Three Chords and The Truth About Yourself
I Guess This Is (Actually) Growing Up
NOFX released a new album recently, four years after their disaster of a prior record, Self-Entitled. How much of a disaster? Well it was released in 2012 and the final song contains the words “December 25th has been blacklisted / Since Dawkins found the proof Jesus never existed.”
It’s embarassing.
Four years and one violent assault on a fan later, Fat Mike began 2016 in rehab, and ended it putting out First Ditch Effort, NOFX’s best album since 1998's one-song EP, The Decline. In a year where every other pop punk band not called The Offspring decided to have a punt with a disingenuous comeback album, First Ditch Effort is personal and raw to its detriment. It’s a purging of not just a lifetime of living hard – that shit’s easy – but an acknowledgement of the violence of that nihlist 90s punk irreverence, a complete rejecti0n of the empty bush-era activism that Green Day will be fruitlessly trying to recapture every time they pick up their instruments until they die.
I don’t even know if it’s good. But it feels true.
Let’s go back to the beginning of the year.
In February, two thirds of blink-182 (also known as blink-121.3) put out California, an album that opens with the absoloutely hilarious line “there’s a cynical feeling saying I should give up / You’ve said everything you’ll ever say” before launching into the most cynical 45 minutes of bubblegum chords and 40-year old men singing about being ‘in deep’ with a girl who is ‘out of her mind.’ There is not a trace of former member (and by all accounts, complete and total dickhead) Tom DeLonge to be found, with his faux U2 riffs and crooning about love, death and ghosts purged entirely, replaced with the long awaited return of jokes about fingering.
DeLonge has been a figure of fun for a while among the now-adults who spent their teen years yelling along to All The Small Things, and with good reason, but at least he was fucking earnest. Yes, he made a movie set to his own music which was a beat for beat remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and yes it was a hilarious disaster, but god damn did he believe in that disaster. California doesn’t believe in itself, it doesn’t believe in anything except the undisputed fact that things used to be better. It never says so in its words (it never says anything in its words) but it is an ode to the times before the invention of ideology, when you could joke all day about how much of a dick-sucking gay your best friend was, and you’d both know you didn’t mean anything by it.
And can you blame them? Their fanbase shat themselves in 2011 when their first reunion album was a more somber affair, despite the fact that it literally only exists because their two best friends died and they came very close to losing a member, too. It wasn’t anywhere near musically capable of expressing those ideas, but it clearly came out of a place that was honest, and Ghost on the Dancefloor is straight up the best song they’ve ever made.
The middle chapter of the 2016 trilogy is Revolution Radio, Green Day’s latest album, similarly attempting to capture past glory, but yearning for relevance rather than irrelevance. American Idiot is an album I will always love deeply because it is in many ways the first ‘adult’ album I fell for, but no one can deny that it’s a now-rich person attempting to tap into the fire of working class revolt with mostly empty platitudes. 12 years on, the person is richer and the platitudes are emptier, but absoloutely nothing else has changed. It’s got the song about a girl where every line begins “She’s….” which is required by law to be on every single Green Day album, it’s got the song where the verses are compressed like a megaphone and the choruses full of reverb, it’s got the phrase “anti-social media.” It’s got it all.
In many ways, Green Day and blink-182 represent two sides of the same coin, their music in 2016 an attempt to reassert an identity of ‘punk,’ despite such an identity being commodified to worthlessness before either of those bands were formed and any of their fans were alive. Revolution Radio is anthemic, all-inclusive by virtue of its sheer lack of a point of view, a muti-millionare rallying cry to anyone who wants to belong to the counter-culture. California is, well also anthemic, but offers a far more passive punk identity. blink-182's idea of punk isn’t sticking it to the man, but not giving a fuck, it’s punk to chill with your bros and have a laugh, it’s punk to not do your homework, it’s punk to do anything at all, so long as you don’t care.
Which brings us back to First Ditch Effort, opening with the words “I was a misanthrope at the end of a rope / I spend twenty years, six years on dope / taking a piss, while giving up hope.” Fat Mike has sung about his alcoholism and addiction before, but here the tongue is removed from the cheek and replaced entirely with a damning introspective honesty which continues throughout the record.
The best songs on the album all have a specific awareness of the way the punk scene is structured to make everything worse and hurt the people it claims to include. In “California Drought,” he laments how unfriendly it is towards the concept of sobriety, in “I’m so Sorry Tony” he laments how the entrenched ideals of masculinity meant he was never more intimate and open with his late best friend and No Use For A Name vocalist, Tony Sly. And in “Trasnvest-lite” he rails against transmisogyny in punk with an anger that is impossible for me to read as anything other than trying to express a non-binary identity without having ever been taught the language.
The album’s strengths are made all the more evident by what is by far its worst track, “Dead Beat Mom,” a song about how much Eric Melvin hates his sons’ shitty mother. In an album defined by empathy for the myriad reasons we hurt each other in life and a deep desire to heal, the traditional three-chord misogynistic jam about a Crazy Ex has never felt more hateful and more out of place.
If First Ditch Effort was just an introspective comeback in a year of high-profile cynicism from musical peers, that would be great, but I don’t think I’d have written this piece if it wasn’t for the final song, “Generation Z.” Until this point, First Ditch Effort follows the traditional sad album template, a tracklist full of purging self-hate and negativity, building up to an anthemic climax that collates the lessons learned and resolves to continue living stronger and better, a full stop that reminds us that we’re going to make it, we’re going to be okay.
That, well, that isn’t what happens here.
Instead, “Generation Z” is a forward looking and less selfish Fat Mike at the end of the album’s journey, and having done the work to improve himself can now only see things getting worse, and worse, and worse. After a short intro, the upbeat guitars and drums kick in as Mike yells “I hope my daughters never know / what it feels like to give up.” At the end of the song, his and Tony Sly’s daughter take over the vocals as the music starts to reference The Decline, but where that song focused on blaming rotting American Culture on idiot hicks and evangelical Christians, here that misplaced Bush-era anger becomes a resigned hopelessness at the failure of capitalism to live up to every promise it ever made.
Like I said at the start, I don’t even know if it’s good, but it is definitely true. With Global Fascism not just rising but actually here, Climate Disaster now unavoidable, and a liberal opposition currently fighting online over how woke a podcast is or is not while Native American land is brutalised and occupied on Thanksgiving, hope is something which is in very short supply. California wants to run away and make like we can go back to the good old days “living in the perfect weather / spending time inside together,” Revolution Radio wants to find solace in hollow opposition, content in musical resistance as the world falls down around its kness, and First Ditch Effort wants to get better, does the work, and then wonders why it bothered at all.
One thing’s for sure, if there are any answers to be found for 2016, they aren’t going to be found in the lyrics of ageing boomers, but as someone who grew up listening to pop-punk increasingly alienated by the persistent misogyny and juvenile refusal of men in their forties and fifties to acknowledge the world as it really is, I appreciated the note of shock that First Ditch Effort ended on. It’s not an apology, because what the hell would be the point, but in a world where so many in politics, in art, in music, in everywhere, are determined to dig their heels in on returning to the elitist attitudes of the 2000s that got us to this fucking place, it means something to watch someone who’s music you care about step back from the brink.
It’s easy to think that getting older and out of touch is inevitable on some level, and maybe it is, but I hope one thing we don’t forget as things get darker from here is this: it’s never too late to grow up.
