Give Me Back

Ebullition Records, circa 1991

Today mine is a privileged complaint. But it’s still a complaint.

After work at two jobs with no lunch break, I rode my bike to the YMCA to sweat it out. When I came out 45 minutes later, something was missing: my well-worn Brooks bike seat. Yes, this is an expensive saddle. Yes, there is a lot of bike theft in San Francisco and in some ways having nice bike stuff is “asking for it.” Yes, the seat was locked to the frame. And you know what? That doesn’t matter. I had so much fucking fun on that bike seat. I rode it across the Pyrenees, twice. I blistered and bruised my ass to wear it in. I worked in a dark cubicle with no windows and no soul for months in order to buy it. And I’m pissed off.

I’m angry that I live in a culture (and a city) in which some people have so much, and other people have so little, so that oftentimes people who are in between and sort of just have a few things can’t walk out their door without locking all their shit down and it STILL gets stolen. I’m angry at the person who stole it for not respecting my shit. I’m angry at the randomness of being late and not staying outside for a minute to make sure that guy who was lingering by the bike rack left before I went inside (a guy, by the way, who did not look in any way in need of the money a Brooks sale might bring him but instead looked like he might just want a really nice seat for his own nice bike). I’m angry at the dozens of rich people marching their cars into the fancy restaurants’ valet parking next door to the Y who didn’t see something or say something. I’m angry at feeling immobilized. I’m angry because this had to happen on a day when I was already feeling taxed by having four jobs for the past three weeks and still not having a paycheck in my hand. And I’m angry at myself for being so upset about having a material, although admittedly very practical, object taken away from me when there are so many greater injustices going on around me every day.

But also something about independence. About the feeling I had, just seconds before choosing that particular bike rack to lock to, that bicycling is empowering for me. It allows me the freedom to drive my own movement, to be in my body in visceral and unexceptional ways, to move faster than people who might want to do me harm, and it always, always, makes me feel better than I felt before. Emotionally, too.

And if I want to be honest, I’m really just upset because the theft of that particular material object takes me one very physical spot farther away from being on that seat, on that bike, pushing myself over mountains and between oceans and into campsites and up hillsides and through rainstorms with my sweetheart by my side. One step more off the road. And one step closer to being back—back to working, struggling, judging, managing, striving, negotiating, and getting jacked.

When I’m angry I listen to loud screamy music.

This record is an amazing compilation by Ebullition Records made in the 90s with the bands Amenity, Desiderata, Seein’ Red, Spitboy, End of The Line, Man Lifting Banner, Born Against, Econochrist, Profax, Suckerpunch, Sawhorse, Struggle, Bikini Kill, and Downcast.

The songs are political in nature, loud and awesome and angry in a meaningful way that would probably not approve of me whining about my fancy leather missing object. The Spitboy song “Seriously” in particular was a staple of my late teen years. The record was also a benefit for Planned Parenthood, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Shelter Services For Women. It comes with an amazingly cool insert booklet packed with essays and lyrics and awesomeness.

It’s great. And it helps me focus my anger. It reminds me of being younger and having less things, and still getting jacked by the ways of men and economies. It reminds me to remember to keep fighting for my rights, as a woman. And that there are bigger things than the ones I’m pissed off about, but also that everybody has a right to pissed off about the things that trouble them.

Because nobody ever asks for it.

And dude. If you can’t give me back a just world or my equal rights, and you can’t give me back my youthful punk mental state, can someone at least give me back my bike seat?

(By the way, this is only free linkable thing from any of the songs on this album (except Bikini Kill) that I could find on the interwebs. There’s a nice open slot here for an online video/music archive project about 90s punk/hardcore/etc….)

The Adverts – Singles Compilation

Get Back, 1998

Here – press play on this first. Then, read:

The Adverts might be my very favorite 70s British punk band. Why? I know nothing about them. I could Google them to find out. But you can do that yourself.

Here’s what we can tell: They were young and British in the 1970s. They sang tight, simplistic punk songs with upswelling guitar licks and yelled/sung choruses about being young and playing crappy punk songs. I don’t even remember where I first heard them. Probably in Kurt’s car. So what’s so great about this band that sounds like any other band of that era and genre and have no musical pedigree to speak of?

