White Riot (2019) Directed by Rubika Shah

This is one of those I was alive at the time stories, late 1970s, thought I knew Rock Against Racism (RAR), and liked a lot of the music associated with the organization. But this 2019 documentary reveals I did not know really anything beyond a few music headlines. 

I did not know, for instance, RAR was crucial to a political movement against a racist National Front campaign in England gaining popularity at the time. RAR galvanizes elements of the punk and ska and reggae and new wave communities into a thriving social movement that culminated in an east London Woodstock-like event, drawing over 100,000, including on the bill over 40 bands, and contributing significantly to the defeat of the NF agenda in the general election of 1979.  

Nor did I know the intellectual force behind the NF movement came from Enoch Powell, infamous for his "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968, a prominent racist political figure in Britain from the 1960s to the 1990s, a classics scholar no less, maybe the British version of William F. Buckley jr., and staunchly hostile to immigration as a threat to the ethno-nationalist (read: racist white) identity of Great Britain. Powell spewed another version of the replacement theory ("In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man"), and inspired more conservative elite panic over post-WW2 migrations of imperial subjects of the British empire to the metropole, and called for forced deportation of immigrants. 

So another historical episode ringing a lot of bells with the illiberal extremes of now; including violent anti-immigrant hysteria and conservative elite panic over democratic reforms and formerly colonized and still discriminated against groups clamoring, justifiably, for more civil rights. 

Nor did I understand what a pivotal role classic rock played in inspiring the RAR movement. Both Eric Clapton ("The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans don’t belong here, we don’t want them here.") and Rod Stewart ("This country is over-crowded. The immigrants should be sent home.") made incendiary public statements in support of Powell's candidacy for Prime Minister in the late 1970s. Clapton's racist rant at a show in 1976 is credited with launching Rock Against Racism.* 

RAR's development centered around this "militant entertainment" fanzine called Temporary Hoarding (lots of cut and paste stark graphics and situationist like sloganeering; looked better than most zines) and, crucially, multiplying small cell groups of RAR music event organizers sprouting up all over Britain and Europe and eventually all around the world; building up over 200 local RAR groups between 1976 and 1982. They'd pull a few bands together, calling the shows "Carnivals Against Racism," and bring together antiracist and antifascist young people. 

All the talking heads behind RAR and Temporary Hoarding that appear in the documentary keep it simple. The story Red Saunders, a photographer and RAR founder, a kind of righteous John Belushi character in the '70s and Baby Gramps as an elderly talking head in the doc, is direct action simple: The NF was inspiring bullying parades of Union Jack-wearing white racists marching through West Indian and Pakistani neighborhoods and triggering increasing street violence against non-white people all over Great Britain. RAR didn't like the racist violence and figured they were not alone. They intrepidly organized antiracist and antifascist music fans, music fans opposed to the NF agenda, white and Black, West Indian, Pakistani, and other foreign immigrant groups, bringing them together to organize more RAR music events. They rallied bands and artists to play these events that opposed the violent racism of the NF: The Clash, Tom Robinson, X-Ray Spex, Steel Pulse, The Specials, The Jam, Dennis Bovell, Linton Kwesi Johnson, the Fall, Buzzcocks, Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Gang of Four, Mekons, Delta 5, Au Pairs, Misty in Roots, Aswad, etc. Impressive class of '77 list. And Pete Townshend of The Who showed up for the classic rockers. All these people come together in RAR shows, which raised public awareness that antiracists, standing together, unified, overwhelmingly outnumbered the violent racists.  

They didn't vanquish the racists for good, of course, but they contributed to a political defeat of anti-immigrant racism in Great Britain at its wolfish extremes. Powell loses to Thatcher, which brought its own set of reactionary politics but the NF agenda was pushed out of mainstream politics. In comparison with Hitler's Germany or the techno-fascism of Japan in the late '30s, and other catastrophic spasms of reactionary violence, here is a humble victory against racism and fascist violence in the modern culture wars organized, successfully, with music. Yay, our team!

