Still apolitical?

Today at the record store just plopped down between aisles I found a crate of old issues of Maximum Rocknroll, the monthly bible of my teenage years, the virtually undisputed voice of punk culture. I thumbed through the big stack and ended up picking up a few of them, each by the list of bands interviewed within. Scrotum Grinder, R.A.M.B.O., Tragedy, The Oath, etc. (I was looking for a Spits interview but no luck). Yellowed newsprint from the years of punk that I missed, too busy at being a mature college student. I sat down with coffee to read them, not for nostalgia’s sake or a quarter-life crisis thing, but because I still like punk rock, maybe more now than I ever did. Punk, it seems, has survived irony when it seems like nothing else has been spared.

Maximum Rocknroll isn’t really known for its variation: MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, invariably, at the top, a list of bands inside, sometimes a special feature; “Marriage, Mortgage, and Punk” for instance. Always newsprint, always black and white, always left. I didn’t really notice until I flipped through them that one of the issues I bought was from November 2001. On the cover, the band list, usually dominant, sits tiny, right beneath the title; rather than somebody screaming into a microphone, the main image is of a standing soldier with no helmet, loosely holding a rifle, looking down, with the words “still APOLITICAL?” This was the first issue to go to print following the World Trade Center attacks; the second, now better-known, infamous September 11th on record.

I won’t be the guy who talks about what that day was like. Honestly, I was bored. But reading the news clippings in MRR now five years later, ones like “Bush is Walking Into a Trap” and “Terrorism, Television and the Rage for Vengeance,” I feel l ike even the biggest pessimists, the most strident anarchists, and the most zealous critics at the time undershot how wide in scope American vengeance would reach. Over the past five years the global war has ground on and deepened, each step seeming more normal than the last even as many of us resisted. Now that we seem to have grown used to the Iraq war, like one might grow used to the worsening cough of a terminal disease, are we still undershooting how much worse it can still get? We’re still apolitical..

I'm a nuclear/nucular bomb

In the chorus of the song "Nuclear Bomb" by the Spits, two vocalists trade the following lines:
A: "I'm a nucular bomb"
B: "I'm a nuclear bomb"
A: "I'm a nucular bomb"
B: "I'm a nuclear bomb"
A: "I'm a nucular bomb"
B: "I'm a nuclear bomb"
And then in uni son:
A + B: "I'm a nucular, I'm a nucular bomb!"

But get this: they each deliberately pronounce it differently, and then sing it in unison, again differently. This might not seem that noteworthy to most peopl e. For instance, when I called Mary about it at 7 AM once, I was halfway to my parents' house in Virginia, driving on the D.C. beltway:
John: "No, but the one guy says 'nuclear,' and the other says 'nucular,' and then they sing it together, but they still pronounce it differently!"
Mary (tired): "Okay."
John: "But the syllables kind of collide when they say it together."
Mary (tired, unsure of why I'm calling so early about this): "Huh."
Coffee (in the form of John's body): "But it's so DUMB! Why would it be so dumb unless it was on purpose and therefore more awesome than anything ever?"
Mary: "Are you driving safely?"
John: "Oh, well there's a traffic jam. A tanker exploded on I-95. Isn't that crazy? Oh, you know what else? That first song on the Turbone gro record is about pizza!" (sings a few bars)

As you can see I'm a very good conversationalist. But the point here is that the conscious choice to have the correct pronunciation of a word (especially one which often proves to be such a point of contenti on) collide so awkwardly with its misfit twin, in such a doofy context, this cannot be underestimated. These might literally be the dumbest lyrics in history, but so meticulously calculated... well, I hate the band Sublime, the word 'sublime,' and the people who use it so earnestly, but I'm going to have to bow to it this time...

Three phrases that have got to go

1. "Dear reader"
Maybe a hundred years ago writing this in a novel was, well, novel. Back then we didn't have to watch all these movies about how overwrought writers are and how they obsess over every last detail. Books and stories just sort of floated down as a gift from the gods. Now we see the writer as a sad person who's trying desperately to connect with the world, so of course the reader is now the one in charge. Also, more people can read now than ever before (although it's hard to tell), so we don't feel special anymore when the writer addresses us "personally" (who, ME?). "Esteemed reader" is out too, but if you somehow allude to the reader's stupidity then we're talking.

2. "With apologies to..."
This is an easy one. Most of the time when somebody writes this they have way more to apologize for than they thought. It's also most frequently used when the premise has already been laid bare, like if someone alters a Shakespeare sonnet to be about, I don't know, their hamster (shudder). If one were to s urvive reading that kind of thing, they would already know what the writer had referenced and the quiet pain in which they lived; the apology is inherent. Defiance is more satisfying anyways. For instance, Crass never apologized for naming their albums "The Feeding of the Five Thousand" or "Stations of the Crass," and those were things Jesus did, so if they didn't neither should we.

3. "But I digress"
It's clear that the writer is digressing when this phrase appears, that's why we're not listening any more. This phrase peaks in annoyance when used in conversation more so than on paper, but even on the page all one really has to do is have a new paragraph ready to skip to if the tangent is boring. If it's a trick and the plan is to return to the digression, either that's a literary device that the writer is using to make it "challenging" for us, or we're just shutting the book right now. Probably both. On the other hand, it's like a fun puzzle when the writer marks off the spurious topic (and spurious topics within) with loads of parentheses (see Rev. Norb's killer columns (most of which had more within the parentheses than without (and the real gems were tucked away beneath many parenthetical layers)) for Maximum Rock'n'Roll in the late nineties), so more of that is welcome (see? it's easy)..