They were not trailblazers of music. They were not the most famous. They were not the most blatantly, on-purpose offensive. But they have this going for them: they make me flail my arms around as though I actually know how to air drum. They make me jump up and down in my kitchen, all the way down the hall from the blaring record player, as though the pasta cooking on the stove could heat up faster from my physical encouragement. C’mon! Get moving! Boil the fuck over. The Adverts are here! Act like you mean it, alone on a Monday night feeling like it’s gonna be a long week. Act like you’re young again.

What is it about rock and roll and youth?

Get me right: I am not saying that one has to be young to rock, or to love rock, or to make rock. But one can’t really ignore the connection between youth and music. It’s as though whatever we listen to from childhood up through our 20s becomes “our” music and sticks there. You can keep learning and listening and accumulating, but you’re still stuck somewhere between the chords of your youth.

Yesterday I helped my best friend of 28 years (yes, that’s right, we’ve been friends for almost three decades) pack up her house to move. In her basement, she discovered a box filled with the mix tapes I had made her, from fifth grade through college. The Adverts weren’t on any of those tapes, although the tapes do reflect an eclectic gathering of groups ranging from show tunes to standards to pop to punk. And some of them—complete with hand-drawn covers and wittily named sides and snippets of stand up comedians cut in-between songs—some of them are as fresh in my musical memory as the day I made them. They take me back. More than that, they’re where I’m from.

As I consciously set out to listen to and write about records, every day, I am increasingly encountering my youth. I am consistently uncertain how much to indulge the past here; every album has a memory, but not every memory is really that relevant to discussing its music. I’m 34 years old: not exactly an old lady, but still it’s there on the these pages: young me with firmer skin and crazier hair and jeans from eras past, running around, hanging with the bad kids, rebelling against the boss or the family, just generally acting like you just don’t give a damn—all set to a soundtrack of these records.  (The act of reviewing your own record collection is a weighted sampling of the musical spectrum, of course. I have been loving music for a long time, and the records I own are often my “favorites” and come with attendant emotional attachments and memories. )

Listening to the Adverts reminds me that one of the reasons I write about music is because I miss it. At some point, I guess I stopped living music every day. This point coincided with leaving my twenties. It was like the moment I turned 30, I stopped knowing as much about music I didn’t wake with a song in my head. I often lost track of my headphones for weeks at a time. I still thoughts of albums released in 2000 as “new” albums. I didn’t have anyone to sing back to.

Bored Teenagers; Anthems Aplenty

But even a 34-year-old knows a punk anthem when she hears one, and this singles comp has anthems a-plenty. The album cuts in fast with “One Chord Wonders”, a sharply self-depracating song about four teenagers who play crappy punk songs. Yeah, it’s deep, man. Almost as deep as their other song, “Bored Teenagers.” These kids tear it up – so self-aware, so snottily good. It’s just heavy enough to be tough, but just light enough to make me smile. Even “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes,” which I assume is supposed to be offensive in that it purports to see the perspective of a serial killer who wanted his eyes donated to science when he died. Gross? Whatever. It makes me smile.

I listen to punk music when I am angry, but not deeply so. More frustrated. Like, after a day when you sit at a desk until your ass hurts and then you still haven’t had time to eat lunch. When all your friends seem stuck in the grind and stop calling. When people who pay you or evaluate you don’t value you When you just want to disconnect from the multiple grownup aspects of your life and tap into some good old-timey rebellion. When you need to have a little fun.

This record is fun, too, and manages in the careless sneer of itself to free something inside. To make you play, feel un-serious consequences to serious reactions, feel like cutting class and actually having it not matter for once. Because you know what? It doesn’t matter for once. For once let’s be immature again without being assholes. Let’s all cut class together. Smoke one. Kiss someone you don’t love but whose eyes are darkest pools of intrigue. Swear we won’t be like our parents, won’t get stuck in routines, won’t settle down. I won’t either. I swear. As the song says, this is no time to be 21. But it’s no time not to be, either.

Germ-Free Adolescents

Art-i-ficial, 1978 (fascimile)

Poly Styrene died today.

When I heard X-Ray Spex for the first time, my mind was entirely blown. By that time I was pretty familiar with 1970s punkk music. But this was something else. X-Ray Spex made punk music that was mature beyond its genre. They combined art with artifice with amps, and they blew most dude-fronted rock bands out of the water. Poly Styrene’s singing and performing contained the sonic genesis of every riot grrl band I ever loved in the ’90s, except this was in the ’70s, when even punkers didn’t sound like this. Bands like the Buzzcocks were a pop factory compared to the gutteral growls of the Spex; and they backed up those growls with downright avant garde arrangements. A fucking saxaphone in a punk band. Their outfits were rad, too.