Admittedly, as a pure musical document, even the most exciting moments, The Clash, X-Ray Spex, are little more than a tease. The musical performances are secondary to the RAR story I share above, naturally. Still, I found the coda of Tom Robinson's "Winter of '79" at the mammoth RAR event at Victoria Park touching. And the doc makes a case for the new waver band 999 being underrated. I'm not sure they're right but I like it as a revisionist proposition. Maybe they are? Now I gotta listen to some more 999, which is something music documentaries are supposed to do. 

So Rubika Shaw's documentary, White Riot, does that and tells a still relevant story about the culture wars, fascist violence against multicultural reality and protesting for peace in England in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Good story. 

*- This is also a time, 1976-1979, Powell on the rise, when David Bowie is quoted to have said, "I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader" and was accused of throwing a Nazi salute during a publicity event. But at the same time was talking in the press about how Britain needed some strict right wing conservatives to take over and clean up the moral mess liberals have generated, presumably including indulgent libertines like himself. Being provocative, transgressive, was the coin of Bowie's androgynous alien glam rock realm and so a bit of a red herring in this discussion. By the early 1980s he was renouncing all his former remarks glamorizing fascist authority as drug ravings and pointing out his lifelong apolitical multicultural anti-violence bonafides, plays with Nile Rodgers, etc. Not his best moments.   

*-Syd Shelton, photographer, put out a book about RAR in 2023. Haven't read it yet. 

"No Escape," Caberet Voltaire (1979)

 One of my favorite early electro punk singles;  bleak, brooding, tribal, and punchy hammer down electronics. And I'm pretty sure burnishing their punk cred with a reworking of '60s protopunk garage classic, "Pushin' Too Hard," by the Seeds. 

"Violence Grows," Fatal Microbes (1979)

 

"They've seen too much and don't want to know/Violence grows/Violence grows/Violence grows." Brit punk rockers writing their own rules. Honey Bane on the mic. Boosted by John Peel. Edgy and timeless. 

The Pop Group and Mark Stewart's Agitprop Post-Punk Funk

"The Pop Group has this obsession with being endlessly in the vanguard of finding a new way of doing everything,"  once said Vivien Goldman, journalist, member of The Flying Lizards, and Chrissie Hynde's NME London flatmate in the late '70s.

The Pop Group were the first post-punk band or in that conversation, anyway. On paper they were irresistible, for their hilariously blunt agitprop titles alone: Learning to Cope with Cowardice; As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade; For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? They were also very into Black music; members eventually formed relationships with On-U-Sound records that has lasted into the 21st century; a label devoted to reggae and dub and related beat music. In the burgeoning punk era British pop press of the late 1970s The Pop Group were a prototype post-punk band. So hot they were on the cover of NME before they even had a record.

And Mark Stewart's voice is the unmistakeable calling card of The Pop Group and Stewart's subsequent outfit, Mark Stewart & the Maffia, and in its loutish way a punk rock monument in its own right. Like a drunken pirate, inflamed with bitter lamentation. Like a 17th century ranter or 19th century romantic poet, caterwauling against the void. Stewart's maybe too smart and didactic and political for a goth icon but he carries on in gothic histrionics anyway. He grabs your attention, whether you like it or not. He'd probably make a great street corner preacher if he wasn't such an angry humanist. He often wails through a bullhorn like a street preacher, even if you'd have to really play close attention to make out much of what he is howling or muttering about. 

Which is part of his achievement, turning his tuneless warble into this big scenery-chewing personality, apoplectic about the human surrender to entropy and passivity, or the placid indifference to the poly-crises raging all around us. Stewart is not having any of it and has some things to say. 

In your face vocals are a common if not universal feature of punk rock singing, of course. And by such criteria alone Stewart is on a very short list of great punk rock singers. But, it should be noted for the same reasons, this makes anything with Stewart's voice impossible to listen to as background music, how I must admit I do most my music listening anymore. The dude will not blend into the music; or tends to "dominate the frame," is how producer Dennis Bovell once put it. 

