Crash-Course, No. 20: I'm Not On Drugs, You're on Drugs!

Third image, first best.

Where’d I hear about On Drugs? No goddam idea, which is exactly the problem with moving fast. Then again, they committed to treading lightly onto the internet - and by choice - and it hardly helps their name gets buried under a bigger act like War on Drugs. On the plus side, I might finally know how Kurt Vile had that huge head start I missed…

As hinted at above, finding much of anything beyond bare-bones promotion is damn near impossible with On Drugs. You have to double-check every headline just to find the band members - Elias Avila, Derek Housh, Cameron Gates, and Steve Gartman, which I found on something like the third link I found (a San Diego Reader plug), and without any mention of who does what - so they really do live the brand. On the other hand, a whiff of novelty isn’t the worst selling point:

“From their experimental punk drone to their intentional lack of an internet presence, they're the band you may not have known existed until you saw them…”

Because they titled an album titled Uckhole Futah, I assumed On Drugs came out of Utah, but, nope, they started in Portland, Oregon. I have a loose sense they relocated to San Diego, California upon signing with Postmark Records - none of the entries on that site last real long - but, based on the venues they played on a 2019 tour, where they come from matters less than where they can play. (Something I mean in the best possible way, because that’s where I’ve found most of the bands - i.e., people who play off the beaten path, but not too far.)

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the “experimental punk drone” holds up because they have a decent range - included in the sampler - between something that fits that bill to circle-into-a-circle perfection like “Squish,” to a pure old-school punk number like “Tony Hawk,” to the dreamy lo-fi number “Scaredy Cat” (which gave me Modest Mouse with less distortion and gave my wife, “I don’t know, something 80s, but also boring”), to garage-rock tear/cover like “Tequila.” Even if those aren't the hardest genres, there’s some decent musicianship going on, basically, a band with the chops to build a live-set around a couple spins around the genre-wheel, only without using the internet for promotion.

Crash Course, No. 17: 70s (Is It?) Punk, ft. Runaways, Rezillos, and Undertones

Yes, and....but also, yes. I'm working on it...

[Ed. - For my sanity and yours, this will be the first post of two. The other one will be up by Sunday.]

I’ve decided to start with something I said I wouldn’t do at all: define “punk.” Ducking the question makes sense for countless reasons – losing “punk rock” as a genre shorthand chief among them - but members of a couple bands I looked into articulated the idea eloquently enough to make skipping it feel like a disservice. Here are some favorites:

“Punk rock is more of an attitude than a sort of music. The punk rock ethos is a do-it-yourself thing, and creativity comes first.”

- Fay Fife of the Rezillos

“I still hate that arrogant, swaggering rock star attitude. It annoys me when I see so-called-punk bands behaving like that. You’re the same as the audience, not some daft rock gods or whatever.”

- Captain Sensible of The Damned

“The problem was Malcolm McLaren's principle, which was to sign to a major label and then to rip them off. Everyone did that, but the major always ripped you off in one way or the other. You couldn't beat the system, so they all went in and within a few years they were all making very slick albums. The original 7" Do It Yourself ethos disappeared.”

- Robyn Hitchcock of The Soft Boys

The two main ideas I get out of that – the urgency of creating/making a statement as a greater good than musical proficiency and the outsider/(semi-pretentious) unpretentious sensibility – get closer to how I’ve always understood “punk” than any musical choice. For instance, I’d call this song as “punk” as anything Green Day ever did (not to pick on Green Day; examples abound). Going to the other way, this song feels punk in spirit, but so clearly from another genre that calling it punk (or anything else) feels like giving someone bad directions, maybe even out of spite. None of that changes the reality that an overwhelming majority of people will instantly flash to a very specific musical sound in their heads when they hear “punk rock” (e.g., fast, simple, sloppy, and with someone shouting off-key vocals over it). That’s useful when someone wants to quickly way to explain a band that sounds like that to someone else - and giving it up willy-nilly feels…unwise – but it also elevates one specific, time-based manifestation of the larger punk ethos over everything else and leaves…just a shit-ton of music homeless, and for bad reasons.

The Crash-Course Project Index

Finding Your Feet, a comedy featuring Dolores Umbridge, apparently...

Welcome to this library of…posts about popular music. Unfortunately, I’ll have to start this with an explanation.

At the time I’m posting this little (for now) index, I’ve written a total of 57 posts for this site. 20 of those were devoted to the One Hit No More Project (and here’s the library for that one, which will grow just like this one), which leaves 37 posts about…other things. I changed both topics and formats between those posts, covering just one band/artist here, and building a post a round a playlist with multiple artists there. Call it a long process of finding my feet – which I think I have going into 2020 (also, I make regular claims to have found my feet, but they keep going missing all the same).

In order to lend both this library and posts I intend to write in the future some thematic coherence, I’ve decided to limit this index to posts in which I focused on one band/artist. (And, in accordance with future plans, I will create a separate index for those playlist posts.) About those posts…

While I cover a decent variety of bands/artists, the majority of them come from “indie ______” genres – e.g., “indie rock,” “indie hip hop,” and “indie pop,” with various sub-genres in between. Those will be the same kinds of artists I look into going forward too. At any rate, links to all the posts of this sort that I’ve written so far are linked to down below. As I write more posts going forward, I’ll add them to this post with semi-regularity to keep this library current.

Finally, you’ll see a bunch of different titles below, as well as a discontinued series or two. Going forward, I’ve decided to continue this under the “Crash Course” series, so the numbers will count up from there (and I dropped the hyphen in “Crash-Course”). That’s all, lots to read below - and listen to. Each post includes a short-ish history of the relevant band/artist, as well as links to a bunch of their music. God bless, Youtube, right?