Trash Talk, Cerebral Ballzy, the new hardcore

With Cerebral Ballzy and the Sacto band Trash Talk there is a revival of hardcore punk taking place that has me excited and intrigued. Both bands also prominently feature young African-Americans. Cerebral Ballzy has a young black kid on the vocals who looks more gutter punk than hip hop, and likewise Trash Talk has a pair of black guys who play guitar and bass and yell backing vocals alongside their white "singer." Both bands play short songs at an extremely fast pace in a style that simulates the hardcore and thrash music of the 1980s--Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, etc. If you dig it, it's Black Brains or Black Threat, if you don't it's Bad Flag or Minor Brains.

I lean toward the former, especially in the case of Trash Talk, who have become my favorite hardcore band since the Refused incorrectly declared that they were the shape of punk to come in 1998. Trash Talk is one of those bands that wasn't very good when just starting out, but they've been touring and recording pretty constantly for over 5 years, and now they're really blossoming (although that may be the wost verb possible to use in association this group's brutal sound) with their latest EP.

I'm honestly not sure what to make of the semiotics of race in these two bands. Of course, racial politics have always been at the center of punk subculture, dating back to Rock Against Racism and the battles between racist and anti-racist skinheads in both the UK and the US. And hardcore punk music is white noise in the sense of being rock music with all the blues, rhythm, etc. stripped out of it. Significantly, I think, the guy in the beginning of the Trash Talk video can only express a colorblind discourse in denying the relevance of race to the group, reverting to the good old "blame the media" explanation.

But to me, the element of racial semiotics that is most noticeable is the way that blackness is being used in both bands to create an authentic aura of street cred. Check out this picture of Trash Talk that appeared in a New York Times story on their CMJ showcase last week.

Their lead singer is the white guy with the long hair. He's an incredible, Iggy-type crowd-surfing frontman with a scream like Slayer's Tom Araya. He's a true frontman, and all other things being equal, he'd be the guy in the front and center of any band picture, not back there like he plays keyboards or something.

Now check out Cerebral Ballzy. It's an important to note that they're being promoted through the stoner cartoon channel Adult Swim, which is part of Turner Broadcasting. Why do these videos that are essentially just displays of vandalism by gutter punks still look like they could be used to sell something like skate shoes?

Don't get me wrong, I definitely hope there's more to come.

The History of Punk in Los Angeles: Dewar MacLeod's Kids of the Black Hole

Future historians are quite likely to look back at the period from the late 1970s through the early 1980s as a pivotal time in the transformation of Southern California, along with the transformation of American society and global capitalism at large. In Kids of the Black Hole, Dewar MacLeod illuminates this time and place by reconstructing the history of California punk rock in an age of “postsuburbia.” MacLeod refers to postsuburbia in several different contexts, but in broad terms it is used to denote the consequences of spatial de-centering and the fragmentation of social life within the Southern California suburbs as they were being transformed by emergent modes of post-Fordist capitalism in the 1970s. MacLeod examines the punk scene not only as a symptomatic reflection of the social conditions of postsuburbia but also as a collective response to those conditions; he describes the local punk scene’s DIY institutions as a “modernist response to postmodern consumerism and fragmentation” (100).

MacLeod provides a comprehensive and balanced history of a punk scene that has not received as much attention as its New York or British counterparts but still represents an important and influential moment for this music and subculture. His methodology includes interviews with some of the key participants in this scene and a seemingly exhaustive collection of local punk fanzines. MacLeod’s writing style is accessible and lively, and it should satisfy fans who are looking for a book that captures the energy and fun of the scene instead of just another academic treatise. In the first chapter MacLeod discusses his own experience with punk as a kid who grew up in the L.A. suburbs, drove to Hollywood’s Sunset Strip to see the Ramones in 1977 and yet was initially confused by punk; only later did he become fully immersed in the punk scene as a college student in the Bay Area. MacLeod was also in attendance at the Elk’s Lodge on Saint Patrick’s Day 1979, an infamous event where the LAPD arrived at a punk show (headlined by the Go-Go’s) in full riot gear and proceeded to administer a vicious and indiscriminate beating on the punks; one of Kids of the Black Hole’s highlights is MacLeod’s vivid description of these events at the beginning of chapter 5. 

 

As MacLeod traces the history of punk in Southern California, the first few chapters of Kids of the Black Hole portray some key individuals and bands that were crucial in shaping the music and subculture but have not received much attention in other books about punk. Among those who MacLeod’s history touches on: Greg Shaw, the rock writer who created Bomp! Magazine and Bomp Records; Claude Bessy, aka Kickboy Face, who edited the zine Slash, sang for the band Catholic Discipline, and helped create the record label that released the music of the Germs, X, and other L.A. punk bands; Iggy Pop, the singer who helped shape, and literally embodied with his self-mutilating antics, the style of punk performance after he moved to L.A. in 1977; Richard Meltzer, the rock critic, songwriter, radio host, and “musician” who formed the joke band Vom (short for Vomit); the Runaways, the all-female rock band, managed and promoted by Kim Fowley, that anticipated punk and the postsuburban aesthetic. Perhaps the most important figure in all was Rodney Bingenheimer, whose English Disco on Sunset Boulevard had become a central spot for the L.A. music world during the 1970s, and who brought the latest trends in British music to L.A. via the English Disco as well as his radio show on KROQ.           

 

The key contribution of MacLeod’s book is that it follows the migration of punk from its regional origins in Hollywood and bohemian Los Angeles out to the suburbs, where a “hardcore” subculture that was more violent and macho, and less artsy, compared to the original punk scene took root in Huntington Beach, Fullerton, and other beach towns and suburbs across Southern California. In Huntington Beach, for example, swarms of young men who called themselves HBs would come to hardcore shows with the intent of starting fights and intimidating everyone around them. The music of the hardcore scene was faster and more aggressive, and MacLeod’s lyrical analysis also reveals the recurring themes of boredom and alienation in the social context of postsuburbia, consumerism, and the disintegration of the family. While Ronald Reagan was the most frequently vilified and parodied figure in hardcore lyrics and visual art, in MacLeod’s reading he “was more like the absent patriarchal father, one who supposedly ruled with an iron fist in a velvet glove, but who in fact did not rule at all.”    

