Chaos in Tejas lives up to its name: One Nazi skinhead band dropped from music fest lineup, but questions still remain

One of my weird compulsions is to listen to this ridiculous cash-in covers series called Punk Goes Pop. For the most part, it’s a fascinating look at how meaningless both of those terms are in that context — hearing some band called The Ready Set play “Airplanes” by B.O.B. and making it even more poppy than the original recording is proof that, I dunno, kids today are gonna grow up and have no idea what punk rock means to old-timers or something.

Still, every so often you get a band who decides to totally metalcore out a Taylor Swift song, and even though it’s obviously formulaic, there’s something inherently satisfying about it anyway.

150 Favorite Songs: #112, “Too Hardcore For You,” We Suck (2000)

Punk rock didn’t belong to me in high school. I listened to a lot of bands that I found out about from Get In The Van, but it was a secret thing for me. It had to be — at my high school, most of the punkers were skinheads, and we didn’t get along. Sporting so much as a Clash t-shirt when I was fifteen might have gotten my teeth stomped out. (For a vast-majority white, suburban town, my high school had a lot of sectarian violence. At the summer fair one year, one of the kids in my clique — the theater nerds — stabbed a skinhead kid at the fountain after he was attacked. When Columbine happened a year later, I felt like I understood how something like that could come out of a bunch of kids who found a way to hate each other based on cultural identifiers even though they were all white and middle-class. Even if my conclusions ended up being wrong.)

Anyway — punk rock didn’t belong to me when I was a teenager. I had my cassette copy of Who’s Got The 10 1/2 tucked in my sock drawer, but I didn’t identify with punker kids. Not until I moved to the border town of McAllen, Texas, after I graduated.

McAllen was as different from the whitebread Indiana suburb of Chicago that I went to high school in as you could get. There, suddenly, I was in a demographic minority — white people were less than 10% of the population. I have a theory that the punk rock kids in McAllen were much more accepting and open-minded than the ones in Highland because they weren’t all a bunch of white kids looking for some sort of identity. (It was still cliquish, of course, but all scenes are.) When I first got there, I fell in with a group who reminded me of my theater-kid friends, who seemed to have a beef with the punkers, and I thought the dynamic would be the same, but it was a much more friendly rivalry. Eventually, I defected.

A big part of why I defected was Marc, who sang in We Suck. He was an inspiring dude — still is — and his band sounded like the way I felt. Because it’s angry and what 18 year old boy isn’t a little bit angry? But it’s hopeful, and that’s important, and angry at the right things, and unafraid to call out what it was angry about. They wrote and played a batch of awesome South Texas hardcore punk rock songs, and I saw them dozens of times when I lived down on the border.

“Too Hardcore For You” was their signature song. And when you listen to it, you can understand why. It’s loud and the guitar is a little bit like a buzzsaw, but the thing that always struck me about it is just how fucking catchy it is. That hook — Marc screams it like he’s gonna kill for it, and Chris, the guitar player, does everything he can to make it ugly. Andrew, the drummer, and Lucas, the bassist, beat the hell out of the rhythm, kicking it up as fast as they can — and it’s still, ultimately, a pop song. A great pop song. One I’ve had a mic shoved in my face to shout the chorus to (along with everybody else in the room) more times than I can count.

My history with the band that was We Suck — who later become The Malcontent Party, and now Beyond Gods And Empires — is as extensive as any history I’ve got with anybody. I’ve spent weeks in a van with those dudes. I’ve come within inches of fistfights with strangers in the Deep South with them at my back. I’ve seen a whole bunch of the country with them. I’ve stood onstage in a room while they and a handful of other people watched, and the other people started throwing full beer cans and lit cigarettes at my head. I’ve watched as they’ve played to rooms packed and empty, in shitty small towns and in great cities, probably a hundred times by now, maybe more. I have watched all of them go from kids to grown-ass men who evolved, the way that we all do, subtly and slowly so that we barely even notice it. I’ve seen Marc go from screaming through his throat to bellowing out of his belly. These dudes are in every way my family.

