Star Trek: SNW Reviews A

I am now starting to do “reviews” of episodes of the new Star Trek series “Strange New Worlds.” Unlike earlier ST review posts this time I’ll be doing, at least MOST of the time, one relatively long essay for a single episode that merits some significant commentary (I wouldn’t be surprised if out of a final total of 46 episodes I’ll do one or two posts that are very brief). I’ll be focusing almost exclusively on the political aspects of the episodes but will usually not comment on the pervasive multiculturalism and gender equality of ST.

“Strange New Worlds” Episode One, Season One. See this for a plot summary.

This episode promises that the series will be roughly as political and progressive as most ST TV episodes are. I’ll get to the more important and general topics in a minute. One minor thing is that there are wind generators conspicuously visible in the background of a scene on Earth.

The main issues are war, civil war (of the sort that we face at this point in America), and Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Elsewhere I have gotten slightly long-winded about WMD. Bearing in mind that I didn’t come up with that term, it’s true that only one is INCREDIBLY DESTRUCTIVE, but they are all united by how indiscriminate they are or at least can be (it just occurred to me that Anthrax in an envelope might not be that indiscriminate, but Anthrax (for example) in the water supply is pretty horrible). Chemical weapons are totally indiscriminate although the non-persistent ones might not go far beyond a battlefield, but if that battlefield is populated, that’s a serious problem and the persistent ones are much worse. And I imagine a death from most of these weapons is worse than a death from a few bullets in the chest that kill you after an hour. Nukes are INCREDIBLY DESTRUCTIVE AND INDISCRIMINATE, most easily consume entire cities, there are some lasting and regional environmental problems, and radiation is a slow and painful killer. As far as the pinnacle of the nuclear threat (to humanity’s existence) you should read the book review I did here.                                       

The weapon developed by the aliens sounds very destructive- like it could easily destroy a StarFleet vessel. The idea of using such a weapon on the surface of a populated planet is horrifying.

In general I am very much against war, although I stop short of embracing pacifism. Some of my thoughts about war IN GENERAL can be found here and there in the posts here.

As far as the topic of a second civil war in this country… First, for the Trekkers out there, present and future, I have to point out that ST has shifted the date for the Eugenics Wars, I THINK for WWIII, and has now added an American second civil war, which apparently now all blend into each other. I kind of knew this sort of thing might happen- about 15 years ago I silently suggested ST should make a LOT of TV stuff and then, as there was more and more conflict between between the two histories (ST lore and reality) with the passage of time, just stop making ST, or reboot it possibly? 

Anyway, let me say some things about a second civil war here in reality. I sort of talked about this here, when I made a plea for, in some ways, partisan peace. There are probably a total of 2,000 more words scattered in different paragraphs on my blog that are relevant to this. I am not sure how you can find them, although probably about 15% of them are in a recent post here. Some times I think it might be becoming increasingly unavoidable, with Trump as President and the division that that means. His supporters simply do not believe the various sources that most of us (liberals and progressives/leftists) do and you cannot believe the things that people around Trump imply we support. That’s part of something that’s a big part of what’s wrong- there is no respect for the facts. I’m not saying that’s brand new or totally avoidable in politics, but it is much worse today than it usually is, and that worsening is 100% one-sided- CNN, for example, spends a HUGE amount of time fact-checking Trump, and spent about 5% as much time fact-checking Biden. I believe that there are some other fact-checkers out there that are also good and might possibly be more acceptable to Republicans (is it better if they’re NOT part of the media?). If it hadn’t just started requiring subscriptions I would, as I have in the past, strongly recommend the BBC News website- it’s WIDELY respected throughout the world, and it’s coverage of Northern Ireland 1997-2005 was close behind the Irish media in accuracy and not far behind how sensitive it was to the Irish perspective (if you know Anglo-Irish history and the early history of Northern Ireland, you’d understand the importance of that in coverage of The Troubles) (I say 1997-2005 because during that time each week I read an average of about 100 articles from Irish news sources (primarily the Irish News and the Irish Times) and about 25 articles from the BBC). GOPers would do a lot worse than getting their news there. I am not going to do an entire essay here on this topic and I think I have said all I have to say here about a possible second American civil war.

Musical Diversity

In the last 33 years I have probably listened to music an average of four hours a day (how is that possible? One factor is that I did about 40 hours a week, for a total of 4 years, at a job that allowed me to listen to music I chose as I was working). There was one period of about 3 years around 2006 where I didn’t listen that much, but in High School and the last 16 years I listened about 6 hours a day on average.

