– By Geordie Pleathur
“The PATRIOT Act was a dagger in the heart, really, of even the concept of a democratic government that is free, equal and just.”
(-Hunter S. Thompson)
“We’re living in a place–the United States– in which one of our goals as not just progressives but as human beings is to dismantle this system of illegal kidnappings, torture, interrogation without attorneys, utter lawlessness”
(-Michael Ratner)
“Let’s call prisons exactly what they are: an extension of slavery.”
(- Robert Hillary King)
“We’re sending the poor of this country to kill the poor of those Muslim countries. This is trading blood for oil. This is genocide. And to most of the world, we are the terrorists. In these times, remaining silent on our responsibility to the world and its future is criminal. And in light of our complicity in the supreme crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ongoing violations of the U.N. Charter in International Law, how dare any American criticize the actions of legitimate resistance to illegal occupation.
Our so-called enemies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, our other colonies around the world, and our inner cities here at home, are struggling against the oppressive hand of empire, demanding respect for their humanity. They are labeled insurgents or terrorists for resisting rape and pillage by the white establishment, but they are our brothers and sisters in the struggle for justice. The civilians at the other end of our weapons don’t have a choice, but American soldiers have choices. And while there may have been some doubt 5 years ago, today we know the truth. Our soldiers don’t sacrifice for duty-honor-country, they sacrifice for Kellogg Brown & Root.”
(-Dahlia Wasfi)
OLD JOKE: An Oxford professor meets a former student on the street. He asks what he’s been up to lately. The student tells him he’s working on a doctoral thesis about the survival of the class system in the United States. The professor expresses surprise. “I didn’t think there was a class system in the United States,” he says. “Nobody does,” the student replies. “That’s how it survives.”
“Why does the U.S. national political class perpetually appear ridiculous to the point of derangement e.g., Republican grandstanding and Democratic capitulations and betrayals?
Jimmy Carter: ‘[The US] has no functioning democracy.’
The Republican leadership knows this. Therefore, the challenge that they face is to please their true constituents, Big Money Interests, yet still create the illusion that they serve their base, same modus operandi as the Democratic leadership. The trick is to create a great deal of diversion with contrived controversies and demagogic fears…A sort of carnival House of Horrors set-up; it is all done with political props and puppet work…aahh scary, scary — the Republicans are going to defund Obamacare and institute a Faith Healing Mandate…aahh scary, scary — the Democrats are going to force socialism on Disney World.
Meanwhile, the One Percenter oligarchs snicker at the rank and file partisans who are taken in by the silly, shoddy stagecraft of this sham republic.”
(-Phil Rockstroh)
“For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.”
(-Oscar Wilde)
“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.”
(—Chris Hedges)
“Obama is a grifter. He posed as a progressive, when, all along, his agenda was to serve the elitist greedheads of the corporate/bankster state and the ruthless operatives of U.S. militarist imperium.
Ergo, Obama evinces the remorseless, ruthless nature of all too many who are attracted to power and bestowed with privilege.
On the other hand, what is one to make of the mode of mind of the power-bereft Obots and Democratic partisan types who act as his apologist? Are they fearful of the sorrow, angst, and soul-sickness that arrives when one comes to the realization that one has been duped?
Upon being betrayed the very ground beneath one’s feet seems to liquify. One’s moorings are lost. One wanders in a wilderness of regret and recrimination.
To avoid the discomfort, a bubble-enclosed mindset arises, comprised of all the cognitive dissonance, casuistry, and brittle pride of the denial ridden. Withal: There is, in evidence, a toxic innocence in the Obot mindset that morphs into a belligerent ignorance when confronted.
Yes, they should be plied with compassion, as, all the while, one continues to pummel them with reality.
Setting the broken bones of the hope-hobbled can be an agonizing process for all concerned.”
(-Phil Rockstroh)
“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.”
(- Herman Melville)
“Anybody who thinks the US attacks other countries in order to help the people living there is completely and utterly delusional. The US government doesn’t give a fuck about it’s own people, many of whom are living in poverty while just a few control the majority of the wealth… so what makes you think they would care about people living overseas?
