Anarchy in the USA
I had decided back in December that I wanted to try my hand at writing in long form for the first time in years. I grew up writing in LiveJournals (yes, plural) and BlogSpots (yes, plural) and a Tumblr dedicated to poetry. But the last 4 years exhausted most of my creative impulses. And then the the whole system, that delicate egg, finally cracked on January 6th. There’s a lot of wreckage to sift through from those events, and I’m not gonna get my shovel just yet.
Jan. 6th did, however, change the way I was going to start this new attempt at writing. See, I spent a lot of 2020 revisiting a lot of the music I listened to as a teenager, specifically punk music. This isn’t significant in and of itself, but several articles and studies of how people were acting during the COVID-19 lockdowns pointed out the depths of nostalgia people were finding themselves in. Since March of 2020, people have been binging movies, tv shows, music, and more from their past. It’s like a security blanket for your brain, calming down the stress that has likely been raging inside it. I had this whole nice plan to talk about nostalgia, and how it motivated my year of listening to music, and connections to other things I listened to, and thoughts I’ve had as a musician and music-lover, and a lot of other dumb stuff like that.
But I’m not feeling very nostalgic anymore. The country has long felt like a tinder box surrounded by arsonists playing a game of Who’s Match Will Catch First, and smoke is definitely rising from the pile. It’s a fragile time. History offers several examples of how traumatic national events can end up becoming a fresh batch of wood for the fire. It is uncertain if those examples will be our teachers in the coming weeks and months. To be frank, shit’s really scary.
And yet, I don’t find myself surprised or caught off-guard by the siege at the Capitol. Our country is practically ungovernable, and it’s entirely predictable as to why: politicians have ignored the wants and wills of the people for decades. Our government has turned the country into an oligarchy, and number of seats at the table of this elite banquet is staggering. 14 BILLION DOLLARS was spent on the 2020 elections. Think about that. For almost the same money, we could have done so much: thousands of miles of new roads built (I’ve replaced five tires in four years driving through the craters in NYC streets); hundreds of thousands of college degrees paid for (student debt is currently a $1.6 trillion anchor around the neck of the largest workforce and consumer base in the country); dozens of new hospitals (kind of important in the middle of an out of control pandemic). But no, it was $14 billion spent on a competition between a white supremacist gangster hell bent on controlling the whole table and a questionably-fit political elite who participated in much of the table-setting over the last four decades. It’s no wonder almost 40% of the voting population straight up doesn’t vote every four years.
The consequence of this sustained corrosion of institutional trust is that people end up latching onto any narrative that helps explain why shit is so fucked up. Patriotic messages encoded in tweets, Russians lurking in every cabinet and cupboard, pizza shop pedophile cabals, every BLM supporter is a violent anarchist, every Trump supporter has a hood in their closet, the goddamn Kraken. We do this to ourselves in large part because our brains struggle mightily with cognitive dissonance. To be an American is to live in constant cognitive dissonance: our economy is strong (yet tens of millions are a paycheck away from poverty); our healthcare system is world-class (yet we pay double the price for worse outcomes relative to other countries); our freedom is our greatest strength (yet we criminalize and incarcerate more of our citizens than any other country); our country has moved on from it’s sinful past (yet confederate flags were paraded through the Capitol less than a week ago). It’s difficult to spend decades being told your country is a shining palace while you feel the ceiling crumbling on your head. Narratives, even outlandish conspiratorial ones, help the brain ease the burden of cognitive dissonance. Security blankets.
I say I’m not surprised by what happened because much of the punk music I grew up listening to, that ol blankey I swaddled my 2020 in, helped break down a lot of the cognitive dissonance early on and made this moment in time feel more inevitable than implausible. Music is a potent tool for providing content and context to both cultural/historical events and personal identity. Consider the power of “Imagine,” “Proud to be an American,” “Power To The People,” “Amazing Grace,” or “Fuck Tha Police.” For millions of people, these songs are not only cultural theme songs that serve as a symbol of a unified identity, they are part of the essential soundtrack of what makes them “them.” They are the sing-alongs, the rallying cries, the celebrations, the pump-up songs that anchor us during seas both stormy and calm. This is as true for punk as it is for any other radical art form.
The title of this entry is a reference to the Sex Pistols’ song “Anarchy in the UK.” Released in 1976 (three years AFTER Joe Biden got elected to the Senate), the song still feels prescient, like a harbinger of the total disaffection and disassociation we see in America today. It laid a primary foundation for punk to be critical and confrontational with authority and institutions, and surely seeded many of the songs that are part of my own sonic identity. 2020’s nostalgia trip at first reminded me of how these songs were the perfect vehicles for expressing youthful energy and angst, and how they charged me to dive head first into music. But as I reexamined the lyrics of many of these songs, the nostalgia trip also reminded me that shit has indeed been fucked up for a while, and it’s practically an open secret.
