Handed down to me like some thoughtful blur

The Germs - No God

When Dave Van Ronk died in 2002, I read an obituary that discussed his early fascination with the U.K. folk ballad tradition. Dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these narrative, mostly unaccompanied songs were collected by Francis James Child in the late 1800s, preserving them at a time when younger generations had stopped learning to sing them from their grandparents. The eight LP collection of ballads sung by A.L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl brought the songs to life for Van Ronk in the 1950s, and he traveled to London to hear these folk songs firsthand. When he connected with the young English and Scottish singers continuing this tradition, they were thrilled to meet an American. "Tell us all about Woody Guthrie!" they asked. "Do you know Harry Smith? We love the American Anthology of Folk Music." If Van Ronk was stunned to learn that the new U.K. singers weren't so interested in their own musical inheritance, he was similarly surprised that they were more aware of American traditional music than he was. Their admiration for this, his local history, refocused him on the American work songs, protest music, and storytelling that became the core of his career. 

Around that time I was in touch with these kids in Oxford who did a label called Youth Club Tape Club and we traded records. At first it was stuff we'd put out, but then it turned into stuff we found around town. They would find cheap Raincoats or Liliput 7"s and I would send them back the Proletariat LP or the Contortions "Buy" with the corner punched. The undervalued UK records for the undervalued US records. We both thought it was really funny, and I kept thinking about that Dave Van Ronk story, wondering if I was part of the process of ignoring the records closest to me, of fixating on things from far away. In response, I mailordered a Wipers t-shirt from Greg Sage, wrote a fan letter to one of the members of Reversible Cords, and started finding new things to love about the Minutemen.

A couple of months ago, my friend Jeremy asked me to come on his radio show to play some songs and tell stories. He started a list of songs we could play and asked me to add some favorites. I put Bomber Jackets, Way Through, and Vital Idles. Honey Bane, Huggy Bear, Sara Goes Pop and Gareth Williams. He wrote back and was like, "hi let's see if we can open this up a little bit" and I laughed so hard at this reminder of my continued fixation on music from the U.K., I really thought it had passed. 

One of the new LPs I sent to Youth Club Tape Club was for a band I sang in, and I remember being anxious about the English kids listening to it. I figured they'd see through my mimicry of the singers I liked, dismiss it as a crummy American attempt at affecting a kind of British post-punk sound. A year or so after that band broke up, Dana and I were talking about why I didn't love how I sounded on it, and I had an epiphany. "Instead of listening to the Fall and Wire, I should've been listening to the Germs." I thought the detachment and enunciation of those British singers was the right model for voicing my discontent. Their choice to cram a bunch of words in each line, to signal tough feelings via breathlessness rather than volume, felt closest to my panic in those years, and to the way I thought I should resist. A lot of words, a lot of information. 

What I realized, what I was trying to say to Dana, is that instead of convincing, I should have been taunting. Ideas are great, but so is feeling. Darby Crash's lyrics are SO GOOD but he communicates so much more through a snarl, through repeated syllables and the sound of his tongue stopping up his throat. He starts "No God" with a rising buzz that sounds like a kid imitating a motorcycle driving by. The broken way he drops the word "worry" signifies more actual dread than the word itself. There's a part in that oral history book about the Germs where someone recalls how surprised all their friends were was when the "Lexicon Devil" 7" came out with the printed lyrics, and how thoughtful the lyrics were. They said something like, "I didn't really even know there were words!" But I wish there'd been a follow up quote where someone else said, "but no one was surprised at the content of the songs." Because no one should have to read the lyrics to unpack Darby's exasperation, his knowledge of the systems operating on him, his refusal to obey. Maybe if I'd come across Van Ronk's origin story a little earlier, I would've taken the lesson to pay attention more to my immediate surroundings and legacy, and probably would've done a better job of voicing my own indignation.