Oi! Rat City rat declares online satire editorial “even punker than” punk rock itself
ALLSTON, MA —Puffing his rollie down to the last drag before carefully stowing the roach in his tobacco pouch, a local Rat City resident talked excitedly about all the hardcore shit going down in sleepy Boston.
“I mean, you got these wild Twitter kids, but our boys are going all Fat Mike on this scene for real,” said the heavily tattooed man in front of the inspired “Fuck Trump” vandalism at the Tedeschi’s on Harvard Ave. “We also got a guy writing manifestos and shit on the Internet like a fucking cyber mafia or some shit.”
Gleefully reminiscing about that time he “knocked out this fucking Crew kid’s teeth” at a No System basement show on Linden St, the 40-something sage who called himself Fast Eddie said he’s more content these days to just hang around outside Blanchard’s and take aim at high-level concerns over America’s densely populated, advanced industrial cities.
“We made a ruckus trying to get Minor Threat to shotgun a ‘Gansett with us when they came through, but I also can’t shake the feeling that maintaining an autonomous global economic machine tuned to raw production at the exclusion of everything else, that rewards the shameless, unaccountable exploitation of millions, can do anything besides strain ever harder to reconcile its promise of exponential growth with the reality of logarithmic slowdown as the system ages and inevitably collapses,” said Eddie, noticing as dozens around him stared into sleek devices worth a $500 biannual upgrade cycle and service fees exceeding $1 daily.
“Ever since the Western Mass scene got me on that Marxist or whatever shit, I’ve been trying to bring the noise at the Democracy Center and shatter these kids’ reality with some nasty riffs and deep words and shit.” There exist dozens of YouTube videos featuring a shirtless Eddie screaming vaguely about the nature of perception at a zoned-out, dispassionately swaying crowd of teenage amphetamine addicts, but he feels like the message just isn’t getting through to the scene.
“That’s why I’m so excited about this guy who does our online stuff. The sooner we quit this blacks vs. gays vs. Muslims nonsense, the better we can fight the deeply disturbing trends that predicate these visible symptoms of tactless, public, personally charged racial rhetoric: like losing the difference between bad news, fake news, and satire; or confusing someone’s political views with their personal behavior.” Eddie added, “Now that’s fucking raw!”
None of the other punks outside Tedeschi’s offered comment, but a man in a sleeveless denim jacket with a septum piercing asked this reporter if I needed to pick up a dime bag before he peaced out. At press time, a few of the punks went to build a fire at the Cambridge St park and suggested I try asking around O’Brien’s for perspectives on Donald Trump’s effects on the production quality of the small-scale counterculture industry.