But in small doses, songs, Stewart's hectoring, shamanistic and dramatically delirious spells are cast; "We Are Time," "Where There's a Will There's a Way," "She's Beyond Good and Evil," etc. And maybe contrary to what you might expect from such a big personality Stewart is actually into the collaboration and band thing. I've never had a full blown crush on any Stewart album but there are times when nothing quite hits the spot like one of Stewart's dub-heavy funky free-jazz political jeremiads. 

And this be, I'm afraid, one of those times. 

A live record of The Pop Group from the '00s is titled "Idealists in Distress from Bristol." Mark Stewart is an idealist in distress and a post-punk original. 

"Rob a Bank" (1980): Robin Hood as Punk Rocker. 

"Where There's a Will There's a Way" (1980): Punk-funk, post-punk, perverted disco, etc.  

"I shall not cease from mental fight nor shall my sword sleep at my side/'Til we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land," William Blake.

Mark Stewart and the Maffia's version:

 

"I Have Been to Heaven and Back," The Mekons (1989)

Late song off Rock'n'Roll (1989), and as pure an example of The Mekons rock & roll as you're going to find. One way you can tell the pure stuff is if they, Sally and/or Tom and/or Jon, kick up their heels like drunken Rockettes when the band joins all together on the crashing downbeats. Like bullfighting Ole's, shambolic urban thriftshop world music. Or Mekons Rock'n'Roll! 

Or rock & roll or rock-n-roll all superior to rock and roll because they bind the two, the  'rock' and the 'roll,' together more tightly than the common rock 'and' roll. I prefer the upper case musical duets, like Sam & Dave, and the imperial E Pluribus Unum of the ampersand but I'm okay with the informality of the apostrophe too. Mekons Rock'n'Roll.  

 

Chrome as Space Rock Avatars and Cyberpunk Pioneers

My short playlist case for Chrome as underground proto-cyberpunk musical missing link to Erik Davis's High Weirdness in California in the 1970s. 

Damon Edge, creator of Chrome, after recording Visitation, 1976, their debut, sent the record to Warner Brothers but they rejected it. They told Edge it sounded like a "messed up Doors album." He took this as a compliment, of course. I might want to add a 'messed up stag Jefferson Airplane' but, yes, very apt. This is the only Chrome album that has such a bad '60s hangover vibe and isn't yet characteristically post-punk. 

What if NYC's band Suicide lived in the Bay Area and had a thing for sci-fi Alien Soundtracks, consider Chrome's second album that came out in 1978? "Chromosome Damage" might be a worst case scenario. Bad trip psychedelia meets DIY tech. Helios Creed joins the band on the second album to solidify the nucleus of Edge and Creed through Chrome's classic period, Alien Soundtracks to 3rd from the Sun (1982). 

"Zombie Warfare (Can't Let You Down)," off Chrome's '79 album Half Machine Lip Moves. Maybe their best album but there are several other legit contenders. As live music fantasies go Half Machine Chrome double-billed with the Wipers, not inconceivable, generates sci-fi psychedelic punk rock mind-melding live music energies. Cum feel the noize. 

Here's Chrome, if I'm not mistaken, and I could very well be, but from what I could gather, 1980, "unreleased studio outtake," so tossed out but, more significantly, tossing off seemingly effortlessly a prototype of a particular feedback heavy guitar band emo-screamo vocal style that anticipates bands like Husker Du and Nirvana and Guided by Voices. Although, I can't say for sure how much actual guitar Chrome uses in this take because all the instrumentation sounds, as usual, heavily treated and filtered. Still, more rootsy and soulful than typical Chrome. 

Chrome's New Wave bid, "Animal," off Red Exposure, 1980. I admire the boldly abstracted pop move but understand longtime fans find it a slight sell-out. 

From the 1981 Chrome album, Blood On The Moon, another album contender. "The Need." Chrome's mature sound is a visionary amalgam of jittery punk, bad trip psychedelia, space rock, and a kind of space rock musique concrete that would morph into industrial music in the 1980s. Creed's noir guitar sound also a big influence on Sonic Youth.  