The other night, I was talking about this record project with my friend Peter and he gave me a great compliment. He said that he likes it because I don’t write about music the way a lot of critics write about music, which is to say in a way that makes him want to kill them. (Thanks, Peter!) That’s not an accident. I believe that music connects with an undefinable cross-section of many non-critical aspects of humanity and personality and experience and time. So do most critics. But somehow, at least in a lot of contemporary criticism, this macho, collector-dude, completist ego thing gets in the way and a lot of critics have to spend time talking like they know more than anyone else about music. Which makes us hate them, because that’s annoying.

I’m probably as annoying as the next music writer; the point of this story isn’t to prove my ego is less than that of some guy who’s invested his entire life in knowing about music. Sure, I probably know more than some people about certain musics. Of course I say things like “avant garde arrangements,” just like other critics.

But the point is, we all know about music. If we love even just one song, whether a pop teenage hit or an epic symphony of old, we know enough about music to talk about it with each other. We may not have all the context, and we still like to hear from people who do have that context, but when it comes to popular culture we are our own best experts. You can feel it in the way your feet won’t sit still to certain songs, in that universal and enduring human need to lip sync into a hairbrush, and in the chill that whispers across my arm hair when Poly Styrene screams.

Sometimes I feel made tired by writing about music. Sometimes it’s nice to just listen to it. So today, listen to some X-Ray Specs with me, and think about their context and influence and all that stuff if that’s what the record makes you think about. But mostly just listen. Do you like it? Why? Why not? What does it make you feel?

Later, you’ll remember this.

Repo Man

San Andreas Records, 1984

Remember when I was talking about Joan Didion and  Tom Waits, and saying that perhaps I’d rather be from his California than from hers? I’d like to add to that by saying that this is also the California I’m from.

Repo Man is a cult film made in 1984 by Alex Cox. It’s about a guy, a car, capitalism, drugs, the possible end of the world, LA, some unseen powers, and a lot of punk rock songs. I’m sure it’s about some other stuff—it’s been forever since I saw it—but in my teenage memory, those are the things that stick. I had friends who were absolutely obsessed with this movie. I loved it, saw it many times, but I never knew all the lines like some guys did.

“Ordinary fuckin’ people. I hate ‘em.” –Bud, Repo Man

Pretty much anyone I knew in high school that was obsessed with this movie hung out across the street. You know what across the street is in high school, right?  It’s the steps of that big old wooden house with the big gate and the shading vines that provide a nice cover for lighting joints. It’s the small alley around the corner whose curbs cradle you when you’re making out or coming down or just having a break from the constant barrage of authority known as the high school experience. In some schools, it’s the parking lot, or behind the church, or under the bleachers. It exists in every teenage world: the place in high school where kids who are a little bit outside hang out.

I liked to move around in high school — I hung out across the street, and I also didn’t. But some of my favorite people were usually there. People who weren’t from perfect one-story craftsman family homes on the West Side but instead grew up in the mountains, by the beach, in ramshackle family situations, in unheated garage bedrooms, a little closer to the edge than other people liked to acknowledge.

In high school I didn’t do drugs, didn’t even smoke cigarettes, was fairly tame in my sexuality. I was from a comparatively sane family, I did theater, I worked hard, and I wore interesting clothes. But I had friends who were far more adventurous than I was. And I loved them, and I hung out with them. Across the street.

Get outta line, next neck on the block –Circle Jerks, Coup D’Etat

Once my high school principal actually tried to talk to me about hanging out across the street. I was in his office for something unrelated, and he mentioned that it seemed like I was hanging out “over there” with “the wrong element.” My parents worked at the university. I used to be friends with (actually, date) his own son. I was a bright girl with a bright future and I wouldn’t want to, well, you know… I stared at him, at first honestly not sure what he was implying. Then I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, and my friends were some of the smartest people I knew, and I walked outside. And across the street.

People who have had to fight for their identities—and especially people who have had to do this as children and teens—guard them with a mixture of unwavering pride and a sense of underlying vulnerability that never goes away, no matter how black your clothes or scratched your arms or loud your culture. If you are a teenager and someone puts you down, hits you, ignores you, or even just doesn’t really notice you – or if you feel in some other way (culturally, sexually) disenfranchised, it shows.  If you can find something that somehow, with its mix of intelligence and fuck-you-ness and bitter humor, speaks to your feelings, you memorize it. It’s punk for a lot of people, or movies like Repo Man, or theater or video games or whatever culture catches you in that moment of vulnerability and allows you in.

