The Jackboot Vision
It Should Haunt Them
links below
At the end of last year, the indie artist known as Dear Vandal suggested on social I might like his song “Fascist Girls”. He was right. The angular bass and postpunk throwback sounds with the very catchy lyrics were right up my musical alley. But it wasn’t as overtly political as the title might suggest. I decided to listen to the rest of the You Were There album.
If this were a music review, I’d go into more depth about the album, its excellent musicality & production, its topicality and how instantly comfortable I felt listening to it as if Geoff Turner, aka Dear Vandal, had tailored this record for my personal tastes. But it’s not, so I will skip all that and focus tightly on the song “You Promised”. As much as “Fascist Girls” appeals to my ear, “You Promised” is the song I wanted to write in 1983. Indeed, a song about nuclear war was the first lyric I ever wrote and became my first published poem when I was 18.
Ronald Reagan took office in January of my freshman year of high school and by time Bill Clinton became president, I was living 2500 miles away in Seattle. These 12 years were literally a forge for my nascent sense of social justice and equity, as they were for many of us. If this were an autobiographical piece, I’d talk about becoming a teacher so I could have direct access to help those who needed support to achieve their goals. Instead, I’ll mention playing the music of underground hip hop while kids were reading and writing. I’ll mention introducing young people to the history of protest in song. All of this because I was radicalized by the fear of nuclear war.
You promised me a nuclear war, Turner sings, in an almost offhandedly disappointed way. Burned to dust at the video store — a line that conjures Martin Blank visiting his childhood home. But where John Cusack’s character embodies Thomas Wolfe’s aphorism about not being able to go home, Turner is actually disappointed because this song is about 2020 and not the 80s. Instead of the end of the world in a nuclear holocaust, we just got sick. Not to mimize the COVID-19 pandemic, but this apocalypse was more a consumer nightmare than the rain of fire & brimstone we all expected in 1984. The song alludes to a magical future, but in reality is infused with MLM and crypto visions. Given this, we’d prefer that nuclear war, timed perfectly for a Friday night as we cruise the aisles of our favorite Blockbuster. We eradicated Styrofoam and acid rain, but the intangible nightmares of deadly virus and digital late-stage capitalism are making us nostalgic for the knowably fatal Reagan era.
We Gen Xers had the DIY Indie/Punk scenes as we came of age, and they are still going strong. One of my favorite songs of 2024 has been “Henry Kissinger’s Dead” by moshcats! featuring DJ Pastor Rock. A fellow Gen Xer, Pastor Rock uses digital platforms to record and release traditional punk music. The Henry Kissinger song is as pure and ecstatic as can be with a psychopathic mass-murderer as the subject. A spontaneous celebration of Henry Kissinger’s death last November, the song is succintly summarized in the lyrics Let’s all shout out for joy today/ Because he’s fuckin’ dead. In stark contrast to Dear Vandal’s New Wave influences, Pastor Rock is punk. Where Dear Vandal uses the political as a broader element in a personal sentiment, “Henry Kissinger’s Dead” revels in a singular message — I hate that motherfucker and I know I’m not alone.
For the past 20 years, the digital future that has allowed artists as diverse as Dear Vandal and moshcats! to release independent music for me to hear and consume has also engendered Millennials and Gen Z to do the same. Drawing on deeper cultural influences, I want to take a deeper look at a song by some artists who are from this younger generation.
Starting with a sample from James Baldwin, whose 100th anniversary of his birth was earlier this month, the song “Dogfight” by Sweetapple featuring Yucki Gross is an immediately engaging noise-rap song that opens with the ultimate nihilist What’s the point to living if it’s only to grind? This resonates with me, and as a teacher, I’ve heard this sentiment from young people my entire career. Sweetapple spends quite a few bars looking at many social travesties and tragedies that colonialism and capitalism have wreaked on marginalized and oppressed communities. The fight in Dogfight is well established and now it’s time to flip that script. Yes, the grind is real, but so is the ability to dream, and Sweetapple would rather learn the lesson of Baldwin than Reagan & Kissinger. Got a dream… got a plan.. melt [their] wings… take [their] things… Fuck diamond rings/ We don’t need you telling us our value.
The featured verse from Chicago rapper Yucki Gross adds a personal dimension here that grounds Sweetapple’s message of community empowerment. Yucki relates the story of his youth, where he spent his teen years selling drugs. I remember hard days we had to struggle, he raps, setting the scene. There’s no nostalgia of a lost childhood, just the absurdity of a kid living by his wits, ekeing out an existence as a street kid. This real existentialism is not sugarcoated or wrapped in any kind of glamourous glow. A victim of PTSD, Yucki follows Sweetapple’s lead into the dogfight — but where Sweetapple posits a Robin Hood-style wealth distribution, Yucki proposes the more hands-on approach: Tax the rich if you want, bitch, I’m coming for heads so I can mount them. Vengeance wrought by those who suffered. Not that Yucki can’t be intellectually leftist in various songs, but this is personal. The people that will pay have enough money to spare that they fund 30,000 dead, and as a coda, a raison d’être for the promise they finna get they karma. The 30,000 dead? Yucki leaves us with the simple message — It should haunt them. The great shock that Baldwin refers to is not that white supremacist capitalist society discards youth like Sweetapple or Yucki, but that they are ready to bring the dogfight to the ruling class’s throats.
Fascism is with us, a by-product of colonialist and capitalist society. The jackboot vision, the carpet bombing, the murder of children halfway across the glove is proof. Every small step is valuable, as long as we have the next breath, we can work to make this a better world and these artists are doing their parts.