A small amount of people have been saying they agree with the possibility of a US military strike in Syria. Perhaps intervention in some way is needed, but do you really want the US – a country that is known for beginning wars based off of lies, and committing atrocities during these “wars” – to get in the middle of this with a military strike? There has already been enough suffering and death in Syria… I do not wish for them to now have to deal with another government who looks to wage war and kill for their own benefit.”
(-Jenna Pope)
“We’re talking in cliché’s, betray yourself for money/Having is more than being, now/Nobody’s sorry…”
(Subway Sect)
“The people in Washington just can’t stand the idea that someone, somewhere might be having a normal, happy life without getting bombed to death in drone attack or shunted off to some black site where the CIA can rip out their fingernails or beat them black and blue. That’s what this whole global war on terror-thing is all about. It’s about sticking your big fat nose in other people’s business 24-7. Some people just get a kick out of that. Why? Because they’re obnoxious people, that’s why. Like the drunk who shows up at your dinner party and slops red wine all over the rug. That’s the US in a nutshell, a first-rate pain-in-the-ass.
Everyone knows this is true, even the flag wavers. They know we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan or Iraq or Somalia or Yemen or wherever. We just go to be annoying, because that’s who we are, The Irritating States of America.”
(-Mike Whitney)
“True radicals don’t treat people with derision and contempt. They don’t bully those with whom they disagree, or reflexively assume, as a mantle, a moral or intellectual superiority that arises out of their ideology. In fact, true radicals constantly question ideology, constantly challenge themselves first and foremost …and choose to go on deeper and deeper quests, no matter the material or social cost. True radicals don’t necessarily “sound” radical, they are radical in that they constantly attempt to dissolve walls, and to discover deeper, universal truths – truths that offer little earthly or social reward.
True radicals break with society where society is broken and unbending, but then they keep going, if they can. For to break with society is to become an outcast. It is to be rejected by most people and by all tribes. That, or to face adulation and constant projection, of the sort that is flattering only to those who still subscribe to transitory rewards.
True radicals face being outcasts, discarded by their peers, rejected in power circles (that would otherwise greatly respect their intellect or sheer gumption), and misunderstood by the masses. They often face a life of monetary hardship.
True radicals are hard to find, by this definition. And perhaps in truth, people are true radicals by degrees. For to continually choose to dissolve walls and walk on the margins is to be passively or actively rejected by one’s family or peers, when every single human being has need of connectedness. It is to walk the hardest walk of all, that of shattering, and re-shattering all illusions, that of diving ever deeper into love. And for people who are radical by default, people who love life and this planet so, so much, that our mass madness is daily excruciating, so much that they’ve no choice but to leap off of some sort of cliff – to risk all, to tell harder, greater truths, well, that leap can become a daily exercise in diving through bitterness.
I think so many promising people, people of truly great mind, heart, and spirit take such a leap, and find there is far too little providing air under their wings. The leap is long, lonely, and for some increasingly hollow, despite its initial richness (and despite the knowledge that it is not, indeed, the truly hollow thing). Courage brings too few rewards, and perhaps too much loss. (“Truth has no friends”, a fellow said once, “only suicides”).
And in order to remain truly radical, and perhaps even, to keep one’s sanity after making that leap, one must have the courage and the wherewithal to keep diving, ever, ever more. Beyond anything we could have dreamed, everything we ever feared, beyond all loss and all hope, to something we cannot yet know or name. People have done this. We have called them divine. We have called them mystics. And we tend to silence them, or to forget them, to turn our backs on awareness of the sacred. We turn our backs, in our distractedness, our fears or pettiness, on flight itself. The kind of flight that dives, and wings, and soars and defies time and bodies, and gravity.
One cannot know when one takes a leap off the metaphorical cliff if one will fall, fly, or die. Some fly. Many fall. Some die. But there is much grace to be found in the simple act of trying, no matter our defeats. (And great loss wishes to say to me, “are you telling me the truth?” And on my still days, even in its dying, my body forms a resounding “yes”).
