Punk is punk and has nothing to do w/electonic or hiphop.
deathtokoalas
i'd say punk has a lot to do with hip-hop, politically. further, this is a type of punk that was popular in california; rave/industrial was a type of punk that was popular in england.
happyhooliedaze
real punk is rebellious and libertarian,NOT political .Rave has NOTHING to to w/punk.Ravers are a bunch of drugged up rich kids that listen to talentless.pre-programmed garbage. Don`t talk about u don`t know as its obvious,ur "standin` on the outside,lookin` in".
deathtokoalas
the reality is that most punk, especially socal punk, was also put together by upper middle class kids. bad religion were centered around rich mommy's basement. they wrote most of their lyrics as a criticism of wealthy white culture from a first person perspective. great band, don't get me wrong, but bringing class politics into punk rock has always been perilous. joe strummer was actually an aristocrat.
rave is derived directly from industrial, which was an offshoot of punk. this is a question of historical fact. it's not a matter for debate.
ron paul is not a libertarian.
the major thing libertarians don't understand is that markets are inherently coercive. they base their ideas around concepts of freedom from the responsibility to contribute, rather than freedom to choose how to contribute responsibly. the end result is a freedom to exploit, rather than a freedom from exploitation.
Paul Boisvert
First off, all of your facts are correct and I'm sure others can agree on that. Also I completely agree with your opinion of Libertarian ethics. With that said, the subliminal opinion within your comment displays a vast amount of Class Envy. I think that your opinion of this band's writing material and your own personal beliefs make no sense because the lyrics to these songs can give you the proper information to fuel your conflagrations against the Upper-Middle/Upper Class. Also, your general thesis on discontent for Class Politics involved in Punk Rock music into a rant on Class Politics was completely hypocritical. I'm truly not trying to throw any hate in your direction because I can admit to suffering from Class Envy as well, of course those of us who have been truly affected by this recession have many of the same beliefs in that specific area. Good luck to you!
deathtokoalas
i was responding to a previous comment, which was a response to a previous comment of mine. the privacy settings that have come with these new youtube/google+ rules have created the problem of not being to reply to replies on your own comments. i think the context would clear things up.
but "class envy" is sort of a weird concept from a leftist perspective, where the aim is to abolish class. i think all leftists have something that is sort of like class envy, but that that isn't a very astute way to articulate it.
i mean, "class envy" is sort of the same concept as "distributive justice". i don't want to completely discard it as nonsense. it's just that, envy is an almost comical way to describe the process of recognizing the injustice of inequality.
Marios Laskaris
Who told you their parents were rich? They were shopping clothes from Walmart from what I know. I am not saying they were starving, but they were not rich either. Writing generic stuff without having done your research is unacceptable and far more off putting than middle class 17 year olds writing songs about what they think is wrong with the world!
deathtokoalas
i don't know or care where brett & friends shopped before they became very wealthy from epitaph records, but if you had done that basic "research" yourself, you'd realize that this entire genre is the reaction of upper middle class suburban white kids - and that, yes, bad religion is a band that mostly operated out of upper-middle class garages.
to be clear: these were guys that lived with their parents well beyond any socially normal cut-off point. they fit any conventional definition of the word "loser". self-releasing records isn't cheap, and they partially offset the cost of that by not taking responsibility for paying for living expenses like rent. if you share the mindset, you realize why climbing up social hierarchies isn't important to some people. but, socal punk as a reaction to suburbanite living (and this is a distinct thing from other kinds of punk) couldn't have happened otherwise. that's exactly what this is.
which is fine. i'm not really criticizing them for this, i'm just correcting somebody's flawed perception of punk having this kind of ghetto hip-hop romanticism. that's not true. the prominent, influential bands were mostly rich kids, which reflects our social reality. it would be a remarkable triumph of capitalism if kids could actually climb out of the projects with socially relevant art projects!
the reality is that it's how most of the audience connects with it. i grew up in a project, but by the time i was in my mid-teens i was living in a white, upper middle class reality. there were a lot of things i didn't like about that. socal punk bands like the offspring, the dead kennedys, bad religion and others helped me make sense of this upside-down reality i was living in and work my way through it's contradictions. upper middle class white kids are humans too; they need ways to cope with reality like everybody else. they may see some problems with the composition of the current system (even as it privileges them). more importantly, they may very well reject it on it's axiomatic basis. it's those upper middle class white kids that this was written by and for.
in a sense, understanding bad religion (and socal punk in general) is very simple: teach a generation of kids a moral code when they're growing up, then tell them to go out and break it in order to be "successful" and finally watch them react in confusion and horror when faced with such daunting contradictions worked into the basic process of survival. this whole cycle of events - from the moral teaching, to the opportunities revolving around being "successful" to the freedom to rebel - is a reflection of the privilege that socal punk was birthed within.
so, rather than reject the idea of these bands coming from wealth, you'd be better off to look into it a little further. it's kind of a vitally important aspect of actually understanding what this is/was all about.
Marios Laskaris
Upper middle class can be punk too. As Graffin says and I totally agree, a girl from an affluent religious family who consistently shows up to church on Sunday with her green mohawk and "Fuck Jesus" shirt is punk. But so is a biology professor who claims that Charles Darwin's ideas were wrong and has his own. Going against the grain is punk.
