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.
"So, on 21 September [2022], when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announced his fifth interest-rate hike of the last nine months, this dirtiest word in economic policy [austerity] was conspicuously absent from his remarks. Instead, Powell described the process of resetting the economy – through the introduction of increased unemployment and possible recession –as a necessary form of “economic pain.” Powell’s comments echoed those of his British counterpart, former chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, in a letter to Boris Johnson: “[the public] need to know that whilst there is a path to a better future, it is not an easy one.”
This framing of monetary policy as some sort of war effort – hard work and individual sacrifice for the greater good –has been part of the playbook for instituting austerity policies for more than a century. In 1920, at the first international financial conference in Brussels, British civil servant Robert H Brand evangelized economic narratives focused on this “hard truth”: in order for the economy to get back on its feet after World War I, “the answer is a very painful one and yet a very simple one. We must all work hard, live hard, and save hard.” As Powell, Sunak and Brand demonstrate, the road to austerity is paved with vague euphemisms."
This framing of monetary policy as a war effort-- sacrifice, saving, thrift and austerity-- might go even further back, the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the dawn of capitalism in Smith (saving as the root of all industry) and definitely Malthus (scarcity and the struggle for existence). But, yeah, austerity economic policies are certainly still with us.
Consider the election as a sort of revenge of austerity economics. The working classes were hit hardest by the post-pandemic supply chain inflation of '21 and '22, so blatantly misdiagnosing the source of the inflation the Fed decided to compound the working classes economic pain by jacking up interest rates and making home and car loans too expensive for most workers. And now a winning plurality of the working classes voting against the government that presided over these rising costs of living (primarily boosted by private business interests) has elected a party whose platform, Project 2025 (surprise, surprise), promises to slash government services essential to the many, the working classes, public education, health care, and social security, which the austeritions, Lusk, republicans, decry as wasteful and indoctrination. It's like an anti-labor austerity economics trifecta.
"In the United States, Joe Biden’s administration pursued a high-growth, high-employment strategy for pandemic relief, pledging trillions of dollars over the first two years of his presidency to invest in clean energy, domestic infrastructure, and working families. The result of all that work could not win Democrats the 2024 election, but as the Journal notes, it did create what is today “a remarkable economy” with “the wind at its back.” The labor market hasn’t been this strong for this long in 50 years, wage gains have been outpacing inflation for 18 months (longer for lower-income workers), and investments in domestic-microchip and electric-vehicle production are beginning to pay dividends. It’s “the envy of the world,” “bigger and better than ever,” leaving “other rich countries in the dust.” Sometimes your best just isn’t good enough."
I like Carter taking shots at Klein and Yglesias, especially for the deregulation fetish they make out of Nimby housing zoning. And I also especially liked his refs to Summers and Furman as mockable villains. Someone with a platform, an influencer, should be regularly saying as much. And I like his plainspoken defense of Bidenomics but maybe, additionally, we ought to mention that 40% of the inflation squeezing consumers pocketbooks has been attributed to corporate greedflation and the Fed's steep increase in interest rates, that pushed home mortgages and car loans beyond what many could afford, was actually intended to curb household spending, tamp down wage increases, and expected to cause a recession and more unemployment. We don't know for sure but there's a good chance that Biden's spending, his big investments in domestic chip production and green infrastructure actually helped stave off the expected recession. In other words, voters just picked the party most firmly behind the unfettered corporate rule making the post-pandemic economy harder on the working classes and rejected the party obviously doing the most to minimize the cost of living increases the post-pandemic economy put on the working classes. It may be a political rule, an involuntary reflex in the body politic that electorates vote against incumbents when going through inflation and rising costs of living but the third, and most successful, coup attempt of the Grump era was billionaire conservative media discrediting Bidenomics with the public and getting a razor thin majority to ignore, if not cheer on, Grump's flagrant bigot violence and non-stop financial fraud and criminal corruption. We'll have to await the outcome of these grave political economic machinations, what happens in the midterms, or 2028, but this looks like one way you lose a democracy and end up a party dictatorship.
"There’s no magic remedy or strategy for contending with how [G]rump operates. In some respects, simply a recognition of this fact is key to having the stamina to contend with him. But it probably means needing to be ready for different threats without running after them until they fully materialize."
Or why spazzing out about every stupid cruel threat Grump makes is probably not the best use of an effective opposition's time. He's always ran this successful hedge with his cult that he really would fix everything, as he is always promising, if it wasn't for the terrible dems and liberals getting in his way. This puts an opposition in a tricky place. Foremost, journalists need to investigate and expose his worst abuses, which will just as often not be the "shiny object" he's owning libs with on social media. Maybe Hegseth and Gabbard are distractions; it's the Project 2025 revanchist rightist technocrats, etc? Anyway, it's going to be an overwhelming "flood the zone with shit" for four years, minimum. And whatever Lusk's ground game really was will be expanded and more entrenched for '26 and '28. But, most important, the opposition needs to let Grump fuck up and have to own it. Keep close score of his economic record. Of course, everything that goes wrong he'll blame on the democrats, and Fox and friends, will amplify his conservative take. Like I said, it's tricky. Oppose the bad stuff he does when he does it but don't spend too much energy opposing every stupid cruel threat he makes. We're in this weird, scary, place, again, where we're waiting for him to blow up the economy or murderously bungle another national crisis event, another plague, war, climate change disaster, or follows through on his campaign promised threats to mass deportations and fascist violence against Americans identified as the "enemy within." To do the terrible thing again that will hopefully finally turn the electorate against him. In the meantime, it's whack-a-mole with every toxic bit of MAGA they infect into the government. First, trying to stop his worst appointments, please. Jayapal, Bernie, Warren, AOC, Jeffries, Schiff, Ferguson, etc. Thanks for your efforts.
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.
"Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?"
So much for the liberal bias in the media. How about the billionaire bigot bias in the media? That somehow Biden has gotten blamed, essentially, for Covid and Grump who jeopardized hundreds of thousands of lives with his anti-public health idiocy is back only four years later epitomizes the peril. One trick going forward for the opposition will be exposing republican violence and their worst human rights abuses without obstructing their agenda, and allowing them to hang themselves with their own rope. It's that adage about how some people need to experience what they want before they understand what it means. Republicans, apparently, need to fully experience the consequences of Grump's Project 2025 before they can understand how they have been played by the promise of bigot violence against their sworn enemies, "illegals," immigrants, POC, Trans, homosexuals, liberals, civil servants, journalists, etc. And the resistance, de-platformed, will have to try to get the word out about the bigot violence and hold the line in Blue jurisdictions while evading the collateral damage of the coming illiberal assault. I'm adapting the adage "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" to keep an eye on your enemies and keep your "woke," human rights respecting and social justice loving, friends closer. Peace.
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.