 

In this sense, MacLeod is able to describe hardcore punk as both a form of resistance and a reflection of the social conditions of postsuburban Southern California during the Reagan years.  One of MacLeod’s sharpest theoretical insights is to situate the spatial practices and tactics of punk—from skating to surfing to squatting—within the geographic environment of postsuburban fragmentation, fetishism, and hyperreality.  Developing in the context of an atomized form of everyday life organized by a triangular route between the tract home, the office park, and the shopping mall, Southern California’s hardcore punks created a subculture that fashioned itself as rebellious but in reality was simply anti-social; comparing it to Northern California’s more politicized punk scene, MacLeod writes that “in postsuburban Southern California, the politics were diffuse, inconsistent, cohering only vaguely around such words as ‘anarchy,’ ‘destroy,’ and ‘my rules.’” Above all, the hardcore scene was characterized by a search for authenticity within an inauthentic social environment, which put the subculture in stark contrast to something like the glam metal scene that was celebrating artifice, materialism, and hedonism on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip at roughly the same time. It in this sense that MacLeod’s history of Southern California punk illuminates the postsuburban social conditions that spawned it, at least insofar as this environment provided the negative point of departure for punk’s symbolic practices and politics.

"On Becoming a Punk Rock Sociologist"

I've been asked to write an autobiographical essay for an anthology about punk and academia. No idea when it will see the light of day, or more accurately the dust of the library, so I'm putting it here too.

I was born in Long Beach, CA and raised in the adjacent city of San Pedro, graduating from San Pedro High School in 1988. I’d like to be able to tell you all about how I was influenced by our hometown heroes, the Minutemen, or Black Flag or the Descendents or any of the other hardcore bands that emerged from the nearby cities of Los Angeles’ South Bay at this time. I can imagine a really good story about how the radical politics and do-it-yourself ethic of the local hardcore scene would inspire me to become the Marxist sociologist I am today. However, that story would be a lie, because the truth is that my paths to both punk rock and radical sociology were never that direct or linear, and I’m just not that cool.

In high school I was a devout partisan of thrash metal bands like Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax and a couple dozen others with a more limited following. By the second half of the 1980s the California hardcore scene had fizzled out. There was this one punk dude who had “Minor Threat” written on the jacket he wore to school every day, but I didn’t know anything about them because the only people I hung out with were other longhairs and stoners. Still, there was a lot of punk influence in thrash metal, which was less about devils and dragons and more about indicting real world authorities, creating a local scene with indie record labels, and maintaining a veneer of authenticity that mocked the posturing and pomposity usually associated with heavy metal.

My headbanging roots notwithstanding, I almost voted for George Bush in the first election I was old enough to vote in, until my mother talked me out of it at the last minute. Like many other metalheads, I was personally rebellious but my half-baked political views amounted to nothing more than simple, knee-jerk libertarianism. I was entranced by power, enthralled by violence, and envious of wealth, and I also hated people I thought were weak or dependent, so it probably isn’t surprising that I almost voted for Bush.

I had begun college during that fall of 1988, as my parents were eager for me to leave my troublemaking metal friends behind and move north to attend San Jose State University. It wasn’t long before I found myself in classes taught by veterans of the New Left. One of them was Professor Douglas Dowd, who had been part of the Monthly Review editorial team with Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy and cofounded the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Dowd would typically begin his classes in Microeconomics with some thoughts about Marx or Ricardo before launching into a series of tirades that indiscriminately covered everything from the wastefulness of capitalism to the insanity of war and nationalism to the cruelty of child labor. This 70-plus year-old man would yell and point and curse and then stop suddenly, look out the window, and silently shake his head while muttering something about the insanity of our world. Many of the students in class were horrified and stopped attending after the first two weeks, but I was captivated. One day Dowd recited the lyrics to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and asked the class if that sounded like the kind of world any of us would want to live in, and I was the only student to raise my hand. “Then you’re a God-damn Communist!” he shouted at me.

O.K., so I guess I’m a Communist now. This was admittedly a major political about-face, but to this day I think my metal roots and cultural rebelliousness prepared me to embrace this stigmatized, marginalized political identity. I had grown up in a working-class seaport with a vague sense that the world wasn’t right, and now I was engrossed in my education to try and understand why. I was listening to the Bay Area’s progressive radio station KPFA and reading everything I could get my hands on, especially Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. My identity and style morphed from headbanger to something like a retro countercultural radical as I became absorbed in Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and anything else I could read or watch about the 60s, Students for a Democratic Society, and the counterculture.

I enrolled in a social theory class the following semester, and it was there that I read Marx for the first time and met my friend Mike Roberts, who today is also a sociology professor at San Diego State. Mike and I started a left campus organization and worked on publishing a newspaper that was unfortunately sabotaged by some other students just before it was about to be printed. Our social theory professor, Talmadge Wright, had also started a group called the Student Homeless Alliance that we became involved with. This was late 1990, and the United States was gearing up for our first war with Iraq, so Mike and I began working with other campus activists to create an anti-war coalition and organize an anti-war demonstration. I experienced my first 15 seconds of fame when my speech commencing the demonstration was sound-bitten for the local TV news.

At this time I knew a lot of people who were into punk rock, but my tastes hadn’t progressed that far yet. Some of my friends regularly made trips up to Berkeley to go to the Gilman Street club, but I never went. They played Dag Nasty, Green Day, and Big Drill Car for me but I absolutely hated all that melody. I thought it was cool that Bad Religion could reference Noam Chomsky and the like, but to this day their singer’s voice drives me crazy. One of my roommates was really into Fugazi, and although they’ve since become one of my favorite bands they just didn’t compute to me at that time. What my metal years had prepared me for was grunge and the whole Sub Pop/Seattle scene, so of course I took to Mudhoney and Soundgarden almost instantly. And then more locally there was Primus, Mr. Bungle, Psychefunkapus, the Limbomaniacs, and a bunch of other bands that formed a metal-funk-punk scene in the Bay Area.

By now my career goals had changed such that I wanted to go to graduate school and hopefully grow up to be a tenured radical like my professors. UC Santa Cruz was known to have a lot of Marxist and radical faculty members, especially in the sociology department, and so I transferred there in the fall of 1991. I did an internship with Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, the journal of Marxist ecology founded by James O’Connor, and worked with the Bay Area activist Frank Bardacke on a project about farmworkers. Other than that, however, there were a lot of people who talked radical politics at UC Santa Cruz but there wasn’t a lot of action, a possibly intentional result of the campus’ relatively isolated location in the mountains of central California. I joked with friends: what if a bunch of students demonstrate in the forest and there is no TV crew there to film them, do they make a sound? My only brush with revolution was accidentally getting hit in the side of the head with some sort of firecracker on the night of the Rodney King riots as the Santa Cruz students marched into town and trashed the local police department headquarters.

