The 90s were a great time for music. Why have straight edge musicians not embraced this period? There is a wealth of material here to mine. Here are some examples:
XI Don't Mind Stealin BreadX
XHe Ain't Gonna DieX
XFaster Than a CannonballX
XFound out about YouX
XDo You Have to Let It LingerX
On the other hand, these are not acceptable:
XTwo PrincesX
XRun-AroundX
XAnts MarchingX
However, XStayX would be cool.
Please let me know if you are interested in pursuing something along these lines. I would be up for multiple coterminous bands.
Straight edge metal is nothing new. It goes back to Judge and up through whatever garbage is around now. I heard a band yesterday that sounded like Pantera, and they weren't the first one.
Here's the thing: Pantera sucks.
Why is there no edge band that sounds like Ozzy? I want to fix that. I hereby announce my intention to form XBark at the MoonX.
If you or someone you know can sing like Ozzy or play guitar like Randy Rhoads, get at me. Lots of people can do those things, but I'm not sure that a single one Xes up.
For a while, I was pretty sympathetic to a lot of Crimethinc. stuff. The more I hung around people who are into it and a part of it, the less I was into it. I could never get into most of their writings. It's a lot of super-verbose, dense, dry articles that don't relate in the least to the reality the overwhelming majority of people on this planet face. Which is fine, of course, but please do not position yourself as any type of revolutionary organization, much less one that has the faintest hope of winning favor with anyone outside of a nearly infinitely small group of people who essentially do nothing productive toward actually making a revolution.
I was really into Evasion when it came out. I related to a lot of it - the hardcore, the veganism, the shoplifting, the dumpstering bagels. Some of it was a bit much (positing anything related in the book as revolutionary outside of a selfish dimension, a tendency to over-romanticize some of his experiences), and I realized it was kind of a "best of" account of the guy's life. Truth be told, I likely wouldn't have dug it nearly so much were the guy not vegan and edge. But that's not a Crimethinc. publication. They just published it. Someone who had nothing to do with them wrote it.
Crimethinc. advocates a lot of ridiculous "lifestyle anarchism" positions, from dropping out of school at sixteen years old with no plans except traveling and shoplifting (I have no philosophical problem with shoplifting in many circumstances, but please understand that there is absolutely nothing inherently revolutionary or radical about it whatsoever) to the concept that one must abandon life within "the system" or whatever to actually be a revolutionary, at least by their terms:
It's the same with talking about quitting one's job and changing one's lifestyle - people who are currently trying to do that have much more useful perspectives on it than full-time anarchists who dropped out ten years ago. (172)
Breathtaking, to be sure. Let's meditate on that for a minute. "Full-time anarchists." What could that possibly mean, especially with regard to the United States. First, it must be stated that there is no legitimate, viable anarchist movement in this country. That is a fact. There has not been for close to one hundred years. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional, by my estimation. No doubt there are lots of people who define themselves as anarchists, and also a number of groups specifically dedicated to anarchist struggle, but I am unaware of any real "full-time anarchists." Especially ones without jobs. I know people who are pretty serious anarchists (adults, over forty) and have been involved with anarchist groups and organizations for sizable portions of their lives. If they are not in prison, though, they have jobs. You can't tell that they are anarchists by looking at them. They look like real people. Cause they are. The reality is that if you are a "full-time anarchist," which I take to mean dedicating your life to making revolution (like Lenin, Mao or Castro did for communism), you are either gonna be in jail (not for shoplifting or spray painting, or even cause you threw a rock at a pig), are out of jail after a long stint, in exile, in hiding, or dead. These Crimethinc. people fit none of those profiles. Likely, they never will.
You see, and again, this is only my estimation, Crimethinc. is the privileged person's anarchism (has anarchism been much else in this country for decades?). This is for people who can run back to mom and dad when things get rough. And they do. Rich kids living "the dream." It's for people who can choose "homelessness" and "poverty." It's hard for people of color to lead the Crimethinc. life. Shoplifting from a supermarket while traveling through Iowa ain't gonna go too smoothly, likely. You know what I mean?
