♫ I'm not a good person / Ask anyone who
knows me ♪”- Pat The Bunny, I’m Not A Good Person
There’s a conflation
between being simple, stripped down and straight-to-the-point and being
shit. The prog bands were known for their technical skill, and so the
punk response was strip rock back to three chords. If these prog bands
were being overblown with intellectual concept albums then punk would present
their views in 3 mins or less with a gutter view of the world. But does
this philosophy mean that punk was a poor man’s rock?
Sure as a genre, punks and
the punk scene were spat on by the establishment because the gobby kids spat
back. But it was originally a haven for the misfits and the outsiders who
were told they were worthless. In the industrial degradation of 1970s
Britain (to the backdrop of black bin bags piling in the streets) British youth
felt like garbage.
This despondency has been
knitted into the lining of punk across the decades. Across the pond, The
Replacements named themselves to imply they were a B-class band, drummer Chris
Mars saying it was “accurately describing our collective ‘secondary’
esteem”. The Cramps sang “I've got a garbage brain” on Human Fly and
years later Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong would question his sanity on
the pop-punk hit Basket Case. A huge proportion of The Ramones’ back
catalogue is about being a weirdo outsider (Cretin Hop, I Wanna Be Well,
Bad Brain, Now I Wanna Be A Good Boy) or directly referencing being mentally
unwell (Teenage Lobotomy, Shock Treatment, Psycho Therapy and I Wanna Be
Sedated).
Some songs oxymoronically
revel in being ‘wrong’. Nirvana’s Dumb has Kurt declare “I think I'm dumb”
and yet he concedes at the end “But I'm having fun”. The classic Sex
Pistols song Pretty Vacant has Rotten declare “And we don’t care!”, surely the
victory cry for 77’s snotty teens.
Some bands pin this crisis
of confidence on the system. Gang of Four’s post-punk masterpiece
Entertainment! is about commodification of humans. On Damaged Goods they
state “Damaged goods, send them back / I can't work, I can't achieve,
send me back.” On the same album The Clash moan about career
opportunities Strummer also questions “What the hell is wrong with me?” via
What’s My Name.
I want to highlight three
songs which have really stuck with me.
The first is by The
Menzingers. Masters at an uplifting anthem, Obituaries is no exception to
their discography. However the earworm chorus stamps “I will fuck this up
/ I fucking know it” over and over again. It feels like failure is an
energy. Not deflated, but destructive and that confident outburst makes
it seem like the outcome, “I am just freaking out, yeah I'll be fine” is worth
fighting for. I Don’t Wanna be An Asshole anymore is another Menzinger’s
song with a light at the end of a shitty tunnel.
The second is by Pat The
Bunny. Loads of his Wingnut Dishwasher Union songs have this destructive
quality, but I especially love the lyrics of I’m Not A Good Person that go “I'm
not a good person / Ask anyone who knows me / I'm mean and
bitter / And a failure at everything that I say I believe”.
Also check out the full album Probably Nothing, Possibly Everything. The
way Pat sings his lyrics seems so fucking bitterly honest. His chords and
his voice are drenched in a venom that it far removed from a pop-punk
grumpiness.
Thirdly I recently came
across a band from Leeds called Daves. In The Menzinger’s style, they
have a track on their EP called Change which shouts loud “I’m not ready to
admit / I think I’m a piece of shit”.
So why do I listen to
these self-deprecating songs? When it’s so easy for me to believe that I
am rubbish. I can’t remember a time I didn’t think I was a Bad Person
because of some drilled-in sense of binary Good/Bad. And this sense of Badness
gets conflated with being wrong, getting things wrong, or not doing things
right. This guilt leads me to think I’m worthless, useless, inadequate
and better off not being around. To quote Martha, “to tell the truth I’m
struggling today/Why’s it gotta feel so sad?” Thoughts are not
facts, and yet it seems one central tenant of the Universe I am shit, the one
cosmic certainty I can hang my life upon. That’s because, in a kind of
Cartesian solipsism, I can only rely on this within my head.
So I think it helps, like
all art, to find someone that feels the same, and is sharing. I do worry
that this self-deprecating is influential. It just helps dig the negative
grooves in my brain, reinforces the pillars that prop up my personality.
It doesn’t feel that healthy.
But a friend of mine said,
whether you say something negative, you need to say the opposite. You
need to counteract the strangling voice in your head that whispers, dominates
and demands. And yes, I do listen to raised-fist-victory-to-us
songs. But also maybe these self-destructive songs are healthy too.
Because they prove someone has taken stock of their world. Wrote it
down. Wrapped some chords around it. It’s identifiable, it exists
and it can be sung about. My anxieties are a thought in chords, and they
can be sung out.
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