Vikings & Beekeepers

“What’s your guilty pleasure?”

There are two different answers that aggravate me when someone asks this fateful question. The first, and the less annoying of the two, is when someone says something that doesn’t make them that guilty: “Oh, I like some rap,” one’ll say. “I hate to admit it, but I like the Strokes,” says the holier than thou art school kid. “I like (insert random older pop act that has been heralded by retroactive critics for years – you know, like ABBA or Michael Jackson or the Beach Boys),” says another. It’s a bullshit copout, but it’s also 100% understandable. If we pick something safe or vague, then we give off the appearance that we are above something that others of a similar ilk consider valuable. It’s a savvy bit of social jockeying for position.

The other more common, and more aggravating, answer is some variation of the phrase, “I don’t believe in ‘guilty pleasures.’ I like what I like and I don’t feel guilty about it.” Ugh.

Granted, it’s kind of a valid point, if you like an artist or song or even a moment of a song, than there’s absolutely no reason to be ashamed. Your instincts are yours and you should wear them with pride. Then again, the term “guilty pleasure” exists for a reason. However, in this day in age of “no taste” or musical openness (where listening to music is like eating at a buffet: it’s okay to fill your plate with a little bit of everything – a whole lot of chicken here – your indie rock – a smattering of cottage cheese there – your outlaw country – a smidgen of macaroni salad in this corner – your radio pop. No one will judge you because, hey, you like a little bit of everything and even when the things you like are outside of you social circle’s norm, it’s the best kind of those things) it’s difficult to decipher what exactly can make you guilty (you like Hall and Oates? Guess what. They’ve had a critical reevaluation and they’re cool again. Same with Ace Of Base. Dexy’s Midnight Runner. Journey. You name it). It’s all pleasure, right? So who’s to judge? But, of course, the truth is (and this is especially true among rabid music fans) there is always someone quick to judge - someone quick to turn your pleasure into a lightning rod of self-consciousness and social uncertainty. I’ve done it to people. People have done it to me.

So how does one have a guilty pleasure? In my opinion, the true definition of a ‘guilty pleasure’ - and most specifically, a musical guilty pleasure - is something - an artist, a song, a genre, an ethos - that carries little to no cultural currency within your general social and ideological strata.

So what the hell does that mean? Well, for an extreme example, let’s just assume that you, dear reader, are an exclusive fan of noise music. So are all your friends. You guys get together every Thursday night with compilations of field recordings and collections of electrical appliances and run them through broken tube amps. You record your results in the hopes of compiling your best, most chaotic, violent, numbing or fascinating moments into one final product. This is what you like. This is what you and your friends obsess about.

Now, imagine one day, you show up to your rehearsal/gathering/communal orgy of noise experience, what have you, with a stack of five albums that you’ve recently been obsessed with.

Albums one through four are you standard fare – noise albums, made available on little known labels, with strange recording processes and questionable audio quality.

“Yeah I read about that in (renowned online noise zine),” says your friend of one of the albums. “I’ve been wanting to hear it for a while now.”

Just as you’ve blown your friends away with your stellar, and obscure, new finds you pull out the fifth disc: the new Josh Groban album.

You assure your friends that it’s not a joke, and that you really think that he has an amazing voice, despite the fact that you have some doubts about this album being his best yet. It’s a grower, you say, you’ll have to give it a little more time.

Of course, the example doesn’t have to be so extreme. Pulling a Groban (a phrase I just made up) doesn’t have to be such a non-sequitor. Maybe you’re a redneck country aficionado among twee lovers. Maybe you’re a fan of the 80s British new wave of metal while your circle of friends are just into 80s British new wave. Perhaps you’ve stuck with conscientious indie rap while all of your friends have “moved on” to nihilistic coke rap.