I’m not crazy / you’re the one who’s crazy / you’re driving me crazy –Suicidal Tendencies, Institutionalized

Listening back, this music sounds much mellower than I thought it was at the time. Punk. It is so angry and so about rebellion. But it is also just, really, rock ‘n’ roll, no? Sometimes faster, sometimes yelling-er , but always about a guitar and a kid who wants to be heard. I must have heard these songs when I first saw the film – probably in junior high, considering the fact that I had an older brother. I know that I loved Suicidal Tendencies and their dirty lack of tact or melody. I loved The Circle Jerks even though I wasn’t even really sure what their name meant. Black Flag was a presence that invoked Cool even if I never got super into them – channeling disaffected teenagers everywhere with we’ve got nothing better to do than watch tv and have a couple of brews, dude. And just today I realize that this soundtrack album contains the first version of “Pablo Picasso” I ever heard, long before I knew who the Modern Lovers or Jonathan Richman are.

I’m glad to have listened to this music young. I’m glad to have identified, even tangentially, with the cultural place this record represents. This place of rebellion and humor all at once, this cult Hollywood outsider status of whatever was happening in the 80s and 90s in California that left such an impression. And I’m glad people listened to me when I was a kid. I wish they’d listened to more of my friends.

Because this record is about them. Kids. About the way it sounded to be a teenager in this place, dreaming of access to a car or money, avoiding the crush of pressures large and small, feeling acutely aware of our impending-apocalyptic era, the hot California pavement shaking beneath our skin every day, trying to understand and accept and get the hell out of and fall in love with where we were from. Across the street, in a cul de sac, or on the open radioactive road. This is California, too.

Suicide

Red Star, 1999 (reissue)

Influence.

It’s a tricky thing in music. When you want to join a band and you look at ads on Craigslist, the protocol is for both parties to list their influences as a way to gauge potential musical compatibility. But bands don’t necessarily sound like the bands they consider influences. Musicians don’t always know the bands that are influencing them at the time. And some bands are so influential, citing them is sort of ridiculous.

Musicians from seminal New York punk bands to ’80s synth pop groups to producer Steve Albini to Bruce Springsteen claim Suicide as an influence. Now that synth music has resurged, you can add bands like TV on the Radio to that list. M.I.A. has sampled them. Music people from all corners of the industry freakin’ love this band, especially their self-titled debut album. And most music listeners have never heard of them.

Suicide was a duo of Alan Vega and Martin Rev who, like their New York punk contemporaries, were about confrontational performance first and music second. They sang and played synthesizers and drum machines. They got yelled at by the audience a lot. They wore ridiculous sunglasses. They didn’t record an album until 1977. And I have many dear friends who cite this as one of the best albums ever. I never heard of it until it was rereleased in 2002, a time when I was hanging out primarily with record collector geeks. But once I heard it, I could not ignore its influence.

On the one hand, the songs are a bit heavy handed from a contemporary perspective. Really, “suicide?” A song named “Che”? Are you serious? But these guys invented this. They were serious, and also not serious. It performance, avant garde stuff, as was the style of NYC punk and postpunk in the 70s and 80s. They were making self-annihilation through offensive-yet-overly-sincere music when lots of people were still listening to Joni Mitchell. (No offense to Joni. Love her.) They hit you over the head with their sound – primitive effects, electro synth walls of sound backing spookily processed vocals. Anger so thick you can see it slide off the vinyl. Or, wait… is that sarcasm?

On the other hand, who cares? It’s good. And it’s inescapably modern — it’s crazy that this record is 40 years old. The electronic minimal rawness of the band sounds like something the coolest kids in the hippest clubs would stand and nod their heads for into the wee hours of the morning, today. And at the same time, it’s genuinely spooky—deeply effective as a piece of music.These songs assault you with their pretenses but then, also, they slip inside and make you a little bit afraid. A little bit on edge. A lot sad about our mixed up modern technological lonely lives and, certainly, deeply mortal.

And Suicide probably changed your favorite rock band’s sound for the better. So give it some credit, with a grain of salt, and lie back and listen yourself to death with the pre-punk post-punk goodness of it all.