I've tried less successfully with Chrome before. There is a muted quality to the production that makes everything sound distorted and staticky and so alienated and impenetrable but once you stop trying to get to some clear narrative center the sculpted, conceptual, abstracted shards of muted noise rock are catchy. Some wag on youtube mused, "Chrome are for Hawkwind fans into industrial music." That sounds about right to me. 

Chrome are a combo of psychedelia, punk rock, and obsessive uses of DIY technology. High-low weirdness from San Francisco, California, in the 1970s. Hardcore fans seem to favor '82's 3rd from the Sun as a kind of aesthetic culmination but my sense of the album is it's when they settle into a more conventional dark metal sound and lose some of the weird charm of their earlier records. Edge leaves the band and moves to Paris in '83, ending what I'll call their classic period.   

The Class of '77 Punk Rock and New Wave

 Very rough video from 1977. Devo still working out their costumes; going for a Robin Williams look circa Mork & Mindy. But rocking out like twisted punk rockers. They're feeling each other out, locking in, winding up the tension and rocking out like they invented a new robotronic punk superdrug. Very confident. Tweakers tight. Hailing from Akron, Ohio, once upon a time Rubber Capital of the World, Devo go from Kent State to "Rust Belt" ur-text New Wave '80s chart champions. Here they are on the verge of breaking out. Also fine example of the robotic, herky-jerky, neurotic nerd spazzing dance style characteristic of New Wave, especially the stuff with any kind of electronic sci-fi art school performative theatrical keyboards slant. 

Or this one, again, very early and crude but at Max's Kansas City in NYC the summer of 1977. Landmark event on the rock era timeline: Devo performing for Eno and Bowie and industry flak before recording their stone cold classic debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo?, at some local NYC studio. Devo had been together since '73 and were seasoned enough but still what stands out here is their moxie and tightness. Charging into NYC and Max's with such nerdy swagger.   

I saw them on their 1980 Freedom of Choice tour, at the old Paramount in Portland. It was rock 'em sock 'em electro dance music with jarring, colorful, pop culture montages on the big screen behind the band. Fun show. But maybe the end of their peak, as their albums seemed to drop off in quality thereafter. They began as a midwest nerd response to punk rock and end up as essential an ingredient to New Wave music as you're going to find, with Blondie and B-52's and Talking Heads and XTC and Human League and acts like that. 

Devo belongs in a big salad of the best New Wave music circa 1977 to 1983.

"Alien Point of View," Nervous Gender (1981)

Pounding tribal tempo, alien punk explicit sex body shaming ranting. Electropunk OGs from LA. Wonder if NG ever played a Burning Man, although do BM's go back that far? Speaking of, a missing piece in Erik Davis's otherwise very engaging book, High Weirdness (2019), was more musical analogues to the druggie hippie cyberpunk synthesis networking through California during the 1970s. The Dead were throwbacks and don't seem to count, not techie enough. One strong candidate is Nervous Gender, along with SF's Chrome or Tuxedomoon or even The Residents. All from the same classic punk/New Wave/post-punk 1978 to 1982 window, or that was their wheelhouse anyhow. Technologically mutant punk rock. Psychedelic cyberpunk. Sexually explicit acid-punk. Scifi-punk. Art-punks having sex with cyborgs. A nugget of high weirdness, "Alien Point of View," in '70s/'80s California music. BTW, you might remember lesbian folk singer Phranc from the '80s. Started out in Nervous Gender but was gone before this recording. Many parts of other classic LA punk rock bands, Germs, Screamers, The Bags, support and cycle through NG. Edward Stapleton and Matt Comeione, core band members, are still at it. Gerardo Valazquez, another founding member, died in 1992.  

More background on Nervous Gender. 

