I know, I know. May was the month for the round table. But I guess I’m just not willing to live by your rules, old man! Stop oppressing me with your deadlines. I’m a child of the revolution and I’ve got hate in my eyes. Ask for me tomorrow and I’ll be gone, ’cause I got a one way ticket to oblivion, and I’m gonna raise hell getting there!
Also, I eviewed an Indian movie about how much hippies suck:
HARE RAMA HARE KRISHNA
So when I discovered that Hare Rama Hare Krishna was less about the Krishnas themselves and more about the hippies who fluttered around the periphery of the religion, I wasn’t wholly surprised. It’s just that, for this round table, I really didn’t want to write about hippies. They’re the most obvious topic for a counter-culture round table. I’m not and have never been a hippie. I have very little I could add to the popular discourse on their counter-culture, what it was, and what it has become. I might have, at one time, found some satisfaction in making fun of hippies, but for reasons that may or may not be more clearly expressed later in this review, the fight has gone out of me in that regard.
Luckily, Hare Rama Hare Krishna affords me an opportunity to freshen things up a bit by looking at a movie that looks at the hippie movement through the lens of a culture hippies were fond of co-opting, lending a slightly different angle on the typical American approach to hippie films. Unluckily, the movie often adopts an air of smug, paternal condescension, alarmism, and xenophobia that ends up making me do something I don’t normally do: side with the hippies.
#1 by El Santo on June 2, 2009 - 10:49 pm
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“I saw the superficial aspects of a culture important to me co-opted to advance a religious agenda in the 1980s and 1990s (starting with Krishnas, but really coming to a head with the mid-to-late 1990s crop of fundamentalist Christian bands calling themselves hardcore or straight-edge)”
On the way home from B-Fest 2007, I pulled off the highway at a rest stop somewhere in Indiana to get something to eat. I noticed, shortly after I sat down, that there was this bunch of crust-punk kids (approximately enough of them to constitute a band) at one of the other tables. One of them spotted me in turn as they were leaving (I was pretty conspicuous at an Indiana rest stop, what with my prickly hair and my painted-up, spiky, and chain-bedecked leather jacket), and took a detour to talk to me. It turned out that they were in fact a band, and that they were on a tour of the Midwest and Northeast; the guy I was talking to was the lead singer. The last thing he did before heading back out to the van was to hand me a copy of their CD. It appeared to be a fairly standard crust-core album, in the same vein as Aus-Rotten or Misery or any of those anarchy-and-not-bathing bands, but then I saw the song titles. “Path of the Damned.” “Consequences of Transgression.” “Enemy 1.” Then I saw the name of the record label: The End Records. Wait a minute… Sure enough, the lyrics (to say nothing of the thanks list) revealed them to be Christian crusties (Chrustians, perhaps?), a concept that made (and continues to make) about as much sense to me as Christian black metal. Interestingly, they seem to have all the same bugs up their asses as regular crusties (war, political corruption, extreme class stratification, racism, etc.), except that instead of anarchy being the Single Magical Answer to All the World’s Problems, it’s Jesus. Perhaps even more interestingly, a close reading of the liner notes suggests that they’re actually directly financed by a church. That makes them missionaries, and I spent the next couple of hours being alternately pissed off that a church was seeding the scene with frigging sleeper cells and flattered at the implication that we’d become capital-H Heathens suitable for a conversion offensive. In the end, I’m left with two positive points: 1. the album sucks appallingly, and should exert little to no influence on its artistic merits, and 2. “Christ Virus” is one of my band’s best songs, and I wouldn’t have written it were it not for that encounter.
#2 by lyzard on June 2, 2009 - 10:56 pm
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“Chrustaceans”, I should think.
You guys all live such interesting lives. I hate you for that.
🙂
#3 by ProfessorKettlewell on June 2, 2009 - 11:54 pm
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[“Sure enough, the lyrics (to say nothing of the thanks list) revealed them to be Christian crusties”]
That must make Crass so proud….
#4 by KeithA on June 3, 2009 - 1:07 pm
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Ultimately, my objection to Christian (or any other religious) punk music had less to do with the expression of a certain philosophy — freedom of speech is big to me, after all — and more to do with the sometimes sneaky way in which it was injected. But the idea of Chrust Punks, given that whole Crust movement’s characteristic Marxist/anarchist leaning, is more bizarre than it is offensive, especially since I have very little in common with Crustypunk anyway.
Prof: if Chumbawumba’s mainstream success didn’t kill the memory of Crass, nothing will.
#5 by ProfessorKettlewell on June 3, 2009 - 7:17 pm
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I think crust / anarcho-punk / grindcore attracted more and varied Loopy Extremists than any other scene in pop culture history. You couldn’t pick up a badly photocopied A5 fanzine without coming across someone accusing some band or label or ‘zine of being a front for the SWP / secret BNP supporters / infiltrated by MI5 / fundraising for CND, or someone ratting out someone else for Unapproved Behaviour (remember that merely being an anarchist / marxist / vegitarian wasn’t nearly good enough: it had to be the exactly correct stripe of said politic.) It’s hardly surprising given that some Extremist Christians would gravitate towards it, whether because they felt a commonality of cause, or just some fresh souls to evangelise to. Never my thing. The smell…..
#6 by KeithA on June 4, 2009 - 9:45 am
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Haha, man. I knew a lot of people in that scene, and the delusions of grandeur were fantastic. As far as I could tell, every single 20-year-old with an anarcho-punk fanzine was convinced that the CIA/FBI/Interpol/MI5,6, and who know what else, had tapped their phones, was intercepting mail, had black vans parked outside their communal punk house, so on and so forth. Because nothing attracts international law enforcement quite like a xeroxed fanzine with a circulation of 20 that features bad collage art of a Palestinian Intifadah guy throwing Ronald Reagan’s head at Queen Elizabeth.
Always went well paired with the number of American crusties who constantly railed about the poll tax, Tories, and Margaret Thatcher.
Endless Struggle — that was the big anarcho-punk activist zine at the time. I think I still have issues instructing me on the inner workings of West Berlin autonomous collectives.
#7 by ProfessorKettlewell on June 4, 2009 - 10:22 pm
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But Keith!! What are you suggesting? It makes sense to me. There’s nothing else that would induce the CIA and MI6 to violate the terms of their own charters of incorporation by operating within their own countries….UNLESS….yes! I understand now. I guess Casper Weinburger and George Younger had a special meeting (probably in Sun City) wherein they agreed that MI6 would infiltrate and subvert Crusty Punk bands and record labels in the U.S, and the CIA would do the same thing in the UK! It makes PERFECT sense!!