When this
establishment of building a paper tower about punk higher and higher every
month has to change, I hope it will be transformed into a television show.
Television addict. Television sect. TV casualty. Tv Party. How do you show
music? The actual sound not people playing it. What can be shown, cannot be
said. That’s what Wittgenstein said. But what about that can be heard? How do
you describe it? This is what i try to do every month with sweating out descriptions
and details of feelings that i got while i was observing noise with my ears.
I’m also stacking this paper tower higher and higher.
How do you show music? Could it be televised? Sounds evoke visions, they do for sure, but what to do with sounds that couldn’t be shown or doesn’t connect to the right scene?
Paper is freedom, that’s why I’m lucky, everything could be transcribed on it. It only depends on the writer.
Television is something else. If a photo is truth then cinema is truth twenty-four times per second, we knew it because Godard has told us. What we weren’t prepared then was Television. TV is transmitting cinema 24 hours per 365 days a year. That is awful lot of truth. While a photo is taken forever because it captures truth, television is just running off, like strangers on the opposite way of an escalator, it generously spends seconds without a shrug on the shoulder, in television everybody is a star with a twisted meaning that is - what you see is already gone. Still we think it’s everything. Nothing had more impact on us but television, through television history has become our present and when it become our present we started to mistake reality with the selected broadcasts that featured on the screen. That’s why some of us keen to have television in three dimension even if that’s just life with a camera included in the room.
Television was a great indicator of people losing their edge. When a band appeared on the TV it meant they have kick up the unwritten contract of underground brotherhood. If you were in television you were someone, while the agreement was in punk that everybody is nobody thus basically everybody is somebody. In TV when a pictures of you was shown even for a fraction of a second that meant everybody saw you because we, the people were watching everything that has happened on the screen. But we were watching you and you didn’t even see us and this made you better than us. That’s not what we have agreed on. For someone like me who comes from among the ashes of a collapsed soviet state it’s not new. When in the past everyone was equal but some of us were more equal. This is television, it’s corrupted socialism.
Television had become our neon bible written by producers who used mechanical techniques to satisfy all our needs, to answer all our questions, to tell us how the world works. These modern apostles made prophets of everyone who happened to stumble into the spotlight where they had fifteen minutes span of fame to die for our sins and redeem our souls.
Then came cable televisions who have changed the game forever. They were the Calvinists who set up a colorful counter religion that opposed the monochrome hegemony. It felt like a kiss. As the idea of a fanzine, a half serious situation taken deadly serious by it’s doers. This freedom of self expression set on the same idea of which we are being jaded by today. That everyone could be on the screen and everything will be relevant. But after all the only thing that has become relevant is to get on the screen in one way or another. Nobel wars are fought so everybody has a word to say, a vision to create, an audience to reach. This was the crusade of cable channels. It’s good, it is how things should be and what is more clearer than the fact since television has disappeared from our daily routine, the channel not the function, everybody speaks for themselves and nothing matters anymore. All of us have our platform, our screen but instead of telling our truth we just puke into each others mouth in the middle of an always ongoing religious war with disco lights vibrating and some cheesy music trying to sell the whole scene as romantic realism. You should ask is it the man or is it the channel? It’s always the man and we must be shameful to see how we don’t give a fuck unless a band plays in front of a disgusting grey wall in between two artificial ferns. For some reasons when a band is taken out of it’s natural environment aka a show in a basement the game becomes more serious. Well mostly for us who are lazy, fat and too comfy. No surprise why I maintain a weird obsession with punx in cable television shows.
The young and restless still get their kicks from the real things. I spent a good amount of time marveling on a live footage of Glue playing in a basement where fellow MRR contributor Al Quint is jammed up in the first row and he is being so enthusiastic about what he is a part of, i couldn’t do anything else but stare on his unstoppable love for punk. On the way how he moves, how he observes and blends together with this fullness of teenage angst. It’s perfect, it’s touching, it’s reality but captured thus it’s more real. It’s you and me. And of course Al. It’s mostly Al but it’s a reflection too, the same one everyone has when they hear something that is reaching further than listening to a genre, dressing in a way or be able to push people in a basement. This is it, the point, feeling great, cause what the fuck else do you want from life?
