Continuing this blog's longstanding interest in the cultural politics of peeing on stuff, (not as kinky or gross as it sounds,) I was thinking recently, as i cleaned my apartment and tried to straighten up my cd collection, about songs which employ the trope of urinating on memorials to capitalism and imperialism and racism as an anarchic and liberatory act. Perhaps i have gone off the deep end.
I am thinking specifically about two different moments in Bay Area radicalism. The Dead Kennedys' "Stars and Stripes of Corruption," from 1985's Frankenchrist, acknowledges the phallicity of state warmongering (the title of this post) but nevertheless reads pissing on the Washington Monument as an act which can conjure forth a radically other vision of the patriotic, and indeed, the nation itself. The Coup's "Piss On Your Grave," (from Steal This Album (1999)) explores the histories of racialized slavery, imperialism, and labor exploitation as a counternarrative to a tour of George Washington's grave which culminates in Boots/the narrator "fins ta take a pee pee" on the headstone and a loud trickling noise and panicked tour guide followed by a blitz of flash bulbs a la the Japanese tourists in Ski Patrol, a wry comment, i think, on the possible limits of politics as bodily spectacle.
These tracks are both epic in scope and length - "Stars and Stripes" is over six minutes long and concludes perhaps the Dead Kennedys' most experimental and ambitious record. "Piss on your grave" is nearly as long, a standout track on an album full of them. Pissing, in both, becomes a gesture of a masculinity in revolt, In Biafra, the masculinity may or may not be slightly queered. For Boots Riley this is about black communist masculinity, aggrieved by capitalism's degradation of black womanhood -- " girls work till they back ache and their breasts don't lactate, " for instance, or "That bitch ass on the front of a buck/never gave a fuck/he forced his black women slaves/to give him dick sucks/and when he bust a nut/he'd laugh and cackle/let the leather whip crackle/send 'em back to pick tobacco/shackled." Revolutionary nationalism via the prostrate and wounded black female body, the scene of subjection. For both, pissing is a radical act of refusal, a masculinist rejection of an emasculating social order - for Biafra it initiates and makes possible the claim that the "real patriots" are "those with the guts to work for some real change."
Biafra's song is interesting too for its simultaneous rejection of the masculinist, phallic logics of neoconservative militarist foreign policy and its turn towards queer punk machismo in the same move. Pissing on the Washington Monument is both a reclamation of hijacked national political discourse of freedom, "the people," etc, and visible, and smellable (olfactory?) marking, not only of territory, but of disgust, and of superiority to a debased political culture. But the "standing above" of this rebellion through micturation seems ill equipped to imagine broader social transformations which also call into question masculinity in its more subtle and pernicious forms...
random shuffle:
Jean Grae: "Whatever"
Architecture in Helsinki: "Do The Whirlwind
New Pornographers: "From Blown Speakers"
Guided By Voices: "Striped White Jets"
The (international) Noise Conspiracy: "Will It Ever Be Quiet?"
Camper Van Beethoven: "Epigram #2"
Annakonda: "Wheedle's Grove"
The Clash: "Somebody Got Murdered."
Black Merda - "Over and Over"
The Specials - "Do Nothing"
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