Nirvana’s Nevermind came out during my first semester at Santa Cruz. I remember that for weeks I would walk around the dorms and count how many rooms were blaring “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or some other song from the album. I knew it was a really big deal when the dreadlocked hippie kids who spent all day playing hacky sack and, as far I knew, listened to nothing but reggae and the Grateful Dead were suddenly talking about how much they wanted to see Nirvana when they came to San Francisco. The next two years or so would represent the pinnacle of the alternative rock/Lollapalooza era. Then the questions began: Did Nirvana sell out? Is alternative the new mainstream? Did I really just see a runway model wearing Doc Marten’s? Does anyone know anyone who likes to be called “Generation X”? Did that douchebag on the TV really just tell me that the new Subaru Impreza is just like punk rock?

At Santa Cruz I took a great class in the history of U.S. imperialism in Central America, read the Frankfurt School for the first time, and wrote research papers about the Black Panthers, American foreign policy, and the Wobblies. But by this time I had also been introduced to cultural studies, both in my courses on mass media and popular culture and in my conversations with activists who were influenced by identity politics and postmodernism. My relationship to cultural studies, as I discuss in more detail below, has always been deeply ambivalent. In the context of all these questions about alternative culture and Generation X, I could see that the issues raised by cultural studies about youth subcultures, hegemony, and resistance were still very pertinent and could not be ignored. I was especially taken with Lawrence Grossberg’s We Gotta Get Outta This Place, which as anyone who’s read it knows is loaded with pomo jargon but still raised what I thought were prescient questions about postmodern society, the ironic cynicism of youth culture, and the role that these had somehow played in maintaining the hegemony of conservatism.

I wrote a senior thesis under the direction of Professor Herman Gray about the media coverage of the movement against the Gulf War and graduated from UC Santa Cruz in the spring of 1993. I was on my way to graduate school and chose to enroll in the sociology program at UC San Diego because it advertised itself as having a strong emphasis in culture, which had quickly become my main field of interest. My first two years of graduate school were a rude awakening. I had chosen to study sociology because as an undergraduate it seemed so interdisciplinary and open-ended, like it was the best of all possible homes for my combination of interests in critical theory, radical politics, social history, and cultural studies. But as a graduate student I quickly discovered that professional sociology was a different animal altogether.

In time I learned that the sociology department at UC San Diego had indeed specialized in culture at one point in its history, but in recent years there had been a major shift toward historical-comparative sociology, and those faculty always seemed to be repeating the mantra that they were trying to make the program more “professional,” “competitive,” and “rigorous.” Yuk. Moreover, what the department did offer in terms of culture was mainly rooted in the apolitical traditions of microsociology like symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. Double yuk. Fortunately, critical theory and cultural studies had made strong inroads in UCSD’s departments of Communication and Literature, and in Ethnic Studies I discovered Professor George Lipsitz, who would serve as a de facto mentor in my study of neo-Marxist theories of culture.

San Diego was home to a bustling alternative music centered at a club called the Casbah, and I began going to shows there on a regular basis. After the success of Nirvana and other grunge bands, the major labels had gone scouting for new alternative rock acts to sign, and San Diego was one of a number of cities that was pegged as a potential “next Seattle.” Seven San Diego bands had signed with major labels during this time, and everyone from Rolling Stone to Details to the E! television network had done feature stories about the local scene. Beyond the hype, I discovered that there was indeed an exciting and musically diverse scene, and I instantly became a fan of the spastic noise of Trumans Water, Drive Like Jehu, and Heavy Vegetable, the retro punk of Rocket From the Crypt, and the cyborg prog-rock of Three Mile Pilot.

I was beginning to envision a dissertation project that brought together the cultural studies focus on music and subcultures with the sociological methods of ethnography and the neo-Marxist inquiry into the place of culture in post-Fordist capitalism. How all those pieces of the puzzle actually fit together would be something I would have to figure out along the way. Unfortunately, most of my sociology professors were vocally unsupportive of this idea. I had impressed many of them with my self-motivated interest in social theory, but for them music was a frivolous concern without any real sociological import. When I told the professor in my field methods seminar what I planned to do, he replied with a snarky tone, “It sounds like you’re just going to hang out with your friends.” Another one begged me to do something else—anything else, really—because I was “too close” to my project, and he eventually removed himself from my committee when I refused.

In actuality, I didn’t have any friends inside the scene, and rather than being “too close” I constantly felt like an outsider because not only was I not a musician, I was this geeky grad student who had all these esoteric theoretical and political questions about music and the scene. Lots of people told me that my project sounded like “fun,” and it was fun to go shows and hear live music in what I thought was a great scene, but it was nerve-wracking as hell to approach these people in a club and awkwardly ask them if we could arrange an interview. Let’s just say I found myself drinking a lot of “liquid courage” during those years.

Getting into the local scene enhanced my political consciousness, not because the bands themselves were concerned with political issues (most of them weren’t), but because I could see how they had formed a community based on creative work and participation. It wasn’t a dogmatic scene of the sort advocated in the pages of Maximumrocknroll, and therefore a great variety of musical styles and influences could be thrown together without apology. And so I began to see the form of democratic cultural production as more significant than the content of any particular political protest or “message.” This understanding of “punk” as a method of production rather than a specific style or sound opened up whole vistas of possibility and informed my belated musical education. Maybe I can explain it this way: Drive Like Jehu led me back to Fugazi and then even further back to Wire and then forward to the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü and then back again to the Gang of Four and Television. See, I told you my path to punk was ass-backwards.

While the Casbah and other local nightclubs were becoming a second home for me, I was still suffering from quite a bit of intellectual homelessness on campus. I was getting a lot more out of the graduate courses I was taking in other departments, so I stopped enrolling in sociology seminars after completing my minimum amount of required coursework and came very close to dropping out of the program. I took a position as a teaching assistant in an interdisciplinary freshman-level writing course, where the levels of overwork were legendary. Before long I had become heavily involved with the effort to unionize the academic student employees at the University of California and would be elected to serve on the strike committee as we planned a number of strategies for work stoppage. This took me further out of the bounds of the sociology department, as my social circle was now mainly composed of humanities students who were involved with me in organizing the T.A. union. Intellectually, however, I never embraced the kind of cultural studies that is practiced in the humanities, where meaning is mainly located in the “text” and acts of resistance are conceived as symbolic matters of reading and style. I was still fundamentally concerned with social process, and the Marxist in me still sought to link culture back to social structure. My experiences in the music scene redoubled these convictions: resistance was a matter of how people organized their community and engaged in creative work, not what people wore, how they cut their hair, or what they sang about in their lyrics.