I wish for air under the unfurled wings of each one of us. Air, and love, and courage, and hope, to keep diving, and winging, beyond our darkened skies, beyond any dawning.”
(-Tangerine Bolen)
“The false mythos, promulgated by the vast, culture-wide, propaganda apparatus of the privileged classes of the U.S., that people possessed of pluck and who are graced with superior talents rise to the top of the hierarchy of vampires of the corporate/
capitalist state has been debunked by psychological study after psychological study that reveal the only trait that those who excel in the corporate/capitalist state possess in abundance is being born into privilege and having psychopathic tendencies.
In reality, most all upward mobility in the U.S. has been engendered by the socialist programs of the Progressive Era and New Deal; programs that ended or were crippled at the advent of the age of Reaganism, a trend that continues to the present.
Regardless of these facts, capitalist hagiographers and their downscale dupes still promulgate the canard that the U.S. is “the land of opportunity.”
Sure thing: If you consider donating your blood to a blood bank owned and operated by vampires an opportunity.”
(-Phil Rockstroh)
“This is just a further example of media culture dictating, devaluing, and debasing society at large by celebrating self consumed celebrities, who in turn are abnormally built up into more than the sum of their parts, as media culture only honors the most sycophantic mind set to create the illusion of a reality it longs to infect the population with, creating a monetized subspecies enslaved to complete control.”
(-Superlegend Frankie Delmane on Kanye West)
DON’T TOUCH MY HAIR!
Hey, I know all about getting old, and tired. I’m exhausted everyday, all the time, 75 lbs. overweight, can’t dance through an entire three minute song on the boombox anymore, I’m damaged goods, like all the slacker-era video-game nerds and lazy, suburban, butter-gulping, remote control oriented housewives who watch the food channel all day, that I used to so scornfully ridicule, and I understand, fully, how no one wants to see ME on-stage, drunk and shirtless, anymore, since I got soft in my middle-age, after the fall, when all the hip jobs were parceled out to the management classer’s relatives and girlfriends and all the lingering punk rockers merged with more affluent forces and the underground consolidated itself, like the corporate monopolies of the nineties, until there was no place for third-string dinosaurs like me except out here in the pasture. So I’ve been out here in the wet grass munching weeds all day with the other crabby old goats. There was nothing else to do. But speaking of old gray mares who ain’t what they used to be, I saw this video of two rocknroll heroes joining forces to cover a seminal bruising ass-kicker of a song, and the vocalist had his glasses on and a stool, and was hunched over squinting, while singing from a lyric sheet, ON-STAGE, looked more like a sociology professor reading “Howl” to the pop-culture studies class, than a rocknroll front-man, and I just thought, “WHY BOTHER”? Honestly, your garden variety tenured corduroy jacket with elbow patches wearing, liberal professor hitting on the freshman girls with old dead guy’s beat poetry, probably summons more gusto. Where is the wild abandon? We can’t all be yoga toned athletes like Iggy or Mike Monroe, but we notice how many of our former fringe-dwelling favorites are phoning in high-dollar, half hearted, nostalgia circuit appearances and wonder if they would perhaps be better off sending impersonators out on the road like Warhol, and Kiss, if they can’t even be arsed to remember the effin’ words, or make any frail stab at moving on stage. Some bands are selling V.I.P. packages, where you can finance their plastic surgery enhanced wive’s bon-bon habits and movie star lifestyle at $300 a pop. Ha. When I was a kid, the bands brought me in past the dickhead college boy bouncers, through the backdoor, and freely shared their green room booze, and let me watch sound check and posed for a dozen pictures while my delinquent pals fumbled foolishy with the old school cameras and flash bulbs…all just because they appreciated that we were their fans. Thanks, my friends. Made life-long supporters out of us, didn’t they? Taking a cue from Michael Monroe and David Lee Roth, COLD BLUE REBELS are so dedicated to maximizing their product’s value, on behalf of you, the still untamed rocknroll people, that they’ve even resorted to taking care of themselves, in order to provide you with the