On Propagandhi
♠
I was fifteen when I first heard the band Propagandhi. I remember holding the album “Less Talk, More Rock” in my hands, and reading the wheel of big black letters printed on the disc’s surface: “Animal-Friendly – Gay-Positive – Pro-Feminist – Anti-Fascist.”
I was confused. I only had a vague idea of what a fascist was. I didn’t know any gay people and I was at an age when I certainly didn’t want to be associated with any. I was aware of feminism, but this was a band full of dudes, right?
I realize now that I looked upon that disc with a small amount of fear, as if it would tattoo on my brain unwanted thoughts and images that would last a lifetime. But my new friend Dave had lent the album to me and Dave was older and did a lot drugs. Needless to say, I admired him greatly.
In a parallel world, Dave could have handed me a record by Bob Dylan or Joy Division. As much as I looked up to him at the time, I would have listened to these records and given them their due. Who knows what strange vistas would have opened up before me? Who knows what postures I would have adopted? I was young and unformed in every sense. My cheeks were still chubby and my features were as fluid and fleeting as the days. I had no tastes to speak of, and at that particular moment, I could have liked anything, become anything. In the world of Joy Division, I would have walked to classes with “Disorder” plugged in my ears; I would have swooned alone in my bedroom; I would have danced herky-jerky. In Bob Dylan’s world, far in the future, “Like a Rolling Stone” would have come on the stereo, and as the chorus broke open and the harmonica swelled, I would have felt again what it was like to be fifteen and free.
But in this world I was given Propagandhi. And in this world, when I hear the song, “Stick the Fucking Flag up Your Goddamn Ass, You Son of a Bitch,” I have to sit down and brace myself before the vast sea of my young life washes over me.
At the age of fifteen I became obsessed with Propagandhi. Not only Propagandhi, but other punk bands, and while that may sound cool, I assure you it wasn’t. I didn’t listen to The Sex Pistols or The Stooges or The Ramones. In fact, I hated the Sex Pistols, had never heard of The Stooges, and thought the Ramones were boring. I listened to NOFX. I listened to Screeching Weasel. I listened to a whole slew of pop-punk bands that had their heyday, or rather their flash in the pan, during the mid- to late 1990s. These were bands that were signed to Lookout! or Fat Wreck Chords, bands that had song titles like “Don’t Touch My Car” and “You Put Your Chocolate in My Peanut Butter.” Nasally vocals and three-cord minimalism were common motifs, as were bratty lyrics. Admire these gems:
Once every 24 hours
I'm supposed to take a shower
That's not the way I do it
Do it, do it
Personal hygiene
Is the last thing on my mind
I don't want to do it
Do it, do it
It doesn't make a difference to me
Everyday I do the same old thing
So why should I have to be clean?
Those dreaded Wednesdays and Saturdays
Also known as shower days
I hate them
Bands like this do not age well. There is a difference between channeling youthfulness and being juvenile, a difference between screaming into a microphone and mooning the audience. If punk rock is the ardent, angst-filled voice of the young, then the giants in punk rock lore, like The Ramones and The Stooges and The Sex Pistols, expressed it in ways that have resonance for adults and teens alike. Their true descendents, like Nirvana, carry the mantle of punk while the others are perceived as bastards and wayward sons. Included in this latter group are the bands I listened to, like NOFX and Lagwagon, Rancid and No Use for a Name—and yes, Propagandhi. These are the bands that you slough off once you grow up. They’re like slap bracelets—parts of your youth that you feel no nostalgia for whatsoever. In fact, if I had the ability to scrub one memory from my mind, it would be difficult to choose between the image of myself jumping on my bed and playing air guitar to No Use for a Name and the one of myself slapping a pink bracelet around my wrist in junior high before going to a dance party.
