The Ramones’ “She’s a Sensation” single came out October 21, 1981.
Hardcore for Nerds
"Why sneer at the intellectuals?"*
punk music, left politics, and cultural history - previously found here.
contact: gabbaweeks[at]gmail.com (sorry, no promos/submissions, thanks) or ask
Dublin, Ireland. 24, male, history graduate
HFN | HFN 2011 HFN 2010 hfn2k9 HRO 2k9 Hoover Genealogy Project | Hitler Runoff | @HC4N
*from the title of a review of Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Departure by Michael Foot, Evening Standard, Nov. 26, 1943.
punk music, left politics, and cultural history - previously found here.
contact: gabbaweeks[at]gmail.com (sorry, no promos/submissions, thanks) or ask
Dublin, Ireland. 24, male, history graduate
HFN | HFN 2011 HFN 2010 hfn2k9 HRO 2k9 Hoover Genealogy Project | Hitler Runoff | @HC4N
*from the title of a review of Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Departure by Michael Foot, Evening Standard, Nov. 26, 1943.
Oct 21
Aug 13
Aug 10
“1/ Teenage boys are just horrible, it transcends race. I can remember being one. My brothers and I liked punk (initially at least) not for all the right right-on reasons but because of the stories about vomiting at airports, Sid Vicious cutting himself onstage. We liked Devo because they were sick.2/ C.f Big Black, Nick Cave in girl-murder-mode, early TG, Whitearse, et al, there’s an argument for the defence that sometimes gets mounted, a variant on Artistic License… the idea is that the Artist is imagining how the world looks like from inside the mind of the psychopath, investigating extremes of human psychology and human experience… But, strangely, them being so imaginative and all, this sort of artist never, ever, seems drawn to imagining how things look from the victim’s point of view. It seems to hold no attraction to them. Funny that! I haven’t trawled through their corpus (corpse-us?) exhaustively, but I’d be extremely surprised if Odd Future have any lyrics written from the viewpoint of someone being raped/murdered.”—
From this past March, Simon Reynolds situates Odd Future in a blogpost which he just reminded us of on Twitter after seeing Steve Albini’s sort-of-anti-OF rant.
1) I was just recently re-reading the Legs McNeil liner notes to the reissue of Road to Ruin by the Ramones, and in the opening paragraph he states, of the climate of 1978: “It was simpler to say of the whole array of musicians and music labeled ‘punk’ that it was a fashion statement coming from London or the equivalent of vomiting on strangers in airports. British puke stole the show, and a lot of great music was buried in its flow.”
And later on, he says of the Ramones’ ‘cartoon’ image and its fourth-album unravelling:
“This flip side of happy dementia is why Road to Ruin works. Unfortunately, what’s bad for an artist in real life is sometimes great for their art. When I first saw the Ramones take the stage at CBGB’s in the fall of 1975, I thought the Gestapo had arrived. I mean, were these guys serious? I didn’t know, and there was something extremely dangerous about not knowing.
‘I’m Against It’ is a perfect example of the Ramones trying to be funny about hating things, but the joke didn’t work anymore. Those wacky lyrics are contradicted by the venom of those “against its” Joey’s spitting out.”
2) “this sort of artist never, ever, seems drawn to imagining how things look from the victim’s point of view” - neither of these examples quite refute this, because they’re both nominally in the voice of the perpetrator, but I’ve discussed Odd Future before in comparison with the Ramones’ ‘53rd & 3rd’ (male street prostitute takes it out on a ‘trick’ in order to reassert ‘macho’ vengeance) and Husker Du’s ‘Diane’ (an almost-doubtlessly satirical portrait of an actual rapist/murderer) - both songs with an obvious sympathy with a victim, of some kind or other. As for writing lyrics from that standpoint, wouldn’t it either be presumptuous (in the case of female rape victims, if the artists are male) or pointless (what is the perspective of a murder victim? Who knows, except for fanatically committed TV cops?). Much better to write with a sense, rather than a mere portrayal, of empathy; or with none at all, the better to highlight its absence from non-artistic life.