most memorable experience, possible. Fantastic! They actually care about cultivating a sincere relationship with their audience. Everybody else shows up fat and half-lidded, saying, “I used to be sort of famous, now pay me!” There is nothing half-mast about Mickey Finn’s punk as fuck Mohawk, or the COLD BLUE REBELS highly charged teddy boy attitude. Mickey looks more like Johnny Bravo than Colin from GBH these days, but has lost none of his Jetboy microphone-stand brandishing aggression. Cold Blue Rebels are hardworking, blue collar, badass motherfuckers, who care a lot. Even if you ain’t into Sha Na Na nostalgia, or Happy Days drive-thrus, or car show culture, you got to respect that. If you have kids of your own, you’ll probably end up giving this disc to one of them, so maybe you should buy two. Mickey Finn’s a scream with his be bop a lulu of a pelvis shakin’, switchblade brandishing, Unknown Hinson inspired, bowling shirted, hillbilly heel persona, pure dynamite. Danny Dangerous is as much a part of the familiar Sunset Strip landscape as Angelyne, or Lemmy, or Giddle Partridge, or Rodney on the Roq. A throwback to when the local color was the color purple. I remember when I first moved to Tinseltown, all the Pretty Boy Floyd worshipping glam kids thought the Zeros were gonna be the “Next Faster Pussycat”! Joe Normal is totally from that torrid, Chris Isaak school of sizzling, sweltering, sultry torch and twang. Everly Brothers ache and longing , and rebel yellin’, Hasil Adkins-style, moonshine crazy, jump n holler. They’ve got a new drummer named Al Diablo. Go, cadavers, GO!
IT’S ALL A HORROR SHOW…
If you were able to navigate the university-debt labyrinth in the past two decades, perhaps your income for purchasing vintage Betty Page memorabilia has increased, but no one elses has, not in twenty years. It is strange to see once poor people quoting all that bloated, blowhard bullshit about how it is the poor who are the drain on the economy(!!?), even in the face of overwhelming avalanches of evidence that it is irrefutably the fracking Wall Street white collar mafia who are gutting your schools, fire departments, and post offices; eroding your Bill Of Rights; fondling you in the airport; stealing your pensions; poisoning the food, water, ocean, air, and soil; lying nations into war, spying on you in your home, and normalizing torture and violent arrests of peaceful demonstrators. 95% of income gains since 2009 went to the top one percent according to a study at UC BERKELEY, and yet we still have to suffer these college grad associates parroting big-media lies from the Nixon era about “lazy hippies and welfare queens”. The entire federal food stamp budget which mostly goes to children, and the elderly is a tiny sliver of the pie graph. 44 % of homeless people are EMPLOYED, but all the overpaid, smug, office pros like to pretend like THEY are doing something really special, that they “deserve” their ridiculous salaries because no one else could sit at the desk quite as fabulously as they do. Most of “your tax money” goes straight into the pockets of banksters, weapons manufacturers, and military contractors. 3/4 of the pie graph is for war, with more pork for war hidden in other parts of the budget, like in foreign aid to Israel. Glamorous Tel Aviv gets the millions needed by Detroit. Upper middle-class people are out of touch, worried that they don’t have enough robot toys, yet, that their former peers are gaining on them, that some hungry Oliver Twist kids are coming to deprive them of their surplus. They think they are their belongings. The rich are straining and striving to become super rich. It’s a rat race, baby. People take out huge loans with ridiculous interest rates to go to college where they are taught to uncritically obey their corporate masters and the military industrial pharmaceutical complex, so they can get a diploma, so they can compete for a job, so they can repay that loan. If there’s a still a record store open in your town, it’s doubtlessly because somebody with an inheritance figured out how to sell an illusory self image to squares in tiny increments. Few actually get to rock, anymore, but everyone still wants to own products and souvenirs of people who rocked forty or fifty years ago, something to keep in plastic bags in the spare room. Once you get to be my age, everybody starts dying and that high school popularity shit means less and less. All those big balls stuff collectors, they are gonna croak just like the beggar on the corner, or the has-been who barely ever made it out of his mom’s garage.
