Reptilian Road Kill: Post-Post Punk in the 90's

I'm the kid with the Bad Religion t-shirt on. Just kidding. I don't know who any of these people are. I just grabbed the image off wikimedia commons. But it looks about right for the time!

Born a little late for post-punk, these post-post punk albums were my jam. (Much to the annoyance and concern of my parents.) 

I first became aware of punk rock sometime in the 1980s before I hit ten years old. I mean, I’d seen that punk rocker destroyed in the worst Star Trek movie ever, The Voyage Home, and I’d seen the Terminator rip the clothes off a bunch of street punks in the namesake film. I probably even saw some occasional weirdos in real life. But I was primed for punk because I was already amped on heavy metal. By the time I was skateboarding in the sixth grade I was ready for an explosion of sounds from the past, and I was lucky enough to meet an older skater punk when he moved on the street introduce me to both the classic and then current punk sounds. This was the early nineties, in the Midwest. Post punk had already happened in England so I suppose most of this stuff is not really post-post-punk, but post-hardcore, skater punk and pop punk. But Post-post punk just sounds better.

So lets take a look at some of the albums that shaped me as a teenager.

Our story starts in California, the birthplace of skateboarding, and home to some of the best punk bands on the planet. First up is Bad Relgion.

​Bad Religion hit my brain and body like a heretical gnostic revelation. I was raised in the “end times” fundamentalist Christian church, some say cult, The World Wide Church of God. I stopped attending around age fourteen. My exposure to punk and bands like this played no small part in my quitting the church I'd been brought up in. Songs like “Turn on the Light” burned with exquisite energy. The lyrics to Bad Religion’s music was always smart and sharp, but listening back I feel differently about some things now. I don’t share the same animosity towards religion as lead singer and lyricist Greg Graffin, though I’m not a big fan of conventional religion, and certainly not fundamentalism. Yet there are alternative streams of spirituality that have given me just as much juice as the alternative streams of music. Punk music has always been political, and the political message in Bad Religion was always front and center. The resonance within the songs “Heaven is Falling” from Generator and “You are the Government” from Suffer are perennial in their message. Others seem to have lost some of their bite, or I just got older, and lost some of my bite. With that in mind, perhaps the song “When?” is more appropriate now.  Quick short pounding songs like “Blenderhead” with its abrupt stop caused my head to spin in a good way, and there is no denying how fun Bad Religion is. I got the opportunity to see them live at least once and the energy they brought to the stage was just as palpable.

Second on this listicle is another band from Southern California, NOFX. Like Bad Religion they helped define the sound of the time. And like Bad Religion, their lyrics could be equally astute and intelligent, but unlike them, they didn’t always take everything so damn serious. They could be funny as fuck, and irreverent as hell. That was part of their long-lasting charm.

The first album I heard from NOFX was Ribbed, from 1991. At twenty-eight minutes long, each moment is packed with feral ferocity. Some of the lyrics are rather juvenile, but the music is so good its rather simple to overlook the juvenilia of it and get besotted with its powerful vibrations and sarcastic whimsy. The fact that they could rip, riff and write a catchy hook all while keeping the adrenaline flowing guaranteed their ascendancy. It’s all on full display in the song “Nowhere.” The follow up albums, White Trash, Two Heebs and A Bean, and Punk in Drublic continued the fun. 

Staying in California we’ll move along to check in briefly with Operation Ivy and their one album Energy, still a favorite. Members of the band went on to form the more famous and commercially successful Rancid. I like a few Rancid songs, but they didn’t really have anything on Op Ivy.
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Operation Ivy was part of the force that kickstarted a wave of suburban American ska, for better or worse. The fast snotty delivery of the lyrics wound up over top of the tightly syncopated, yet still slightly sloppy playing, as if they are just managing to keep it all together, without it falling apart. These bass and guitar rhythms hit a lovely sweet spot. Songs like “Artificial Life” have only proved too prescient of the way binge watching TV would become even more acceptable with streaming services.