My intellectual homelessness was glaringly evident and became a huge liability when I went on the job market for the first time in the fall of 1999. It seems that what transpired in my graduate program was something like a microcosm of what was happening in American sociology in general. There has been a great expansion of interest and research in culture among American sociologists since the 1980s, but these cultural sociologists have taken great pains to distinguish and insulate themselves from the broader field of cultural studies. The studies of popular culture and media, much less popular music, are very few and far between. American cultural sociology is significantly more conventional, eager to be accepted within the mainstream of the discipline, and rarely engaged with questions of power and resistance. Don’t take my word for it, listen to what one of the leading proponents has to say in its favor: “American cultural sociology is conservative rather than revolutionary in its academic program, unlike the British cultural studies model which has attempted to transgress disciplinary boundaries and create a completely new academic and discursive field.”

No matter what kind of theoretical and methodological spin I try to put on it, my work reeks of cultural studies simply because it is has the word punk attached to it. I sent out over 100 job applications during my first 3 years on the market without landing a single on-campus interview. I nearly gave up on the idea of an academic career on several different occasions, but a lack of other marketable skills and job experience made me feel trapped, and I still had a deep intellectual passion, not necessarily for sociology but for understanding social processes and contributing to social change. Fortunately I was able to hang on as an adjunct instructor of sociology at UC San Diego, as my courses on popular culture and youth attracted very high student enrollments; I taught a total of nearly 1,000 students during my final year there in 2001-02.

As my contract with UC San Diego and a long-term romantic relationship both came to an end at virtually the same time, I found myself living with my mother and collecting unemployment in late 2002. I was ready to give up on academia once and for all when I miraculously got a temporary position at the University of Kansas that began in the Spring 2003 semester and lasted through the 2003-04 school year. I sent out another heap of job applications but still couldn’t land a satisfactory tenure-track position, so I accepted another temporary appointment at Colgate University for 2004-05.

In 2005 I finally landed a tenure-track position at Florida Atlantic University. It’s not a prestigious school by any means, but it’s a good place for a punk like me: lots of older, “non-traditional” and working-class students, many of whom have roots in the Caribbean. Securing a permanent academic home has afforded me the time to finally finish turning my dissertation into a book titled Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis which will be published by New York University Press in 2009. Meanwhile, American sociology continues to aspire to the status of a science along the lines of economics and political science while attempting to avoid the stigma of the humanities conferred by cultural studies, and so there is no reason to expect that the study of punk or any other form of music will be moving into the center of the discipline any time soon. But somehow this feels like the appropriate place for a punk rock sociologist: screaming from the margins, denouncing the mainstream, and maybe—just maybe—developing the new ideas that are destined to shake up the establishment.

Jane's Addiction and Nine Inch Nails

A handful of observations about last night's NIN/JA show...

First off, Trent Reznor now bears an uncanny resemblance to Bruce Springsteen. Seriously, he's got short hair and long sideburns, he's sobered up, healthy looking, and even a little buff, and last night he was wearing good 'ol American blue jeans and a button-down black shirt that was quickly drenched in sweat. I'm not a big NIN fan, but they sounded good, especially on the thrashing "March of the Pigs," my favorite song of theirs. I kept waiting for them to play "Closer" so I could watch all the drunken frat boys pumping their fists while collectively singing "I wanna fuck you like an animal," but alas it didn't happen, to their credit I think. They finished their set with "Head Like a Hole." Eventually I just sat down on the lawn and watched them on the big screen, so it was sort of like listening to a Nine Inch Nails album while watching Springsteen at the Super Bowl. Honestly, the thing I will remember most is the beautiful full moon that arose at dusk between the palm trees in a brilliant orange color illuminated by the setting sun. Oh yeah and then this drunk girl fell over my friend Katy and then tried to make out with her as she was trying to console her.

Jane's Addiction, on the other hand, proved themselves to be the Rock Gods they have always been. Perry Farrell pranced around the stage with a set of maracas and some sort of feather boa like the old Jewish drag queen he's become. Let's just say he looked perfectly at home in West Palm Beach. And as cheesy as he is, Dave Navarro is still one motherfucker of a guitar player. Their show began with a black-and-white film showing some topless ladies engaged in a burlesque dance and then segued into the rolling bass line of "Three Days." I'm so glad that Flea is gone and Eric Avery is back in the band because those simple, rumbling bass lines are one of the things I love most about Jane's. "Three Days" has got to be one of the best epic rock songs ever written, and Navarro absolutely shredded on what I think is his most beautiful heroin-drenched guitar solo. Unfortunately their stage set was missing that opium den/Voodoo/Catholic idolatry of candles and red velvet that Perry's girlfriend Casey Niccoli used to design. But unlike NIN, Jane's lived up to their stadium rock billing because Perry and Dave are old-fashioned rock stars who somehow manage to fulfill their enormous egos, especially Perry, who always had a devious shit-eating grin on his face while peridoically drinking straight out of a huge bottle. Other highlights included a gorgeous version of "Then She Did...," which caused me to be close my eyes and get so blissed out that my friend Erin started watching me and laughing, at which point I shoved her and told her to fuck off (sorry Erin, but you had it coming bee-yatch!) There were some other songs that I didn't recognize because they must have been from that crappy album they made after reuniting, but there were rocking versions of "Been Caught Stealing" and "Ted, Just Admit It," with the latter including a cool film collage of sex, violence, violent sexuality, etc.

Slayer!

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, CLEVERLY answer these questions. Pass it on to a gazillion people and include me. Try not to repeat a song title. It's harder than you think.

Pick Your Artist: Slayer

Are you male or female: The Antichrist

Describe yourself: Angel of Death

How do you feel about yourself: Can’t Stand You

Describe where you currently live: South of Heaven

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Hell Awaits

Your favorite form of transportation: Altar of Sacrifice

Your best friend is: Necrophiliac

Your favorite color is: Raining Blood

What's the weather like: Born of Fire

Favorite time of the day: At Dawn They Sleep

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called: Sex. Murder. Art.

