Comments on: EMPTY RITUALS- Dressed to kill, b/w Hardcore 7″ (Mental Assault Records, USA, 1984)

By: Good bad Music for bad, bad Times! / SS DECONTROL- Get it away 12″EP (X-Claim Records, USA, 1983)

Tue, 11 May 2010 19:14:44 +0000

[...] You cannot argue the overwhelming power of “Get it away”, the 2nd release by Boston’s notorious SOCIETY SYSTEM DECONTROL. Test it yourself: Turn up the volume to a considerable point, play these songs one after another and then take any other record and spin it next. If it’s not falling flat in comparison, it’s gotta be one of those truly monolithic Hardcore classics like Die Kreuzen’s first, “Tied down” by Negative Approach or “Kings of Punk” by Poison Idea etc. If you want your Hardcore to show a certain level of technical perfection, a full frontal and pounding production and aggression at the brink of a killing spree, there are not too many other records like this. On the other hand, Springa’s tortured vocal chords, the absolutely merciless guitar by Al Barile and the band’s general attitude and the narrowness for which SSD pretty much stand always kept me from playing this EP constantly over the past decades. Take Die Kreuzen for instance: That LP is of an incredible brutality, but it leaves you room to breath because the band manages to deliver different patterns of emotionality that still may be very tense all the time. Not so with SSD: Unfiltered aggression, a bulldog vehemence is the concept and in a way, “Get it away” falls victim to its own consequence. How they violate the Buzzcock’s rather buoyant “No Reply” and make it sound like a war anthem is something that has got to be heard to be believed. Contrary to popular believe, “Glue” is not a song about sniffing glue, unfortunately. Rather it’s one of the genre’s typical ways of dealing with Hardcore’s main issue, the suppressed homosexuality. I sometimes think the panic fear of cigs (fags!) and beer bottles articulated by straight edgers is nothing but a culturally transformed homophobia and as such reveals the obsession with the male genitalia. “Come up here with us, emotions let them go, gotta be real hard (…)” from the song “Xclaim” ….. Now guess what “Forced down your Throat” is about. Read and hear more here. [...]

By: Admin

Admin — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:05:32 +0000

There’s one copy of this great 7″ on ebay right now:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170425226227&refid=store

By: What's the Truth?

What's the Truth? — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:53:23 +0000

I don’t imagine there’s an English translation of this Darwin and Foucault book out, as I haven’t been able to find one, but that sounds fascinating. I really should start working on French and German…

I’ve been reading something along similar lines recently, this book called Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze by Keith Ansell-Pearson, which establishes a conversation between Deleuze’s ideas and modern evolutionary theory. It highlights the way in which Deleuze’s biology-concerned influences (Nietzsche, Bergson, Monod, etc.) played a role in his thought, but also what his thought and evolutionary biology can contribute to each other now (evolution as difference and repetition and so on.) Really fascinating stuff! I don’t know if it’s been translated from English yet, but I would certainly recommend it.

By: justin

justin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:41:46 +0000

I’m just stuck on music being some kind of evolution, maybe both literally and metaphorically. But with my burned out mind I’m talking in terms of addition and subtraction, while you guys are capable of talking in terms of applied calculus. Genres of music are born, die, morph, resurface for a variety of reasons. I think that the younger generation, those somewhat out of the mainstream, are struggling for an identity. Let’s face it, as far the 90′s and 2000′s it was pretty stagnant when compared to other generations. My crystal ball says that this imitation is going to lead to something new.

By: Admin

Admin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:39:47 +0000

Great input, WTT. You’re absolutely right about the Spencer-connection: “survival of the fittest” first appeared in the 5th edition (the german translations translated it as “(…) of the strongest” until pretty recently, from what I remember from my Social Darwinism studies).

Phillip Sarasin, Swiss historian, recently compared the evolutionary process (mutation / selection) with Foucault’s concepts of power and history and such (“Darwin & Foucault”), arguing that they both followed a similiar conception in terms of imaginations of bodies (discourse and evolution as acts of “cold labor”).

By: What's the Truth?

What's the Truth? — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:32:15 +0000

This isn’t entirely relevant, but I will make it so…It was actually Herbert Spencer, considered the founder of Social Darwinism, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” and Darwin later adopted (unfortunately) it for his 5th edition of Origin of Species.

But the beauty of evolution as we now understand it is precisely that it’s not about the survival of the fittest, but about the survival of the “fit enough.” There is no single ideal form for any particular context/environment, and so a real diversity of forms can coexist, influence each other, and participate in this larger process without a cuthroat, completely individualistic or racist logic. I think it’s that self-organized diversity that makes genres like punk so exciting in their early days. So many ideas that haven’t been formalized, so much change, exchange, and creativity. That’s all for my science moment…

By: Admin

Admin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:21:11 +0000

It’s getting a bit scary here – from conspiracy theories to social darwinism …. You weren’t serious about that “natural selection” thing, were you, Justin? Just to prove my anal character: Darwin didn’t say the “strong” survive, but the “fittest”.

By: justin

justin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:47:44 +0000

Just to show you how much of an idiot I am, I submitted half the same comment twice.

By: justin

justin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:46:31 +0000

I kind of liked what Jerry said about the “global mainstream”. I don’t know about that being part of some conspiracy, I think it’s more blatant than that. It’s always been about control. The bottom line is that most people are idiots (myself included maybe), gotta be somewhere in the range of 99.999999999999%. We eat that shit up that “they” feed us. In fact we like that shit so much that we decide to grow our own crop. At various points in history people strike out on their, ignoring the crops their neighbors are cultivating and choosing to plant something completely different.

Some things remind me of reinventing the wheel.

You know there was something nice about the days of reading zines, ordering demos, trading tapes and so on. A little more adventurous. I’m telling you Erich, the answer lies in the evolution of music, natural selection, only the strong survive.

By: justin

justin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:35:32 +0000