None of the Above- Moscow 7” (1982)
Some of my favorite “political” lyrics in early hardcore are bands like Raw Power, MDC, and None of the Above, where a dominant theme is hating cops. Of course, a wonderful mix tape could be made of all the great anti-cop hardcore songs, but there is something special about these bands. They have pieced together, out of their miserable daily lives, some sense that the cops, their boss at work, the politicians on TV, the army, are all part of the “same thing.”
Of course Crass, the Dead Kennedys, Bad Religion, and later political bands from Assuck to Propagandhi—they all know this, too. But they know it as a starting point, whereas None of the Above present authority as a problem lived daily and violently. There is something moving in the case of None of the Above, because as a band they aren’t particularly “radical”—they aren’t self-described political agitators like MDC or the Dicks.
None of the Above’s lyrics, taken collectively, depict all the frustrations of a certain class existence and its historical particulars. A low-paying job, rednecks, Reagan-era propaganda, violent cops, all the mediocrity and “small-time” self-disgust of living in a backwater (Oklahoma). Some of the lyrics are overtly “political”—“Propaganda Control” and “Taking Away Your Rights”—but then these are political only in the sense of bourgeois formal democracy: the logic of rights, freedom of thought, habeas corpus, elected officials, etc.
Like almost all of my friends, I grew up in one of the wealthiest places in America, and went to an Ivy League school, and live in New York. Doubtless this class-insertion unconsciously influenced my early perspective on punk history, even in the articulation of a “rejection” of my upbringing. For me, the “smarter” bands (I’ve named a few above) had the best politics, whereas straight-forward protest lyrics like those of Drop Dead were dumb and “sloganeering.” But now it seems to me that these are two sides of the same coin. That is to say, the quasi-academic analysis of the former, the bands who would refer you to Noam Chomsky and Baudrillard, was just as stillborn as the rigid and formulaic protests of the latter. In short, the appeal of these political bands contained its own negation: middle-class, WTO-protesting, flailing incoherence. But our politics, to deserve that name, HAVE to be better than Rage Against the Machine, just as our art should be.
It has to be our contention that apolitical bands like Black Flag and even conservative bands like Agnostic Front are more politically useful than “political” bands like Crass, because the former is an artistic appropriation of social existence, whereas the latter is a superfluous and misguided abstraction from it. The one obvious exception here would be Crass’ album Penis Envy, which (at its most powerful) directly stems from real life.
I don’t want to valorize “personal experience” here at all. But we are talking about art and not political tracts. The notion that “the personal is the political” is both a truisim and a… false-ism. One sees the false side of this maxim in the various travesties of emo and of the fate of anarchist topics in slowly becoming tenets of Park Slope yuppieism. The personal—say, getting evicted from my home because I lost my job and could not pay a subprime mortgage—cannot qua personal experience make any meaningful connection with a politics that could then respond effectively to that experience. i.e. if I become “radicalized” and involved in community activism, this is still local/personal and can NEVER (as community activism) overturn the forces that led to a) my unemployment or b) my subprime mortgage. (For a further critique of “spontaneous” politics arising from personal experience of being downtrodden and exploited, see Lenin’s What is to be Done? There must be local politics, but this has to start from an objective theory of the non-local.)
But while personal experience is not the alpha and the omega of political thought, art is best when it starts from real life. On the other hand, the very worst, most lifeless art has a “thesis.” Black Flag and Agnostic Front, whatever the flaws of their analysis, really express something about life for the under-class (we can’t really call Black Flag “proletarians” in good conscience): drug use, violence, problems with cops, collisions with other races, personal worthlessness, hygiene issues… it isn’t a pretty picture, and the conclusions (often misogynist, sometimes racist, generally “apolitical”) are all wrong— but I prefer it to a lecture from Jello Biafra.
To this end, I draw your attention especially to NOTA and Raw Power. (MDC are simply too mediocre, musically, to stand at the same level.) Each band gives a little panorama of their society at a certain (low) level of class existence.
Here is a little drama by Raw Power called “No Card” that is nearly as powerful as De Sica’s film The Bicycle Thief.
“They asked me for the democratic card to work in the factory. / They asked me for the socialist card to drive a bus. / They asked me for the communist card to be a dustman. / But they never asked me why I hate them. / And they never asked themselves why they take my life.”
None of the Above are the same way. You never get POLITICS presented to you except in a trivial way (“This Country Once Was Free”), but this response is artistically integrated into a picture of life, rather than being a conclusion on top of some data.
When we talk about politics in punk, it is crucial to understand that punk has only rarely drawn what might be called correct conclusions. The list of erroneous ideological responses includes: the Bad Brains’ Rastafarianism, Discharge’s aestheticism, Crass’ anarchism, Agnostic Front’s conservativism, Amebix’s primitivism, and the liberal-progressivism of current American punk— all of this can be historicized and understood as what is constitutionally impotent and misguided, namely, the “politics of punk.” On the other hand, the isolated observations of, say, NOTA, Raw Power, Ratos de Porao, Wretched, Los Crudos are artistically valuable—and these bands can all be enjoyed AS MUSIC—because they perform the basic function of art in its Aristotelian sense: mimesis, or the appropriation/abstraction of “truths” about reality in a way that these truths are then represented in a non-abstracted state, as reality (i.e. as events occurring before our eyes).
Like all other art, there is a great deal of analysis left to be done to trace the logic of these appropriations, as well as the work’s conception of itself (i.e. Crass really imagine themselves to be doing something quite other than our description—this is a complex play), and finally the conditions of its production: understanding always that these “material conditions” do not stop at the artistic process but are themselves taken up in said appropriation. Or, the best art does this. And the worst analysis keeps “the world” and “great art” asunder, like Pyramus and Thisbe, calling to each other across an insuperable divide.
That punk’s relationship to the world is artistically powerful and yet ideologically and politically a disaster must be the first order of business.
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