The Horrible (And Not So Horrible) Truth About Mission of Burma

Post-punk Amerindie guitar band Boston legends 1979 to 1985. "Peking Spring" was a local hit in '79 but the first I heard Mission of Burma was a 7" vinyl single, "Academy Fight Song," I bought with my hard earned dough at Singles Going Steady in Portland, OR in '80. Loved the bad college roommate tirade in it; I'm not your academy, your school, your philosophy, club, etc. Prep school punk; real Catcher in the Rye stuff; i.e., catchy, angry, and self-righteous punk declaration of independence. In an interview much later Clint Conley, the songwriter, says he was trying to do a Talking Heads song. And, indeed, there is a jittery New Wave-y pop quality to the song they rarely if ever return to in later records. 

Back in the day I was a little underwhelmed by their next record and first EP, Signals, Calls, and Marches. There were standout tracks. "All World Cowboy Romance." And I like "(That's When I Reach For My) Revolver," although, apparently, most other musicians and artists think it is Burma's signature song. It's the most covered of their songs. I get this, I think, but actually prefer another version of the same song they do later on Vs, their only album, '82, or only album in their original post-punk era incarnation, at any rate, called "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate." Which is a sort of a punk rock Trustfall-song or an inside-out love song that Burma plays with all their scrappy might. Rocking out is in the ear of the beholder, of course, but these guys play music loud and hard. The principle reason they disbanded after a '83 tour, not forgetting the live album of a tour they put out in '85 as the maybe underrated The Horrible Truth About Burma, was because the Tinnitus in Roger Miller's hearing was getting so bad he couldn't continue to be around loud music so much anymore. Their material is heavy, dour, and obviously hard work, if a pulverizingly effective sonic force. But the exhilaration in "Certain Fate" is gleeful and rhapsodic. And in keeping Conley has said of this song that he was trying to do the Buzzcocks. 

Live version gives you a look at Burma in their prime, with their original audience and band supporters at the Bradford Ballroom in Boston in '83. 

Rock critics, it is my memory, used to disparage instrumental psychedelic riff rock droning like this as tedious filler. This might be known as the English major bias in rock snob era rock criticism, 1960s to 1980s. No words here. Just sounds; that sound like Glenn Branca's symphony of guitars covering Tommy James' "Crimson and Clover." Moment of zen. 

I even liked a lot some songs off drummer Peter Prescott's Volcano Suns albums. I think there is that sense that Burma never quite lived up to their potential. Never broke through, had a smash hit. No A+ records or  albums. True, maybe. But "Academy Fight Song" and Vs. are close. They were one of those volatile the-sum-is-greater-than-the-parts post-punk bands, brilliant, erratic, too loud and dissonant for the radio or anything beyond college radio but a creative burst of their own post-punk noise rock thing.

The Fall's Mancunian Post-Punk Prole Art Beat Therapy

North country and western England prole art dance music 1983. From album, Perverted by Language, on a short list of my favorite Fall albums for sure, and an even shorter list of truly great post-punk albums. And it's not just Mark E. Smith, in your face, clever, obtuse, cryptic, provoking suspicions, homophobic "Sodmized by presumption," antifa "In a German history book," or antisemitic "a Jew on a motorbike," but the band, who he apparently rarely speaks to, so under him or behind him or in whatever hierarchical relationship to him, actually, rock out with him in rivetingly tight post-punk shambolic intensity. Classic Fall. 

"Who Makes The Nazis" (1982),  post-punk legend Smith tells you: White-O's [flag waving white supremacists], All the Os, Intellectual half-wits, balding smug faggots [great, more potential homophobia and lumping all us bald guys w Nazis], long horn breeds, smiling Buffalos [atavists?], rapists in mirage Spa Motels, real Irish know [underground violence?], Joe, Benny's cob-web eyes, bad bias TV, BBC, George Orwell [note to self: read that James Burnham book], Burmese Days [colonialism], Black burnt flesh, and Crack unit species [militarists? decade before the Crack epidemic]." And a word from anti-fascist (and, again, likely homophobic) Bobby: "If you're out of love, just give them real soap. Hates not your enemy, love's your enemy." Let me guess: "Bush warriors" have menaced Smith/Benny and they're suffering untreated PTSD? And you still can't argue it isn't a little Hitler like for Smith to fire a musician for eating a salad, as he allegedly once did. Nonetheless, poet laureate of anti-fascist soccer hooligans. 