Me? I’m fine. I am being enthusiastic on that bizarre scene when Siege performing their hearts and guts out in a blindingly bright, huge white room that has electricity and an american flag in itself. They play for infinity for an unseen but imagined crowed. They want themselves to be recorded in their best possible form. All that screaming, the falling and crawling on the ground, the power, that raw mutant energy is captured in this one terrific performance. As if they knew when you could shine for fifteen perfect minutes you can shine forever. The chase of catching up with themselves and the success of even though they couldn’t keep up with their own self-dictated speed they still are amazingly good. A voice from a known but further place, inhuman screaming because it’s too human, what is? - to live and be confused. It is fragile still it’s boldly tries to conquer the world. It gathers audience for itself. They don’t seem to care about it if it’s too bizarre, they are playing and the rest is history. This makes sense because a show in front of a camera is more relevant just like every show someone writes a review about. This is television and cameras are expensive. No one could fuck up the scene.
Top World? When Jesus and Mary Chain are yelling that they wanna die, they wanna die and all the kids are dancing like it’s another bubblegum pop song. The beat is right, the lyrics are only spent on entertainment. There’s no disturbance. No one gets it, it’s a picture, it should look cool, the rest is for the rest.
There is Huggy Bear as a driving force of showing they are really at the top of their game. A flashing, vibrating vision of power, fashion that is in the hands of the people, dictated by the youth, noise, some sense, a lot of sense, anger against oppression that until than was obvious for a society that’s classes has been distributed by assholes. It’s a dance party, a revolutionary one, a message sent out to everyone who is afraid of us. It’s an offense. But who gets offended they deserve it.
Somewhere else Die Kreuzen is defending punk for a tv host, teenager girl then playing out their Midwest teenage boredom, amazing and super awkward freak hardcore. It feels like a fault inside a system and at the same time it’s great that even in this environment this music could function and show to kids like you and me that adolescent noise is important. The manic apathy that wraps around their set is terrific, the way they are aware of that this music is brilliant and still they hesitate with destroying the whole world with it. It’s their secret, for them on that footage there’s no audience so they can reveal everything. Music like this is for the depths of lonesome weekend nights spent with pasting together fanzines, for being alright with your own self, for awkward raging.
Agnostic Front was making fun of a cable show with switching instruments, faking notes, revealing their true self of being just a bunch of idiot kids who by mistake made some very good hardcore music when they were super young. It’s funny because it’s true and funny because for once they laugh as well. It’s a good evidence of everyone was young and innocent. For me it’s a mirror in what i can see society. How something innocent got spoiled and became total cop hardcore.
Agnostic Front - 1986 Cable Access show by riton23
No Trend presenting in a nauseating scene the truth about Teenage Love as if they were left alone in an empty space but they are fine with it. It’s funny, brutal, i can dance to it, you can be frightened by it.
Just like how Flipper set themselves on loose and proved they don’t give a damn if they are disturbing as many minds as they can. Flipper understood the monotonic power of the television. That if you ever happen to be on screen then no one will make you leave before you finish what you want to say. They pushed all their brain hammering songs on an unprepared and unaware audience. If you are lucky and have a soft mind then this mechanic drilling won’t damage it, it will just give you a rough massage. Videodrome.
Lost Kids playing Cola Freaks and everybody is happy. Some danish avant-gardism, painted faces, moving melodies, harsh guitars. An abandoned disco is taken over by freaks who get high on Cola.
Blitz playing New Age on amphetamine, convincing enough so that bitter after taste of european speed appears at the back of your mouth, the drummer is standing, there isn’t any chair for him, the singer is chewing his inner wall of his cheek. The smack kicked in. They find every of the interviewers questions offensive. It’s again something that has went wrong, a reporter’s life is being threaten by speed skinheads who aggressively force amazing melodies into their really dumb music. Burgess nightmare transforms into reality, the generation that was crammed into the land of block of flats has came out, here’s your abandoned baby Maggie.
Even that is pure gold when Thin Lizzy’s performing some christmas carol with the Sex Pistols. As the drummer of the ’Pistols is trying to hit a soap bubbles with his sticks instead of his kit. It’s another knife in the back of punk, so what we are already zombies, still nota s bad as a butter commercial.
How do you show music? Could it be televised? Sounds evoke visions, they do for sure, but what to do with sounds that couldn’t be shown or doesn’t connect to the right scene?
Paper is freedom, that’s why I’m lucky, everything could be transcribed on it. It only depends on the writer.