I know this is a long, winding way to get to the point. This space is still going to be about music, and I’ll share some just after this paragraph. But one requires some context before they start yammering on about 20+ year old punk songs in the midst of the biggest civil unrest in over a century. To be sure, these songs are not revelations, nor are they exemplars of the genre. However, looking at when they were composed (all of them recored pre-9/11), they offer a window into the kind of world we have been forced to bear for so long. If history is going to be our teacher, then we need to look at all possible sources for the lessons. This includes music. It must.
That all being said, here are five punk songs from my youth that helped prepare me for the moment we find ourselves in today.
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Rancid — Antennas
This album is like buying a bunch of commercial fireworks and setting them off all in one go. Rancid rips through 22 songs in 38 minutes, covering a staggering range of topics: mob bosses, Loki, Rwandan genocide, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, US imperialism, and John Brown, to name a few. But it was “Antennas” that really struck me this past year. Opening with the lyrics, “You’re selling racism/You’re selling sexism/You’re selling everything you get your fucking hands on,” the song perfectly sums up the damaging affects of our polarized corporate media structure (which has only been exacerbated by the rise of social media in the 20 years that have passed since this song was released). News that divides is far more profitable than news that unites. Tim Armstrong’s statement to “let California fall into the fucking ocean” today feels like clarion call — if we continue to blindly follow the media’s lead, we will never pull ourselves back from the brink.
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Anti-Flag — Die For Your Government
“Die for your country, that’s shit.” Hearing such a stark repudiation of American militarism was shocking as a young teen, and it was almost too forceful a critique for me to “get it” when I first heard it. War was an abstraction, a thing the United States had done a bunch and was pretty good at. It wasn’t until the lead up to Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that this song’s anti-militarism message clicked. At the time, conversations with peers about whether there would be a draft helped plant this song deep into my views on the modern military and its purpose (or lack there of, beyond feeding profiteers and destabilizing autonomous countries). This song plainly speaks about the way our government uses its people as pawns to advance goals that have nothing to do with the well-being of its citizens, and how we as a people should fight against these impulses.
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Terrorgruppe — All Comic Book Heroes Are Fascist Pigs (ACAB)
I will admit, this song felt more goofy than serious when I listened to it as a teen. It starts with the lyrics, “Mikey Mouse, Superman, Fantastic Four, Dick Tracey, Spiderman,” and for a long time I didn’t think much beyond the comic book references. It wasn’t until years later that I realized the connection between these characters and policing: most superheroes are essentially glorified cops. While this is a simplification, it can’t be overlooked that our most popular superheroes are authoritarian figures charged with purpose to exact justice and maintain order. In some cases, they are de facto police… I mean, Batman’s whole shtick is the necessity for an unaccountable super cop because the real police suck at their jobs. It’s no accident that the iconography of characters like Captain America and the Punisher are used as right-wing symbols. The government also realizes the power of the superhero: many Marvel movies are funded by the Pentagon, for instance. This isn’t to spoil superhero movies(I quite enjoy the MCU), but it’s important to realize that celebrating their fictional justice can bolster our real life oppression.
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Propagandhi — Resisting Tyrannical Government
This was a song I always had on repeat, even though I didn’t fully understand the lyrics until I was well into my 20's. Ruminating on direct action, worker exploitation, and global capitalism, this song introduced me to many words that are now part of my regular vocabulary (tyranny, rank and file, capitalist). Despite not grasping the main thesis of the song, the final lyrics have always stood out to me for their charge that those with privilege must fight for those without: “And yes, I recognize the irony/The system I oppose affords me the luxury of biting the hand that feeds/That’s exactly why privileged fucks like me/Should feel obliged to whine and kick and scream/Until everyone has everything they need.” This rings true especially during times of extreme crisis like we find ourselves in today.
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The Broadways — Everything I Wanted To Know About Genocide I Learned In The 3rd Grade
Subtle song title, right? If I’m being honest, this kind of edgy shit was right up my alley when I was young. In fact, this song might be the first song that cued me to the way music can confront the big lies we are told. Listening to it now, the lyrics come across as ham-fisted, but to a 13 year old, hearing someone speak plainly about colonialism, white supremacy, and the false narrative around Thanksgiving was a revelation. It was confrontational but self-aware. It was direct in its language and intention. It made me realize early on that the narratives we are given by the powers that be to comfort ourselves are often stitched with lies, and that we must be clear-headed about our history if we are going to understand the present well enough to protect the future.
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Link to playlist of all songs featured here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4FUAy95y2RRrGEhw10VGlm?si=BQLTC0NoRdWVmkRZWPQX1w