Your preferred aesthetic is at odds with that of your social circles. You’re not being contrarian, you just honestly like something that “people like you” would see as tacky, juvenile, saccharine and/or generally deprived of aesthetic value. Your choice isn’t de rigueur.For myself, that social structure is similar to that of a lot of people my age with a long history of enjoying online music criticism, an alarmingly high point-of-reference and a gluttonous hunger for more music. I scour the musical landscape, devouring all styles and genres, carefully sidestepping slow-moving targets like Celine Dion, Nickelback, Fergie, etc. It’s the lifestyle of a lot of people my age, but that deliberate sidestepping is key in defining our taste – it’s as much about what we don’t like as it is what we do like. We have a guilty pleasure when we embrace the things that others reject.

Of course, those discarded artists and musicians are lying there waiting to be picked up, wiped off and reintroduced to the world as a “forgotten classic.” And, with that sickening amount of preamble, that’s almost precisely what I’m trying to do with this new, God-willing, recurring column (honestly, there are only so many guilty pleasures one can have, this column might cap off at three). There have been artists, songs, genres,etc. where I’ve looked around and wondered “this stuff is great, why does everyone hate it so much?” Hopefully a nice critical re-evaluation is in store, but I doubt it will be.

So…what’s my guilty pleasure?

I like mid-90s punk. Pop punk (or popcore), skate punk, ska punk, surf punk, whatever.

Bands like Rancid, NoFX, Lagwagon, ALL, The Mr. T Experience, Pulley, Strung Out, No Use For A Name, Propaghandi, Millencolin, Good Riddance and on and on and on (I never really liked Pennywise, can’t explain why) were among my favorites as a kid and many of them still frequent my headphones to this day. Those hyper-compressed guitars, breakneck speeds and hooky choruses were the ingredients of my earliest musical infatuations and they continue to illicit favorable responses from me to this day.

Why is it guilty?

I think that Lagwagon, a band that has been around seemingly since the dawn of time (they were the first Fat Wreck Chords signing), performing their brand of technically sound, nasal-voiced skate punk, said it best with the title of their most recent EP: I Think My Older Brother Used To Listen To Lagwagon.

To many, listening to these bands and bands like them is the equivalent of searching through a box of old clothes and finding your favorite jacket from your freshman year of high school: sure, it momentarily takes you back to your “glory days” of your delightfully misspent youth, but there’s no way in hell you’ll be wearing that ugly thing ever again. At least not in public.

A lot of people with discerning taste in music who spent the majority of the ‘90s under the age of 18 would gladly cop to owning and loving NoFX’s Punk In Drublic or Lagwagon’s Hoss when they were 15. However, if you ask most of those people today about those bands and albums, you’ll likely be met with a little fond nostalgia and a whole lot of condescension. You see, they’ve grown out of that stuff. Silly rabbit, skate punk is for kids.

If you’re going to listen to any new punk these days, it better contain some sort of high pretension prefix like “post,” “art,” “dance” or “noise,” and if you are going to delve into some current no-frills punk rock, it better be steeped in lo-fi murk like a Jay Reatard or be some kind of logical miscreant descendant of Steve Albini.

At least that’s how it goes in my circle – or at least the circle I would likely gravitate towards (reality, however, is slightly different, but let’s just assume that my community is made up of fans of Pitchfork, Stereogum, the AVClub and the like).

But then there’s the circle of 90’s punkers that still love that stuff, that still proudly wear their old NoFX hoodie and walk around in cargo shorts. I still hang with a few of these guys, but here’s where the second level of guilty pleasure comes in: the agreed upon within-the-genre classics don’t stand as my favorites. Most of these aging skate punks hail NoFX’s two landmarks - 1992’s White Trash, Two Heebs And A Bean and 1994’s Punk In Drublic - as their favorites, while I gravitate towards the one part thrash/one part ska/ a million parts ignored So Long And Thanks For All The Shoes from 1997 (which exists in that forgotten wasteland between the band’s early 90s breakthrough and their early 00s anti-Bush “comeback). Same goes for Lagwagon: It’s generally agreed upon that 1994’s Trashed and 1995’s Hoss are their two best, but while I love Hoss, I really love 1998’s Let’s Talk About Feelings and 2003’s (gasp) Blaze. Heck, everyone loves Rancid’s 1995 classic …And Out Come The Wolves (and I truly believe this album should be considered a classic no matter what musical stream you subscribe to), but who likes the band’s self-titled, impossibly hookless hardcore experiment from 2000? I’ll tell you who. Me. (When I saw Rancid live earlier this month – great show, by the way – even they steered clear of the album, dishing a solitary cut from the bile-drenched album).