(The value of this post is fairly low- only about 45-55% of it will be political)

Before I get to the best part of it, let me first explain a few minor details and some background to my addiction to music. I pretty much exclusively listened to cassette tapes until some time around 1999. I also have bought very few CDs (my commitment to being a good fan went down at some point in the late 1990s and has pretty much stayed there in terms of buying CDs, etc. instead of mostly just listening to YouTube which is what I’ve done about 4/5 of the time in the last 7-8 years). I have never had an iPod, I don’t listen to streaming music sites (“muve” I believe is one example, or Last FM perhaps). I have been doing almost all of my music-listening the last 16 years on YouTube. About 2/5 of what I listen to is stuff that I paid for earlier when I bought tapes and/or CDs, and with a big chunk of the stuff I DIDN’T ever pay for, I’m very comfortable ethically with that (see “The Music of my Enemy” below).

When I was very young (about 9) I was a fan of Michael Jackson. At 13 or 14 I went to a massive concert which included Vanilla Ice, I BELIEVE MC Hammer, and I THINK En Vogue. I’m almost embarrassed by that, although in the last 35 years there is one En Vogue song that I really like (“Free Your Mind” (the main reason I like it is the moshing in the official music video)). I kind of liked Vanilla Ice and I just learned some stuff about him that is kind of cool. And in a brief spoken word bit on either Home Invasion or Original Gangster Ice-T said something positive about MC Hammer. But I’m still kind of embarrassed about it.  In one, two or three year(s) of Jr. High School I listened to a lot of rap- of the Beastie Boys (“License to Ill”), 2-3 albums by rappers Run DMC (and 1-2 albums by The Fresh Prince, but I think I stopped listening to him in 9th grade and since then I think I’ve listened twice (in the last several years) to two of his hits, just out of curiosity and/or nostalgia).

At the risk of getting a little personal, in 9th grade my two best friends got into Megadeth and some other heavy metal bands. I was sort of open-minded about it, but not very. For various reasons I won’t go into, at the beginning of 10th grade (1991-1992) we had a falling out. I WAS a little guilty in the first 1-2 months after that of suddenly discovering a strong interest in heavy metal and wearing combat boots and that might have been pathetic. But I kept listening to rap, I started listening to more hard-core rap like Public Enemy and Ice-T, and I started listening to miscellaneous stuff that was labeled “alternative.” The bands labelled that way in the 1990s that I still listen to a LOT today include: Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Fishbone, L7, Faith No More, Ministry, and Biohazard (I didn’t listen to  Biohazard until 1993).

Starting in the Summer of 1992 I listened to the punk bands The Dead Kennedys and The Dead Milkmen (just an amusing coincidence). More recently I started listening a lot to a CELTIC punk band called Dropkick Murphys. Some of the bands that I lazily put in the metal category have some major connection to punk music. This includes DRI and Suicidal Tendencies who I enjoy listening to. Biohazard is also kind of a punk band.

Going back to my ex-friends in 1991/1992, I am, in one way and one way only, proud of the fact that when they started listening to Slayer and some death-metal bands I didn’t follow them (the thing is, since I didn’t follow them in that direction, it couldn’t be called pathetic). In early 1993 I bought one Slayer album (Seasons in the Abyss) and bought no more until 2 years later, when I was in college. Around the same time that I bought the Slayer album I bought one Napalm Death tape (From Enslavement to Obliteration) (Napalm Death are death-metal) but that was it for death-metal until about 25 years later.

In High School the main two heavy metal bands I listened to were Megadeth and Metallica. I listened a fair amount to some others including Anthrax, Sepultura, Pantera, Nuclear Assault, Body Count, DRI, and Suicidal Tendencies (unlike every other band I mention in this essay, I no longer listen to Sepultura).

There’s one minor heavy metal band that I listened to a little bit in High School that really should have been part of me transitioning towards being a socialist (a transition that took place in High School), but I don’t think it was. In a few minutes I’ll talk about how in general listening to music contributed to me becoming a socialist. The minor  band I just mentioned is called Sacred Reich, and even though in High School I had been less familiar with this, I’ve known for 1-2 decades now that they were progressive. In HS I had an EP of their’s with four songs. One was totally non-political and about evil or monsters or something. One was a cover of the anti-war Black Sabbath song “War Pigs.” The one I remember listening to was a (1980s) anti-intervention song called “Surf Nicaragua. The fourth song turns out to be a very progressive song, but I only identified it as such in the last 16 years. “One Nation” is anti-war, anti-racist, and even a little critical of economic injustice (there’s a brief reference to “greed”).

