rsmurphy wrote:
OrthodoxEaster wrote: Sat Feb 14, 2026 12:33 pm
Which is why Sonic Youth's "Death Valley '69" (trashy, creepy) gets played around here a whole lot more than "Youth Against Fascism" (cringe, as the kids like to say).
Playing with Lydia Lunch is inherently political.
I don't like reggaeton. Never have. The music has no circuitry, no color scheme. Bad Bunny's super bowl performance was absorbing but the soundtrack was listless.
I missed Green Day but from what I can gather I would be disappointed. As a punk band to spend the latter half of your life being overtly political only to get on one of the the world's largest platforms and wimp out is lame. At least play "Going to Pasalacqua" and engender hope, drive, an appetite for something better.
Personally speaking I have been giving the side eye to any band not broadcasting the right side of this moment in history.
In 1984? Not so much. It was just some art kids making the audio equivalent of a horror movie about Charlie Manson. I feel like the more deliberately and explicitly political stuff in Lunch's canon came just a little later. Sure, there was a lot of abused-lost-little-girl stuff in Teenage Jesus, but it seemed more like punk rock nihilism and personal pain than topical.
If anything, circa 1984, stuff like Kim Gordon's "Brave Men Run" or "Early American" was way more concerned w/politics than what Lunch was doing concurrently.
But those songs were also very, very vague and abstract, more like art criticism. You'd have no idea what these songs were actually about by just reading the lyric sheet. (You could argue that the first stridently "topical" Kim song might have been "Flower." But uh, the words were written by Thurston, which gives the thing a totally different meaning.)
If anything, a band like Rat at Rat R was the political group in that scene. But honestly, a song like "Amer$side" is a lot more obvious and has aged more poorly than a cultural critique such as "No Ears."
And all of this might as well be fucking doo wop or Little Richard lyrics compared to Fugazi or Minor Threat or Crass or whatever. It's way, way,
way less overt. Nobody's spelling shit out for you, generally speaking. And that's kind of where I usually start to chafe (free pass to a chunk of the Minutemen catalog).
See the No Trend song "Do As You're Told," which the Dischord scene took very personally. Even if it wasn't necessarily about them!
You and I basically have similar feelings about Bad Bunny and reggaeton. Even by electronic or dance music standards, it just doesn't work for me.
Lu Zwei wrote:Oh boy, wait until you find out about Big Black, OE.
I'm not even sure what this means, dude? You think I didn't know about Big Black in the '80s already?
If anything, people misread Albini's lyrics as being
right wing in those days. There were like, protests against Rapeman concerts! (Come to think of it, Rough Trade also refused to press Sonic Youth's "Flower" single b/c of the naked Puerto Rican woman on the cover. The leftists found it "offensive." Paging Bad Bunny!)
Anyway, Albini's made a big to-do about apologizing for everything, as we all know. But he didn't always feel that way. (Read the liner notes to Pigpile, in which he basically tells people looking for "lyrical decency" to go fuck themselves.)
Personally, I always felt like the brighter people in the room knew his stuff largely amounted to a mixture of yellow-journalism vignettes holding a mirror to America's ugliness, ironic commentary, button-pushing, and juvenile gross-outs. Eugene from Oxbow basically said the same in his eulogy for Steve. That if you were smart and not reactionary, it made you
think.
I'm not a comic-book guy, but an old friend of mine once likened the lyrics by a lot of those '80s Chicago bands to Action Comics. There's some truth there.
I've heard that the US military has actually blasted Naked Raygun songs to psych up its troop operations—obviously, missing the sarcasm in stuff like "Rat Patrol" (about a tv show, actually!) or "Soldier's Requiem." Fuck the military, but again, I dig art that is more open to personal interpretation. It's kinda funny how dopey that makes the Army look... (I'm guessing they decided to skip "Only in America" on Throb Throb, hahah! Idiots.)