IN HIGH SCHOOL I would go over to my friend Sam's house
to listen to records. He was a vegetarian, probably still is, and
knew way more about punk rock than I did. My listening habits were
eclectic, a euphemism for regrettable. Sam and his friends, who
did zines and dressed funny and didn't eat meat or do drugs, were
privy to another world. He played me a record by a band called Born
Against, and it was more confusing and chaotic than I could fathom,
and I would not acquire the taste for it till much later. I felt
more at home with poppier fare, or even Strawman, who were poppy
but political. It stuck with me anyway, the inkling of an underground
seeping through our suburban network.
About 10 years after they broke up, Born Against are seeing a resurgence.
Emerging out of New York's ABC No Rio scene, the hardcore band ascended
during the first Bush administration, writing songs about abortion
rights, cops, corporations, and liberal complicity while pushing
the buttons of orthodox punks. As vocalist Sam McPheeters's own
label, Vermiform, went under last year, Kill Rock Stars and Prank
Records took over the repress duties for the two Born Against collections,
The Rebel Sound of Shit and Failure and Patriotic Battle
Hymns, which came out in the spring.
Maybe "resurgence" isn't accurate – Born Against
records must have consistently sold well enough to warrant keeping
them in print. In the past decade Born Against and Vermiform have
influenced a ton of hardcore bands and labels. From the absurdly
confrontational and sacrilegious name to the graphic design and
McPheeters's hoarse howl and sarcasm, Born Against casts a narrow
but lengthy shadow across this sector.
What does it say about our culture now when one of the most overt
political statement available on the market is a decade-old hardcore
record? You could say that Born Against are needed now more than
ever as a response to the growing conservatism of a reinvigorated
right-wing America, but then you would have to wonder how much good
it did the first time around. The music holds up to scrutiny –
the songs are passionate anthems of rage and confusion, wittily
executed. Yet maybe political music doesn't really change how people
live their lives – it alleviates guilt yet is still a part
of a corporate commerce structure. Owning a Rage Against the Machine
record does not a revolutionary make, nor did hearing the ultraleft
Strawman radicalize the teenage me.
Men's Recovery Project, McPheeters's post-Born Against group, seem
to speak to his dissatisfaction with overt political content. Shooting
for theatrical absurdity, he would dress up in colonial garb and
recite the entire "Give me liberty or give me death" speech
by Patrick Henry. One urban legend about MRP involves a performance
consisting of mooning the crowd, a cookie, and driving away as fast
as possible. The performance-art direction of MRP is hinted at on
the last track on Rebel Sound, a dirgey chugfest with samples
from a Donahue show featuring McPheeters as a repentant caller.
You can almost hear the gate click as McPheeters crosses the line
between preaching to the converted and pranking the masses.
McPheeters alludes to punk's dirty little secret in the press notes
for the KRS reissues. All of its state-smashy rhetoric aside, punk
– hardcore specifically – is a sort of class cross-dressing.
"Observers have since noted the obvious – that it is obnoxious
for those with funds to critique those without funds, especially
over issues where money is involved and certainly there is something
deeply gross about a song like 'Well Fed Fuck' when sung by someone
who is in the process of shedding a small personal fortune."
This never occurred to me when I was trying to decode the suburban
revolution of the early '90s, but it's an unavoidable contradiction
today. McPheeters is hardly a déclassé Brahman, and
he is assuredly living leaner than Michael Moore, but it explains
a lot about a subculture based on voluntary withdrawal from the
shackles of class and family. This is a contradiction that I could
relate to, cranking Born Against through headphones at my cushy
dot-com job, the same workplace where a coworker would bafflingly
sport a T-shirt that read "Portrait of Poverty."
There is music that gives me glimpses of a way out, and Born Against
are an example of this because they were cynics confronting the
closed minds of the scene that birthed them. Around the same time
that hardcore closed ranks, there was riot grrrl, there was Nirvana,
there was a swell of youth disenchantment ready to mobilize into
consciousness-raising blocs. Most of that kinetic potential got
absorbed, dissipated by its overexposure. Was this, as another voice
of that era might say, a case of "selling kids to other kids"?
McPheeters might concur, as he writes that Born Against "probably
would have been doomed to irrelevance even if it hadn't lost its
financing. Shows that in 1989 had attracted middle-aged hippie couples
and kindly squatters and benevolent, bucktoothed skinheads were,
by 1993, a sea of disinterested young boys with backpacks."
After a decade of this, of hauling my backpack everywhere, I need
a change. Please tell me, show me, that things are actually going
to be different.