I can’t remember which came first, but the first bit of political activity I engaged in MAY have happened after I took a music-connected step towards identifying strongly with the cause of anti-racism. That step was going to the first concert I care to remember. It was in 10th grade and it was an Ice-T and Body Count concert. I saw the first band play and there was moshing which I quickly decided I liked and I saw Ice-T do some rap (which also inspired moshing), and then I had to leave before Body Count played because I had to get home before it was too late (my parents didn’t know I was at a concert and wouldn’t have believed that what I told them I was doing would go that late). (In High School and college I was into relatively non-violent moshing (and I felt very strongly about picking up people who fell down)).

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The High School Years: Becoming A Socialist

So, a focus on music and my political development. If I ever get around to typing it, a future post about how I became a socialist will overlap heavily with this post.

One aspect of this that I think about is, why did I come to focus more on racism than other symptoms of capitalism and get an Ethnic Studies degree instead of a Women’s Studies degree? I have no idea how I found myself listening to rap music in Jr. High. I wasn’t watching MTV and my parents were no more than moderately anti-racist. I didn’t have older siblings who listened to rap (actually, I might have been watching a LITTLE MTV because I have memories of watching 1-2 music videos by The Fresh Prince). On one hand, as far as I can remember, the rap I was listening to in Jr. High was non-political and only about 3/4 of it involved Black people, but It probably contributed to how I started listening to Public Enemy and Ice-T in late 1991.

I think that listening to that “Hard Core” rap is a huge part of why I did my first political act (and that may have been AFTER the Ice-T/Body Count concert I went to). In the Spring semester of 10th grade, in early 1992, I walked out of my 4th period class (I think it was 4th period) and joined about 50 of my peers walking around Boulder protesting the not-guilty verdict in a California trial of the racist white police officers who beat Rodney King a year earlier. That night I went to a march and rally for the community in general and/or the CU-Boulder campus and I was actually on the front page of the paper the next day (next to me was someone who later was the first or second person to get an Ethnic Studies degree at CU-Boulder, and there was someone wearing a Primus shirt and one person wearing a Body Count shirt).

This is a little embarrassing because I have heard things here and there indicating they’re not progressive, but I think some political stuff by Megadeth and Metallica nudged me towards the left in High School. Those songs are:

Metallica
“Fight Fire With Fire” is about the need to avoid nuclear war.
“Ride the Lightning” is in opposition to the death penalty.
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” could almost be mistaken for an anti-fascist song because it is indirectly inspired by an anti-fascist novel by Ernest Hemingway. The thing is, the MOVIE based on that book retained the anti-war message but not the ANTI-FASCIST message of the book.
“Disposal Heroes” is anti-war.
“Blackened” is about nuclear war.
“…And Justice for All” is basically about politics and power in this country, but I am very unsure about what EXACTLY is it saying. This one may have had no affect on me becoming a socialist.
“One” is anti-war.

Megadeth
“Set The World Afire” is about nuclear war.
“Holy Wars…. The Punishment Due.” The first half I’ve heard might be about international conflicts like Israel and the Palestinians and/or (possibly more specifically) Northern Ireland. Beyond that I’m not sure what to say about it.
“Take No Prisoners” is anti-war.
“Rust in Peace” is about nuclear war.
“Symphony of Destruction” is about politics but I can’t figure out what they’re trying to say.
“Architecture of Aggression” is sort of the same- it probably IS anti-war, but I am less certain than I am when it comes to “Take no Prisoners.” Megadeth just wasn’t consistently and explicitly progressive.
“Foreclosure of a Dream” is I BELIEVE about US federal farm policy in the 1980s. I am just not familiar with farm policy. I DO like the license plates in Colorado that say “No Farms, No Food” but I just don’t know anywhere near enough to comment on this song.

I think that is a pretty complete list of the relevant Megadeth and Metallica songs I listened to in High School that may have nudged me towards the left.