But Propagandhi was slightly different from the Fat Wreck Chords mold, even if they appeared on their compilation records. “How to Clean Everything” (1993) was Propagandhi’s first album. It is the most NOFX-ish of the discography: short, fast songs, nasally vocals, hammering drums, and pop-friendly licks. But for rare examples (like “Ska Sucks,” an evergreen sentiment), Propagandhi did not cater to the brat-rock mode. Lyricist and vocalist/guitarist Chris Hannah—and Propagandhi as a whole—viewed music as a form of social activism. Hannah wrote scathing lyrics aimed at the
Welcome to this world, imputed identity
Born, tagged, tattooed, pacified
Generously bestowed my rights and privileges replete with
Arbitrary values ascribed
There’s nothing I can tell you. There’s nothing I can say
Stunted conversation, censored thought
I’m completely free, at liberty, guaranteed
Unless of course you decide I’m not
But I’ll not be resigned to fall in line behind you
You’ve taught me to be a pawn
It won’t last for long
Those who see through the lies are quickly gagged and bound
Ambition realized: tear the whole fucking thing down
And from “Head? Chest? Or Foot?”:
They subsidize your nightclubs and they subsidize your malls
They herd and brand the masses within painted prison walls
Til your freedom of assembly becomes the missiles they create
Or just mass delusion dancing to this music that you fucking hate
One future. Two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
“They”? “You”? Who were these people? If I ever have a fifteen-year-old son squint malevolently at me as he leaves the house for school, I suppose I’ll know. And at the time, these simplistic formulations and angry lashings-out made perfect sense to me. The government was evil, it went without saying. Capitalism sucked. Americans were neo-colonialists, of course. Propagandhi was the perfect bridge between slap-bracelet innocence and an innocence in which I imagined I was wide awake and in the trenches. And the music was as poppy, bouncy, and head-bang-able as the lyrics were dire. I put songs like “Middle Finger Response” on mix-tapes for girls I liked.
While other bands of this era eventually languished in their fart jokes, Propagandhi matured. By the time its third album “Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes” (2001) was released, the music had changed. Gone was the nasally voice: Hannah’s rose to a higher register that was knife-like in its ability cut through the band roaring behind him. The hooks were still catchy and hum-able, but the riffs were faster, heavier, verging on heavy metal, and blistering guitar solos were added to the arsenal. Gone was John Samson, the sensitive, poetical bassist of whom Dave used to giggle and say, “He must be the gay one,” and in was Todd “The Rod” Kowalski, whose burly timbre gave Propagandhi’s sound some heft and threw off the last vestiges of its
But the lyrics, for the most part, were the same. Hannah switched to an essay format—and one of the joys of listening to Propagandhi is to hear him scrunch and stretch unmusical syllables so that they lock like clockworks into the rhythm. His grievances were also more intelligently formulated, but the same enemies were ever present. At a time when I was growing increasingly embarrassed by my Che Guevara T-shirt and reconsidering my commie sympathies, it seemed entirely unsubtle and a bit childish to rage at the injustices of history, the hypocrisies of state government, and the inequities of capitalism. And after all, when it comes down to it, they’re just a punk band. From “Mate Ka Moris Ukun Rasik An”:
I'm still humbled by it all: around the same time that I was riding with no hands, busting windows and getting busy behind the sportsplex (with Labonte's older sister decked out in her Speedos), Bella [of East Timor] was flinching from the sting of Depo Provera “family planning,” her own Pearl Harbor and a holocaust spanning 25 years to the rest of her life. A prison my country underwrote in paradise.
From “
And I drink myself to sleep, because I'm losing faith that any of us will ever amount to anything more than reluctant human subsidies, the moving parts in a death-machine, protesting their complicity, but waiting for somebody else to throw their bodies on the churning gears.
Fine. He may be right. But what a narrow worldview! For as much as the members of Propagandhi believe they are unveiling the world for what it really is, for as much as they believe they are gathering evidence from the depths of history and across the globe, their views are cramped by a belief in an overarching, all-consuming system of power and greed. In a broad, vulgar swath, it can explain everything. I could have believed in such a system only as a kid—much in the same way I could have believed in its antidote, in an egalitarian, utopian society. And what of love, of jealousy, of the numinous maze of our inner lives? The world is much bigger than what Propagandhi recognizes.
Yet I still listen to Propagandhi. The latest album, “Potemkin City Limits” came out in 2006 and I did not hesitate to buy it. It was not only for nostalgia’s sake, though that was a large factor. Nostalgia is perhaps why I have never been very successful converting friends to Propagandhi. It must sound completely different to their ears because they never heard it as I did, on the cusp of adulthood, when my life was changing and I felt like I really had taken the red pill. Propagandhi was a part of that, both in sounds and words. The music has the quality of a secret language, a private keepsake that no one knows of but me and a few others, like Dave, which makes it something that I’m happy to say is my own. In this sense though, my dedication to the band is more accidental than anything else. What if it was Joy Division instead?
But there was something else as well. I wanted to see if Propagandhi had changed. I wanted to see if time had softened them as it had the rest of us. From “A Speculative Fiction”:
We got a shepherd's sling and five stones in our hand and the battle of 1812 lives in our hearts. We don't care if we're destroyed. We'll never capitulate. We'll take the whole fucking world down; down with us in flames.
Nope. And those lyrics sound ridiculous, I know. But as the drums slammed down and the backing vocals soared over Hannah’s snipes, I couldn’t help but lament, just a little bit, the loss of my conviction, no matter how misplaced, and a time when I was actually sure of something.
—RS