If you've been poor, and I mean real poverty, not the kind that you choose and out of which you can move again at will, it fucking sucks. Being on food stamps because otherwise you don't eat unless your aunt brings your family food, sucks. Getting welfare because otherwise you are (literally, not "traveling") homeless, as a family, sucks. Not having a job because you have no car and you cannot afford a taxi to get to a potential job, sucks. The fetishization of poverty is offensive to those who live it with no choice. Only rich white kids choose "poverty." Fuck all these people on poverty vacations. Your existence grates on those with whom you claim solidarity.
But I know, you've really got one over on everybody cause you don't work. Someone has to, otherwise there would be no one from whom you could mooch.
And finally, you know what? I don't work either. I haven't had a "job" in over five years. But I don't fucking care. I don't go around telling people about it. And I certainly don't think that it puts me on some road to nirvana or whatever. I've long (always?) recognized that people have to survive, and in this world, it largely means working for someone else.
Reading/listening to Ian Mackaye can teach you a lot about life. It has me. This is a guy who has really thought about shit his whole life and ACTUALLY FIGURED SOME THINGS OUT. That's the big deal. Lots of people think about stuff, but this guy got somewhere. It's really something. That's what it means to be wise, to actually reach conclusions that can help people, to which people can relate.
I don't know how many times I would have a car go by and someone would scream, "Fuck you, you fucking punk faggot!" But then I realized that if you do not speak that language, you recognize that they are not talking to you. Let's say that I'm in Sweden, and a carload with a bunch of guys goes by and they yell something at me in Swedish. I don't know what they're saying. As far as I know, they are saying, "I love basketball!" Who knows? So when I'm walking along the street here and some guys go by in a car, and they don't know me, I don't know them, but they say, "You're a fucking punk faggot, fuck you!" then it should have the same effect. They are not talking to me, they don't know me, and I'm not what they say I am, so they must have me confused with someone else. In short, if you don't speak the language of violence, you are released from violence. This was a very powerful discovery for me.
It's a discovery on which I'm still working, but at least I've got some directions on how to get there.
Here is the other quote that really struck me in his exchange with Gabriel Kuhn:
There was a certain period in my life when I was very angry, when I was really agonizing over things. It made me feel miserable, and I began to question everything: What is the point of all this punk rock? What is the point of me singing? What am I trying to do? Eventually, I realized that the reason I was so angry was because I want people in the world to be well. And I realized that it was a worthwhile project to pursue in my lifetime. But I also understood that I myself needed to be well to do that. So I figured that I would do my best to live a life of wellness. This doesn't mean that I'm trying to bask in my riches. It means that I'm trying to release myself from the anger and agony. Remember what I said earlier about someone going by in a car and calling me a "fucking asshole?" They are not talking to me - 'cause I'm not a fucking asshole.
Brilliant, just fucking brilliant. I cannot explain how deeply I relate to that. I burn for people, animals and the planet to be well and the ensuing certain frustrations make me so angry and hateful towards the bulk of the human population. I feel this every day. It is constant. I just don't feel that there is really anything I can do to make anyone or anything well. It's all a series of frustrating, crashing defeats. Over and over.
Releasing oneself from the anger and agony, that is the challenge of my life. If nothing else, it's very comforting to read this and only further cements the idea that Ian Mackaye is an exceptional thinker.
It's so important to realize that Ian did this stuff, this letting go and moving ahead, without giving up. He didn't get a stupid haircut and snazzy new jeans. He didn't lose himself in some empty fashion, he didn't immerse himself in an indulgent, vapid, solipsistic music scene. No. He has been vegan forever, he is still straight edge and punk as fuck. He still cares about people and animals in a serious way, but figured out how to do it without destroying himself. I need to figure that out cause you better believe I'm not going to go out like the rest of those pieces of shit. I'll die alone and in misery before that happens.
