A conflict as old as punk itself
Rax King on Crass
Rax King joins us again today to write about the band Crass and the long simmering tensions in punk music between the art-educated left wing and the working class. This will be sent out in the next edition of the newsletter. You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read it in full.
She most recently wrote for Hell World about reading Milton Mayer’s 1955 book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945 in the age of ICE.
Luke O’Neil
Early in the book, Mayer outlines some of the reasons his little men still cherish their time in the Nazi Party, and not one of them cites the carte blanche he had in those years to torment the Jews. Indeed, his friends sheepishly attest that, prior to the official expulsion of the Jews from their town, they’d all had relations with their Jewish neighbors ranging from the cordial to the intimate. The unpleasant task of mistreating them was just the cost of, to name a few perks, stable government jobs where before there had been only the university; free summer camps and activities for the kids; and deeply discounted trips abroad for provincial people who had never been outside Hesse, much less Germany. In Marburg, the ten little men all vigorously attested, “nobody” went hungry or cold or uncared for the whole time the Nazis were in power. (“Nobody they knew,” Mayer is quick to point out.) In their telling, even in the repentant schoolteacher’s telling, the Party was more civil-social organization than genocidal force — the Lions Club for antisemites.
Please also check out her books Sloppy Or: Doing It All Wrong, and Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer.
A conflict as old as punk itself
by Rax King
When British anarcho-punks Crass first tried to release their 1978 debut LP, The Feeding of the 5,000, they met some trouble that I’ll let them describe in their own words. From the lyrics booklet of that record:
“Once again the violent majority assert their bigoted reality through the silencing of others. [Opening track] ‘ASYLUM,' an antichrist/feminist statement has been erased because no company would press the record if the track was left intact.”
To phrase it somewhat less stridently, the workers at the Irish pressing plant charged with filling the order didn’t take kindly to such lyrics as “shit, fuck, I vomit for you, Jesu…down now from your papal heights!” They refused to press the record with such a blasphemous track on it, and so The Feeding of the 5,000 would begin not with “Asylum” but with one minute of silence titled “The Sound Of Free Speech.” The band also included a note in the liner notes offering to sell cassette tapes featuring the prodigal track to anyone who wanted one; a few hundred punks apparently took them up on it. In the band members’ recollection of the incident as it appears in the book The Story of Crass, one can make out the two fighters, locked in a conflict as old as punk music itself: in this corner, the art-educated left wing; in that corner, the working class.
(This feels like the right moment to launch my disclaimer that this essay is going to be unsatisfying to somebody. Punk fans tend to be obsessive autodidacts, and I don’t doubt that many of them can upend this same cup and read a completely different story in the tea leaves with just as much evidence to support it. My advice to anyone who wants to loudly disagree with me, which I hope you’ll receive in the intended spirit, is: write your own essay, or shut the fuck up.)