I remember how that loathsome, “We Built This City” was still on the radio when Grace Slick had the audacity to start all her insufferable crone groaning about how Mick n Keith should retire. Lennon also struggled with his envy that they still had a gang in evil eye make-up, back in, what–1980? So I ain’t sayin’ nobody should retire, but if I’m expected to pay top dollar to see you “rock”, make a motherfuckin’ effort. That whining goatee, Scott Ian, with his skater shorts, throwin’ Dio’s devil horns wants you to pay(!) to shake HIS hand—-yeah, the Anthrax guy, oozes with bitterness that the fans owe him, because of file sharing, and well, maybe somebody, somewhere, has downloaded an Anthrax song, once, they tell me even Paula Abdul still has her fan, but uh, if they exist, the downloading Anthrax fans, I don’t know them. If he thinks times are tough for his tour bus riding, home-owning, record collecting, autograph signing, “That Metal Show” starring, eighties thrasher ilk, how much harder do these Lars Ulrich greed-monkeys think it’s been for the rest of us; who didn’t sign to a big label with our shitty bands thirty or forty years ago? We can’t even get record store jobs anymore, unless “we’re” twenty year old females with nose-rings. Either you’re a tattooist, or related to someone famous, or you’re OUT. Suck it up, Jack. I got mine. You shoulda, coulda, woulda. Tough luck, kid. It’s weird seein’ pictures of people you went to school with on-line, looking EXACTLY like their fat, white-haired, baseball capped fathers, with the glasses and the goatees, deluxe riding mowers, sports apparel and khaki pants. Watches and tan little belts….Red Bull and Jagermeister…so, so many of them attended state college twenty years ago and became hand pumping, home-town car dealers, pompous panjandrums, low level bureaucrats and office workers–it’s surreal. Painful reminders, of how in spite of their token and now almost obligatory Misfits t-shirts and Minor Threat collections, and big black Lollapalooza era tribal tattoos on their gym inflated muscles, most of these Midwestern middle-class Ken dolls hosing down their trucks on Sunday were having an ENTIRELY different experience than I was, back in the day. Which boot-camp did YOU go to? The one where the bell rings, and you obediently rush off to wait in line, racing to the redlight, racing to the ATM, racing to the checkout counter, racing to the drive-thru speaker, racing off to work, racing to Hooters, racing to Home Depot, racing to the bowling league? Life is football to these people. Socialized from birth to be shamelessly insincere, pushy, selfish, oafs—they base their flatulent, man-cave dwelling, Discovery Channel emulating identities and relationships on power, and uniforms, and are are all certain they are winning.
SMEAR THE QUEER…
When I was in school, I was popularly known as “Joey Ramone” (other times “Devo”, or the never goes out of style old stand-by, “fag”) and violently bullied non-stop, so when my friends who were blonde, white, doctor’s kids reminisce fondly about that shithole, I don’t share their “go team” jock nostalgia. The surveillance grids really make public most people’s true alliances in old age, as they all wanna high five with the Kanye imitating white boy dickheads at the reunion, sipping bitter craft beer on the wraparound sundeck. I’m still not ready to make nice with those sadists and rapists, no matter how successful their local businesses become. So there you have it. Maybe some ex punks have incentive to assimilate, but if you ain’t on nobody’s gravy train, needing a job at the auto parts store, or Maybelline is gonna divorce you and take the kids, there’s no pressure to fit-in with the white hats. They were dickheads back then, and they are having dickhead children and training them to be dickheads, now. I went to an exceptionally malevolent school that emphasized sports and dress code conformity. Polo shirts, designer jeans, Swatch watches, and teenagers with expensive cars. The richest quarterbacks and even some of the more emboldened by numbers golf nerds punched you everytime they passed you in the hallway, knocked your trapper keeper out of your hands, put your head in dirty toilets, and raped your girlfriend after church youth group, and this was all with the approval of the teachers, counselors, coaches, and administrators. The sons of judges and cheese factory owners and downtown nightclub moguls were the actual literal terrorists, back then. If a poor kid wrote punk rock band logos in