OK. Let's start with a song, then discuss the ideology it is reacting against. It's all directly (im)pertinent to contemporary Scotland, you'll see; stick around for the punchline, cos you're not going to get this sort of stuff anywhere else in this country, trust me. So let's kick off with an old satiric pop-punk classic. I have included the lyrics below the video link:
Her legs are hairy logs, and she's got earrings in her face
She's giving me the creeps
The bums that she calls homeless people still aren't eating now
She's giving me the creeps [x4]
She's giving me the creeps
Well I extend my most heartfelt apologies
For being white and male without a cause
I used to be a huge fan of American punk music when I was younger. Indeed, I was a fan of American/UK underground musical and filmic and literary culture in general, and have written for more publications than I can remember about those subjects. But that's another conversation. Chicago pop-punk band Screeching Weasel were my favourite band back at that time, though I have not bought anything by them for over twenty years, and I used to read Maximum Rocknroll. The now-defunct punk zine (though it still maintains an online radio presence) was run from San Francisco, and was the Bible of the world punk scene, the fundamentalist inky-finger DIY-band-information sea that all the anarchopunk zine tributaries ran down into.
MRR
was
the way I kept up-to-date with information about Screeching Weasel,
and other fun bands, through the columnist writings of their
contentious, controversial, crank-yanking singer Ben Weasel, and
others: Pink Punk Lily, The Rev. Norb, Mykel Board, etc. I read about
the Weasel's excellent 1991 Pervo-Devo
EP,
from which the song above comes, and ordered it through the post. I
ordered it from a small DIY label in San Francisco called Shred of
Dignity (later Outpunk), who were the world's first record label
dedicated purely to queer punk bands.
I loved that EP, and
still do. In fact, I'm going to post the pisstaking first song from it, I
Wanna Be A Homosexual,
cos it's fucking hilarious and great:
As
you can imagine, back then, being a hetero male in Falkirk, a
post-industrial drunken angry homophobic town, and being into this,
and other weird, obscure splatter and exploitation and punk
shit...did make people look at you askance. However, I couldn't care
less back then, still don't, and it made no difference to me. The EP
arrived with a bonus. I must have included a few cents extra and, as
was the DIY punk spirit back then (maybe today, I dunno), they sent
me along another gay-themed EP for free, which was nice of them. It
was on clear vinyl, as I recall:
You
can see some angry riot grrrl bands on there, another burgeoning
extremist feminist musical scene from the time. Look it all up, if
you feel like it. Being from San Francisco, MRR was right on the
(lunatic pink) fringe of the burgeoning extremist PC scene, hardcore
as fuck. They would cover gay punk bands like Pansy Division:
Vegan
Reich were a militant vegan straightedge (zero-edge straightedgers don't
drink or fuck or do drugs; a nightmare ascetic life, basically) band,
who would haunt the letters page of MRR with holier-than-thou diktats
from Muslim singer Sean Muttaqi. Check out the lyrics below this video if you like
being told what to do, and judged mercilessly and
apocalyptically:
The
letters page was hilarious, as everybody tried to out-PC everybody
else, scoring holier-than-thou hardcore militant points, whilst
getting mocked by others not buying the religious
fundamentalism-alike PC racket. At the time, reading about all these
freaks and faggots and drunks and junkies and shock-and-awers and
nailbiters and cockblockers and neighbour-shockers and earbleeders
and anarchy-seeders and “peepers and prowlers and pederasts and
panty-sniffers and punks and pimps” (James Ellroy)
in
the punk scene round America was fascinating to a young Scot. It was
far away, seemed alien and exotic and new, and these were people I
wished I could be round back then. I remember (as far as I know) idle
chatter to get loads of punks to move to one area of America (can't
remember where) so they could take over the place, to a degree, and
make sure they didn't get any hassle; strength in numbers, at least.
That call being promoted from San Francisco, the one-time home of the Jim
Jones cult was ironic indeed.
For
anybody who doesn't know, Jones was a 1970s cult leader who took his 918
acolytes out to Guyana in South America, then killed them at gunpoint
by making them drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid (really Flavor Aid; doubt
Kool-Aid would have liked the publicity). This is where the
now-generic term 'drink the Kool-Aid' comes from, to denote somebody
who has been brainwashed by some discipline into
self-destructiveness, or at least mental intractability.
As
I just briefly showed above, that extremist, take-no-prisoners,
incredibly-angry-at-marginalisation subterranean subculture (sometimes just white middle class brats rebelling against affluent mommy and daddy, until they got a career) was just
starting to come into existence in the punk scene. Maximum Rocknroll
was the loudmouth-amplifying megaphone that pinballed the minority
sexual identity fury round the USA and the world. I have never been homophobic
or discriminatory towards any kind of sexuality in my life, so I
thought it was cool, as there were angry, oppressed youngstars
starting their own zines and scenes and fighting for their right to
party in any cocksucking and arsefucking or cuntlicking or fistfucking combo they
felt like. I totally approved.
The
fact it was so abstract it was almost rendered meaningless to me; the
photos and letters and records could have come from Mars, they were
so far removed from the Falkirk angry drunk scene I was slowly
drowning in. Complementing its depressed, weary blues scene, the town
would eventually get its own punk scene a decade later from the time
I am writing about, where they all started spouting tired “this is
punk/this isn't punk” well-worn American cliches, but that's
another story.
So what does all this angry sexual minority
extremism and infighting and America-copying (culturally, I was guilty of it too; though at least I was doing it at source, discovering the stuff myself, buying the obscure, hard-to-get books and films
and records and magazines, not having it regurgitated to me by somebody else) and
hissyfitting and pussyfooting and backslapping praise from
backstabbing men and women sound like to you, perceptive and sighing, and maybe farting or nosepicking, Scottish reader?
That's
right, our very own beleaguered first minister's (I'm not
capitalising her title, fuck that) government, and some of her
more...how shall we put it delicately...vocal
followers.
Oh
come on, you knew
that was coming
Tell
me I'm wrong.
Laughing, as ever.
END OF PART ONE
Read Part 2 here:
aaaaargh can't wait for part 2
ReplyDeleteHaven't written it yet, so you're just going to have to... :)
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