What is life to you: Serenity in Murder

What is the best advice you have to give: Mandatory Suicide

If you could change your name, what would it be: Ice Titan

Your favorite food is: Dead Skin Mask

Thought for the Day: Here Comes The Pain

How I would like to die: Piece By Piece

My soul's present condition: Cleanse The Soul

The faults I can't bear: Criminally Insane

My motto: God Hates Us All

Cat Power: A Good Woman

When I’m depressed and for reasons I still don’t quite understand I absolutely must listen to something even more depressing, only the music of Chan Marshall’s Cat Power seems to do the trick these days. She replaced Nick Drake in this regard many months ago and has been in heavy rotation around my house ever since. So when one of my graduate students (thanks Alexis!) informed me that Marshall was the subject of a new biography (*Cat Power: A Good Woman*, by Elizabeth Goodman, published by Random House), I moved it past all the other books to the top of my reading list (and yes, I am geeky enough to maintain an actual reading list).

Marshall grew up around Atlanta with parents who were immersed in the music scene that emerged as the hippie counterculture morphed into Southern rock during the 1970s. Her father was an aspiring musician, and their household was awash with alcohol, drugs, and rock music. Her parents divorced when Chan and her sister were young, and their mother was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and became an alcoholic. The tumultuous relations with their insane mother caused the Marshall girls to move in with their father, which lasted until they were in high school, when he kicked them out of the house so he could live with his new girlfriend. Chan then dropped out of school and moved to the Atlanta hipster neighborhood known as Cabbagetown, where a local music scene had developed in the late 1980s and early 90s.

There is some intrigue surrounding *Cat Power: A Good Woman* in the fact that Chan Marshall refused to be interviewed or cooperate in any way with the making of this biography and even went so far as to ask her friends and family to do the same. The author, Elizabeth Goodman, begins the book with a story about the day that Chan’s mother called from her tobacco shack in rural North Carolina demanding to know Goodman’s credentials and to speak with her “superiors.” And yet despite all this resistance Goodman did a fine job of reconstructing Marshall’s life and career by drawing on previous interviews and painstakingly tracking down all the people who surrounded her in Atlanta and New York’s Lowest East Side, where Chan eventually moved and developed her musical career in the 1990s. I will admit I was initially afraid this biography might read something like a glorified zine article penned by what I imagined to be an English major fresh out of an elite liberal arts college, but the journalism is outstanding given the circumstances and Goodman’s writing style is incisive and witty while steering clear of the flowery prose that Cat Power’s melancholy music or Marshall’s melodramatic personality could have provoked from a more indulgent author.

Many people feel that to hear Cat Power’s music is to feel Chan Marshall’s pain. There’s just something so vulnerable and intimate about *that voice* which seems to channel not only her own experience but all the other Southern women whose suffering and longing for redemption have been expressed for generations by singing in church in the way Chan learned to do as a child. Some of this has become part of the Cat Power spectacle itself, like in an infamous concert at the Bowery Ballroom where Marshall broke down in the middle of the set and then walked out into the audience, laid on the floor, and curled up in the fetal position. More routinely, Marshall has been known to suddenly stop mid-song and constantly apologize to her audience or to perform in the dark or with her back turned. Goodman doesn’t hesitate to expose this behavior as passive-aggressive manipulation or admit to being a little grossed out by a certain type of Cat Power fan for whom this is a voyeuristic form of entertainment. But it’s clear this isn’t all just for show, either. By early 2006 Marshall had become the kind of alcoholic who drinks around the clock, and she cocooned herself in her Miami Beach condo with the intention of committing suicide. Delusional to the point where she was chasing evil spirits away with sticks of incense, Chan was eventually rescued by a friend who tricked her into being hospitalized for detox treatment, where she again hallucinated that she was sharing a room with a vampire and a growling lion.

So, yeah, Chan Marshall is “crazy as a shithouse rat,” an inexplicable phrase that my dad would use to describe me when I was a kid. One song that always gets to me is “Metal Heart,” from her breakthrough album of 1998, Moon Pix. “It’s damned if you don’t and it’s damned if you do/Be true ‘cause they’ll lock you up in a sad, sad zoo.” To have a metal heart is to be alienated from your own emotions, to experience your heart as if it were a thing, not an organ but a cold machine with a life of its own that you can’t control. When you have a metal heart you end up in a lot of no-win situations and it’s not even a question of being misunderstood by others because you don’t understand yourself. As the music builds, Marshall sings “Metal heart you’re not hiding/Metal heart you’re not worth a thing” as if to say that the best one can hope for is the ability to disguise those insane emotions, and if you can’t do that then you should just tear that worthless fucking thing out of the center of your chest and throw it away.

Another track on Moon Pix is the classic ode to the alcoholic life, “Moonshiner,” a traditional folk song that Bob Dylan covered in 1963 and has subsequently been performed by Uncle Tupelo, Elliot Smith, and Bob Forrest among others. Cat Power regularly records other artists’ material and has issued two full albums of nothing but cover songs, with Marshall putting her distinctive stamp on each one (the gorgeous “Sea of Love” and nearly unrecognizable “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” immediately come to mind). With “Moonshiner” she steps into some enormous shoes, as Dylan’s version is one of the best recordings of his folk period, and the cover by Uncle Tupelo is supremely haunting to boot. And yet Marshall not only steps up to play with the big boys, she spins the song into something of her own, putting an exclamation point onto the alcoholic’s desperation in yelling out “You’re already in hell/You’re already in hell/I wish we could go to hell.” When Dylan and others sing “Moonshiner,” they finish with the line, “When the bottle gets empty/ It sure ain’t worth a damn.” When Cat Power does it, Chan more bleakly concludes “When the bottle gets empty/Life ain’t worth a damn.”

These are two songs that make the hairs on my arms stand up, but my favorite track of all on Moon Pix is “The Colors and the Kids.” The song begins “Must be the colors/And the kids/That keep me alive/’Cause the music is boring me to death.” I don’t know what she meant, but I catch myself singing those lines a lot lately because I’m an aging guy who is constantly surrounded by young people who never fail to inspire and disappoint me at the same time. They’re in my class or at a show or in a meeting, so fresh-faced and full of life in this dead world of ours, and then the next thing you know they’re saying something so dumb about how Conor Oberst is a genius. I’m drawn to their brightness and vitality like a moth to light, but I just wish they would do something more…I dunno, interesting or whatever…but then again I’m not even sure what that would be, I just know when it’s boring me to death.

