Bedtime for Bonzo!
Read my Rant here:
http://www.thekowalskis.comBut HELL, even The New republic had something to say about it! Read on:
REAGAN'S PUNK ROCK.
Reagan Youth by Spencer Ackerman Post date 06.14.04
By the time Ronald Reagan was laid to rest this weekend in Simi Valley,
it seemed as if every aspect of his character, his presidency, and his
legacy had been unearthed and examined. Not without justification--even
Reagan's detractors conceded the late president's iconic stature. His
supporters deified him, making Reagan almost metaphysically identical to
the very concept of human liberty, and proclaiming freedom to be
Reagan's greatest bequest. Yet some Reaganites seemed less than
confident that their Reagan would be history's. Rush Limbaugh sought to
interpret Reagan to the "millions of Americans under the age of 30 [who]
have no concrete memory of Ronald Reagan's presidency," explaining in
National Review that he "defines the utter beauty and blessing that is
America and reminds us all of our destiny."
But for a large portion of those under the age of 30, their portrait of
Reagan emerged through another of Reagan's gifts to the country--one
that went almost completely ignored throughout last week's memorials.
They could tell Limbaugh that no accounting of Reagan's cultural legacy
is complete without noting a simple truth: Ronald Reagan is responsible
for some of the best punk rock ever recorded.
While not as eloquent as Reagan's Brandenburg Gate address--Bad Religion
perhaps best summarized the contemporaneous punk understanding of
Reagan's America by declaring "Fuck Armageddon, this is hell"--the
hardcore records of the early 1980s age a lot better than Knute Rockne,
All American. As long as there are disaffected teenagers in America able
to seek out (and, now, download) that era's music, Reaganites won't just
have to battle liberal historians to convince young America that their
vision of the Gipper is the right one. They'll have to go up against the
Dead Kennedys.
If Reagan embodied everything sunny and inspiring about the United
States to his supporters, to the preternaturally angry punk rockers of
the early '80s, he represented anomie, arbitrary authority, and an
ignorance that was socially acceptable, even valued. At the dawn of the
Reagan era, pioneering singer and guitarist Bob Mould was a student at
St. Paul's Macalaster College. "I remember watching these kids getting
up in the morning on my dorm floor, putting on a suit and tie and a
briefcase, talking about this guy from California named Ronald Reagan
and how he was going to be the next president," Mould told journalist
Michael Azerrad. "And I'd be sitting there arguing with those fucks in
speech class and poli sci and just hating that, thinking 'This is not
acceptable behavior. This is not what we're supposed to be doing with
our late teens.'" His response was to start the Minneapolis juggernaut
Hüsker Dü, whose musical evolution away from the stifling formula of
hardcore punk--blisteringly fast rhythms with the barest patina of
melody, performed with all the precision of a prison tattoo--would lead
to some of the greatest rock and roll of the decade. The same held for
Joey Keithley, who didn't let his Canadian citizenship stand in the way
of his Reagan-hatred. "I didn't like the rock 'n' roll I was hearing,
and I didn't like Ronald Reagan," he recently recalled, explaining why
he started hardcore legend D.O.A. and rechristened himself Joey
Shithead.
The punk assault on Reagan was relentless. A bunch of Queens high school
students called themselves Reagan Youth. Their eponymous anthem took the
parallel to its logical conclusion and seig-heiled the president during
the chorus. Michigan's gloriously primitive Crucifucks saluted Reagan's
would-be assassin in "Hinckley Had a Vision." The Berkeley-based punk
rock bible Maximumrocknroll published anti-Reagan screeds in practically
every issue. MRR also released what many consider to be the greatest
hardcore compilation LP of all time, Welcome To 1984, whose cover
featured a mohawked punk defacing a stylized poster of Reagan. The 1983
Rock Against Reagan tour united some of the most potent hardcore bands
of the time, including D.R.I. and M.D.C., in a common purpose, and in
July of that year they unleashed their vitriol on the National Mall.
But no band inveighed against the president with the intensity of the
Rock Against Reagan tour's headliners: San Francisco's Dead Kennedys.
The DK's first record, Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, was an
eclectic and sardonic take on late '70s California. Reagan drained
practically all the subtlety out of the band. In 1981, they released
their greatest post-Fresh Fruit offering, the raw and furious EP In God
We Trust Inc. The sleeve featured a gold Jesus crucified on a cross of
dollar bills. On "Moral Majority," singer Jello Biafra got to the point:
"Blow it out your ass, Ronald Reagan." That was nothing compared to
"We've Got a Bigger Problem Now," a reworking of Fresh Fruit's classic
"California Uber Alles," which skewered the "suede-denim secret police"
led by Governor Moonbeam, Jerry Brown. The new version unloaded on
"Emperor Ronald Reagan/Born again with fascist cravings" as it built
from a low-key lounge groove to a scorched-earth crescendo. In case
anyone missed the point, the band took the stage at a show nearby the
1984 Democratic National Convention in Klan hoods, which they removed to
reveal rubber Reagan masks.
Of course, not every punk rocker used Reagan as a foil. The very
existence of any form of human civilization was sufficient to raise the
Nietzschean ire of L.A.'s Black Flag, the greatest of all American
hardcore bands. Others, deploring the de rigeur anti-Reagan politics of
the punk scene, embraced the president. Beloved New York hardcore band
Murphy's Law enthused, "Ronnie Reagan, he's our man/If he can't do it,
no one can!" The singer of Chicago's Effigies, John Kazdy, ended up a
prosecutor and member of the conservative Federalist Society. (He
explained, "There is nothing punk rock about voting for a party that
wants to put more government in your life.") Still, without Reagan to
use as shorthand for everything undesirable about America, punk's
intensity lost a certain focus. As punk rock lurched through the Clinton
years, California's NOFX released a 1996 EP of retro hardcore,
justifying the project by warbling, "Guess what, nostalgia sucks/But I
miss the days of Reagan punk."
The band's front man, Fat Mike, is actively trying to bring those days
back. In April, he released the Rock Against Bush compilation, which
brought together 26 contemporary punk bands to rail against Reagan's
self-proclaimed ideological successor. He wasn't the only one. Tobi
Vail, who drummed for groundbreaking punk band Bikini Kill, wrote a
widely circulated essay celebrating the Rock Against Reagan phenomenon
before declaring, "[T]he time is ripe for Bands Against Bush." Last
October, "Bands Against Bush" concerts were held in San Francisco, New
York, Seattle, and other cities. This time, however, the bands involved
are hardly the obscure denizens of marginal record labels. Rock Against
Bush features multi-platinum acts like Sum 41 and the Offspring. But the
project also acknowledges the debt it owes to Reagan-era punk rock:
included is a new track, "That's Progress," by Jello Biafra and D.O.A.
Their presence on the compilation is a tacit nod to the inadvertent and
surely undesired punk-rock legacy of Ronald Reagan. All that's left is
for the Reagan Library to reserve wall space for the In God We Trust
Inc. cover art.
Spencer Ackerman is an assistant editor at TNR.
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