After a long career as one of class of '77 punk's most stylish, accomplished post-Dadaist ranters, Smith tries crooning. No Ray Davies, to be sure. But something semi-sweet in a mumbly wounded animal kind of way. Put out on Cherry Red Records in 2003. 

PRT.

Hedwig & the Angry Inch (2001)

"Angry Inch," Hedwig & the Angry Inch: In theatrical form as pure a piece of punk rock as you're likely to find in the 21st century. The sound is rooted in early '70s glam rock, T-Rex, Bowie, so it's transgender glam rock punk rock. Intense, funny, and brutally poignant. This is the DIY punk aesthetic in the 21st century, tightly scripted and catchy as hell. Cinematic punk rock. 

"The Medium Was Tedium" b/w "Don't Back the Front" The Desperate Bicycles (1978)

 Simon Reynolds, in his book Rip It Up, argues the Desperate Bicycles were more important to the developing DIY ethos than the arty moves made by '77 punk rock bellwether record labels like Fast Product or Factory. The DB's were from London, and didactic as the Gang of Four but not as collegiate or sarcastic or ironic. The drummer on this single was 14. Their direct DIY message: "It was easy, it was cheap-- go and do it!" In other words, start a band and make a record. If we can do it, they said, you can too.  

This is the 'A'-side of the DB's second single, "The Medium Was Tedium" followed by the 'B'-side, from 1978.  

"Don't Back the Front" 

Punk Rock Tuesday

"Toy Love Song," Toy Love (1980)

 The blare to the recording is harsh but grows into something. Toy Love were an early punk rock band from New Zealand. They originated from Dunedin and were active between 1978 and 1980; ofter referred to as progenitors of the Dunedin sound that Flying Nun Records began documenting in the 1980s. More Chris Knox, Alec Bathgate (later Tall Dwarfs), and Paul Kean (later The Bats). 

"Nothing," The Enemy (1978)

Chris Knox in a 1978 punk rock mohawk. The Enemy were one of the first punk rock bands from Dunedin, and for some mark the beginning of the "Dunedin sound"; New Zealand's indie rock sound documented and spread by Flying Nun Records. Very crude live recording. A guy in the band, probably Knox, complains about not being ready to play for the people who traveled a 100 miles from Christchurch to see them. Flying Nun was formed in Christchurch. Proto-NZ punk rock. 

Bonus: Knox's next band, Toy Love, was definitely ready to play. A power pop songfulness pokes out of their headstrong noize. 

"Click Click," The Wedding Present (1994)

Should have been called "No In-Between," reflecting the song's uncompromising romantic intensity. In the 1980s the Wedding Present were associated with the C86 indie rock label in the UK. David Gedge, WP's only constant member (at least 28 others have played with him), is a bonafide two-way player-- i.e., he plays guitar with ferocious speed and drone pop grandeur and matured into a master of punk rock heartache and melodramatic love songs. Gedge lived for a spell in the 1990s in Seattle but never succumbs to grunge's dinosaur rock bombast. In the long run carving his own hard jangle punk pop path proves to be Gedge's superpower. The classic sound of the Wedding Present is terse, frenetic, buzzing with thick feedback energy, and ringing with dissonance and harmony. Noise pop. (And another fundamental inspiration to 1990s shoegaze.) The backup singer echoes Gedge, as if to soothe his restless mind with her soft banter. Even if the bad romance gets old the roar of the careening guitar noise never does. 

"Beat on the Brat," Ramones (1976)

In my early years teaching, on particularly bad days, after school, no more students, the coast more or less clear, I'd shut the door to my classroom and blast this and feel like slam dancing off the walls as I angrily straightened desks and stack books and papers, trying to restore some order to my chaos before heading home. 