Here's the next installment of my thoughts on what I read in Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and Radical Politics. I read Dennis' interview with great enthusiasm. Some of it was pretty rad, but overall, I was not that into it. He's really image-oriented, which I am just so not about. He talks about how the Noise Conspiracy change their sound and their aesthetic every time they put out a record, saying crap like this:
I mean, we've been playing for ten years now with Noise Conspiracy, and you can look at our outfits throughout the years, and they've changed a lot, and so did the whole aesthetics. With every new record, we try something new - not only with the aesthetics, but with the politics and the music too. We maintain our ideas and our musical foundation, but we kind of switch and twist them a little bit every time and try to spice them up with something new.
You know, a lot of people try to decide what exactly it is that people should like about their band. We just figure that people can dig the politics, they can dig the snazzy outfits, they can dig the music, they can dig whatever - it's up to them to decide what to take with them when they leave our show or listen to our record. So while many bands are like, "This is what we are and this is what you should like about us," we just say, "Whatever you like is cool with us. If you don't like the politics, we're sure you find something else that you like."
I am just so turned off by that. It's like a fucking stage show. Politics is fun everybody. Whoo whoo, revolution rules! Slogans and marketing, fashion and image. Fuck all of that. Empty shit. Judging by people's responses to the last nine Noise Conspiracy full-lengths, I would say that lots of people realized that they are full of shit. Then he goes on to say something that made me like the dudes in Refused a whole lot:
I was always into this concept [changing images and ideologies], so with Noise Conspiracy I got a chance to realize it. Actually, when we did the last batch of touring with Refused, I tried to get the band to wear matching outfits, but the guitar players just happened to "lose" them. After a week of shows they were just like, "Eh, these jackets that we had tailor-made are gone..."
Good, fuck those jackets. What a bunch of boy band crap. Fuck.
Speaking of changing images, up top is a very recent picture of Dennis. He's punk as fuck these days, looking like it's 82. I guess it's appropriate, now that he's got his matching band.
So anyway, this is what Dennis has to say about his ideological and philosophical inspirations:
Personally, I like to mix different sources and hope that something cool will come out of it. Anarchism and socialism I've always been into. Situationism - which is as much an art movement as it is a political movement with an amazing critique of capitalist society, right at the breaking point of modernism and postmodernism - is just really well suited for lyrics, especially if you look at Raoul Vaneigem. And poststructuralism helps you understand how the world works today. Then you throw in some surrealism and some dada, and everything becomes even more interesting.
Interesting indeed. What a fun political collage life is. Anarchism and socialism? Situationism is not just well suited for lyrics, but also verbose, dense and largely irrelevant to those who aren't highly educated or pseudo-intellectual.
I guess he really does want revolution with a catchy phrase. What's after that? A bunch of well-dressed revolutionaries speaking to one another about a bunch of esoteric ideas? Way to be practical. So intensely privileged.
It's not like there's really any hope in anarchism (or socialism, or anything else he references), but come on, this guy is just making a mockery of it all and yet somehow has stood as an icon for radical music for years. People who are so into crafting their public self image really bum me the fuck out.
Duh. But this is for a reason other than being in Fall Out Boy. I finished reading this really interesting book a few weeks back, Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and Radical Politics. It's an anthology of interviews and writings, as the title says, on straight edge and the ways in which people have politicized it, through connections with such (not necessarily) disparate ideas as feminism, veganism, radical queer analysis, anarchism, and communism. The book is international in perspective, including people from Brazil, Israel, Poland, Sweden, Holland, the U.K. and of course the United States. Some of the interviews are great (Ian, the two people from Poland and one of the dudes from Point of No Return), some are really good and some are pathetic for what they reveal about the interviewees.
In the midst of all this is Andy Hurley, whose interview is entitled "Straight Edge, Anarcho-Primitivism and the Collapse." Yup. I guess it's to present the ideas of primitivism through the mouth of someone a bit more recognizable than anyone from Gather or Peregrine. Andy doesn't seem to be too into his own ideas and just kind of regurgitates stuff from Derrick Jensen and the great Klan sympathizer/apologist (he writes that "Nonetheless, the loathsome nature of the KKK of today should not blind us to what took place within the Klan 70 years ago, in various places and against the wishes and ideology of the Klan itself.), John Zerzan.
