Tag: punk rock

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“In my songs, I’m trying to duplicate verbally the pain or the joy or the emotion that’s going on inside my head.”
—John Lydon

Your musical opinion of punk rock is unimportant, and so is mine. Its cultural significance is a different matter. Music as music is important to us as individuals, of course. Music plays a part in every life, and many of you won’t just like your music of choice, you will be attached to it as something sacred. But any musical genre is not just notes and scales, voice and instrumentation, it is a part of the culture that produces it, and therefore any music produced over the centuries is important, like it or not. (more…)

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Reactionary Modernism here.

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Part 5 of 7

Edited by Greg Johnson and Peter Jacobi

In 1995, Jonathan Bowden self-published his Collected Works in 6 volumes (London: Avant-Garde, 1995), edited by Jürgen Schwartz, one of Bowden’s pen names. The six volumes comprise 27 distinct books, 12 of which had been previously published. Altogether, the Collected Works contain more than 2,600 pages of rare early Bowden. (more…)

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The following is reprinted from the Will2Rise Substack.

I knocked on the big metal doors of a commercial building on a quiet Roman street. I had no contact name—just an address. It came from some random account I found while going down a European nationalist rabbit hole on social media.

It was around 2013. My first time back in Italy since childhood, since those family visits that left more flavor than memory. I was there with a chick, planning the usual romantic getaway. The Colosseum. Wine. Ruins. But one square on the itinerary was mine. One day, one reason I really came to Rome: CasaPound. (more…)

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Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, a film about the quick rise and even quicker fall of the eponymous all-female teenage punk band, is a big guilty pleasure of mine. Indeed, an enjoyer of this movie would have much to feel guilty about. (more…)

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Abortion is one of those topics which need to be thought through before you start flapping your gums. It’s like Israel, the death penalty, and assisted suicide. Don’t go to the meeting unprepared, and don’t take rash and emotive stupidity to an intellectual gunfight. Always remember that you can lead an ass to reason, but you can’t make him think. (more…)

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Albertine was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself. — Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

We were trying to write great pop songs, but ended up creating something new by accident. — Viv Albertine, Clothes, Boys, Music (more…)

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Jim Goad has produced a short film to accompany his latest essay, “The Punk Rock Roots of Punching Nazis,” on how punk went from toying with Nazi imagery to becoming intensely anti-fascist — and becoming a lot less interesting in the process. (more…)

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Blacks make up nearly a third of United States postal workers, and I don’t care if someone tries to punch me for suspecting that this is one of the main reasons our postal service is going to hell.

I make part of my living by selling my books through the mail, and skyrocketing postal prices combined with plummeting postal service means that no matter how meticulously I package the books I send out — they’re lovingly cocooned in a bubble envelope that is cradled inside a rigid cardboard mailer — sometimes they wind up damaged, anyway. (more…)

John Foxx

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Listening, they were listening. — John Foxx, The Quiet Men

Ultravox! were a band out of time. — My brother

Genres in music, like genders elsewhere, keep multiplying. But there is one which seems particular to England: art-rock. Founder members of bands often met at art college, if they weren’t getting together at Pistols or Bowie gigs (which often meant they were already at art college), and the results of visual arts students transferring their visions to a musical canvas produced a rewarding school of rock music. (more…)

The Clash at the 1983 US Festival.

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On Memorial Day weekend, 1983, The Clash held their final concert. It was a meaningful one aside from that, given that it was part of a four-day festival in San Bernardino, California that featured some of the most popular music acts in the world at the time. The Clash headlined what was called New Wave Day on Saturday, May 28, and played to perhaps 100,000 people in the stifling heat. (more…)

Sonny Weems of China’s Guangdong Southern Tigers, who was recently called a word that rhymes with figure after a game by some native Chinamen.

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Exciting New Artisanal Beer Aims to Stop Black People from Assaulting Asians

Ever since Donald Trump used the racist term “China virus” to hatefully misrepresent a virus that came from China, many black Americans interpreted it as a dog whistle to begin beating the shit out of Asian-Americans on the streets. In case you didn’t get the memo, blacks suffer from an internalized whiteness that makes them think it’s okay to pummel non-whites, whereas Asians are plagued with an internalized whiteness that makes them score well on standardized tests, earn high incomes, and commit far fewer crimes than blacks. (more…)

Steve Albini, back when he was interesting.

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Back in the late 1980s, when Republican strategist Lee Atwater made a grand public display of posturing as a blues musician, musicians rightly recoiled and said that he was way out of his element.

However, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a musician, many of whom seem to have trouble wiping themselves and tying their own shoelaces, who didn’t act as if they were qualified to endlessly opine about politics and the way the world should be run. (more…)

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Crisis was an English punk-rock band formed in 1977 in Surrey. Their initial lineup consisted of Insect Robin the Cleaner, Phrazer, and the most famous two who didn’t have absurd nicknames: Douglas Pearce and Tony Wakeford. Crisis was explicitly a Leftist band, appearing at various Rock Against Racism concerts and collaborating with artists and organizers from the Anti-Nazi League. (more…)