I've been going through my records lately, trying to be honest about what I really like, what is just alright and what I have for I don't know why. I have decided that the last Look Back and Laugh release, that "State of Illusion" twelve inch, is just not that good. Which is a bummer, cause I really like that band. It totally pales next to their first LP or the split with Dropdead. That shit is BRUTAL. Anyway, so yeah, Unbroken's Ritual LP - not very good. Warcry, as much as I am into them as an idea and as good as the "Harvest of Death" seven inch and Maniacs on Pedestals LP are, the reality is that Deprogram is not a very good record. I'm not gonna keep it just cause it's a Warcry record, you know? Wow, just realized there is a Motorhead patch on the front of that record. Now I'm really not gonna keep it.
What is good though, both in content and concept, is God's Chosen People, a compilation LP released on Old Glory Records in 1993. There is no specific theme to this record, aside from using two of Jacob Riis' turn of the century photographs of white ethnics living in American slums as cover art. I don't think it was a benefit, either.
Still, the record has a definite coherence to it. The bands featured on it (Avail, Merel, Elizabeth Herz, Askance, Puzzlehead, Native Nod, Rorschach, Groove, Shadowman, Iconoclast, Greyhouse and Born Against) are(Avail is the only one still going)/were all bands that, for lack of a better term, "cared about stuff." These were bands playing hardcore and punk rock when it was still pretty uncommercial to be doing so. These bands played out of love, out of necessity. They were not trying to get on Warped Tour, they didn't have shirts in Hot Topic, they weren't on Ferret Records and every one of them had zero MySpace friends. Honest!
It comes with an 8 1/2 x 11 photocopied zine insert where each band gets a full page to put whatever they want - lyrics, images, contact information, you know.
Well anyway, so what? I believe that the purposeful, worthwhile comp is a rare creature these days. This feels like an actual compilation of bands that Mr. Old Glory liked, whether as performers, people, or both. It's not an attempt to sell anything, aside from itself. The songs with which I am familiar were not on other releases, or at least not in these forms (Avail gives us an excellent pre-Dixie rendition of "Sidewalk"). Nowhere does the proprietor of this record tell you what to buy, or even make such suggestions. So, so many compilations I see today are really just marketing materials. They are CDs (or more recently, downloads) put out by labels featuring "hot" artists from their "rosters" and almost always let you know from what release each song is. And that's fine. I understand that labels that want to stay in business need to promote their releases. It's when it seems that's all there is...
I miss this. This hearkens back to a time when punk meant a bit more, when there weren't twenty-six million bands all vying for sponsorship, when you had to do work to find bands, when bands booked tours over the phone, when things weren't so alienated and separate. You could totally still put out a record like this, and I'm sure that people do, but I'm not sure that anyone would really care. Compilation records used to be really important ways for bands to get exposure. Some of the most widely-mentioned classic punk and hardcore records are compilations - This is Boston, Not L.A., Flex Your Head, Not So Quiet on the Western Front This is the A.L.F., etc. The internet broke this. At least, for now.
I don't know if this is still the case, but a few years back, you could find this record pretty easily in used bins for quite cheap. I doubt the price has gone up; I'm just not sure if they are as readily available. If you find it, it is definitely worth getting. I don't have my record player set up to rip mp3s from it, but if I do or find a digitally encoded version of this record, I will totally up it.
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