his text book, he got felonious malicious destruction of county property charges leveled at him! If a rich kid did the same thing, he was handed an eraser, maybe given a book fine. Nowadays, the general public is still socialized the same way, but they’ve added-in the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, racist bit. The sports nutty bully-boys go after Sikhs on the streets, anyone who “looks different”, Muslims, environmental and food labeling activists. It’s the same old white privilege sports sadism, wrapped in a frantic flag waving, freedom-fries inhaling, irrational fear of Arabs, or of an indian Miss America. Controlled opposition wooden dummies like Nafta Bill Clinton will complain about the polarizing effect FOX TV has had on the country, but it was his indeed, his own 1996 Telecommunications Act that handed the public airwaves over to these six companies. No one seems to remember his involvement with Waco, either, or Nafta. As I write this, a widely awarded and bona fide dean of journalists, Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize recipient and former writer for the NY Times, has come out admitting that the entire corporate media is a puppet show and the Arab boogeyman story was faked, when Cindy Sheehan said the same thing, the empire reacted by having corporate shill drug warrior and tv personality, Dr. Drew, invite her to appear on his show under false pretenses, ambushing her for her assertions, and gas-lighting her-meaning he was intentionally prodding her about her fallen kid, trying to make her seem crazy. I’ll tell you who’s crazy-all these housebound wives who worship at the alter of false prophets, bogus drug-war profiteers, and products shills like Dr. Drew, Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, and “The Doctors”. Bring back Dr. Creep! A famous beauty who inhabits a reality of non-stop privilege, flattery, and luxury told me last year that her government would never conduct a false flag operation. Americans line up to watch war propaganda, line-up to buy poison, line-up, to harm themselves and their loved ones. We pay to be spied on with flashy gadgets. Pay to be molested in domestic airports for the “privilege” of flying. Pay and compete and wait in line to compete and pay to poison ourselves for the profit of the one percent slave-owners. Compete for the privilege, are proud to own the trinkets. It’s looney-tunes. If you suggest any of this is at all foolish, they will instinctively seek to harm you into silence, immediately. Who needs the secret police when the everyday people are already so sieg heil sports indoctrinated to be snitches and bouncers and low level enforcers? Have you seen footage of these armed and violent stormtroopers the government sends to beat up peaceful protesters? It’s indefensible. Are those the men you still trust to protect your precious collection of Bad Brains bootlegs from all those scuzzy lumpen herd welfare mothers and drug offenders?
The Republicrats have shut down the government, except for you know, the “botched drug raids”, pet killing, tasering, spying and invading and fracking and gouging and most all our estranged family and former friends tragically believe everything they are told on cable tv. Grownups who should know better question no corporate media story, ever. If Brian Williams says it, it’s true. From JFK to 9/11. How did all the leather jacket clad, once beautiful girls I used to know become these church going, sporting event attending, sports-car driving, NASCAR watching, day-spa co-owners with alcoholic desert drinks always close at hand, Margarita mamas, Mcmansion captives, reposting last year’s vacation photos and pro-war Jesus memes on Facebook, perpetually on cell phones talking to their sisters about spray tans and juicers while casually, callously dropping garments on the floor for old ladies to have to bend down and pick up for minimum wage all day at Target, in their ugly fuzzy scarves and furry sweaters, toasting themselves and their softball playing ex marine husbands? Ever seen drunken middle class women with long fake nails and hair extensions try to do the electric-slide to outdated Inxs songs and Diddy style radio music at sports bars? It ain’t pretty. The weird part is how these are the same broads who were so harshly judgmental of me way back in MY hard partying days. Married to hunters and military men. Listen to all those empty vodka bottles clanging around, when they take out the garbage, they can’t recycle or the neighbors would notice all the empty booze jugs. How do you go from knowing all the lyrics to the Smiths, the Cure, and Depeche Mode songs to raising jock sons, gobbling prescription pills, subscribing to Us Magazine and eating out ten times a week at the Outback Steakhouse and T.G.I. Fridays? Cable, college, credit card, career. That’s how! They have never heard the phrase “disposition-matrix”, would assume it is a Skrillex-like dance band, would not google it if you dared them to, they don’t care, but they can tell you the name brand of Kim Kardashian’s sister’s latest diet product, in a heartbeat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