Television is something else. If a photo is truth then cinema is truth twenty-four times per second, we knew it because Godard has told us. What we weren’t prepared then was Television. TV is transmitting cinema 24 hours per 365 days a year. That is awful lot of truth. While a photo is taken forever because it captures truth, television is just running off, like strangers on the opposite way of an escalator, it generously spends seconds without a shrug on the shoulder, in television everybody is a star with a twisted meaning that is - what you see is already gone. Still we think it’s everything. Nothing had more impact on us but television, through television history has become our present and when it become our present we started to mistake reality with the selected broadcasts that featured on the screen. That’s why some of us keen to have television in three dimension even if that’s just life with a camera included in the room.
Television was a great indicator of people losing their edge. When a band appeared on the TV it meant they have kick up the unwritten contract of underground brotherhood. If you were in television you were someone, while the agreement was in punk that everybody is nobody thus basically everybody is somebody. In TV when a pictures of you was shown even for a fraction of a second that meant everybody saw you because we, the people were watching everything that has happened on the screen. But we were watching you and you didn’t even see us and this made you better than us. That’s not what we have agreed on. For someone like me who comes from among the ashes of a collapsed soviet state it’s not new. When in the past everyone was equal but some of us were more equal. This is television, it’s corrupted socialism.
Television had become our neon bible written by producers who used mechanical techniques to satisfy all our needs, to answer all our questions, to tell us how the world works. These modern apostles made prophets of everyone who happened to stumble into the spotlight where they had fifteen minutes span of fame to die for our sins and redeem our souls.
Then came cable televisions who have changed the game forever. They were the Calvinists who set up a colorful counter religion that opposed the monochrome hegemony. It felt like a kiss. As the idea of a fanzine, a half serious situation taken deadly serious by it’s doers. This freedom of self expression set on the same idea of which we are being jaded by today. That everyone could be on the screen and everything will be relevant. But after all the only thing that has become relevant is to get on the screen in one way or another. Nobel wars are fought so everybody has a word to say, a vision to create, an audience to reach. This was the crusade of cable channels. It’s good, it is how things should be and what is more clearer than the fact since television has disappeared from our daily routine, the channel not the function, everybody speaks for themselves and nothing matters anymore. All of us have our platform, our screen but instead of telling our truth we just puke into each others mouth in the middle of an always ongoing religious war with disco lights vibrating and some cheesy music trying to sell the whole scene as romantic realism. You should ask is it the man or is it the channel? It’s always the man and we must be shameful to see how we don’t give a fuck unless a band plays in front of a disgusting grey wall in between two artificial ferns. For some reasons when a band is taken out of it’s natural environment aka a show in a basement the game becomes more serious. Well mostly for us who are lazy, fat and too comfy. No surprise why I maintain a weird obsession with punx in cable television shows.
The young and restless still get their kicks from the real things. I spent a good amount of time marveling on a live footage of Glue playing in a basement where fellow MRR contributor Al Quint is jammed up in the first row and he is being so enthusiastic about what he is a part of, i couldn’t do anything else but stare on his unstoppable love for punk. On the way how he moves, how he observes and blends together with this fullness of teenage angst. It’s perfect, it’s touching, it’s reality but captured thus it’s more real. It’s you and me. And of course Al. It’s mostly Al but it’s a reflection too, the same one everyone has when they hear something that is reaching further than listening to a genre, dressing in a way or be able to push people in a basement. This is it, the point, feeling great, cause what the fuck else do you want from life?
Me? I’m fine. I am being enthusiastic on that bizarre scene when Siege performing their hearts and guts out in a blindingly bright, huge white room that has electricity and an american flag in itself. They play for infinity for an unseen but imagined crowed. They want themselves to be recorded in their best possible form. All that screaming, the falling and crawling on the ground, the power, that raw mutant energy is captured in this one terrific performance. As if they knew when you could shine for fifteen perfect minutes you can shine forever. The chase of catching up with themselves and the success of even though they couldn’t keep up with their own self-dictated speed they still are amazingly good. A voice from a known but further place, inhuman screaming because it’s too human, what is? - to live and be confused. It is fragile still it’s boldly tries to conquer the world. It gathers audience for itself. They don’t seem to care about it if it’s too bizarre, they are playing and the rest is history. This makes sense because a show in front of a camera is more relevant just like every show someone writes a review about. This is television and cameras are expensive. No one could fuck up the scene.
Top World? When Jesus and Mary Chain are yelling that they wanna die, they wanna die and all the kids are dancing like it’s another bubblegum pop song. The beat is right, the lyrics are only spent on entertainment. There’s no disturbance. No one gets it, it’s a picture, it should look cool, the rest is for the rest.
