Selectivity and inclusivity, now and then

One day, some time ago, in the halls of my high school, a friend [K] walked up to me and asked, Hey, have you heard of the Dead Milkmen? This was a game we played with each other, a way of gauging who was the more culturally adroit. As we lived in a town named after a species of deer [no ready cable access] and attended a high school that required only 3/4 of the credits to graduate as the school you probably went to--and were further hampered by slow internet connections and the fact that, in 1998, the internet didn't really have anything on it anyway--we didn't know much about pop culture. So, to begin, the detentes were usually small and safe. We'd score points for being the first person to hear a band or song on 93ZOOFM and report back. Questions like, Hey have you heard of Weezer [this circa 1994] or Hey did you hear the new Prince song [Circa Purple Rain, no later, I swear] were common.

Then, sometime around 1995, our friends started snowboarding. Soon everyone--even those, like myself and this friend [K], who never actually snowboarded but sure as shit wanted to look like we did--everyone started buying their clothes and shoes and accessories at the not-so-local skate shop. You probably have one in your not-so-local vicinity. There, in this skate shop, were strange pieces of merchandise, unique to the hemisphere of what would later be called 'extreme sports.' These things were called 'tapes'. True to name, they were honest-to-God tapes, video ones, depicting snowboarders, skateboarders, BMXers, anything really ["Just so long as it wasn't corporate," they told us, in the days before they found a way to successfully go corporate].

These tapes, in addition to telling us how to dress and how to act and what to think and how to feel* [*only offering masculine feelings, like the pelvic tingle of hot snowboard chicks and the impotent rage of being pissed on while you sleep], also introduced us to a strange and foreign kind of music. Mostly punk, with a little hiphop, the unifying aspect of these power chords and breakbeats was that they were nothing at all like anything you'd ever hear on the ZOO.

Suddenly what was hip was anything that wasn't conventionally so, anything that hadn't been previously hip. We would be, and would remain, changed at the core. It meant no longer listening to anything on mainstream radio [though the consensus was that Weezer would be grandfathered into this new and contrarian lifestyle]. NOFX, Pennywise, Social Distortion, Bad Religion all rocked our trans-pubescent worlds--rocked them hard--and did so without ever, ever, selling out, something no one really understood the intricacies of [it was connected, somehow, to going corporate], but which all knew was not to be done. Most of us figured selling out was communicable, so we'd never admit to listening to the ZOO, and when someone slipped up [especially if they owned like a Burton coat or something] we'd call them out as heretics of our youth rebellion, slandering them mercilessly. NARC! Poser! Those who screamed the loudest were surely the most Just, the most Faithful. Those not with us were against us.

Rancid, a band, now mostly forgotten, was the hottest shit one summer, until the day the ZOO played Ruby Soho. By the dawn of the next they had been stricken from every place of honor. I hid my CD so as not to be tempted by it. Thankfully, it didn't really catch with the ZOO kids, so after a lengthy quarantine . . . Out Come the Wolves was admitted back into our ideological cannon.

To sound as trite as I possibly can: that thing we worshipped, I think, was youth itself. Youth and rebellion. However, most of our parents were really nice and our teachers permissive and I suppose most of us were fairly logical, so the rebellion part never really manifested outwardly per se, against the structures of power; God, family and school. But we were thinking it. Oh yes. We were just waiting for someone to impose their values on us, tell us what to be or how to act. On the day that happened, we were prepared to do exactly what those board-riding tapes and punk CDs had suggested.

actions could erase all the fear we suffer/
people segregated no one understands each other/
he's a different color but we're the same kid/
I will treat him like my brother he'll treat me like his/
...
the inner city's burnin' yea it's screamin' black and blue/
the power and the passion of a million youth

Yes, that. Our city was a Post Office, a VFW and a place called "The Backwoods Store" but, by God, did we scream, with power, with passion, and usually, with Miller Highlife and Goldschlager Cinnamon Schnapps. Individualism! A hundred mall-shopping rednecks called out, in unison. Power. We were a motley and vigorous cultural experiment, nay a movement, free to anyone with $500 for a snowboard [or at least the matching coat]. God that was great, the life of the elect, completely free of posers and existential irony.

But, but . . . there was a point to this story . . . "Hey, have you heard of the Dead Milkmen?" Remember how I said a friend asked me that? A thousand words ago or so, at the top there.

About then K and I had kind of decided that the rest of our friends had listened to but not really heard the music that bound us. They had spoken and sang the messages of inclusion and unity but had failed to internalize this punk ethics--so we shunned them. Because they were lukewarm, we spit them out of our mouths, but not in any real, demonstrable sense. The power of such movements lie in their great numbers, and, like an inquisition, it only took one whisper--poseur--from one darkened corner to bring down a whole, carefully-crafted persona. So K and I, we kept up appearances, drank and sang and pumped our fists and pretended to snowboard, but secretly we went out on our own, to the very hinterlands of even this, our most fringe of teen groups. And we searched. For music. That spoke. To our souls.

That kind of soul-speak you can't hear on the ZOO, remember, nor even on snowboard tapes.

