X's "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts"
This song has been a constant touchstone in our life, as as we’re sure it is for others, and even more so, obviously in the past decade or so. Indeed, things are so bad that the previous capitulation, “both sides murder,” has passed beyond a line, to where it now showcases the appeasement of bad attitudes that brought us here and on some level countermanding the moral authority of the song. But that’s actually the beauty of the song. It’s about how hard it is to get everybody locused and focused and on-the-bus in time to catch the Hale Bopp. Sorry, couldn’t resist. But for 2% of you that was hilarious. Envy them.
The point is that incrementalism is all we have, but that’s no reason not to be pissed about what has happened or normalize the trauma. Doesn’t have to be specific. That’s the really interesting thing about writing political songs versus any other kind of narrative craft. The extraordinary thing about songs and stories is that those details that are actually personal and real, when invested in a creative work help make it more universal, not less. By making them more specific, we make the work broader.
But in a piece of political songwriting or analogy, making it specific kills it. This admittedly is more of a songwriting thing, but it’s not the topical songs so much, as the ones that speak to broader issues. So among the Dead Kennedys oeuvre – and they were quite topical – it’s the tracks like “Well Paid Mechanic” and “Holiday in Cambodia” which speak to a specific mindset, that endure more than songs like “Bleed for Me” (though foreign adventurism and torture never went out of style) and “California Über Alles” (they had to rewrite it after a worse threat emerged!!) that truly survive. Though obviously the latter has some legs, it’s a fantastic so; East Bay Ray’s riff is freaking delicious.
Yet, to return to the matter at end, the X song speaks to the challenges of knowing right/wrong and watching as people blow through the light and Tesla right thru human beings like they were USAID recipients. (Fish’n’chip paper writing can be topical AF. Hell, we don’t even spend the money on the paper anymore!)
The other absolutely exemplary thing about it is the way it starts. “The Facts We Hate.” Interestingly, it utilizes the same effect as the Dead Kennedys, something we’ve not seen anyone reference – the kind of cocktail jazz opening which it shares with “California Über Alles.”(Can you hear Jello intoning, “Last call for your freedom of speech, happy hour will now be enforced by law”?)
At the core of this powerful realization, is why we won’t be on the road everybody yelling “hurry up, hurry up.” The people who see the need for change, the True Cassandras, as they say, are going to be long in front of the others. There’s a propagation that’s necessary. (Not unlike what we’re seeing with the dramatic uptake in EV adoption just in the last two years.) This slow building requires hand-holding. “I must go slow, I must not think bad thoughts.”
There's this great bit about our ethnocentrism that's just a throw-away line because at the time nobody really got it. They vamp about Central and South Americans, and Native Americans. Canada doesn't even make the conversation lol!
That’s that the other thing, that kind of blows me away about the song. It’s about not blaming the people who don’t understand the urgency of the situation. They are the victims in a power struggle that puts the witless on the frontlines against the vulnerable, and requires that the people who need to explain the urgency don’t give in to their desire to punch the witless in the GD nose. (Let me refer you to Lou Barlow on the existence of human piñatas, soulless – JK – nomads who wander the earth, demanding recompense: “Punch in the Nose.”)
The sheer enormity of that demand can only be answered with existential dread. “So wait, I need to convince people braindrained on Twitter that the richest person in the world, a South Affrikaner self-styled edgelord who hates the poors and women, is an awful person, and the thing is, they haven’t worked that out yet, and, oh by the way, it’s an existential crisis for humanity, so pick up the pace.”
There are so many moments in life we are grateful not to be standing directly next to a jet turbine. Let me refer you to Winston Churchill for elaboration.
It’s odd we have songs about so many things, but there are a paucity of ones about living with the innate knowledge of of our own self-destructive capacities and the feelings of frustration and helpless experienced trying to solve or forestall the crisis point.
The stanza about the murder of innocents hits home especially hard now, between Pretti, Good, Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary and the poor damn fishermen.
The other sort of delightful thing is the third stanza bitch. I include below the “unplugged” version which elides past the stanza where they complain extensively about the kinds of bands that don’t get played on the radio – their friends, their peers. It’s actually a trenchant part of the critic, but it runs afoul the specificity we mentioned earlier. Very few people – even music nerds – are familiar with Texas’ Big Boys! (Black Flag at least had competing tours criss-crossing America, which would’ve been a great marketing gimmick if it weren’t kind of a creative disaster, but suppose you pick your poison.)
The whole complaint about beets versus beats is actually a decent conceptual complaint (though it’s tinged with race) that we shouldn’t be talking about the making of songs, this rather self-indulgent exercise, but the creation of food and sustenance we can share. Punk was about our commonalities while singing about beats (“B-E-E-T-S, not B-E-A-T-S”) is comedians telling jokes about air travel.And as we can see, the control of the media and the means of getting the word out to the people is one of the ways the Establishment milks the life energy from the Cassandras and activists. If proper word-of-mouth were allowed to exist – without a firehose of diarrhea and distraction – this activity of getting everybody on the road would be far less labor-intensive.
It’s the old they have the money, we have the people. And as always, it’s a long game that wins; battling money is attrition warfare. They will grind us down, and we will besiege their castles denying them means to expand their empire, and ultimately starve it to its knees.
But that’s a long ways from here. We need to all get moving down the road. Sitting here crying into your pashmina scarf is getting us nowhere. Let’s hop up and keep moving if we want to make ICE headquarters before the Children of the Corn come out.