And I love what they do now. But when I think about the music that’s meant the most to me in my life, that came to me at a time when I needed a home, needed to trust that I could meet people who would be like family to me, would still be in my life a decade later, that I could find that in stupid punk rock after feeling excluded from it as a teenager — I think about Marc shoving the mic in my face, and then Kari’s, and then Senia’s, and then whoever was next to her, and it still sounds legit to me. “Too Hardcore For You” — it sounds exclusionary, but it wasn’t meant that way. It just meant you had to step up.

150 Favorite Songs: #146, “I Still Love You Julie,” Against Me! (2000)
I was never deeply attached to Against Me!, so I didn’t mind their metamorphosis from the sort of band that made songs that sounded like “I Still Love You Julie” to the kind they are now, the sort of epic, Springsteen-y thing they’ve become. But this song always meant a lot to me.

That opening line — “Last night, a room full of drunks / sang along to the songs I never had the courage to write” — it’s something I’ve always related to. Another one: “We’re not going to call everyone on their shit tonight / even though half of you won’t even smile / the next time we pass on the street.” I’ve never really felt comfortable in the punk rock scenes I’ve found myself a part of. It always felt like at least half of what I was doing there was anthropology, and the scene politics and constant one-upping that occurs among certain members of those communities are just exhausting. And so I liked that there was a punk rock song by a band that was very much a part of those sort of insular scenes that sang about it honestly. Because a part of me, sure, wanted to be the one whose songs everyone was singing along to. And a part of me knew that even some of the people I’d had some really positive one-on-one conversations with would treat me like an asshole if their friends were around.

This song came out when I was 20, and I was just about past trying to find a home for myself in anyone’s punk rock scene at that point, but the thing I really love about it is that it acknowledges all of the things I felt — but it doesn’t define those communities by it. Because despite all of the rampant problems with punk rock scenes, and the parts of it that can be really harmful to the girls and boys who end up on the wrong side of the politics and various cults of personality, it’s also a thing that changes, and saves, a lot of lives. A lot of outcast kids who need some sort of community find it there — and so we’re not gonna call everyone on their shit tonight. Yeah, it’s probably a scam. We can admit it. But: “Maybe somehow this scam will still save us all,” he sings, and for a lot of people I knew — not me, and not everyone — it did. Keeping your eyes open about a thing’s flaws without dismissing it is, I think, one of the keys to learning how to conscientiously enjoy a lot of things in life. And maybe it’s a way to try to make those things better, too.

150 Favorite Songs: #147, “New Noise,” Refused
Man, this song sounded like it came right the fuck out of the future the first time I heard it. That’d have been, what, 1999 or so? And nothing anyone else was doing sounded anything like it. Guitars and electronic instruments and shouty voices — all that shit was old hat, but nobody was using them like this. Nobody was trying to say anything with them, and nobody was trying to make a point about what music had the potential to sound like in the future because of it. Refused called the album that “New Noise” came from The Shape Of Punk To Come, and that’s the sort of shit that would be super arrogant, except that, in hindsight, the only thing that they got wrong was that they were too optimistic.

Because “New Noise” is more interesting than so much of what followed it. Refused laid out a blueprint here of what aggressive music could be — political, but not preachy; full of electronic elements, but not just pointless appropriation; big and noisy and angry, but joyful; personal, but not self-obsessed. I wish that “punk to come” had followed that blueprint, because most of what we got were boys talking about how much they hated their ex-girlfriends, or affecting the disaffected attitudes that people had played up twenty years prior. Most of the bands who wanted to explode wanted to explode in ways that bands had been exploding for a very long time. Refused wanted to make new noise. And to be sure that people would notice, they called it “New Noise,” called the album The Shape Of Punk To Come like a direct challenge, and no one took them up on it. Which is too bad — the record is twelve years old now, and it still sounds like it came from the future.