Bad Religion
I have this problem: I listen to Bad Religion constantly. Well, Suffer, No Control, and Against the Grain. (My thoughts on How Could Hell Be Any Worse? will have to wait.) Once I listen to one of this trilogy, I inevitably play all three for a week. This despite finding Bad Religion pretentious, politically misguided, one-dimensional, corny, poser-y, and anti-art. The grossest thing is to imagine Bad Religion writing their Bad Religion songs and patting themselves on their backs for throwing in these superfluous “oooh” and “aaah” harmonies—“Can you believe we wrote another killer harmony? We’re like the Beach Boys… only punk!” It’s disgusting, along with every other affected “rock” element that the band throws in to ensure my Cali-fresh good time.
It’s entirely possible to situate your experience of Bad Religion solely at the level of Greg Graffin’s lyrical delivery: the uncensored verbal spillover of this smarmy, middle-class, wisdom-dispensing, creepy, utterly insipid “hardcore guy who grew up but is still into the values.” What’s disgusting here is Bad Religion’s vision of a positively-given human potential (embodied in the spontaneous good-heartedness of the young) which is being crushed and manipulated and bought out and perverted by external cultural string-pullers behind the scenes, or by technological automation and homogeneity. Hence the preponderance of lyrics about “why don’t you see?” “when you will try to change?” “wake up,” etc. etc. Of course, this image of a full, meaningful life obstructed by a “bad” modernity is not only a tired cliché, but a deeply conservative one. To Bad Religion, we are all trapped in our suburban, willingly-deceived, pill-popping apathy. Politics, I suppose, is only what would HAPPEN if people heard Bad Religion and “looked around” for the first time. It is utterly inconceivable to Bad Religion that somewhere people are already violently struggling for their freedom without having been freed from their cave of malaise and misapprehension by some idiotic punk song. One begins to suspect that it is the members of Bad Religion who need to “wake up and look around,” i.e. leave the white suburbs of southern California.
Their vision of liberation is equally banal: the boy with “too many toys” or the “automatic man”—all they need to do really is “go against the grain,” follow the beat of their own drum, etc. But in fact this HAS been the cultural trajectory of the past 20 years: the cheap consolation of self-expression and individuality, our private “ethics of consumption.” If (in the words of No Control’s opener) “what we needed” in the late 1980s was a “change of ideas,” that vision has come to full fruition in our culture of non-conformist liberal eco-awareness. The nightmare of the global present is that it in many ways is the world dreamed up by Bad Religion’s purely feelings-oriented “politics.” (Of course this Manichean worldview still posits a religious fringe as the irrational, stubborn block obstructing our mental liberation.) It’s the shittiest possible cynicism, the “one sane person” who sees other people as drones without real dreams, completely pacified by TV and Reagan.
Their utterly juvenile worldview aside, the music hardly seems to offer a more sophisticated opening for appreciation. Isn’t it just the most basic, by-the-numbers, not very fast pop-punk? Musically, it’s certainly not on par with the Bad Brains or Youth of Today or Rudimentary Peni or Gauze: the music is entirely predictable, often verging on self-parody.
Wherein lies the appeal, then? (Aside from the spiteful pleasure in hearing Greg Graffin mispronounce his own pretentious lyrics, like “beatitude” and “quixotic”…) I like to think of the band as a counter-Nirvana. If Nirvana were the extremely photogenic, complex, and emotionally dark band whose angst about fame was a riveting (and very real) drama, Bad Religion are the autistic D&D nerds who really aren’t good-looking enough to be famous, who can’t ever “inhabit” their lifelong careers as rock musicians, whose attempt to make “real music” (the Into the Unknown album) was a famous failure. So, where did this flurry of creative production come from? These three albums, released in three years, are propelled by an immediacy, a catchiness, a dedication to never boring the listener—in short, by a total detachment from the “artistic personality” that is always pointing to its own depths. If Bad Religion lack the grit and personality of NOTA or Agnostic Front, there is in fact an obscure passion at work here: an unpleasant, grating, even awkward urgency… contorting itself into a strained, verbose catchiness voided of personal charm.
I think we all know “this guy,” the correlate to the anti-art just described. You don’t want to date him. And the peek behind the curtain—reading his diary, let’s say—is EXACTLY what you expected. But there is a paradoxical kind of inert fecundity churning in that mind—a nerdy, aggressive acerbic (yet simple) outlook that is, as on the cover of Suffer, burning, furiously sharpening itself without getting anywhere. But isn’t this basically a Wagnerian type: Alberich? If you view all of Bad Religion as a dramatic monologue by just such a character, it is really a gripping drama.