As I have said earlier, the harder rap I listened to, including three Ice-T albums, and 3-4 Public Enemy albums probably had a better effect on me than the Metallica and Megadeth stuff I just referred to. And then there was the Dead Kennedys stuff- some of their songs might not inspire progressive politics but about half of them do. And there was at least a couple that were about economic injustice- “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” and “Kill the Poor.” There were several other political DK songs whose lyrics I’m too lazy to confirm- with the exceptions of “Police Truck” (police brutality), “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” and “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” (about Ronald Reagan), which I definitely remember (as I was typing this I started listening to the DKs for the first time in about 4-5 years) (I believe that in High School and college I listened to 3/4 or 4/4 of the Jello Biafra DK studio albums).

There were a handful of songs by Suicidal Tendencies that contributed to me becoming   progressive:

“Two Sided Politics” is basically contrasting the life of a rich person with that of a working-class person, and there’ some anti-Reagan stuff, etc. One thing I think is noteworthy is that there’s one line that says “I’m not anti-government, government is anti-me.” I like to think that might be in part an anti-anarchist statement.
“Fascist Pig” could be a little more political (that is, deeper) but Mexican-Americans criticizing the police may have pushed me a bit to the left.
“I Want More” is about the class conflict with some references to the minimum wage.
“Give It Revolution” was a little vague but probably nudged me in the right direction.

There were a handful of songs by a thrash-metal band called Nuclear Assault that pushed me to the left in High School. Although I have listened to their other stuff in recent years, in HS pretty much the only album I listened to was “Handle with Care.”
“New Song” which was a fairly good anti-racist song.
“Critical Mass” is a pretty good environmentalist song.
“Inherited Hell” is also like that.
“When Freedom Dies” Although I’m not sure what it’s saying about US foreign policy during the Cold War, it IS saying that freedom and civil liberties, etc. shouldn’t be weakened in the name of national security.
“Search and Seizure” is sort of similar, but basically about law enforcement harassing metal-heads (I’m not sure whether or how the lyrics-writer would generalize that statement to include punks, hippies, etc.)

Another band that influenced me in High School was a “cross-over” hard-core punk/thrash-metal band called DRI (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles). In HS I saw them play live twice and listened to three of their albums.

First there was the album “Definition” which included the following songs:
“Acid Rain” was about the environment.
“The Application” is about multiple forms of employment discrimination and DOES include a line about racism and a line about homophobia, and one about religion and one that is probably about being HIV+.

The album “Thrash Zone” has several political songs.
“Labelled Incurable” might be about AIDS (as far as I can tell DRI were probably anti-homophobic).
“Kill the Words” is sort of generally about censorship and dictatorship but seems to be at least partly if not totally about that sort of thing in the Muslim world; I have no idea if they’re anti-Muslim or just consistently opposing fundamentalism, censorship, and dictatorship (there IS another song where they condemn religious discrimination in employment, so they probably aren’t anti-Muslim)
“Worker Bee” although it’s not written as a socialist song, I think it’s basically about economic justice and is by a band that I’m pretty sure is in favor of social justice as well (I’m suspicious of bands, people, etc. who are economically progressive but not socially liberal).

There was one Soundgarden song about the environment called “Hands All Over.” Although I don’t feel like looking at the lyrics, I believe that there were at least a few L7 songs I liked politically (one example is “Pretend We’re Dead”).

This will require at least one paragraph. Although I’m not real familiar with this, I have gotten the impression that Rage Against The Machine were a bit to my left politically. One social-dem critic told me that the political forces RATM admired either would have told RATM to fuck off, or alternately, should be killed (I think that may have been a reference to the Peruvian leftist army/terror organization called Shining Path). I sort of stumbled onto RATM a little earlier than most of their fans. Somehow I knew that their performance at a small club in Boulder around late 1992 or early 1993 would inspire moshing, so I showed up. I don’t remember thinking about it much but I guess I liked the music enough and the general vibe and bought their album shortly after the show. At some point at least a couple months later they came to Denver with House of Pain and it was great listening and moshing KNOWING that they were promoting dissent in this country. At that concert I learned about Leonard Peltier, and generally drifted towards the Left. (Right before House of Pain came on stage they played the music sans vocals of a song I mention below called “Just Look Around” by Sick of it All). Yes, RATM was alternately politically vague and/or leaning towards the hard-left. But they contributed to me becoming a dissident of some sort and it’s slightly possible that wouldn’t have happened if not for them. And musically they were pretty cool.

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The Last 16 Years

This next section will be pretty brief. It’s about what music I have been listening to in the last 16 years.

