Some days you wake up and...

During a rather dark and reclusive stretch of my life, this Jenny Holzer postcard always sat on my desk next to my laptop. I used it as a talisman (and judging by the drink rings also as a coaster), focusing my paranoid fancies onto something external and benign while I stared deep into the abyss. The casual, moderate voice normalized grand delusions into everyday occurrences.

To this day, when the days get short and the nights get cold, I wake to find myself repeating the phrase to myself. A mantra to get me through the morning dread.

SkatePunk: I Don't Wanna Live to be 34

SkatePunk was the first music growing up that I could truly call my own. Distributed through cheap Realistic Concertapes, via skateboard kick & push, peer to peer, hand to hand, it had fuck all to do with my hip parents record collections and even less in common with pop radio or a nascent Mtv. It was instead the product of a particular subculture of skateboarding in the late 80s. A time when the now multi-billion dollar international industry was not only a really fun hobby but a de facto statement of social defiance and in many small towns an act of civil disobedience. It was a strange experience as a young kid to have your favorite past time become a minor criminal act but it totally amped up your inherent youthful rebellion and the music kicked in hard and fast to soundtrack it all perfectly.

Unlike previous post-atomic decades, in the 80s we came to a peculiar acceptance with our own imminent nuclear annihilation. This rather mad respect for the world ending at any moment fed the aggression, urgency and uniquely perverse optimism of SkatePunk. If we didn't have long to live there was no time to learn more than a few chords, no time to wait for a record deal or spend a year in the studio honing your magnum opus. Hell there wasn't even time enough for me, as a listener, to sit through a drum or guitar solo. If you were going to fiddle about prog rock style on the guitar I was out of there. I had girls to snog, ramps to ride, curbs to grind, fights to start. And always there was the feeling that time was running out, that dark international forces were out there working hard against me seeing my 21st birthday. I sure as hell didn't have time for 12 minute songs or three hour concerts sets.

SkatePunk was political in that all powers of authority, institutional or otherwise, were to be rejected and should go fuck off! It was dystopian in that the total collapse of society was taken as a given and therefore we should live for today and for each other and the rest of the mess could go get lost. It was about love and loss in so far as those things consumed with such force that the only remedy was to found in a primal shout, a shower of guitar feedback and a good violent dance. But most of all SkatePunk, unlike Punk's first wave, was constantly in motion. There was no vamping it up on the high street in Vivian Westwood, or wasting time eating White Castle and scoping girls draped in heavy leather. We had something to do, skate, and we did it with the same urgency and abandoned with which we danced, loved, shouted at the night and ran from the cops. You can hear it in the music but the songs are only 2 minutes long so listen sharp.






















SkatePunk Vol. 1: I Don't Wann Live to be 34

1. Dead Kennedys - Police Truck(1980)
"Dispatch calls are you doin something wicked?, No siree, jack, were just givin tickets"
2. Circle Jerks - Live Fast Die Young(1980)
"I don't wanna live to be 34, I don't wanna die in a nuclear war"
3. Dickies - Gigantor (1980)
"Quicker than quick, Stronger than strong, Ready to fight for right, against wrong"
4. Agent Orange - Bloood Stains (1981)
"Someday i'm gonna change my mind, Sometimes I'd rather kill"
5. Minor Threat - In My Eyes (1981)
"You tell me you want to be different, You just change for the same"
6. T.S.O.L. - Abolish Government/Silent Majority (1981)
"Wake up to the same old shit, Live your life to suit their fit"
7. Bad Brains - Big Takeover (1982)
"So understand when I say, there's no hope for this U.S.A"
8. The Faction - Skate and Destroy (1983)
"The cops are coming after me, their sons are BMXers, They always try to stop me but urethane is faster than boots"
9. Social Distortion - Mommy's Little Monster (1983)
"Her eyes are a deeper blue, she likes her hair that color too"
10. Suicidal Tendencies - Institutionalized (1983)
"All I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me."
11. Black Flag - Slip It In (1984)
"You're getting around, I'm not putting it down, It's just what it is, Getting it while it's around"
12. Butthole Surfers - Wichita Cathedral (1984)
"Wiped out wasted Wichita, Cathedrals on my mind, Last time I got wasted there, My poor dog just went blind"
13. JFA - Pipetruck (1984)
"dumdum dada dumdum"
14. Drunk Injuns - She's Gots A Gun (1985)
"Thoughts of tomorrow, Tear me apart, I think of the past, You’re the pain of my heart"
15. D.I. - Johnny Has A Problem (1985)
"Chippin' every day chipin' for the gipper, Chippin' on chippin' on down the line"
16. Toy Dolls - My Girlfriend's Dad's A Vicar (1985)
"He's a Vicar ya know, works in a church"
17. 7 Seconds - Walk Together Rock Together (live) (1987)
"Why don't I buy you a beer? Because I'm not old enough"
18. Dag Nasty - Excersise (1987)
"I'm irresponsible, I'm irrational, it's irreversible, what are you gonna do?"
19. Descendants - All-O-Gistics (live) (1987)
"Though shalt not partake of the dreaded decaf"
20. G.B.H. - Makin' Whips (1987)
"But you're going nowhere ya missing the whole damn point, lighten up, lighten up and we'll rip the joint."
21. McRad - Weakness (1987)
"My weakness is I can't say no, My weakness is I can't let go, So stay with me I'll let you know that love is something I can show"
22. McRad - McShred (1987)
"McSHRED!!"