Even among those who didn’t “grow out of punk,” my tastes are – to cop a line from one of the greats from the early 80s – out of step with the world.

Why is it a pleasure?

It would be naive of me to deny the fact that nostalgia does indeed play a part in my enjoyment of the punk rock from my youth. Even when I listen to modern day offerings from these old bands (I’m listening to Millencolin’s new album as I write this), it’s undeniable that I do it at least in part out of loyalty. It’s like catching up with an old friend.

The base of what I love about some of these bands is the same as what I loved about them when I was young: it’s fast, loud and, when the going’s really good, it can be fucking fierce – and a little ferocity every now and then is a good – nay - a great thing.

Of course, at around 18 years of age, I had to draw a line in the sand - not every artist and album was going to be joining on any further musical journeys. However, what stuck around, stuck around for a reason.

Most notably, skate punk bands like NoFX, Lagwagon, Propaghandi and Millencolin are the few that have really been a perennial presence in my car (same goes for bands Rancid and the Mr. T Experience, but I want to focus mainly on the skate punk stream of this era of punk rock).

Of course, of all these bands (mostly stemming from two labels – Epitaph Records and Fat Wreck Chords), NoFX were the flagship. It could be said that every band on Fat could be described as “NoFX meets ­­__________.” Essentially, NoFX were the kings of the SoCal sound, a healthy balance of Bad Religion, Descendants, Rudimentary Peni, skate culture and metal. That sound was and is essentially NoFX in a nutshell – fast, tight, talented and oh so nasal (I guess that would be the band’s sole original contributions to punk rock, which is part of the reason the genre is now written off).

The band was able to establish a name for itself in the cheapest way possible – joke songs. Tracks like “Liza and Louise” (a little taste of erotic lesbian punk-lit), “The Brews” (an Oi track for the yarmulke set) and a Louis Armstrong version of Minor Threat’s “Straight Edge” quickly gave the band some name recognition and a whole lot of novelty band cache. But joke rock has a shelf that lasts roughly as long as the length of the song.

When NoFX got serious, however, that’s when they really excelled. So Long And Thanks For All The Shoes is their first album that doesn’t feel like a big in-joke. Instead, it dishes out a bunch of super short, super pissy thrash tracks that leave little room for the listener to breath. Sure, there’s a good half dozen ska tracks (although NoFX’s version of ska is more palatable than a lot of their skacore contemporaries (I’m looking at you, Mad Caddies), but the songs just fly by in gloriously short orgasmic bursts just like the early 80s hardcore Fat Mike and Co. grew up with.

While tracks like “Kids Of The K-Hole,” “Murder The Government” and “180 Degrees” all kick some serious ass, it’s when the band decides to throw mud on their punk rock contemporaries where the album really feels most in its element.

“It’s My Job To Keep Punk Rock Elite” opens the album at a breakneck pace, with guitars buzzing and guitarist Eric Melvin yelping in the background. Lyrically, the song positions NoFX atop the punk rock scrap heap, preaching in the name of segregation between themselves and all the poseurs faking the funk (“This music ain’t your fucking industry!” summarizes singer Fat Mike). It’s a blistering take down of the industry that they helped to create, popularize and saturate; but for a band that boasts some of the crispest production in punk (courtesy the unavoidable Ryan Greene), “Elite” gets down to the ugly, angry core of what makes this music so great.