Then, on that fortuitous morning, K walked up and asked me about these weirdos, these punks, previously unknown even to we few, so in the know. He said he'd found them in a discount tape rack at a convenience store on Highway 2, behind Martina McBride's Greatest Hits. I was dubious but soon turned, though not ever as fully as he did, to the subversive dissonance that is [was] the Dead Milkmen. They had songs; Lord had they songs. Songs about reckless consumerism [Bitchin' Camaro], about spousal abuse [Gonna Beat My Wife], about New Wave kids [You'll Dance to Anything], about finding your Messiah in the signature drink [Manishevitz wine] of a culture that is resistant to the idea of messiahs [I dream of Jesus]. They were just what a good counter-culture movement should be: anti-everything. They were anti-establishment, anti-coherent theses, anti-singable choruses. Their music, far from the elaborate production of even the punkest of punk bands at the time, sounded like it came from a Radio Shack microphone hooked to a tape deck sitting in the middle of a grain elevator. "These guys don't give a fuck about anything," I remember K saying. He was right.

The last thing they cared to do was offer alternatives to the lives and lifestyles they caricatured and lampooned. The world was a festering sore--a sucking chest-wound--they proclaimed, and the band-aid of activism was useless, the triple antibiotic ointment of change, ineffectual.

No, the only thing to do with such a flesh schism is to pick at it.

Such a glorious thing, this criticism and superiority without personal accountability. I immediately took to it. Rather, I continued what I'd always been doing, empowered by the knowledge that there were other people doing it too. Cool people.

My immutable high school truths:
Everything sucks.
Nothing will change.

That, my 80,000 dollar college education would teach me, is essentially Nihilism [Rancid, in hindsight, wrote a song about it], and it's great. It's the absolute best thing to happen to a kid who's smart enough to have realized there's something screwy about the status quo, but too dumb [and lazy] to find a way to change it. You might catch a nihilistic young punk saying--probably over the churn and yowl of the Sex Pistols tape his mom just got him--"Gaw there aren't any good revolutions any more," without reflecting that revolutions don't just happen, and that the Sex Pistols didn't revolutionize anything except working class Cockney fashion. When there is no moral impetus, you can't feel guilty about sitting on your ass. Right up my alley.

[Sex Pistols also killed rock and roll, but my friend K says he's pretty sure it was already mostly dead anyway.]

In college I grew out of nihilism, kinda, once Nietzsche told me what was wrong with it, and I sought out progressive bands who had also grown out of it. These bands sought to reinvent rock whilst simultaneously reinventing our minds and our social strata. Fugazi was doing such things while I was toddling and I had some catching up to do. Post-punk it was called, and what a great and descriptive name that was. Ian MacKaye was a prophet, preaching the coming of a [highly dubious, pinko] utopia that, if we'd all just try a little harder, would be just about perfect for just about everyone. Wow was that going to be cool. I got excited about that.

But, in the meantime [aka my adolescence and young manhood], NAFTA had happened and Republicans controlled the legislature and later the presidency [after someone decided to run an android against everybody's best friend from college], labor movements were losing clout with the rise of outsourcing. I realized with some desperation that this strange, smelly, small-concert-venue egalitarian political ethics would never see the light of day.

Later, sometime after I first heard the name John Forbes Kerry, I realized that this woeful state of affairs, the wealth gap, the education crisis, unaffordable health care--all the multifarious incongruencies of capitalism--the things post-nihilist me had railed against as new and startling evils, would not have changed even with a different legislature or executive. These things had been going on since well before I came to be here, in this lanky body, in this little town, listening to this angry music. It had been happening, probably, since the discovery of fire or the first irrigation project. A cynic might say humans--or at least their nation-states--were born on stratification. That egality is a heckuva idea for deer and moron college kids, but that civilization just can't function that way. It's fine for the kibbutz but impractical for the industrialized super power. Where does that leave us?

Even after women's suffrage and the civil rights movement and the coming [inevitable!] acceptance of homosexuality, there will still be people who can't feed themselves and can't keep themselves healthy and are denied, fundamentally, all those wonderful things the founding fathers talked about every person having. This is inevitable. There is a finite amount of resources, of capital. Money don't grow on trees.

And we'll have names for these people, these degenerates. They will be bad names, epithets. But no longer Nigger or Faggot or Feminist. They'll be Low-life; White-[black-, red-, yellow-]Trash; Welfare Mother [Father]; Leech; Drain. They'll be Poor People, and we'll hate them because they aren't like us. They'll be brought up poor and they'll stay poor. They'll raise poor children. They'll be sickly and they'll smell and we'll hate them. Because. They aren't like us. And they won't be suitable for employment, like us. Because, you know . . . they aren't like us.

These people--filthy--looking to pull even, to start level, they're communists and pagans. They hate America and God and our magnificent freedom. You want medicine? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps friend. If you can't afford bootstraps, that's just the providence of the free market. This is the Calvinist capitalism. Taxation is theft. The wealthy are elect. Who the hell are you? They're the Narcs, Posers. Trying to act like us, be us. Heathy. Alive. But we'll see through that. We've gotten really good at seeing through that. We know how to deal with them, did that in high school.

That other thing, though, it was such a good idea. Great even. That thing between Nihilism and whatever this angry and impotent new thing I feel is. Egalitarianism. Egality. That was a hell of a thing.

Pity it didn't work out.

Well fought though.