I'm sure I've forgotten a bunch of great bands and tunes so drop your faves in the comments box. Vol. 2 will be up in a couple of weeks. I just need to track a few things down.

NJ crew - check out Randy Now's excellent collection of old school City Gardens photos & flyers here.

The June 4th Incident

Like many important events of the 1980s, my experience of the Tiananmen Square massacre results from news reports preempting my Saturday morning cartoons. I'm at my grandparents' house where I stay most Saturdays, it's a warm day in early summer and I probably have a million outdoor activities planned that will be postponed for another day as I sit unmoving, transfixed by the events unfolding on television in place of my beloved Kidd Video. I'm a middle class kid in the suburbs of New Jersey. I'm in no way ignorant of current events or other cultures but the world beyond my everyday experience, let alone my national border, is still distant and ethereal, unconnected to my daily life, but these images of horrifying, darkness shrouded violence will bring the reality of the outside world cascading in to my grandmother's front room.

The post-gulf war technology that journalists wield today didn't exist then so when the PRC cleared international press from the square and cut the satellite feeds the reporting was plunged into darkness. Frantic reporters shouted down scratchy telephone lines over shadowy pieces of smuggled footage and repeated images taken the weeks before of the young protesters, sunlight on their faces, with no knowledge of the horrors to come. I know that the image from the following morning of the brave solitary figure standing against a line of tanks is the iconic image of the massacre for a culture founded on the cult of the individual. For me, however, it was the images shot weeks before the crack down, of a group of people larger than any I had yet seen, all standing together, smiling in their conviction, making their mere presence a statement of political intent, their occupation of physical space a defiant gesture, locked arm and arm singing out with one voice a song I would later learn was The Internationale. These images locked in stark and tragic juxtaposition with the crackling telephone line reporting of violent repression, mass chaos and raging fires punctuated by automatic weapon fire and desperate shouting are the images that I carried with me from June 4, 1989 into adulthood.

My faith in governments to protect their people and to enact the will of those people above their own interests has never recovered from that day. It was torn to tatters not only by the oppressive acts of the PRC but by the pitiful actions of my own government which was willing to put its own political and economic gains ahead of the lives of young libertines who had naively looked to the US as a beacon of freedom and justice. I have since found myself in a number of strange and tense protest situations, from the pitiful group of fifteen that shouted in vain in the park against our university's inhumane treatment of animals, to the anti-WEF protests just after 9/11 where the percussive hum helicopter rotors drowned out the chanting and we all knew that we stood in the sights of a hundred sniper rifles; or the marches against invasion of Iraq that saw my girlfriend and I constantly scrambling from under the hooves of trampling horses. In all these mad and dangerous situations I've always found a strange calm of conviction and it may be that I believe that in my resistance I owe this much and more to a group of brave young students that I watched be massacred by their own government now twenty years ago.

I'm a pretty rational person, but I have a rather irrational faith in the power of of people united in spirit to stand up against the forces of oppression. The evidence that street protests in the Untied States are capable of effecting social and political change is not strong. The current political and media climates in this county do not suffer the street level activist well. It often appears that this form of political expression is antiquated and futile, but I have always held the conviction that for an individual to turn their physical presence into on a statement of conviction, to have their occupation of physical space be an act of resistance is an integral part of the democratic process and essential to the maintenance of liberty in a society. I think this conviction is grounded in lessons I learned sitting in my grandmother's front room watching a million brave Chinese citizens stand firm against oppression twenty years ago today.