I’M YOUR GARBAGE MAN…
People actually talk to me about Foo Fighters and Green Day like they are the Pistols and the Clash. Are you kidding me, man? Even Little Steven, he really seems to take Green Day seriously. I don’t get it, but I know they had the time of their lives. My generation, they did nothing, they lifted up the usual chubby frat-boys on their shoulders, watched “Friends”, bought video game system after video game system, listened to Alanis Morrisette and Matchbox 20, and assimilated their parent’s bogus Crocs wearing unrealities and buckets of wings and yards of beer in “Who Let The Dogs Out” playing, vile sports bars, a few of ’em in bigger cities bought solar homes and grew civil war beards…hang on, broheem, I’m texting….I can’t think of one original voice that’s emerged from my age group since Sinead O’Connor, The Manic Street Preachers and Chuck D., and Tupac Shakur. Those fart joke, Diet Coke, millionaire, corporate punks can all kiss my ass. Look at how all the once edgy bands became dress-code enforcing, KFC gobbling, Cornrow Elvises after five minutes of fickle fame. We all know Guns N Roses lost the “AND ROLL” part of the equation when they threw out Adler, who was promptly followed by Izzy, but this giant, corporate, super fame, monster truck, sporting event they got goin’ now, does it really even qualify as “ROCK”, anymore? Nothing sadder than when yesterday’s rebels become the cops and elitists of today. One of my own former drummers gave up punk rock entirely and did just that-literally. Became a small-town cop. Crazy. Makes a guy lose faith in human nature. Still trying to impress his Smilin’ Bob step-dad through goose-steppin’ assimilation. Gross.
The “Entertainment Weekly” super hero blockbuster corporation juggernaut can even suck all the fun outta vampires and werewolves and zombies and Halloween, can’t they? I still love the Cramps, avoid the G.M.O.’s they cram into our Count Chocula and Frankenberry. I thought the horror thing was finally losing it’s appeal with Marilyn Manson, and I love all that shit. Rat Fink car models, lowgrade fifties monster-matinee hosts, Vampira, Alice Cooper, Alien Sex Fiend, Bauhaus, Misfits, Specimen, Sisters Of Mercy, Electric Frankenstein. I’m still goth at heart. But they killed it good, didn’t they? The models on cable? Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt? All that’s left is cos-play for computer nerds, jockabilly for N.A. gym-rats with high-end dayjobs. When even the squarest of the squares wear corpse paint to the office on casual Fridays, you gotta wonder, what’s the point? We’re all stuck in middle school, forever. It’s all shit and lies now, we’re all trapped in these high definition fed, delusional, live forever bubbles of suburban conformity and consumerism. Most toys wins, all that. You ever tried to buy some 70’s action figures for your kid on E-Bay? They’ve jacked everything up, so high on E-Bay, the Star Wars geeks, goateed gamers, and adult cartoon shit hoarders. Killed it all thrice. Flogging the dead undead, undead, undead. All that Scooby Doo “boo!” has become boo-hoos, as we wake up, and realize the hard reality of our present situation—that Hannibal Lecter and Vlad the Impaler and Freddie Kruger were strictly Howdy Doody Time, compared to the actual oil barons and Wall Street despots, torturers and prison profiteers who are currently fracking, drone attacking, targeting individuals, creating all this needless hell on earth. And only THEIR own, shit head, millionaire kids can afford a rundown Mystery Machine, nowadays. Be a sixties rockstar’s kid, or be gone. Bela Lugosi really is dead, this time. If only mad professors, bent on world domination, and their black clad stormtroopers, and super spies with secret weapons, were still just the stuff of paranoid science fiction graphic novels and upper middle class collector Fangoria subcultures!