And what you're asking for/your idea of the "proper punk band" is impossible. You're asking for a bunch of 17 year olds that have no money to somehow aquire guitars and drums and convince Atlantic records (since epitaph would not exist in your "punk world") to release their album! Not possible! Most punk bands had to "create record labels", because no one would release a punk album from an unknown band back in 1975-1980. And if epitaph was not created, offspring, pennywise and NOFX and so many other punk bands probably wouldn't exist now and I definately wouldn't have been able to listen to them/discover them over here in Greece. So thank f**k for that! You need to think about reality too and not just theory!
I'll help you get an idea of their world back then. Sure they were not living in the streets like bums, but they were not living an untroubled life either:
''In 1976 I moved with my mom and brother to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Like millions of other victims of divorce in the 1970s I had to deal with the fact that my father was now living far away (in Racine, Wisconsin) and I would not get to see him as much as most other kids see theirs. This pain was compounded by the bewildering alienation I felt as a Wisconsin boy at Junior High School in the Los Angeles unified school district. I had entered a landscape unlike anything I experienced in my 11 years of life. I had dark brown fluffy, wavy hair, unfeatherable, impossible to mold into the cool rock-and-roll hairdos of the 1970s that were so popular. I wore velour kids shirts from K-Mart, and corduroys and because they were less expensive than jeans and we didn't have a lot of money. I had cheap shoes, usually also from K-Mart or Payless, always worn out, with goofy logos that emulated the real popular brands that all the other kids wore. I could see fellow 7th graders come to class with squinty eyes and euphoric smiles reeking of pot smoke. If you went along with the flow, unquestioning and complacent, you were accepted and rewarded with social status. If you questioned the norm, or went against the grain in any way, you were in for a rocky ride down the social ladder.
I came to be friends with a particular class of people who were labeled geeks, nerds, kooks, dorks, wimps, and pussies (or "wussies" if you combine these last two). We hung out together and did creative things after school...''
deathtokoalas
as pointed out in a previous comment, i was responding to a previous comment about prominent punk musicians and class. i've never presented an ideal of a punk band, or criticized anybody for the class they were born into. i was merely rejecting the idea that punk (and especially socal punk) had any kind of inherently "lower" class politics, for the sole reason that it just simply isn't true.
lukmruk
"ron paul is not a libertarian." oh sure he is randroid
deathtokoalas
right-wing libertarians tend to reject rand and objectivism. it isn't very good with ideas like the nap. and paul is racist, homophobic and sexist - ideas that tend to be weak in libertarian circles. libertarians tend to be in favour of gay marriage, to the extent that they acknowledge marriage at all. not paul. libertarians tend to be pro-choice on abortion. not paul. and libertarians tend to be "colour blind", they don't write up racist newsletters to try and control a white supremacist voting demographic.
paul, like rand, is just a peculiar type of american conservative. there's no value in analyzing him more deeply than that.
miaumiaucatmagician
you're making very good comments all the way
mattlaureys
here are some words from greg himself from "no direction" :
"a righteous student came and asked me to reflect
he judged my lifestyle was politically incorrect
I don't believe in self important folks who preach
no Bad Religion song can make your life complete"
Alfredo Rodriguez
The reality is, you have no clue. You weren't there when they wrote this, and fuck your political agenda. Fuck Joe Strummer, he wasn't even in a punk band. Sorry, but I can't even think of his useless bands name right now. Dance music, isn't punk rock, go rock the cashbah on the dance floor.
deathtokoalas
i don't really enjoy the clash, either, but there are a lot of other early punk bands (like the buzzcocks) that double very well as dance music. again, i don't know where people are going by disconnecting punk from dancing. what's the motive for that kind of revisionism? hardcore was something else, but it was as much of a reaction against punk as it was an evolution of it.
i also don't know why there's so much hostility to rave culture. ignoring the historical connections, just the similarities in outlook should be enough to see a set of political allies. they're both dead now, but rave was arguably more successful than punk in building a viable counter-culture. i guess there were punks that hated hippies, too, but they must have been no less close-minded.
randomusername987
I agreed with the first part, but how the hell was all the rest relevant?
deathtokoalas
i think it follows from the conversation. i mean, can you be more specific?
randomusername987
Well i was referring to the original post. What does ron paul etc have to do with Suffer?
mattlaureys
what are you even ranting on about ? that guy was making solid points and you start going on a rant talking about things that are completely insignificant. the reasons people disconnect genres from eachother is because they are diff genres and completely diff music duh. you're just ranting and linking everything to punk. and you say "they're both dead now" punk is very much alive tons of punk bands still making music and rave is also , still plenty of raves going on. you like to bash on punk don't you ?
Alfredo Rodriguez
I guess Bad Brains was also a rich band of white kids from the "burbs" as well. All these bands come from blue collar working families. Greg and Brett's parents are educators. Teachers don't make much money. Fuck Ron Paul fucking racist piece of shit!
deathtokoalas
the last time i checked, bad brains weren't skate punk from southern california. further, it's rather insensitive for you to suggest that teachers don't make a lot of money. relative to who? doctors? it's a certain sort of cluelessness that would argue that teachers are not comfortably in the middle class.
as mentioned repeatedly, that has nothing to do with what i was talking about. i really couldn't imagine dropping a bad religion record off at a mcdonalds and expecting the employees to connect to it. the songs do not discuss issues that are of relevance to the most desperate members of the working class. rather, they discuss topics that are of concern to the middle class children of teachers.
Sam steinhauer
Average yearly salary for a public school teacher in the US is about $50,000. However, Greg's parents were Professors which is most certainly an upper middle class job. Still don't get why this should change my opinion of the band.
deathtokoalas
i at no point suggested it should....