May 09
gabba gabba, we accept you, we accept you, one of us
“Consider, as a final example, the attitude of contemporary American liberals to the unending hopelessness and misery of the lives of the young blacks in American cities. Do we say that these people must be helped because they are our fellow human beings? We may, but it is much more persuasive, morally as well as politically, to describe them as our fellow Americans - to insist that it is outrageous that an Americans should live without hope. The point of these examples is that our sense of solidarity is strongest when those with whom solidarity is expressed are thought of as “one of us,” where “us” means something smaller and more local than the human race. That is why “because she is a human being” is a weak, unconvincing explanation of a generous action.
From a Christian standpoint this tendency to feel closer to those with whom imaginative identification is easier is deplorable, a temptation to be avoided. It is part of the Christian idea of moral perfection to treat everyone, even the guards at Auschwitz or in the Gulag, as a fellow sinner. For Christians, sanctity is not achieved as long as obligation is felt more strongly to one child of God than to another; invidious contrasts are to be avoided on principle. Secular ethical universalism has taken over this attitude from Christianity. For Kant, it is not because someone is a fellow Milanese or a fellow American that we should feel an obligation toward him or her, but because he or she is a rational being. In his most rigorous mood, Kant tells us that a good action toward another person does not count as a moral action, one done for the sake of duty as opposed to one done merely in accordance with duty, unless the person is thought of simply as a rational being rather than as a relative, a neighbor, or a fellow citizen. But even if we use neither Christian nor Kantian language, we may feel that there is something morally dubious about a greater concern for a fellow New Yorker than for someone facing an equally hopeless and barren life in the slums of Manila or Dakar.
The position put forward in Part I of this book is incompatible with this universalistic attitude, in either its religious or its secular form. It is incompatible with the idea that there is a “natural” cut in the spectrum of similarities and differences which spans the difference between you and a dog, or you and one of Asimov’s robots - a cut which marks the end of the rational beings and the beginning of the nonrational ones, the end of moral obligation and the beginning of benevolence. My position entails that feelings of solidarity are necessarily a matter of which similarities and dissimilarities strike us as salient, and that such salience is a function of a historically contingent final vocabulary.
On the other hand, my position is not incompatible with urging that we try to extend our sense of “we” to people whom we have previously thought of as “they.” This claim, characteristic of liberals - people who are more afraid of being cruel than of anything else - rests on nothing deeper than the historical contingencies to which I referred at the end of Chapter 4. These are the contingencies which brought about the development of the moral and political vocabularies typical of the secularized democratic societies of the West. As this vocabulary has gradually been de-theologized and de-philosophized, “human solidarity’, has emerged a powerful piece of rhetoric. I have no wish to diminish its power, but only to disengage it from what has often been thought of as its “philosophical presuppositions.”
The view I am offering says that there is such a thing as moral progress, and that this progress is indeed in the direction of greater human solidarity. But that solidarity is not thought of as recognition of a core self, the human essence, in all human beings. Rather, it is thought of as the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation - the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of “us.” That is why I said, in chapter 4, that detailed descriptions of particular varieties of pain and humiliation (in, e.g., novels or ethnographies), rather than philosophical or religious treatises, were the modern intellectual’s principal contributions to moral progress.”
Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 191-2.
Mar 07
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Ramones - ‘Havana Affair’, ‘Listen To My Heart’, ‘53rd & 3rd’ from Ramones (1976)
Maybe it’s just a legacy of St. Patrick, but to me the best things always seem to come in threes. Or rather, three is the easiest form of analysis - in a trilogy, trinity, or troika - that avoids dichotomy but is still easily graspable by the three-dimensional mind. Here are three songs in sequence from the record, that can be used to illustrate some interesting ideas about punk, irony and moral violence.
I
The second side of the Ramones debut LP starts off with ‘Loudmouth’, a brash, angry song which, in its lyrical expression of rage - “You better shut it up/I’m gonna beat you up” - is very similar to ‘Beat on the Brat’. It’s nasty, brutish, and short, an unreflective assault on the polite niceties of life; but it’s also naked in its aggression, devoid of any explanatory meaning except that which may be given to it by the societal and cultural context. ‘Loudmouth’, however, also establishes a musical violence which continues into the next song, ‘Havana Affair’; the staccato bursts of the former expand into the grenade- or shell-mimicking drum sounds of the following track.