First, take a look at Andy's ultraprimitive 6,000+ square foot lakefront home, with its five bedrooms, four bathrooms and multiple BMWs in the driveway
Nice house. So in the interview, on page 254, he talks about how veganism is only relevant in our modern industrial world:
I always understood that in a better way of living, in the way of living that humanity is supposed to live [what the fuck does this mean?], I wouldn't be vegan. There is just a different connection, a different relationship. There's a relationship between predator and prey that has nothing to do with the relationship that civilization has to the animals it uses in the meat and dairy industry, in factory farming etc. So I definitely don't agree with the analysis that veganism saves the world. Not at all, because the whole question is still about civilization, and about farming and agriculture.
Of course veganism doesn't save the world. But it does more than you talking on your fucking iPhone and taking orders for your "Fuck City" shirts while fishing "naturally" on land you bought cause you're fucking rich. I'm super tired of this "relationship between predator and prey" bullshit that Derrick Jensen loves to propagate through his fetishized ideas of "the" Native American and how he/she honored the kill. Yeah, as though something is right because Native Americans did it. The Mayan people (in their civilization, which is really inconvenient for primitivists who idealize Native Americans, considering that they were Native Americans who built a pretty serious civilization long before they had most unfortunate contact with European death bringer parasites) performed human sacrifices, which seems like not a good idea. All that relationship shit is an excuse. Just admit that you are killing and that's it. The relationship is that you kill something and eat it. Whatever animal you are killing has no relationship with you, other than the one of great fear that you give it when you take its life. Like a deer is coming to offer itself to you, knowing that it's the right thing to do, living in this newly re-wilded natural world again.
So then why bother being vegan at all? Don't worry, Andy (by way of his friend Kevin Tucker) has got that one all figured out:
Besides, within civilization veganism is important to me because, again, I'm against oppression and this applies to the meat and dairy industry and all that, and so that's another thing I just can't support. But I've been planning on buying some land up north in Wisconsin, to at least have something that can never be clear-cut and used for timber, and to have a place that's wild, a place that I can utilize natural survival skills on. And then maybe one day I'll start looking for roadkill, start fishing in natural ways and stuff. I don't know when I'll get to that bridge and when I'll cross it, but I assume it will happen. As I said, I've been struggling with this for a while now and have had lots of talks with [Kevin] Tucker about it. It's become kind of a running joke.
There you have it, veganism and vegetarianism are merely protests against civilization. They don't deserve consideration once we switch back to living like we're "supposed to," as though anyone can know what that means. People have lived so differently over so many centuries, and here we see people claiming THE TRUTH, going back to that original moment, where everything was great. Then what happened, aliens came down and gave us bad ideas, or those creatures who live at the center of the earth crawled out and showed someone advanced technology? No. We happened. People. Or rather, we kept happening. The same fucking species, year after year, has continually fucked things up more and more. I'll write another post about this later.
What's the running joke? "LOL, I'm gonna eat meat soon!!" "Yeah right, non-primitivist, privileged industrialist!! LOL LOL LOL!" So funny right now.
Perhaps you wonder why I care. It's not really anything about Andy Hurley. Certainly, I do not look to him for ideas on anything. Before this interview and doing some subsequent perfunctory research (which turned up the episode of Cribs), I only knew that he played in Fall Out Boy and used to be in Racetraitor and Vegan Reich. Some people I know who think that anyone who is vegan and straight edge rules told me that he is a primitivist. So yeah, Andy Hurley is not an important part of my thoughts.