The beauty of “The Colors and the Kids” in enveloped by Chan’s voice and a piano, because there’s nothing else in the song. Don’t take it from me, listen to what my identical twin Dave Grohl has to say: “That song is so heart wrenchingly beautiful and romantic--it makes me want to kidnap her and run away and hide forever.” When the song hits its most dramatic moment, Chan sings the futile cries of a lover who swears that he or she can change if you’d just give them another chance: “I could stay here/Become someone different/I could stay here/Become someone better.” The sense of loss continues into the next verse as she mourns: “It’s so hard to go in the city/’Cause you want to say hello to everybody/It’s so hard to go into the city/’Cause you wanna say, ‘Hey, I love you’ to everybody.” Yeah, it *is* hard when you live the rootless lives that so many of us do (and musicians on tour are only the most extreme example) because people keep passing in and out of your world, and then you run into each other again and you can’t believe how much time has passed, and it turns out Dave Grohl is right because you want to kidnap that person and run away or at least freeze that moment in time, but the next thing you know you’re saying goodbye and you have no idea when, or if, you’ll see each other again. Modern life is just sad like that.

Moon Pix has my most beloved songs, but on the whole my favorite Cat Power album is You Are Free (2003). I’m sure she intended something more optimistic but sometimes I think the album’s title is taunting me, like if I need to reminded that I’m free then I’m not really free after all. On the ghastly ballad “Baby Doll,” Chan poses a question that I swear has been asked by everyone who ever had the misfortune of caring about me and became distressed by my periodic states of despair: “Baby/Black, black, black is all you see/Don’t you want/To be free?” The first track on You Are Free is called “I Don’t Blame You” and it concerns a musician who is just going through the motions, faking it onstage and not wanting to play the music their audience wants to hear. Many people believe the song is about Kurt Cobain, and they’re probably right, but I think that sort of diminishes the point because it’s a predicament that any of us could find ourselves in when called upon to perform according to someone else’s expectations. Any of us could be massively popular and successful yet fundamentally un-free if other people’s image of us became an alien thing separated from our “true” selves or held against us with a demand to perform like a trained seal. “Just because they knew your name/Doesn’t mean they know from where you came/What a sad trick you thought you had to play.” Chan apparently knows what it’s like, and she’s right there to console us: “They never owned it/And you never owed it to them anyway.”

Freedom is a cruel joke for the kids profiled in “Names,” the gold medal winner in the fiercely competitive battle for the title of Most Depressing Cat Power Song Ever. One by one Chan introduces us to her childhood friends who ended up as casualties of American abuse and neglect. First, there’s Perry, a boy with a learning disability whose father burned his skin and sent him to his death when he was 10 years old. Next we meet Naomi, the 11 year-old girl who taught Chan “how to please a man” after school in the back of the bus. Chan begins telling us about Sheryl, her BFF at age 12, whose “father would come to her in the night,” and then stops singing as if to emphasize that what came next was so horribly unspeakable. Donovan was also a very good friend who started selling cocaine, and Chan hasn’t seen him since he was 13 years old. Finally there’s Charles, who told Chan he was in love with her when they were 14, but then he began to smoke crack, and then he had to “sell ass.” She says she doesn’t know where he is, just like she doesn’t know where any of the rest of them are. Yeah, I know, Chan. I knew a few kids like these growing up, and I don’t know where they are either. These days I find them at the homeless teen center where I volunteer or alternating between recovery and addiction in south Florida’s massive and growing drug treatment industry. They’re like a little nation of disposable youth unto themselves.

I have two personal memories of Cat Power performances. The first was at the now defunct Studio A in Miami. It was one of Chan’s first shows after her alcoholic breakdown, and the crowd was abuzz with rumors and speculation about what kind of crazy shit she might pull this time. Instead she delivered an absolutely riveting performance that was capped off by the most beautiful a cappella I’ve ever heard. The crowd was annoyingly restless, however, and the moment she stopped singing the club put on some dance music, forcing all the sheepish indie rockers to shuffle away to make room for those who were there to bust a move. That’s Miami for you. They must have heard that Chan was friends with Karl Lagerfeld and had started modeling for Chanel, otherwise I can’t explain why they were there. The second memory is of Cat Power’s show at the Langerado Music Festival in 2007, where the set ended with a cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” I laughed when she started playing, because it took on a whole new meaning when Chan sang it. I think I’ve heard that song about a thousand times, and I do believe it’s one of the best songs of our short century, but I’ve only heard Cat Power do it that one time (she’s never recorded a cover in the studio) and yet for some reason it’s still burned in my memory and I’ve never heard that song the same way since.

Top Ten Songs about Loneliness

10. The Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby.” This is the classic ode that revealed loneliness to be a sociological rather than merely personal problem. All the lonely people, where do they all come from? In the 1950s and 60s, mass society theory stated that individuals had become atomized as we trudged along in our suburbs, offices, and highways, crowded together yet desperately alone. In mass society you have neither individuality nor community, but instead a throng of isolated people who frantically conform to authoritarian institutions and consumer fads because they’re terrified of being left behind. The Beatles probably didn’t need to look any further than to their own fans, to all those middle-class teenagers hysterically screaming, crying, and fainting in their presence, to spot the problem. All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

9. Wilco, “How to Fight Loneliness.” I didn’t give this song much thought until it was used in a key moment of the movie Girl, Interrupted. The song is just oozing with sarcasm as Jeff Tweedy answers the question of how to fight loneliness by repeatedly singing “just smile all the time.” Lots of people will sincerely advise you to do just that—you know, “fake it ‘til you make it.” They’re the same sort of people who will tell you that happiness is a “choice,” that you can simply “choose” to be happy no matter what the external circumstances are. Many well-intentioned people have said things like this to me, and I nod my head and thank for them for their help but what I’m really thinking is that they don’t know shit about loneliness or depression. I’m guessing that Jeff Tweedy agrees with me because he says things like “shine your teeth ‘til meaningless/sharpen them with lies,” and so the chorus “just smile all the time” sounds like the taunting affirmations of a psychologist armed with a thousand bullshit ideas about the power of positive thinking.

