Tag: punk rock

Gang of Four at the State Theater in Portland, Maine

A rock show for this time, playing music that sends a message across the decades.

I have to start by saying that the State Theater is one of the worst-sounding music venues I’ve ever been in. Opening band The Downtown Boys, who I really wanted to like (and probably would on any other night) were absolutely unlistenable in that room. Pure sonic mud. They were passionate and political and clearly having fun up there on that stage (their saxaphonist/keyboard player is a hoot!) but if you played me one of their songs today and didn’t tell me who I was listening to, I’m about 90% sure I wouldn’t be able to tell you who they were. It was that bad. I apologize for not having the ability to form more of an opinion about their performance. I suppose I should make an attempt to learn more about them, and I will certainly try to do so at some point.

Regular readers (hah!) of this blog will know that most of the music I write about here fits under the “prog” umbrella, but it should be noted that I have had lots of years of music listening, and my tastes are quite broad. I have both obsessed about and reacted against more different music than most people hear in a lifetime, and in the fullness of time, I have probably both loved and hated almost every sort of music.

Gang of Four at the State Theater in Portland, Maine. Photo by Landi Michaels.

So when I tell you that this first-gen obsessively hard-left post-punk band, Gang of Four, hit the stage the other night, I about lost my mind. I LOVE Gang of Four. I am not rational about it (except, of course, that I have lots of thoughts about them, and have sorted through them at length) and I couldn’t help abandoning everything and just hopping up on to my spindly old pegs and DANCING as soon as they began their set. Their energy did not let up, nor did mine. Start to finish, they were amazing.

I found myself thinking about how, with four albums and a couple of EPs to their name, this band could play a full set that sounded like a high-level greatest hits comp, and they absolutely did! They didn’t play anything from their final album Hard. Frankly, that was no great loss. Give me those first three albums and the interstitial EPs and I’m all set.

And speaking of greatest hits: I know it’s a standard set piece, but Jon’s very rhythmic whacking of a microwave oven with a baseball bat was extremely satisfying. In fact, that was one of the many moments of cultural resonance that came with the set in general. There was a feeling in the air that what Gang of Four was offering from the stage was medicine, that every note and nuance was there to counteract the effects of fascist evil. It was a utopian moment in time for that very reason.

And it was also the band saying goodbye. Original band members Jon King and Hugo Burnham have said that they won’t be bringing the band out on tour again, that they’re closing the book on headlining tours. I’m grateful that I got to see them. I haven’t been able to get to any of their shows before, no matter how much I love them, but this moment seems like the most impactful time to have come to their positive, warm, anti-fascist performance. It is fuel, which I suspect is what they want their music to be.

Finally, I want to shout out Ted Leo and especially Gale Greenwood who did a great job of filling giant shoes. Gale especially was having a great time on that stage, bouncing around and clowning and holding down that very heavy beat along with Hugo. She was a great addition to the show. (I just learned that my friend Linda Bean Pardee played bass with Gang of Four before Gale! Hey, Mikey!)

Also, Hugo took a few moments at the end of the night to shill for Graham Platner, which I greatly appreciated.

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Sometimes I Wonder if I Will Live to See the End of This Era.

A Show-and-Tell

If, if Reagan played disco
He’d shoot it to shit.
You can’t disco in jack boots.

High upon a white horse
He’d sing lame lyrics
To try to reach the working man.
–The Minutemen, 1982

That’s the entire lyrics to If Reagan Played Disco by southern California punk band the Minutemen, released as one of five songs on a seven inch vinyl record entitled “bean-spill e. p.”

Here’s my copy: Sorry, I will only be posting the non-obscene label here…

        

This cultural artifact from 43 years ago shows that the issues that seem so immediate and emergent right now have been with us for decades. The Republican conservative project has been the same for all this time. The Democratic response has been just that – a weak, ineffectual response. The Democrats initiate nothing. All they seem to do is talk in the least effective/offensive way about vaguely lefty ideas they never enact, while governing like diet Republicans.

The real response to what’s happening in the world now comes from outside the corporate infrastructure, in places like the LAVA Center, citizen political groups, spaces that hold independent artists, writers, musicians and other creatives, who exist outside that structure. We are purified in our intentions because we exist outside the mainstream.

The mission of mainstream cultural money and power is to blind us to what’s real, to create an artificially rarified sense of what qualifies as legitimate cultural contribution so that anything real – anything you’d recognize as coming from someone’s real life and intention is seen as substandard — grubby and grimy, faulty, unwashed and obscene.

Because the truth is obscene. We see the IDF shooting Palestinian children in the head, carpet bombing and starving an entire people out of existence. And in the Palestinian people we should see ourselves. The big money, the power of industry, and world leadership supplies the bullets to, as our president says, “finish the job.”

“The job” is to diminish working people, out of existence if necessary. Their mission is to fill us with artificial hopes and synthetic mass-manufactured bullshit dreams, all the while eroding all of the real value – the compassion and care, the pride, the willingness to work to better each other and ourselves together, the simple beauty of the world around us – and turn it all into a zero-sum game, a race to gobble up that which has more value if left alone, those things that will grow if nurtured but can only wither if exploited.

Our job is that nurturing, and we’re doing it now: sharing our hearts, hearing each other. It’s the same job the Minutemen were doing decades ago. “If Reagan Played Disco.” In those words, there is a dream. It’s the same dream that had that lone student standing in front of a line of tanks in Beijing not so long after this record was made.

Some say that student’s name was Wang Weilin. The Chinese government says there was no such person. It’s said he was 19 years old when he stood in front of those tanks. It’s said he was arrested for “political hooliganism,” whatever that means. Now, nobody can prove he existed or if he exists still, in some gulag somewhere. But we know who he is, because of what he did – what we all saw him do, even though his country’s government denies it ever happened.

D. Boon, the guitarist and singer of the Minutemen died in the band van when it rolled while they were on tour, three years after this record was released. These grooves are part of his corpse. After he died, his fellow band members George Hurley and Mike Watt continued on.

Years later, they recorded a drop-dead gorgeous instrumental called “Tien An Men Dream Again” as fIREHOSE, with guitarist Ed fROMOHIO.