“It’s My Job To Keep Punk Rock Elite”

Elsewhere, So Long takes some sneering (yet seemingly loving) shots at Maximum Rock’n’Roll’s late founder, Tim Yohannan on “I’m Telling Tim,” which sarcastically kicks a little dirt in the editor’s occasional holier than thou attitude (“You better watch out, you better not cry/Someone’s watching/You better put out records DIY/Punk rock values”). “Kill Rock Stars” (not so lovingly) sets its sights on Kill Rock Stars founder and Riot Grrrl persona Kathleen Hannah for her angry, annoying anti-male take on equality between the sexes (“Just cuz I don’t know the reason you’re so pissed / Don’t detect me misogynist / I thought the goal here was mutual respect / Not constructing a separate sect”). Both songs fly by in well south of 2-minutes – double time ejaculatory blitzkriegs on their own peer group.

Of course NoFX were also able to kick some serious ass in the long form as well. Five years before Green Day were sipping champagne and supermodel piss out of their Grammy awards for their “bold,” “takedown” of middle American values with 2004’s American Idiot (which included their “magnum opus” in the nine-minute “Jesus Of Suburbia,” essentially five or so previously written songs strung together), NoFX released the 18-minute single, “The Decline.” “The Decline” feels epic while also being comfortably familiar (Bad Brains-style speed, yelping guitarists, Fat Mike’s lightning fast pick-work on bass) and it takes aim at all the things that would really become hot button issues just a couple of years later in Dubya’s America (the religious right, legalizing marijuana, um, the religious right). It’s an exhilaratingly angry, pissed off 18 minutes – a punk rock ethos with prog rock scope.

However, NoFX only do angry sparingly. If you want a non-stop assault of vitriol, look no further than Winnipeg’s own Propaghandi. Lauded for their caustic, irreverent slabs of technically impressive skate punk, Propaghandi established themselves – at least for the brave ones - as their apparent to NoFX’s throne with albums like 1993’s How To Clean Everything and 1996’s Less Talk, More Rock, but it’s 2001’s Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes that’s really special.

Propagandhi were always violently left-wing, stridently anti-religious, preachy animal rights activists, but TE,TA (acronyms!) pushes the message further than ever, with nearly every song focusing on external issues. It could come off as a bit much if Propagandhi didn’t provide such a monolithic torrential downpour of metallic guitars and pummeling tempos. In fact, the album, while awesome and huge, is almost difficult to take in a single sitting. This kind of rage needs to be broken up in little bite-sized pieces lest you be pummeled into the ground by its undeniable ferocity.

“Back To The Motor League” is the albums standout – opening with a lyrical adrenaline rush of excessive profanity and pure attitude (“I like to party fucking hard / I like my rock n’ roll the same / Don’t give a fuck if I burn out / Don’t give a fuck if I fade away”). “Motor League” flies by at a whirlwind pace, throwing sand in the eyes of Eminem, nu-metal and prairie skinheads and big-upping fire-breathing solos and the Dead Kennedys in the process. This one’ll knock you on your ass. Listen to it loud and try to deny its awesomeness. Whether you love this brand of punk or hate it, you cannot deny this song’s effectiveness.

“Back To The Motor League”

Of course, not all skate punk (or metal punk) needs to be so angry. Lagwagon, a band that, to the unfamiliar, would be indistinguishable from NoFX, aren’t big on typical punk rock posturing (and when they try it, it comes of as insincere), instead they focus on mostly internal issues (pretty emo stuff, actually). Musically, the band has all the attachments of metal inspired pink, but they allow room for differing tempos and quieter, legitimately sincere moments. Truth is, Lagwagon’s music is the definition of subtlety for those raised on their harsher, more visceral counterparts.

“May 16,” from the band’s 1998 album Let’s Talk About Feelings (a sitcom’s length batch of perfectly constructed technical punk tracks), flips back and forth between cut time and double time, with frequent stops and starts and a host of shots for the band to hit. The band was once quite renowned for their ability to play a standard form of punk rock with some serious jazz-like proficiency established as a foundation (in fact, Pitchfork gave Let’s Talk About Feelings a 9.2 rating when it was originally released in 98. To put it into perspective, that’s the same rating they just gave the new TV On The Radio).

