Slighcarp and Grimshaw

I left the house today to learn about my new job assignment. Today is one of the april days referred to in the childhood ditty, and remarkably crappy. While doing the dishes, I decided to put on Kiss It Goodbye’s only lp, called She loves me, She loves me not…. Understand that when I first developed my own taste in music to the point of having to seek out stores that would sell records from places like Victory Records, I wanted to listen to things that would be the aural equivalent of getting whiplash from being hit in the head with a brick. My friend Casey was very into Rage Against the Machine, and when we would drive to soccer games, that’s the sort of thing that he would want to listen to, whereas I wanted to listen to Deadguy’s Fixation on a Co-worker or whatever-the-hell-tripe Earth Crisis was shouting about at the time. Straightedge as I was by simple default, I wasn’t interested in the message of going vegan and hitting people who weren’t with bats. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

But really, Deadguy was where it was at. I was listening to a lot of punk music concurrently, but So-Cal punk, with harmonies and a tempering of anger with melody and, from time to time, some hope. Deadguy was the first east coast hardcore band I got into, and from the word go, there was something new and troubling about it–and who could resist such weight and sludge coupled with what sounded like true bitterness and rage about nothing in particular? Sure, there was the song about having a crappy office job, another about some girl that done someone wrong, but it is only now, actually thinking about it, that it strikes me as extraordinarily existentialist, even wallowing in serious nihilism on occasion. They were singing about how unbelievably fucked up it felt constantly, simply to be alive and conscious in New Brunswick, NJ in 1995. And the guitar sounded like a garrote and the vocals were a rope fraying itself into its constituent bloody threads. It was really just the thing to get me through the last couple of years of high school. If I remember correctly, it was really the first record that really gave my parents pause.

And now, as I listen to it again, I’m not sure it was evil, but it certainly sounded it. Today, at 29, when I have the wherewithal and the means I didn’t really have in high school to burn down a whole town, I could totally talk myself into burning down just one house. I suspect, in a couple of years, by the time we have kids, I won’t even be able to be talked into the one. Man, I’m getting old.