So we're staying with John Peel and the late eighties for another day. If the Boy ever asks, "What did you do in the second summer of love, Dad?" I'll be able to play him Extreme Noise Terror's Carry on Screaming. I'll also mention that the first song to be dedicated to him on national radio, when he was two weeks old, was Napalm Death's You Suffer, thanks to Gideon Coe.
I'm assuming that, should I ever be so foolish as to play Extreme Noise Terror or Napalm Death as a kind of boast, the Boy will be able to counter with something Much More Disturbing from his own generation. What moral panics can we look forward to in the early 2020's, I wonder?
The start of the record sounded remarkably tame to me (bearing in mind the claim on the back "Probably the loudest record you'll ever own"). I wondered if it's the nature of culture that twenty years is sufficient to tame anything. That was until I got beyond The Stupids and Electro Hippies, the latter being actually rather charming in their literal telling of inconvenient truths:
we're not just cranks, we really care
but it must be done and must be soon
cos tomorrow's too late you stupid goon
Indeed it is/was. You, me, and everybody, we're stupid goons. Fact.
After those first two acts, things step up a gear, or two. And if you're wondering how I manage to quote the songs, yes, there's a lyric sheet. Very important for accessibility and getting the message across. There's no other way I'd know that the second verse of Napalm Death's is:
THERE IS A FASCIST
INSIDE YOUR HEAD
CONTROLLING YOUR THOUGHTS
UNTIL YOUR DEATH (emphasis in original)
Of course, the verse falls foul of the old homunculus argument in philosophy of mind (simply put: who's controlling the thoughts of the fascist — does he also have someone inside his head, and so on ad infinitum?), but I think I know where they're coming from. In case you didn't get the point of You Suffer, here is a subtitled live version.
There's definitely something refreshing and cleansing about the intention behind a lot of this music, albeit a hardcore vegan puritanical anarchist intention. That comes into sharp relief when one of the bands lets the side down, as do Doctor and the Crippens with their song Pink Machine Gun, which, sadly, is about exactly what you'd fear a song with that title would be about. After that, the indignation they express about "slug pellet poisoning" and "multiple trowel wounds" in Garden Centre Massacre somehow seems insincere.
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