8. Bruce Springsteen, “Stolen Car.” Most of the songs on The River, a double-album that charts the demise of a relationship, could have made this list. So many of Springsteen’s songs are about cars, and one of the things I love is the multiple meanings he assigns to the automobile culture in America: the desire for escape and the freedom of the open road; the ultimate male commodity fetish; the possibility of fatal accident; the Fordist path to the American dream; the decimating consequences of deindustrialization in factory towns. In the beginning of “Stolen Car” he’s recapping the events of his failed marriage: boy meets girl, they fall in love, get married, and settle down, they swear they’ll never part, they move to a house on the edge of town, and then slowly but surely they drift apart. She looks back at the old love letters he wrote to her, and it seems like they were written a hundred years ago. Next thing you know he’s totally fucked up and aimlessly racing down the highway in a stolen car, trying to comfort himself with the thought that it’s all gonna be alright. He’s just waiting to get caught but somehow he never does, so he just keeps driving. The guy’s so alone he can’t even get busted.

7. The Beach Boys, “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.” There are also a lot of songs on Pet Sounds that could have made this list. There’s something doubly depressing about hearing this sort of stuff from the Beach Boys, whose surf music harmonizing makes everything sound so upbeat and carefree until you actually listen to what they’re singing and remember that Brian Wilson had a breakdown and didn’t leave his bedroom for like three years after this album was recorded. This song begins, “I keep looking for a place to fit/where I can speak my mind.” Oh how often I’ve shamelessly taken pity on myself because I think I’m not made for these times, that my talents for writing and teaching are being wasted in this illiterate culture of video games and instant messaging (“they say I got brains/but they ain’t doing me no good/I wish they could”), that I should have grown up in the 1960s or the 1930s, that I am so unlucky to have been born into the most non-revolutionary time in modern history. Brian Wilson felt my pain, even in 1966: “Every time I get the inspiration/ to go change things around/ no one wants to help me look for places/ where new things might be found.”

6. Don Gibson with Chet Atkins, “Oh, Lonesome Me.” This song takes the melodrama of self-pity to absurdly low levels. It’s been covered by a number of musicians, but I mainly know it because of Neil Young’s version on After the Gold Rush, which is particularly great because Neil’s voice gives it that wounded animal sound he perfected in the early 1970s. This song captures the resentments that accrue when you’re alone at night and you imagine that everyone else is out having a blast: “everybody’s going out and having fun/I’m a fool for staying home and having none.” And it’s at least twice as bad when you’re missing a girl and you get these flashes of her out with other guys: “I bet she’s not like me/she’s out and fancy free/flirting with all the boys with all her charms.” Misery loves company, so I wish you people would just stay home and cry yourself to sleep at night.

5. Jimi Hendrix, “Burning of the Midnight Lamp.” You just don’t expect this kind of shit from Hendrix. You expect to hear the badass acid-drenched guitar monster talking about standing up next to a mountain and chopping it down with the edge of his hand. But I guess the dude got as lonely as the rest of us. Although “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” features Jimi’s typically intricate and assertive wah-wah guitar work, it begins with the thought that “The morning is dead and the day is too.” Hmmm…sounds like one of those rough nights where you wake up choking on your own vomit (or maybe someone else’s vomit, like one of the drummers for Spinal Tap). “All the loneliness I have felt today/It’s a little more than enough to make a man throw himself away.” You know, I never thought Hendrix wrote very good lyrics, but I like this one: “Now the smiling portrait of you/Is still hanging on my frowning wall.” “Loneliness,” Jimi begins to say, momentarily slowing down the music in anticipation of some profound thoughts, “is such a … drag.” ‘Nuff said.

4. The White Stripes “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet).” This one’s kind of funny. It’s the last song on what I think is the White Stripes’ best and certainly most underrated album, Get Behind Me Satan. I love Jack White’s guitar playing, but on this album I also began to take notice of what a great songwriter he is because many of the songs, including “I’m Lonely,” are primarily played on the piano. It’s an absolutely beautiful song in which Jack first sings about missing his mother and his sister before getting to the part that makes me chuckle, where thinks about this girl he knows he can always have but decides he just hasn’t gotten that desperate yet: “I roll over in bed/Looking for someone to touch/There’s a girl that I know of/But don’t ask for much/She’s homely, and she’s cranky/And her hair’s in a net/And I’m lonely, but I ain’t that lonely yet.” In short, sometimes loneliness isn’t the worst thing in the world. At the end of the song he goes to commit suicide by drowning in a river but then stops himself at the last minute, “before my lungs could get wet.” He reiterates that he misses his sister, and that sometimes he gets jealous of all her little pets.

3. Woody Guthrie, “At My Window Sad and Lonely.” The archetypical ode to a lost lover who’s moved away, gorgeously sung by Wilco on the first Mermaid Avenue album. Leave it Woody Guthrie to capture the universal feelings of heartbreak with such poetic simplicity: “At my window sad and lonely/Oft times do I think of thee/Sad and lonely and I wonder/Do you still think of me?” So complete and self-explanatory, in fact, that I’m not going to say anything more about it.

2. Led Zeppelin, “Tea for One.” The best song on the worst Zeppelin album, “Tea for One” doesn’t offer much lyrically, but it does feature nine and a half minutes of Jimmy Page’s most intense blues guitar riffs. Page’s guitar sounds like someone in a prolonged fit of crying, first slow and moaning, then hysterical, manic, and uncontrollable, then slow and moaning once again. While the song stretches on and on and on, Robert Plant keeps repeating the same question, “How come twenty four hours sometimes seem to slip into days? One minute seems like a lifetime, baby, when I feel this way.”

1. Wilco, “The Lonely 1.” Well I guess Jeff Tweedy must know something about loneliness, because Wilco is the only band to make this list twice, and that doesn’t count the Woody Guthrie song they’ve also covered. In fact, as a song about the loneliness of a rock star as seen by one of his devoted fans, this one could be about Tweedy himself. A lovely song with a haunting steel guitar and violin, “The Lonely 1” paints the picture of a musician in the spotlight he’s always dreamed of inhabiting, arms outstretched for his autograph as he heads backstage after the show. In an image that I think it says it all, he stands “alone in the halo’s haze.” Oh the great numbers of people who have spent their lives chasing fame to heal the hole in their hearts, and the much smaller numbers who have achieved that fame only to find standing alone in the spotlight and the haze of a smoke machine. The fan is alone too—he or she comes home, finds no messages on the phone (ah the good old days when you had to go home to check your phone messages), and then plays the ones from yesterday just to hear something from someone, I suppose. The fan turns on the stereo and there’s the rock star whining about the fact that they’re lonely, even though every one wants an autograph or a picture with them. Kind of makes rock stars seem like assholes, doesn’t it? I mean the fan would do anything for the rock star and defends everything he does: “when the critics pan, I write in your defense.” But then maybe the fan has the luxury of being able to live vicariously through someone else, while the rock star who’s made it to the top realizes there’s no one except him standing up there, alone and now totally distant from us ordinary folk.