There is Huggy Bear as a driving force of showing they are really at the top of their game. A flashing, vibrating vision of power, fashion that is in the hands of the people, dictated by the youth, noise, some sense, a lot of sense, anger against oppression that until than was obvious for a society that’s classes has been distributed by assholes. It’s a dance party, a revolutionary one, a message sent out to everyone who is afraid of us. It’s an offense. But who gets offended they deserve it.
Somewhere else Die Kreuzen is defending punk for a tv host, teenager girl then playing out their Midwest teenage boredom, amazing and super awkward freak hardcore. It feels like a fault inside a system and at the same time it’s great that even in this environment this music could function and show to kids like you and me that adolescent noise is important. The manic apathy that wraps around their set is terrific, the way they are aware of that this music is brilliant and still they hesitate with destroying the whole world with it. It’s their secret, for them on that footage there’s no audience so they can reveal everything. Music like this is for the depths of lonesome weekend nights spent with pasting together fanzines, for being alright with your own self, for awkward raging.
Agnostic Front was making fun of a cable show with switching instruments, faking notes, revealing their true self of being just a bunch of idiot kids who by mistake made some very good hardcore music when they were super young. It’s funny because it’s true and funny because for once they laugh as well. It’s a good evidence of everyone was young and innocent. For me it’s a mirror in what i can see society. How something innocent got spoiled and became total cop hardcore.
Agnostic Front - 1986 Cable Access show by riton23
No Trend presenting in a nauseating scene the truth about Teenage Love as if they were left alone in an empty space but they are fine with it. It’s funny, brutal, i can dance to it, you can be frightened by it.
Just like how Flipper set themselves on loose and proved they don’t give a damn if they are disturbing as many minds as they can. Flipper understood the monotonic power of the television. That if you ever happen to be on screen then no one will make you leave before you finish what you want to say. They pushed all their brain hammering songs on an unprepared and unaware audience. If you are lucky and have a soft mind then this mechanic drilling won’t damage it, it will just give you a rough massage. Videodrome.
Lost Kids playing Cola Freaks and everybody is happy. Some danish avant-gardism, painted faces, moving melodies, harsh guitars. An abandoned disco is taken over by freaks who get high on Cola.
Blitz playing New Age on amphetamine, convincing enough so that bitter after taste of european speed appears at the back of your mouth, the drummer is standing, there isn’t any chair for him, the singer is chewing his inner wall of his cheek. The smack kicked in. They find every of the interviewers questions offensive. It’s again something that has went wrong, a reporter’s life is being threaten by speed skinheads who aggressively force amazing melodies into their really dumb music. Burgess nightmare transforms into reality, the generation that was crammed into the land of block of flats has came out, here’s your abandoned baby Maggie.
Even that is pure gold when Thin Lizzy’s performing some christmas carol with the Sex Pistols. As the drummer of the ’Pistols is trying to hit a soap bubbles with his sticks instead of his kit. It’s another knife in the back of punk, so what we are already zombies, still nota s bad as a butter commercial.
Stalin
performing for a huge audience that is sitting, teenage girls are trying to
catch up and clap in rhythm. They fail but nice of them to try. The show seems
like as the Fabulous Stains were reality. Even the make-up fits. There is
something weird in presenting this mess to a tamed crowd. Is this art? They
don’t get it still they accept it? Should it be shown? Too many questions.
There’s even a black and white, but beautify filmed sketch documentary on
japanese bands performing. My favorite is SS playing Mr. Twist. In every
endings of all their limbs there is concentration, lust and hunger for more. As
if this was a religion. It’s hardcore with surf guitars, weird punk with
serious agro fun. It’s noisy, weird music in which Japan was always one of the
best but SS executes its songs with a detailed care, it makes sure there isn’t
a second when tension goes away. Perfection.
There is more. Beat Happening performing Black Candy
Suburban Reptiles - Saturday Night Stay At Home
Suburban Laws - Janitor
Unit 3 with Venus - Beer
There is more. Beat Happening performing Black Candy
Suburban Reptiles - Saturday Night Stay At Home
Suburban Laws - Janitor
Unit 3 with Venus - Beer
Mercenárias - Polícia
Sarlo Akrobat
CCCP
and more and more and more. What is no more is television itself. It’s dead. Just as how some people think punk is. Well folks, we outlived MTV. Jello, I hope you are happy now.