Dealing with revolutionary Cuba, which was at the time less than two decades old, but also not too far off the ages of the Ramones themselves, ‘Havana Affair’ is an odd song. Whether or not it’s specifically about the Bay of Pigs (“PT boat on the way to Havana”) it’s a comic and, if not identifiably critical, then certainly irreverent view of US influence in Latin America. However, it does so through what would surely be characterised today as minstrelsy: its character “used to make a living … picking the banana”, which Joey Ramone sings more like “pickin’ de bananah” - a black slave accent. Which is conceivably true to the story, and the line can even be interpreted as a reference to United Fruit Company, owner of the biggest plantations in pre-revolutionary Cuba. But throwing in a couple of random Spanish words (“loco!” “mambo!”) hardly makes it any more culturally sensitive/less appropriative, although it does fit in with the Ramones’ goofy sense of humour.
Of course, that’s all that “Havana Affair” really is, with the politics of the situation - “Now I’m a guide for the CIA/Hooray for the USA” - being almost incidental; yet, even if the song has no obvious meaning beyond a joke, it’s a reflection of American concern, or unconcern, with the global effects of their foreign policy. A more recent New York band who took a phrase from Latin American history, translated through one or two Anglophone cultural moments, are of course Vampire Weekend and their Contra album. Given the micro-examination of their perceived cultural tourism, wrapped as it was in layers of clever irony, what would people make of ‘Havana Affair’ if it arrived today?
II
The next track, ’Listen To My Heart’, runs in with a deceptively similar tempo, but an altogether lighter or more personal subject matter. It’s a case of the Ramones subverting their own subversion, producing a clear statement in the form of a pure (punk-)pop song:
Despite the fact that it is among the fastest songs, on the album, “Listen to My Heart” has much in common with “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” one of the slowest songs. Both are straightforward love songs with approaches leaving only the slightest possibility of an ironic reading. “Listen to My Heart” also shows the enormous gulf between the moribund progressive and singer-songwriter love songs, which either traded in some kind of macho sincerity or weepy-eyed self-pity. The Ramones, instead, recast the love song into a 1:56 burst of declarative sentiment, once again leaving the reader to fill in the blanks. No “boy has girl, boy loses girl, boy cries” here, just “boy wants girl.” Period.”
Nicholas Rombes, Ramones 33 1/3 (Continuum, 2005), p. 89-90
And while ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’ was gloriously unambiguous and simple, the message of ‘Listen to My Heart’ is deceptively clever. “Next time I’ll listen to my heart/Next time, well I’ll be smart” are in fact contradictory statements by most traditional notions of psychology, but in the resolution of those two factors is the key to living. Similarly, the combination of hope - “That girl could still be mine” - with emotional fatigue - “but I’m tired of the hurt/tired of tryin’/I’m tired of the pain/tired of tryin’/I’m tired of cryin’” - is a brilliant exercise in Zen-like duality; is he giving up, or refusing to give up? The Ramones aren’t as dumb as ‘Havana Affair’ may make them seem, and it’s interesting that it’s the most formulaic, unoriginal song which reveals that.
III
‘53rd and 3rd’ is the most well-known song of the three, with its very recognizable drop-in beat, which is almost martial - reflecting its own military themes but also harking back to the explosive violence of ‘Havana Affair’. And its roughness is enhanced by Dee Dee Ramone’s chainsaw vocals - the raw original of songs like ‘Outsider’ or ‘Too Tough To Die’. However, its storyline is by far the ugliest part - a male prostitute, allegedly based on Dee Dee’s autobiographical experiences, turning tricks (mostly unsuccessfully) and then taking out a razor blade in revenge, to be in turn pursued by the police. The language is blatantly homophobic, or at least concerned with establishing a rigid form of masculinity - “No more of your fairy stories”, “I proved that I’m no sissy” - but it’s split between Joey singing “If you think you can, well come on man/I was a Green Beret in Viet Nam” and Dee Dee’s response “Then I took out my razor blade/Then I did what God forbade”.
