Please Put Rambo Back Inside Your Pants

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"

random shuffle

Mahavishnu Orchestra - "Vital Transformation." I think this was my favorite track on Inner Mounting Flame when i was in high school, though it's been a while and I can't really remember. McLaughlin's great, and the violinist is amazing.

Snooky and the Cosmic Flowers - "Hearing Things." From the Golden State Funk compilation. Good stuff.

Minutemen - "Please Don't Be Gentle With Me."

XTC - "Life Begins at The Hop."

Harmonettes - "Can't Go Halfway." From the Numero group Belize City Boil Up compilation. There are numerous factually innacurate statements in this song, such as "if you want to have a smoke, you've got to have tobacco." Nevertheless I like this song.

Pere Ubu - "Street Waves."

The Advantage - "Double Dragon 2 (Story and Boss Music)." Crappy video game, good theme music. The sucess of an endeavor like this band demands in a large part on how seriously they take themselves. The more, the better. I don't like irony very much. More on that later, maybe.

Siouxsie & The Banshees - "Happy House.." Great song. Someone should cut a version of De La Soul's "Kicked Out The House" with a beat that samples this song. Or maybe that would be too ironical.

Black Merda - "Good Luck." I discovered this album this summer. It's amazing. Go find a copy.


Camper Van Beethoven - "O Death."

I can't sleep and i'm inexplicably itchy - i think it's an allergic reaction to something. At some point I'll write a post about how Dwight Hall's board, apparently totally disconnected from its activists and student leaders, wants to throw in its endowment with Yale's, which could place the funds of the center for public service and social justice in places like Argentinian shoe factories that don't pay their workers for years, private and abusive U.S. prison corporations, calamitous attempts to privatize natural resources, and oil wars, none of which seem to align well with Dwight Hall's various stated mission. The proposed bone they want to throw concerned parties, to create a separate, socially responsible fund, is really somewhat ridiculous, as if such a move could somehow balance or offset the very real problems inherent in how we know Yale invests its money. Putting a couple thousand bucks in microlending or whatever is nice and all, but it doesn't render any less fucked up the three million that's gobbling up Argentina's telecommunications industry or riding IMF structural adjustment privatization to coal power in Indonesia...

But for the moment I'm lying awake, reading Josh Freeman's Working Class New York, enjoying the schaadenfreude of the Yankees' loss to the indians (thank you, gnats of Lake Eerie,) and marveling at Manny Ramirez's dramatic three run home run in the bottom of the ninth to beat the angels. It takes my mind off the mets a little. Not too much though.

Freeman's book is fascinating. I took it off my exam list at the last second, but i think it needs to go back on now.

October 5th? I'll be there.

Gotta love that "David Marks."

To protest UC Berkeley's new deal with B(ritish) P(etroleum), students wheeled a big green and yellow (BP logo colors) trojan horse onto campus and poured molasses on the sidewalk to symbolize the baleful politics of oil capitalism.

"UC Berkeley is becoming an extension campus of Big Oil U," John Simpson of the Santa Monica-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights said at the protest.

Most of the demonstrators, wearing "I didn't enroll in BP-UC" T-shirts, appeared to be UC students. They say the university's research agenda is being set by corporate interests.

random shuffle

Linton Kwesi Johnson - "Di Black Petty Booshwah" (Dub)
The Bats - "Mr. Peculiar."
Teenage Fanclub - "The World'll Be OK"
Spoon - "Don't Make Me A Target"
Otis Redding - "Mr. Pitiful."
The dB's - "I Feel Good (Today.)"
Wolf Parade - "Dinner Bells"
Badly Drawn Boy - "Magic In The Air" (Haven't listened to this album in like six and a half years.)
Wilderness - "Your Hands."
John Coltrane - "Serenity."

Zurich is Stained

(and Transport is Arranged.)