Between about 1998 and about 2009 I only listened something like 4 hours a day to music. In 2008, for I think the first or almost first time I got on YouTube. Since then I have listened to almost all of the Megadeth and Metallica that I missed, plus the older stuff. I started listening to practically all Slayer and I started listening to a LOT of death metal. The following bands are the death metal bands I listen to: Carcass, Napalm Death (I love their music and I think that if I paid attention to their lyrics I’d agree with a lot of them), Deicide (MUSICALLY I LOVE Deicide, but I assume I would be offended by their lyrics if I read them), Obituary, Cannibal Corpse, and Morbid Angel.

I got caught up on Body Count albums that I missed after Born Dead and also listened to the first two albums. Although I don’t listen to them much I listen some to stuff I missed earlier from Anthrax, Nuclear Assault, and Testament as well as what I listened to earlier. Although I’ve barely looked at the lyrics I some times listen to stuff I missed by Sacred Reich, and I am even more sure than before that they’re progressive politically.

Yes, my very favorite genre is thrash metal (and/or speed metal- at the risk of sounding stupid, I am not sure what differences there are, if any, between speed and thrash).

I listen to the following Suicidal Tendencies albums, both now and in High School: Their first (self-titled) album, How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can’t Even Smile Today, Controlled By Hatred/Feel Like Shit… DeJaVu, Lights! Camera! Revolution! and The Art of Rebellion. I haven’t listened to any ST that I didn’t listen to in High School. On a related note, I would say the same about DRI albums Definition, Crossover, and Thrashzone.

Today and in high school I listen(ed) to three Ice-T albums: The Iceberg, Original Gangster, and Home Invasion.

Until recently I took a 10-15 year break from listening to more than three songs by Public Enemy.

In the last 5 or so years I listened a little bit to Run DMC (albums Tougher Than Leather, Raising Hell, and probably King of Rock) and the Beastie Boys’ License to Ill and Check Your Head. I listen A LOT to the House of Pain song “Jump Around,” but it has been so long since I listened to the entire album.

I have a huge number of YouTube mix-tape playlists. A large chunk of it is miscellaneous 1990s stuff (some mainstream, some not), and another large chunk is some stuff where the theme of the fan-made video was anti-racist skinheads.

I found a massive playlist of mainstream 1980s pop hits and placed the ones I liked (about 58 of them) in my own playlist. To some extent (not a large one) I was exposed to many of those songs as a little kid (I was born in 1975) when watching a 1980s movie or when I occasionally was listening to the radio. I listen to that playlist about once a week. And one of the songs on it I have kind of fallen in love with- the music, the images in the video, but I have not examined the lyrics. It’s Holding Out for a Hero by Bonnie Tyler.

I also fell in love with a great song by the Dropkick Murphys called “Out of our Heads.” In the last year I have probably listened to it an average of once a day and I listened to their first three albums once as well.

Since the early 1990s I have been a fan of two Tom Petty albums- Full Moon Fever and Into the Great Wide Open.

I was at least kind of exposed to ska starting when I got into Fishbone in High School and I’ve been increasingly curious about it in the last 23 years. Although they might be more accurately called “Ska PUNK,” I do enjoy listening to The Mighty Mighty BossTones for about half an hour a day on average in the last 5 years.

I listen to a small amount of Irish Republican music. I bought an entire album by Black 47 but for some reason, even though I get the impression they’re progressive, all I listen(ed) to were/are the two republican songs (one of which I believe is a Celtic rap song).

In the last several months I’ve started listening to about seven Beach Boys songs, I have fallen in love with the song “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs and I like “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” by The Robins.

I have studied (i.e. read articles on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s web-site) skinheads in general and totally opposed Nazi skinheads specifically, and I listen to a fair amount of “Anti-Fascist Oi!” Oi! In general, both fascist and anti-fascist, might bear some resemblance to punk and might be defined by the lyrics (about violence, the working-class, and being a skinhead). The main such band I listen to is The Oppressed.

I listen to a small number of songs by the progressive (largely folk and/or punk) singer-songwriter David Rovics.