Other punk songs from the period which feature viscerally shocking violence on the part of one of the protagonists include Suicide’s notorious ‘Frankie Teardrop’, but also the somewhat later ‘Diane’ from Husker Du’s 1983 EP Metal Circus, told from the perspective of a rapist and murderer. I wrote about it for Post Punk’s Top 35 Or So Songs of the 80’s - it has a great chorus - but of Grant Hart’s parting line, “It’s all over now, and with my knife”, I said that it is delivered ”if only to end the song, leaving the questions of this black comedy largely unresolved. ‘Diane’ was the story of a real murder, but the song leaves no clue as to its real meaning, apart from perhaps the sour ludicrousness of this tragedy, or a send-up of traditional American pop and romance.”
The difference between ‘Diane’ and ‘53rd and 3rd’ is that no-one could really assume that Mould and Hart were in favour of rape and murder, whereas the Ramones situation is a little more open-ended. Nevertheless, they are similar in that there is nothing internal to the Husker Du song that allows you to make that judgement, it has to come from outside - from your own moral reflection and views on society. The power of the songs is not just in their violence, but their expression, even advocacy, of violence with ambiguity. You are confronted with the brutal ‘facts’, and you have to make up your own opinions. Which is how it should be: there’s no form of direct artistic expression that conveys unambiguous disapproval of the actions or attitudes so expressed, save for loud, dumb sarcasm, and that creates its own problems. Irony is the method, consideration is the message.
Mar 06
Mar 03
The following is a pretty representative sample of a quote that reflects Internet discussions and criticism about the group Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, followed by the personal memory it most often triggers. It is presented without comment.
SF Gate: The members’ ever-present smirks hinted at the truth behind the nihilistic, no-holds-barred lyrics. Odd Future’s members aren’t actually misogynists, violent criminals or homophobes. Unlike some rappers, Odd Future raps about offensive subjects simply because pissing people off is their idea of a good time.
When I was 14 years old I met a recent high school dropout, three years my senior, who took me under his wing. In skinhead circles he was known as “Jim Hate” — a self-applied nickname that he felt best described his personal ideology. “I’m not racist or sexist or homophobic,” he often told people. “I hate everyone equally.”
I believed him. Or at least I wanted to. Our group of friends consisted of a mix of skaters and skinheads; we were, interestingly enough, comprised mostly of black and Latino men. There were only three white boys in our gang, of which Jim was one, and only one female — a white skinhead girl that Jim dated for a few years. I didn’t know what being “subversive” was, but I felt like we were doing something in that vein; if punk rock was meant to be offensive, Jim figured, then what could be more insolent than offending other punk rockers? So he toyed with racist imagery — at one point wearing a pin with an emblem that is widely known as “the South African swastika” on his flight jacket — and he started a band that took down almost everyone: gays, women, immigrants, vegetarians, whoever. Despite being a closeted-gay, vegetarian, son of immigrant parents, I actually played guitar for Jim at one show in the late ’80s. In retrospect, I went along with all this because I never really had a family, and Jim — regardless of his misguided ideas — was a kind and affectionate friend to me. He played an almost paternal role in my life at that age; I craved for his approval. But my unwillingness to challenge him stemmed from being young and naive and convinced that this kind of blanket “hate” rhetoric was harmless. Pissing people off was our idea of a good time.
By the time I was 16, I grew tired of the looming threat of violence and overarching negativity that inevitably came with Jim’s friendship and we parted ways. I wouldn’t see him again until 1992, when he appeared as a guest on the short-lived Jackie Mason Show. The text at the bottom of the television screen identified him in his new role: He was now an organizer for the American Front. Jim’s new girlfriend, who sat beside him, wore a T-shirt that positioned the face of Martin Luther King, Jr. inside of a crosshair target. It read: “Our Dream Came True.”
The transformation was complete. He had finally embraced the pinnacle of offensiveness.