Next up is The Queers. I first saw The Queers at my first real concert experience, when they opened up for Rancid at Bogart’s. The Queers would continue to play Bogarts regularly for the next several years and it was always a good time. I liked them better than Rancid, and still like them better than Rancid. Anyway, enough Rancid dissing. They have their place.
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Their album Love Songs for the Retarded remains a go-to classic. By today’s standards this album title would even offend the punk rockers themselves. Don’t let that stop you from listening. All most all of its cues are taken from the Ramones, with just a bit more distortion and a lot more beer. Songs like “Teenage Bonehead” and “Fuck the World I’m Hanging Out with You Tonight” showcase what they are all about: fun rock and roll, drinking beer, and having fun. One of the great things about The Queers is the backing vocal harmonies recalling fifties rock and pop, you know, the same stuff the Ramones were inspired by. At the bottom, they are fun, irreverent, uncouth, all the things you expect in punk. With great riffs, heaps of distortion, songs you can sing and shout along to, nodding your head with many shared experiences. This is the kind of music that could take you to the imaginary land of Riverdale, and hang out with Archie and the gang, if they guzzled forty ouncers and cough syrup.

Now I need to turn my attention to Fugazi. I still have a signed ticket stub from Ian Mackaye somewhere in a ziplock bag of teenage memorabilia. That was from a show at Bogarts where I saw them for $5. Can you imagine seeing a band of their caliber for five dollars today? It’s hard to imagine but that was the case back then, and many of the other shows I went to weren’t much more expensive, allowing teenagers and threadbare bohemian types to get in on the culture. Because that is what it was about, the culture, the music. By all accounts, Fugazi made a tolerable living as a band that toured quite a bit. They just didn’t need to live like Taylor Swift lives. They also didn’t want to screw over their fans. Hence five dollar concerts. I think this DIY business model could easily be done again today. (It is for sparsely attended noise and other underground shows.) Bigger groups with larger followings could still do so. At a lower cost, they are also more likely to sell out the show. The Fugazi show I went to was certainly packed to the gills. And the band was kind enough to hang out with everyone afterwards in the alley behind the venue. That is the kind of approachability we need to see more of these days.
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Their second album, 1991’s Steady Diet of Nothing was the one I had on tape that fueled so many bus trips on my headphones to various skateboarding destinations around Cincinnati. Listening back, it sounds killer as fuck and as fresh as Friday. No surprise there. Fugazi;s music has aged extremely well. That’s why it remains a favorite, and continues to garner new listeners. The opening bits of “Reclamation” bring on waves vitriolic adrenaline. I’m ready to go take on the world again. “Nice New Outfit” with its shouted backing vocals over exacting rhythms makes me smile and want to go climb a telephone poll and scream at the top of my lungs. It just continues to get stacked on up from there. It’s really hard to turn this album off once you hit play, but why would you want to put a pause to such an unrelenting pulse? 

Moving on to the band Screeching Weasel, for a rather different kind of sound again. Here the pop and the punk fuse together again. Frontman Ben Weasel had helped write some of the songs on The Queers album Love Songs for the Retarded. Perhaps that’s why My Brain Hurts shares such a stylistic similarity. The tracks are catchy. The lyrics are juvenile and touching. Songs like “Veronica Hates Me” glow with angst and unrequited love. “Teenage Freakshow” with the light vocal harmonies in the background and simple organ pouncing recall some lost times in Riverdale again. Hanging out with Veronica.
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What interests me now about  Ben Weasel is the time he spent at the Élan School in Poland, Maine, where he was sent after being expelled from his previous school in Illinois. These boarding schools that were all part of the “troubled teen industry” are a special interest of mine, having known several people sent to such places (some family). Some of those people and punks I never heard from again. But that’s another story for another time.

Another favorite group of mine from the era was Blatz. I only had one copied tape from them, and it was their Shit Split album with the group Filth. I didn’t really care for the Filth side as much. What I loved about Blatz was the coupled male and female vocals, hearkening back to the anarcho punk tradition started by Crass and their ilk, where dual male and female vocalists were de rigeur. Blatz also weren’t afraid of using phasers and flangers on their guitars which was unusual for punk bands. Blatz came out of the same 924 Gilman Street Project scene as Op Ivy, but their sound was decidedly more feral and hedonistic. Songs like “Homemade Speed” and “Fuck Shit Up” were fun favorites, and they mined noir territory in the lyrics to “Lullabye” and “Berkely is My Baby (And I Want to Kill It).” Actually, nihilism is good word to describe the style of Blatz. The working class anger they espouse at people going to school and anomie at hypocritical hippie’s drips with rawness even now. The whole thing sounds like it was recorded live, which adds to the menace.
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I wonder if they’ve mellowed at all with age. But if they had, I’m not sure I’d want to listen to the kind of music they may make now. So if you feel like perhaps you are mellowing too much in middle age, put one of these albums on and let it rip.