“May 16″

Of course, technical mastery only gets you so far, both NoFX and Propagandhi are more famous for their lyrical content than they are for their musical abilities and Lagwagon is no different. Knowing that they are now considered elder statesmen in a dying art form, Lagwagon have taken it upon themselves to be the reflective, self-aware uncles of modern skate punk (if there latest EP title wasn’t indication enough of the band’s awareness of their place in the world). 2003’s Blaze, an album considerably late to the mid-90s skate punk party, contains perhaps some of the most bittersweet observations on what it’s like to grow old and feel like your heyday is behind you.

“Falling Apart” goes for laughs, as singer Joey Cape complains about his failing body and inability to rock as he and his band mates look toward 40 (and possibly even 50) and look back on a career that saw them go from “young up-and-comers” to “tired and derivative old-timers” in no time (“Hello, welcome to the show / Thought we broke up years ago” and later “We’re already bogus / We’re already fading / We’ll never be the Rolling Stones”). The song, of course, hints that the band will likely be calling it quits within the year, but that was 2003 and this is 2008 and they’re still putting out new stuff.

“I Must Be Hateful” is more poignant. With a tender, repetitive riff playing over a changing chord structure (a classic technique in pop punk), Joey Cape takes the roll of an old forgotten friend from someone’s past. Cape acknowledges that his old friend is “finally free” of him and has likely moved on while Cape has stayed in the same place. The song speaks to a pretty universal occurrence, but it could be seen as Cape viewing his own band in the role of the left behind friend, pining for the good old days but resigned to the fact that, at least between Lagwagon and its old fans, it’s likely over.

“I Must Be Hateful”

The second verse has Cape waxing nostalgic on his and his friend’s old days obsessing over the bands they loved growing up (“Dear You the vinyl, it was blue / Stalking poor Blake commiserating drunks at sea / Do you remember when Jawbreaker rocked the boat? / I’m sure you do and don’t”). Who knows if this is necessarily seeing himself as stuck in a rut, jealous and resentful, or if, in fact, he actually feels bad for those who move on and never look back, not recognizing the value of their up-bringing. Cape says it in the simplest of terms, but the theme resonates.

It’s that idea of “moving on” from this brand of music that makes no sense. These songs are every bit as effective as the more attitudinal early and modern punkers. Sure, the jokey stuff rarely holds up and, with a few exceptions, most of the ska tinged songs and bands from those days are best forgotten, but when the going’s good, as it is with the above examples, there’s really nothing like it.

But of course, I’ve only really discussed NoFX, Propagandhi and Lagwagon. I haven’t mentioned Rancid’s ability to get a room of nearly 4000 Edmonton-area punk rock kids (and old-timers) moving to their timeless anthems of friendship and loyalty.

Or how Millencolin were able to claw their way out of the ska punk garbage pile to release the definitive midtempo pop punk album in 2000’s Pennybridge Pioneers.

Or how Torche’s Meanderthal, one of this year’s most critically adored albums, contains several moments that sound eerily like Pulley.

Or how Lifetime, one of the premiere melodic hardcore bands of the 90s, were able to reunite and release one of 2007’s hookiest albums (landing at #11 on this site’s year end list, ahead of such luminaries as Spoon, Of Montreal, Kanye West and Animal Collective).

Or the Bouncing Souls. Or Bad Religion. Or the Descendants/ALL. Or the Mr. T Experience. The list is endless.

What these bands may lack in critical appeal or cool cache, they make up in their ability to rock unpretentiously and hone in on our (or at least my) base desire for something fast, hard and exciting.

“Exciting” is the key word there. Too much 90s punk in your and it all starts to bleed together, but after unhealthy doses of placid indie, navel-gazing electronica, cuddly folk and tuneless avant-garde, the jolt of adrenaline of “It’s My Job To Keep Punk Rock Elite” or Let’s Talk About Feelings feels like the perfect palate cleanser for the musically open-minded.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.