Jim often talked about “Jim Hate” in the third person — as a character he used to provoke people, separate and distinct from the first-person Jim, who was actually kind of a nice guy. But the problem with fashioning a second identity when you’re only 18 years old is that you don’t really have a grasp on your primary identity. Deliberate subversion depends on a modicum requirement of self-actualization, and at that time, neither Jim nor I could say that we truly possessed that level of introspection. The fragmented ego eventually yearned to integrate the character-identity into his authentic self because it was the character that fed Jim’s hunger for attention; he made no distinction between positive and negative scrutiny.
Earlier this week, the current leader of the American Front was found murdered in his Sacramento home. I haven’t heard from Jim Hate in almost 20 years.
This is really interesting, especially for being a personal story coming out of the punk scene, but I’m not sure that I agree with the (implied) overall conclusion. In a way, it answers a lot of what I was asking here and here about Odd Future and violence, Swastikas and punk; and it’s factually more sober than most high-flying rhetoric about punk rock subculture and ‘subversion’. But at the same time, I don’t think one can blame the movement for the worst of its after-effects without acknowledging that there are other, negative forces at work in addition to the positive freedom of punk rock and fuck-you-all free speech.
For a start, isn’t this emphasis on “primary identity” and “self-actualization” (paging Dr. Ewing of the Maslow psychology ward!) exactly what a) drives youths towards finding those things and b) in doing so, makes them adapt radical and - in hindsight from older years - not very sensible positions? In other words, is it not both its own impetus and cause? And then, for those people who pursue this entirely predictable line of behaviour, how many reassert themselves under some more moderate secondary identity, how many follow through with a destructive primary one, and what actually decides which route they take? If it is even is a route, and not just a projection backwards from adulthood into the turbulent past, asking ‘how (or more importantly, why) did I get here?’. Ultimately, if someone lets their imaginary, ironic character take over their life to the detriment of what we would prefer to see as normal human development, is that the fault of imagination or irony, or due rather to some other factor in their life more pressing than whether or not they had a critical education in the meaning of culture?
I was going to continue on from the latter post about the Ramones’ first album - with the realisation that OFWGKTA’s music itself doesn’t much appeal to me, and I can enjoy all the extra swag second- or third-hand, but I do like the way its existence as a cultural talking point makes me look again at punk - using a trio of songs from the second side: ‘Havana Affair’ (questionable post-colonialist take on revolutionary regimes, interesting in the current climate), ‘Listen To My Heart’ (surprisingly good advice on balancing emotional and rational feelings) and ‘53rd & 3rd’ (violent tale of youth prostitution embracing elements of homophobia and defined masculinity). In part to show that there are some rather shocking things in there - or at least they would certainly shock if they came out for the first time now - but also to show that you don’t necessarily need a master’s level degree in irony* to get some value out of them. And the same ought to be true, to some degree, with Odd Future.
*Although, if Modern History - specifically the politics of Communism in Europe, c. 1930-1950 - counts, I technically do have that.
Feb 19
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Ramones - ‘Beat on the Brat’ from Ramones (1976)
Generally, I think that the Ramones are much better than the Sex Pistols as a starting point for punk, for several reasons: they were there first (an issue of chronology which the likes of Summer of Discontent may not appreciate), they didn’t fall apart in a cheap tragedy of cynical manipulation, and they made consistently better music which resulted in a richer vein of American punk and punk-pop (especially in the case of this album’s direct influence on the Undertones, both an Irish and a UK band). Of course the Sex Pistols are the most iconic punk band - often to the exclusion of any more nuanced reading of the genre - and it would be extremely churlish to take that valid part of history away from them. However, it’s not hard to uncover the shock-doctrine aspect of the Ramones and their music, most of all on their debut album, which flirted with Nazi imagery (‘Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World’ and “I fight for fatherland”, not to mention the iconic opening track), horror movie violence (“Chain Saw” and “I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement”) and this song, which is halfway between advocating corporal punishment and encouraging physical child abuse.