In the last 4-5 years I have spent a fair amount of time listening to YouTube playlists of music from the Vietnam era. For some reason I have used that word to find good mix tape playlists of classic rock, including classic rock that I vaguely remember from movies about Vietnam. (I believe that what we did there was wrong and I have evidence from more than just left-wing sources)

Alternative
Rage Against the Machine (the first two albums) Soundgarden (Badmotorfinger and Louder Than Love, and a little bit of some others that I didn’t listen to in High School), Nirvana (all 3 studio albums), Alice in Chains (Dirt and Facelift), Fishbone (Truth and Soul, The Reality of my Surroundings, and Give a Monkey a Brain and He'll Swear He's the Center of the Universe), L7 (Smell the Magic, Bricks are Heavy), Faith No More (The Real Thing and Angel Dust from High School, and We Care a Lot in the last several years), Ministry (The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste and ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ), and Biohazard (I didn’t listen to  Biohazard until 1993) (Urban Discipline, State of the World Address, and Mata Leao)

I THINK that covers about 99% of the songs and albums that I should mention here.

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The Music of my Enemy

Since late 2008 I have spent probably an hour a day on average listening to Nazi Skinhead music. For multiple reasons, some a little vague, I enjoy listening to the music of my enemy. I stumbled onto it shortly after I first got on YouTube in 2008 and I recognized the name Skrewdriver that I had learned about in 10th grade when researching the racist right for a paper I was writing (primarily about the racist right in this country, but I’m not surprised some of the sources I read mentioned the BRITISH Skrewdriver). Anyway, I liked most of the music (not the lyrics) and just really enjoyed listening to the music of my enemy (yes, I also listen to a small amount of anti-Catholic N. Ireland loyalist music). I also learned a handful of things by studying the lyrics and the imagery in fan-made videos. Crucially, I quickly started to alter the lyrics into anti-fascist poems- in many cases, so that my poems were saying the exact opposite of what the original was saying (when there was a change in topic, there was always at least some conflict between my poems and what the authors of the original lyrics believe (and some times a LOT of conflict- a lot of the N. Ireland poems were based on lyrics by people who supported the British and Unionist causes)). The first poetry post is here.

I wish I could explain in better detail why I enjoy listening to the music of my enemy.

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The High School years- the PMRC and “musical intolerance.”

In 11th grade one of my best friends (James, of Portland, OR) and I did a “‘zine” (a very small and unprofessionally written/edited magaZINE). It was kind of political, kind of creative (well, James’ stuff was creative, my stuff less-so but the ‘zine in general (called The Conformist Monthly) seemed pretty popular with our friends and probably about 10% of the BHS students). One thing I did that I am a little embarrassed about is an essay about what I called “musical intolerance.” Although actually typing that and making copies of an issue that contained it is something I probably shouldn’t have done, I DO believe that most of my peers in High School were close-minded about different kinds of music, and at the time I believed that I was better because I listened to metal, rap, alternative, and punk.

Something I wrote for The Conformist Monthly that I AM proud of was an essay about the Parents Music Resource Center. The PMRC was created in the mid-80s, primarily by Al Gore’s wife Tipper Gore, and Susan Baker, the wife of senior GOP leader James Baker. It was largely supported by the religious right and practically no one to the left of Bill Clinton supported it. It’s been decades since I studied it, but the main thing it did was successfully push for an industry agreement to place “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” stickers on certain albums.

I really am not insensitive to the desires of many parents (probably around 95% of them) to keep young children from listening to songs about sex and drugs and songs which use swear words (I believe there is a spectrum between two situations- one involving children under 13, and one involving young adults who are around 15, and at the latter end of the spectrum I’ll be honest I am not sure if I care about parents wanting to keep their teenage kids away from that kind of content). And these stickers were a problem. In the past, MANY music stores wouldn’t sell those albums. In the past MANY of the artists negatively affected were people of color, and in general, many of the albums targeted contained songs with political messages that were liberal or progressive. This country might have been a better place in the 1990s if those songs had been heard by more people.

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“There Goes The Neighborhood”

(The title of a Body Count song about their presence in the punk and metal genres)

As I near a conclusion, the climax to this is something I want to talk about that is very special to me. That is the intersection of rock (or at least the heavier and/or faster variants of it) and rap (I’ll be honest, I think I’ve always failed to understand that many fans of rap and/or hip-hop define one as corporate and the other as something closer to the street, and I’m just going to use the term “rap”).

I don’t listen to a lot of music made between 1998 and today, so I’m going to focus almost exclusively on stuff from the 1980s and 1990s. Here is I think a complete survey of that topic up until some point in the mid- or late 90s.