SKULLS….
Having said all that, if there was anyone with the musical talent and enough brutiful charisma to shoot white lightning up the long-dead corpse of psychobilly again, and bring the decaying monster back, to fight the dumbed down villagers, with their torches, and lynch-mob, dumbfuck Sarah Palin, symbolic-other hating, mentalities, it might just be this impossibly energetic, dieharder, clique of glam ghouls from the Sunset Strip—–THE COLD BLUE REBELS. These four Edward Scissorhanded hep cats still revel in the black cat fifties fantasies of bullet bra’d bombshells and hot rod drivin’ greaseball j.d. rebel rockers, fightin’ the man. Fuckin’ A. Remember Levi and the Rockcats? You know how rockabilly people are always obsessed with detailing? Detailing their souped up retro ride, detailing their expensive vintage instrument? That’s the coolest thing about COLD BLUE REBELS: their attention to detail. Mickey and Joe Normal and and Danny Dangerous do everything with an aesthetic evil eye for always entertaining and collectible detail, they don’t half-ass anything. The Glamour Punks have one of the most fanatical cult followings, “one sick posse”, of any under recorded band, ever—Spaz Draztic was the CBR’s original drummer. Jetboy were the absolute glammest of the glam darlings of the Guns N Roses and Faster Pussycat concho-belt era, and the purple haired Zeros were the West Coast’s own cartoon Ramones. Alumni of all those bands got bored answering fanmail about the metal years and noticed how little rock & ROLL was left in the internet age, when we’re all isolated in little boxes, sitting on our boxes, staring at tiny gadgets, ceaselessly strategizing new ways to obtain more boxes to box-out with our boxed-in box-headed Botox friends, so what did they do? They totally broke all programming protocol and got together, in person, renewed real relationships, and decided that what was missing from modern music was energy, risk taking, spectacle, entertainment, heart. They thought about Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Lux Interior, and decided to make it their own personal mission to introduce the younger generations to Eddie Cochran cool and the Stray Cat struttin’ sluttery of in your face, sweaty, live and in person, tonight only, blue suede death rock. The kids went wild! Fat old geezers in Motorhead t shirts started coming out of retirement to see the raw powered rockabilly rebels light their own rocking chairs and coffins on fire. COLD BLUE REBELS are here to remind you that you are already dead. You might as well live it up, laugh it up, slap on some Spiders From Mars make-up and ball tonight. You know what else they did that was so exceptional and unusual in this lazy era of half hearted, spoilt-ass, ex celebs, who all seem to think we owe them something? They want to GIVE the FANS a GOOD TIME. They apply themselves to ENTERTAINING their paying audiences. COLD BLUE REBELS want YOU to EXPERIENCE real ROCKNROLL. Imagine that. Another cool thing these macabre marauders have done right, is when every last fourth-string asshole who ever got a record deal on the coat tails of some corporate-rock cattle call wants you to “like” their page and purchase their swag, and pay them hundreds of dollars to shake their dirty hands, THE REBELS go out of their way to make damn sure their swag is WORTH buying. They offer a colorful, amazingly cool line of badass designs. NOBODY else seems to care about the fans, these days. COLD BLUE REBELS have thought about YOU! Some greedheads have accused me of being anti-this, or anti-that. Anti-war, anti-torture, anti-genocide, anti-ripoffs, maybe. How refreshing to see some veteran entertainers who aren’t out to rip you off. Let me be clear, the compact disc you need to purchase in time for Halloween is COLD BLUE REBELS!!!!
http://coldbluerebels.com/
WISE UP, ALL YOU FONZIE LUNCHBOXES!
It seems like I hear about a new French surf music band every two weeks these days! The TAIKONAUTS don’t dress as cosmonauts or sci-fi creatures, they chose the classy black and white Reservoir Dogs look instead, but just like most other bands in the style, they use vintage movie samples and probably worship Dick Dale every day before breakfast.
Veglam 