It gets the full critical analysis from Nicholas Rombes’ 33 1/3 Ramones:
“For what it’s worth (and it must be worth something) “Beat on the Brat” is the only song on the album that’s not sung in the first-person; the lyrics of each of the other songs are sung as “I” or “we.” This seemingly trivial fact of narrative theory helps explain part of the unease of telling, as well. Joey has said that the idea for the song emerged when he “lived in Birchwood Towers in Forest Hills with my mom and brother. It was a middle-income neighborhood, with a lot of rich, snooty women, who had horrible spoiled brat kids. There was a playground with women sitting around a kid screaming, a spoiled, horrible kid just running rampant with no discipline whatsoever. The kind of kid you just want to kill. You know, ‘beat on the brat with a baseball’ just came out. I just wanted to kill him.
This story of the song’s origin and meaning illustrate the danger of relying on a song’s author to explain its meaning. This objection is, of course, an old concept: it was the New Critics of the 1950s and 60s who warned of the intentional fallacy, whereby readers of literary texts make the mistake of assuming that a correct interpretation of a text could be best found by determining the intention of the author. Instead, the New Critics argued, authorial intention can never be known: perhaps the author is lying when she explains the intentiojn behind her text, or perhaps she has forgotten or misremembered her original intention, or perhaps the text expresses subconscious drives and desires beyond the strict control of her intention.
Does it help to know Joey’s supposed intention in writing “Beat on the Brat”?
Or, on the contrary, does hearing Joey’s explanation shut down other possibilities of meaning for us as listeners? In interviews, David Lynch is notoriously reluctant to interpret his own movies or explain them because, he says, he wants to preserve the mystery for audiences. In our confessionalist era -our era of blogs, personal web pages, and reality TV - we are practically forbidden from withholding our “feelings,” as if this would be a gesture of bad faith.”
As an insensitive jerk, that last line gets especial approval from me. But seriously, this treatment of ‘Beat on the Brat’ is an obvious primer on how to deal with Odd Future, with or without the understanding of rap’s broader codes and signifiers. Personally, I’ve always taken the New Critical stance further and considered songs as almost unanchored texts, floating with no firm interpretation either from the artist or from any one particular listener. To a degree at least, art means what we want it to mean - more importantly, what we often don’t want it to mean. You can come up with one reading, and it works if it’s persuasive - and practically speaking, if the artist does come out with a definitive interpretation (or two) that does tend to restrict things, but not always completely, as many controversial songs will show - but there can always be a better analysis around the psycho-cultural corner.
What ‘Beat on the Brat’ means to us depends to a large extent on what we want punk rock to mean. Is it just a catchy phrase (“Beat on the braught”, as Rombes points out) put to a basic rhythm, which is probably the most thought any of us give to it the majority of the times we hear it in passing, just like punk functions to a great degree simply as fun, energetic music? Does it express in that energy something more on the level of outsider anger, ironically (and bitterly so) expressed towards the defenceless and yet privileged, with the plaintive remark “what can you do”? One of my favourite posts I’ve done here was on the final scene of the last season of Skins, which musically and dramatically expressed the pent-up rage of youth, and desire for identity, with near-absolute perfection - and against a baseball-bat wielding adult villain. Or can you take it further and see it as a reflection of violence and psychological angst in society, in the way that punk pointed to the world’s ugliness when most contemporary popular and rock music steadfastedly avoided doing so (though, unlike the Sex Pistols, the Ramones always tried to combine their edge with a bubblegum-pop appeal - with notably limited success)?
In the essay on punk I quoted earlier, the New York variety of punk appears not as the overt bondage-wearing London fashion set, but as something even more subversive:
“That the word “punk’ derives from prison slang, for the “boys who give up their asses to the ‘wolves’” (Savage, 1991, pp123-140), is not news. In mid-70s New York, The Ramones and Richard Hell took their barely coded look from the boy hustlers on 53rd and 3rd, ripped jeans and t-shirts, adorably mussed-up hair. It was the refusal to recognise any community politics in this self-locating gesture, the emphasis on hostility and self-loathing and extremes of relational withdrawal, that gave this scene its pulling power.”
Odd Future or No Future?