The issue is that his notion of veganism is just so offensive to my own. Sure, it's good that the dude is vegan for the time being (if he even still is at this point) and has (had?) been for a long time. It's way more than I could say for most people. I guess he promoted it, somehow. Maybe not, I don't know. Fall Out Boy is a pretty stupid, meaningless band, after all. But to just say that, "Hey, when it comes down to it, animals really are here for us to eat," that fucking SUCKS. What the fuck? Seriously. That is anthropocentrism at its core. It's like that food chain chart from the "Lisa the Vegetarian" episode of The Simpsons - we are the center, everything goes to us.
I've never viewed veganism as a relativist concept, that it's only desirable under industrial conditions. It's like saying that racism was only bad as long as black people were slaves or that dumping a little raw sewage in the ocean is ok, as long as too many people aren't doing it.
And what's up with this dichotomy that we either hunt animals or have industrialized agriculture? Why can't we plant for ourselves and work little plots of land? Sustenance is not exploitation. Stupid, shortsighted shit.
At the end of the day, I find it sad that Andy Hurley has this internal dissonance where he feels that he has to beat back his compassionate desires and kill. He refers to it as a "struggle." I would imagine it causes a good deal of anxiety. It's like he can't be a good primitivist if he doesn't eat meat. I guess that's what you get when your only thoughts on primitivism/how to live life come from reading Derrick Jensen, John Zerzan and hanging hard with Kevin Tucker. It's like he has to turn himself into some kind of robot, some idealized version of primitive man that is not likely based on much research. And he's choosing food as the primary method of that. I don't get it. If someone were of the opinion that hunting and killing is the absolute only method of survival post-collapse, and that person were also heavily disposed to veganism, why not train yourself to do the necessary killing and trapping and whatever and then leave it at that? It ain't like the collapse is imminent. Really. I don't see what the imperative is to abandon veganism at this point, if its something you still believe in.
We have obviously better ideas than killing to survive, but we're supposed to abandon them because we think that our ancestors behaved in certain ways. They also attacked one another with axes and lived in caves, wiping their asses with leaves at best. I wonder which "wild" version of humanity is most popular.
Fuck yes. Mantra. This is kind of the best Shelter record. Not the best as in the most pure from the heart (although, at that point, maybe that's really all that Ray Cappo was feeling), but holy shit are the songs good. The whole thing is just so solid. Every song rules and is memorable. The album benefits from being bookended by two amazing songs, with excellence in between.
Musically, it's fairly different from all the Shelter records before. It's a lot poppier, and at points, it's also a bit rappier. Really, Ray has always been somewhat of a rapper. It's just that there are more songs with rap-style vocals on Mantra than on previous records, which is fine by me, cause it works. I am generally not into mixing rapping with hardcore (New York in the 90s), but sometimes it rules. I think it also helps that it's not cheesy wannabe hip-hop over shitty riffs (again, New York in the 90s), but rather an adoption of hip-hop vocal stylings. Ray will not shoot you.
Fact - "Message of the Bhagavat" is an amazing opener. "We've got...We've got...We've got...THE MESSAGE FROM THE BHAGAVAT!" Hell yes you do. That shit always gets me going.
It's also a lot happier sounding than any previous Shelter material. That's ok though. I like both kinds of Shelter. Older Shelter had a decidedly more austere aural aesthetic, but I enjoy that at least as much.
Fact number two - "Metamorphosis" is an amazing closer. THE LYRICS ARE SO GOOD: "Told what is best for me but I've seen their destiny. Our leaders' ignominy reconfirms my concern to rearrange and change my life."
There are no crappy songs on this record. Some are fast, some are mid-tempo, some are catchy as hell ready for radio punk that never was(specifically "Here We Go" and "Empathy" - could have been a hit in another time), but it all rules. No excuses need be made.
Fact number three - Mantra is out of print. That's what happens when, in a time of hardcore bands briefly crossing into the mainstream (Sick of It All, Civ, Bad Religion), you foolishly, vainly jump the ships you built for a piece of shit label that offers you a couple of dollars. The mid 90s were a strange time for hardcore.
Fact number four - it is quite common in used sections, as lots of people mistakenly sleep on it. Or just download it here.