The habit reminds me of this anecdote about the early years at Creem magazine. Several summers, pivoting around 1970, some staff members shack up outside the city of Detroit. Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, and, the publisher, Barry Kramer, were the regulars, I think, but at any rate the house they were sharing was owned by Kramer. Bangs and Marsh were there possibly to escape the city heat in summer but definitely to save on rent. They get along okay but all cooped up like that for weeks on end they need some escape and downtime. Bangs said he found his solace by regularly retreating to his small room, closing the door, and blasting Black Sabbath at full volume. 

I was doing something like that with this Ramones song. I remember at least one time when a student walked into the room on afternoon when I had this song on and the volume turned up to eleven. Initially there was incredulous shock at how loud I was playing the music. But I turned it down quickly, although not off, and helped them. The song continues to play in the background, like a runaway subway train, if now muted, the student, a nerdy boy, into video games, standing around while I find some paper they need. Finally, the student exclaims almost quizzically, "beat on the brat with a baseball bat"?!  

"Of course, I would never," I chuckled nervously. 

Two seminal forms of pre-'77 punk anger: The Stooges were angry punk and dangerous; and The Ramones were angry punk and funny. Unsuspecting students were lucky I didn't play "Search and Destroy"! 

"Y.A.L.A," M.I.A. (2013)

In as much as punk rock is in your face, taunting, angry, and snotty M.I.A. is punk rock. She turns YOLO ("you only live once") inside out, like a Hindi mind trick, now YALA ("you always live again"), but with the same urge to throw caution to the wind. M.I.A. was defining "bangers" before "bangers" were "bangers bangers." 

Post-colonial Sri Lankan/Global South, immigrant as global refugee, dancefloor toaster with swagger and lots of sauciness: "Where is my mind?" Pioneer in world beat electronic music genre. That her electronics sound like cheap home electronics adds to the rock & roll energy. She's more DIY hiphop than DIY punk. 

And maybe most punk rock contrarian-libertarian of all she's now come out against vaccines, which goes with '77 punk's wearing Swastikas for sheer stupid "I wanna destroy the passerby" punk-rock-ness. I mean, if you have a bad experience with a vaccine by all means speak out about it. But your misfortune, terrible as it may be, isn't a credible argument against vaccines; it can't negate the millions of lives saved by vaccines. The health care where I live tries to screen for bad reactions to vaccines. Sounds like a lot of people close to M.I.A. missed such screening measures. Anyway, what I especially don't like about M.I.A.'s latest punk move is how it feels like she's trolling for the conspiracy theory fake news audience. Which actually does endanger public health. So, annoying and disappointing.

But, alas, M.I.A., Bad Girl to the bone, again, again, and again, rocks, always has. "Y.A.L.A."! One thing I believe for sure, it's a banger! 

"Christian Nationalism," Anti-Flag (2019)

This one never gets old, unfortunately. More pop punk, so maybe I like more of it than I thought. Straight up radical leftist Antifa on Fox News. As an updating edit, I'm apt to change "you're no better than the rest" to "you're the worst of the worst" but Antiflag nails it with appropriate Swiftian sneer: "We all know who you are." Christian Nationalism is the paranoid style as religious community. It's tough guy Christianity, which means violent, intolerant, and militantly fascist on principles. American Nazis, basically. They're really not pro-life so much as they're in fact anti-women's rights, which we hope is another big reason they lose at the ballot box this fall but there are Billionaires out there more afraid of democratic reforms (or women's rights, apparently) than violent fascist dictatorship. (Again, not unlike with the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s.) So maybe it can happen here after all?! Anyway, Antiflag are from Pittsburgh. They've put out over a dozen albums since 1996, with titles like A New Kind of Army and The General Strike. Maybe the best leftist pop-punk band? 

