips, binbags, tattoos, the pretty-slut tease, fetishwear taken casually public) is adopted against the instant society stops being shocked. Stops being shocked by surface gestures anyway: the moment when the occasion of reaction wasn’t silly kids capering in horror masks, but genuine evil, currently lurking unnamed or overlooked. They only wanted a world where what you wore was all just fashion: where how you look isn’t who you are. A world healed, a world purged. When right prevailed, these signs would pass unmarked — and until then, we lived in unreal time.”

Odd Future actually happen to be “silly kids capering in horror masks”, except they’re not, they’re much more: and the description is probably best applied to their horrorcore predecessors who, like bike gangs or street punks, provided the cultural model of violent outsiders for the next artistic movement to adapt in a form that actually resonates with an interpreting audience. That piece mixes in a lot of biblical language, giving an eschatological, mystical feel, awaiting an Odd Future in “unreal time”. For us, whatever about the artist, it’s about the way some things don’t bother the culture at large, at least not in an appropriately radical way. Swastikas were a way of reacting against the conservatism of a post-war world that had satisfied itself but not its youth, that had stagnated in false solidarity. Who’s to say that horror and violence doesn’t play a similar role in today’s liberalism?

history politics punk odd future NO PAST

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