Honorable mention: Three Dog Night, “One.” Come on, you know you know it, so sing along with me now: “One is loneliest number that you’ll ever do. One is the loneliest…”

Zombies! Organize!!

Whereas my last adventure in live music took me to the depths of North Miami’s ghettos for the International Noise Convention, this weekend found me in the upscale consumer’s paradise of West Palm Beach for the politically radical 80s kitsch techo/rap of Zombies! Organize!! and Freeze Pop. Full disclosure: one of the members of Zombies! Organize!! is my student Laura, who was one of my undergraduates and has since enrolled in our Master’s program and taken two graduate seminars with me. I had no idea that Laura was even in a band until a few months ago, but I’ve since discovered that they have quite the following among hipster kids in South Florida.

I’ve never had any reason to visit West Palm Beach’s downtown shopping district, so I don’t know my way around. I find myself stuck in the Saturday night traffic of something called CityPlace, which in truth is neither a city nor a place (discuss!), but instead an expanse of lame high-end boutiques and shitty mid-priced restaurants. Then again, while crawling through the Manhattan-paced traffic I watch some cops maliciously eyeing a handful of black teenagers who are aimlessly loitering in front of one of these stores, and I think to myself that maybe that this is a city after all.

The cover charge tonight is 15 bucks, and I’ve driven over 50 miles to get here, so this better be a good fucking show. I chat for a while with Laura, who is outfitted in a black tank top and a pink tutu, and she introduces me to the other band members, who as it turns out are her sister and her sister’s husband. Yes, this is a family band.

Zombies! Organize!! take the stage and all the hipsters rush in from the bar to start dancing. Their sound is composed of rudimentary keyboard beats and deadpan white-kid raps of the sort I haven’t heard since Lambda Lambda Lambda’s triumphant performance at the end of the first Revenge of the Nerds movie. I am filled with a teacher’s pride when I listen closely to the lyrics that sound like snippets of Marxist theory and Situationist sloganeering being rhymed at a high school pep rally. It’s like Judith Butler became a member of Devo. No wait, it’s like Le Tigre schooling Grandmaster Flash in queer theory. I mean how could you not love a band that uses “hegemonic masculinity” in a chorus or rhymes “Spartacus” with “lick my robot clitoris”? Adorable!!! Now I got it: It’s as if the little girls who once comprised the Shaggs had been abducted and forced to bear children for the benefit of a techno-socialist cult led by the members of Kraftwerk, and then said cult decided it was now time for their children to form a band that could de-program the exploited and pacified masses of late capitalism and its culture of the simulacrum with hypnotic retro hip hop beats and mallrat accents.

Freeze Pop are the main draw tonight, but it’s a tough act for them to follow. They are a more grown-up band featuring a sexy female singer and two guys who are masters of the key-tar (you know, a keyboard that is slung over the shoulder and played like a guitar with an extraordinary amount of ironic posturing). It’s a good show finished off with some totally bitchin’ covers of “The Final Countdown” and “Don’t Stop Believin.’” I stick around for a while longer because I am inexplicably struck by the urge to keep dancing with some friends I have run into at the show. It’s almost 2 AM now and time to go home. On the way back to I-95 CityPlace is deserted with the exception of security guards and police officers. I indulge the fantasy that they are there to restore order after all the consumers have had their brains eaten, or better yet, decided to go get organized.

The International Noise Festival

In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, the French theorist Jacques Attali wrote that “What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new.” It’s Friday night and I’m driving with two film professors and one of their girlfriends through one of the deepest and darkest ghettos I’ve ever been to in North Miami. The nearest exit ramp has been closed so we’re driving through the neighborhood known as Little Haiti, where there are no street lamps and few street lights, long stretches of warehouses and storefronts protected with wrought iron, and the occasional cluster of gangsters lurking ominously on street corners. We arrive at our destination, a punk rock club called Churchill’s, and suddenly there are nothing but white hipsters with chopped hair and tight pants who look like they’ve stepped out of a Hot Topic catalog.

We are here for the International Noise Convention, an annual event at Churchill’s which I have heard much about but never attended. The club is small, dank, and filled with the familiar scent of sweat, spilled beer, and stale cigarette smoke. About 50 kids are standing in a semi-circle around a young woman who’s on a slightly elevated stage and looks to be plugging various chords in and out of some kind of machine while popping cassette tapes in and out of a tape recorder. It’s a surreal, post-apocalyptic scene like something out of Blade Runner or Mad Max, with all these kids attired in tribalist and retro styles hypnotically bobbing their heads to sounds that can’t really be called “music” but are undeniably entrancing. I close my eyes and allow myself to be overwhelmed by the noise, which I can only try to describe as the rhythm of an old dot matrix printer periodically interrupted by the chirping of birds.

She finishes, and almost immediately a band starts playing in the center of the club on a stage that isn’t elevated at all. Churchill’s is so small that I don’t even need to move, I just turn my body to the right and find myself uncomfortably close to the band. A guitar player produces a few solid minutes of feedback, and then the drummer begins pounding out some beats and the place erupts into a mosh pit with bodies flailing and pushing in every direction, including right back into the drumset and amplifiers. It’s one big mess of piercing sounds and pierced bodies, and I’m totally digging it. Some kid next to me is smoking a joint and later in the night he walks by and whispers that he’s selling doses. I shake my head no and then spend the rest of the night debating whether this would be the best or the worst of all possible places to drop acid. Since I wasn’t fortunate enough to be at the Masque in 1978 or Cabaret Voltaire in 1918, this is probably as close as I’m going to get to seeing the decline of western civilization in all its glory.

Some of the performances were unspeakably terrible, like the wannabe Jesus guy who kept chanting and moaning into the microphone or the dorky kids with all the good equipment who thought they were New Order or the drummer who stuck his fingers and his drumstick down his throat to induce vomiting on his cymbal. But on the whole it was so refreshing to see the spirit of anarchy alive and well as a succession of unknown kids took the “stage” with the confidence that the rules don’t matter anymore because any piece of technology can be a musical instrument because any noise can be considered music. Jacques Attali was writing about this sort of noise more than 25 years ago: “Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible.” And so on that note we stepped out of the club and back into America’s Third World, a warzone of disorganization in the moment of our global economic meltdown, and I prayed not to get lost on the way back to Interstate 95 (we did get lost for a little while, but obviously did get back safely enough for me to tell you this story).