1. In 1986 Run-DMC and Aerosmith collaborated on a new version of the latter’s song “Walk This Way.”
2. In 1989 industrial metal band Ministry did a song with a rapper- the song is called “Test” and is a great combination of rap and industrial.
3. In 1991 Anthrax and Public Enemy collaborated on a new version of the latter’s song “Bring Tha Noise.”
4. Shortly after that, Public Enemy and Anthrax went on a national tour together.
5. Ice-T and his musician friends created Body Count in 1990.
6. In 1991, Rage Against The Machine was formed with music that was sort of heavy and/or sort of fast and vocals that would often be labeled “rap.”
7. I am having some difficulty nailing down the details, but in the early and mid-1990s Biohazard, who were more or less a hard-core punk band, did at least two songs with a rapper (Onyx) and, crucially, did music videos for the two songs that involved Onyx that I can remember (one reason this is VERY significant is that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true that Biohazard had, years earlier, toyed with white supremacy as a marketing tactic in NY City’s competitive music scene, and may have done these 4-5 collaborations (including TWO videos) to make up for that).
8. In 1993 the soundtrack for a movie called “Judgement Night” was entirely devoted to collaborations between rockers and rappers.

I could and probably WILL do a lot of research on this topic in the next year or two and write something very substantial, but I have always had very positive political thoughts about this series of collaborations because I THINK they had some potential to positively affect race relations in this country. IF they HAD that potential it wasn’t something permanent, as 35 years later we are struggling to prevent a white supremacist from occupying the White House. I am not sure what is the status today of that potential- I’m not sure I should be making a big deal about the need for such intersections today, especially because there might be plenty in recent years and/or they are having no impact on American race relations.

When thinking about this topic, I wish I had a better grasp of sociology and psychology.

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Some miscellaneous thoughts

1. For about 10-15 years until recently, I took a break from being a fan of Public Enemy, although in hind-sight that didn’t involve changing the “Favorite Music” section of my blogger/blogspot profile page. I have listened over the years to about four albums by PE, all of which were either in the 1980s or the very earliest 90s. On one of them, there’s a song that includes two lines I have always found offensive, but which really got me pissed off about 10-15 years ago. One line is applauding homophobic VIOLENCE and another one implies it’s okay for a man to beat his partner if he takes her on vacation around the world. I am still very offended by those lines, but decided to listen to those albums from High School again).
2. In the early 1990s there was one song by the hard-core punk band Sick of it All that I really liked and which I have always really liked. For some reason I have practically never listened to any other SOIA songs. The one I listen to is called “Just Look Around.” The thing is, in 2001 I was at a party for progressives and one person asked the room what is the most progressive hardcore punk band? Part of me DID know that the correct answer was Fugazi, but because of that one SOIA song I said it was SOIA. The guy who asked the initial question said something about a pirate flag and slapping women. For some bizarre reason I didn’t respond. But if you look at the lyrics you’ll see that something like 2/3 of the lyrics are completely acceptable to progressives. The other third is some slightly questionable lines (i.e. mentioning anti-Semitism among blacks when that might not be helpful (for all I know it IS helpful)) and the very worst of the lyrics in that 1/3 is a reference to the “workingman” when “worker” or “working person” would be a lot better (this might be what the guy at the party was talking about when he suggested I wanted to slap women).

In the official music video, when the lyrics refer to “diseases and modern plagues of our times” they flash the “Silence=Death” symbol of the movement calling for a better national response to the AIDS crisis. I guess it could be a negative statement, but I have always assumed it was a positive statement about that symbol, which would probably also mean that SOIA are anti-homophobic. Lastly, another song on that album seems to be about attacking Reagan over Iran/Contra.
3. I organized my first fund-raising show (it was a VERY small venue) in 1995 to support the Left Hand Bookstore (in Boulder) and the college-years ‘zine that James and I did (it was called Subliminal Prison). The opening band was called Sonnus and I don’t have much to say about them. The other two bands were A) a High School band from the Denver area who were probably influenced by punk, and an amazing band called D-Town Brown. The latter’s music I have difficulty describing. I believe it was possibly influenced by rock (at least one of the 2-3 times I saw them playing a regular show there was moshing and 1-2 band members had earlier been involved with a band that was either thrash/speed-metal or death metal)) but I think it was more influenced by some other stuff (mariachi perhaps? (There were 4-5 members in the band and all but one were Chicano (the last member was black)). Although James and I did a publicity campaign in waves, very few people showed up. Not sure why.
4. The second fundraiser I did Involved Sonnus, D-Town Brown and a punk band called Dead Silence. It was for the Colorado Coalition for Single-Payer (the Canadian health-care system) and I gave Denver CCSP a LOT of flyers to put up in Denver (the venue was in Denver, where I didn’t live) and I don’t think any of those flyers were put up anywhere. I’m not saying I was totally blameless, but I do think that most of the blame was CCSP’s. The only reason that a significant amount of money was raised is that the owner of the venue (The Mercury Cafe) took less money than she usually did in that situation.
5. In high school and college, when I went to a show/concert I would dress in the spirit of taking nonconformity as far as I could. If I was at a Dead Milkmen show, I’d wear a Megadeth shirt, if I was at a Primus concert I would wear a Public Enemy shirt, etc.
6. You might like a post I did about whether or not Slayer is racist.