"Vaporized," X-15 (1981)

 

First song on Seattle Syndrome Volume One (1981), a compilation of local bands representing an awkward post-punk moment in local history. X-15 actually formed in Bellingham, a college town a couple hours north. But they were a thing at Gorilla Gardens, an underground club in Seattle in the '80s. The collection covers punk, post-punk, New Wave, No Wave, and various electronic art party experiments. "Vaporized" sets the bar high as the opening track: Bowiesque New Wave punk rock with a crazy-wild glam-punk thespian-jock vocal. Shoulda coulda been a big chart hit, up there with The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" (1979) or the Vapors' "Turning Japanese (1980). Nonetheless, has the esteemed honor of kicking off in style a period compilation of various artists, probably hated at the time by the hardcore punk bands, but holds up well if you ask me: Nerdy, funky, funny, some proto-Goth, some New Wave noir, hot and cool. But, anyway you slice it, "Vaporization" is a peak. 

PRT

The Velvet Underground Were Punk Rock Artists

Just watched Todd Haynes' documentary The Velvet Underground (2021). As hagiography it's very satisfying, so if you're a fan at all and haven't seen it yet you'll want to. Andy Warhol's 1960s pop art Exploding Plastic Inevitable in all its infamous demimonde glory. The origins of heroin chic and the greatest drug song in rock & roll history. The misty story of Moe Tucker's vocal on "After Hours." John Cale explains the early allure of the Velvets' sound as a combination of R&B and Wagner. Jonathan Richman, maybe their biggest fan, gushes with mysterious awe about various strange essences in the Velvet's music. And the doc is packed with images, found film footage, that many will have never seen before. 

Haynes' does have his own take, though. And I find it persuasive but not entirely convincing. 

In his story the Velvets were a Warhol art project, part of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Andy brought all the improbable parts together, Cale, Lou, and Nico. Set them up with his avant-garde pop art light show and took them on their first tour of the West Coast. Under Warhol's creative curation they produced a singular masterpiece, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967). And then a proto-punk rock reaction to the Flower Power and hostility they encountered on their West Coast tour, White Light/White Heat (1968). 

Bill Graham, the big West Coast producer, hated The Velvet Underground, the doc shares. Tucker attributes this to Andy's superior light show. And clad in black the Velvets couldn't relate much to the colorful sunshine hippies of the West Coast. In this way, White Light/White Heat presages the Sex Pistols crash and burn spectacle in sonic dissolution and mayhem; making a noise fetish into an art move. It doesn't have the "songs" of their other albums but could be their most influential album sound-wise. 

But then that was it, the highly flammable ingredients of  The Velvet Undergound explode apart. Or, actually, Nico drifts away. And, basically, Lou drives everyone else away. He breaks with Andy. And shortly thereafter he gives the rest of the band an ultimatum as to whether Cale or he stays. Cale leaves and so the story of the original Velvet Underground is more or less over, in Haynes' account. 

The third album, The Velvet Underground (1969), the soft one without Cale or Nico, is glossed over. Loaded (1970) is barely mentioned, other than to point out Lou cut Moe out of that one too. A sort of addendum to the Lou broke up the band story. And VU, the lost album that ought to have come out between those two (but wasn't released until 1985) gets no mention at all, or none I can remember now. Not taking anything away from the first two albums, both classic albums, but there is a case to be made that the last three Velvets studio albums, without Nico and Cale, and in one instance even without Tucker, are as good or even better than the first two, or at least not dismissible as such. 

Not to Haynes's story, though. The more puzzling question for me is why Lou was never able to match in his solo career the greatness of even the last three Lou-centric Velvets' albums? And which maybe shows that the greatness of the Velvets five studio albums goes beyond Andy, Cale, Nico, Tucker, or even Lou. Something else that Richman and 1000s of bands since have tried to tap into and reproduce. 

Anyway, seeing the doc reminded me how important White Heat/White Light was to punk rock class of '77 and subsequent noise rock. The Velvets patent a version of art punk based on bleak beauty, violent negation, and rock & roll dissipation; a perfect mean of amateurish racket and avant-garde noise.  

"I Heard Her Call My Name" (1968)

 "Sister Ray" (1968)

"Guess I'm Falling In Love (Instrumental Version)" (1968)

Punk Rock Tuesday.