UPDATE 12/25/24 I unintentionally left out a handful of bands I should have mentioned, but with one of them I feel like I really need to do this update. In 10th grade I started listening to the heavy metal band Ugly Kid Joe, and after about two decades I just recently re-discovered them. I started listening to their EP "As Ugly As They Want To Be" (their first release) and their first full length album "America's Least Wanted" in High School. They describe themselves as neither glam nor thrash and I think that's accurate. In a minute I have something more important to say, but first a little story. In the Summer of 1992 there was a tour with (from top to bottom) Ozzy, Slaughter, and Ugly Kid Joe. I have pretty much never liked Slaughter, but I have always had at least some positive thoughts about Ozzy and in the last several years probably 1% of all the music I listen to is Ozzy. The concert was at an amazing venue called Red Rocks and although it doesn't facilitate moshing (I THINK I remember that right) I'm glad I went to a concert there. But I got lost on the way there, so A) I somehow missed almost all of UKJ's set (I think they may have started early??), and B) after I heard ALL of Slaughter's set I had to leave after about 30 minutes of Ozzy because my Mom didn't know where I was I and I was afraid if I got lost again I'd get home so late she would worry. BUT I GOT TO SEE ALL OF SLAUGHTER'S SET!!!!! (The important part of mentioning UKJ is that on the first full-length album there's a fairly good anti-racist song ("Same Side"). It's not militant, it's not angry, but I think it's pretty cool despite that. As I was typing this and listening more and more to the song, I started asking myself some critical questions about the idea that it's an anti-racist song and then I remembered that the vocalist, Whitfield Crane contributed to a special re-recording of the Motorhead song "Born to Raise Hell" where he and ICE-T did some of the vocals and in the official music video they appear together)

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Conclusion

Although there was one gap that lasted about 3 years where I listened to very little music, it was a huge part of my life in High School and college and in the last 16 years. I find listening to it very enjoyable and it contributed to the several factors that led me to embrace progressive political values, and it generally makes me feel very good. Although I don’t think I’ll be expanding my interest in music any further (I don’t think I’m going to try bluegrass for example) I am (perhaps too) proud of the fact that I have fairly wide-ranging interests in music.

Most of the time I was typing this up I was listening to a song from the very early 1990s by a band called EMF. It’s called “Unbelievable” and I think it’s sort of a dance song but could also inspire moshing. The song, and to a greater degree the video as well, is very energizing and I got so much done with the multiple writing assignments I gave myself.

Mutually Assured Destruction: My Review of David Mace's "Fire Lance"

 I somehow stumbled onto the sci-fi novel “Fire Lance” in High School. It may have played a small role in me moving towards the left during those years (when I was 16 I became a member of the Rocky Mountain Peace (and Justice) Center at least partly because of their position on nuclear weapons). I’ve read it 2-3 times since then, most recently a couple of weeks before this post was published.

It was written in 1986 by a British sci-fi writer named David Mace. I read one of his other books but I didn’t like it very much (Fire Lance is one of my favorite books). It’s one of my favorite books because it’s both politically progressive and reminds me of the centrist/centre-right author Tom Clancy who often wrote about the military (I might go into more detail about this in a future post, but between 1989 and 2009 about 70% of the fiction I read was by Clancy and people like him- since 2009 it has gone down to about 1/4 of the novels I read).

Fire Lance is about a nuclear war between the USSR and the US. It’s not clear when in the future it takes place, but I think maybe it’s supposed to be about 10-20 years in the future from the author’s perspective in 1986. It’s pretty vague about the political situation that became a shooting war. It started with satellites in space going down and then there was some conventional action in Europe, and then it went nuclear. Some large majority of each side’s nuclear arsenal is used before they stop.  Around the same time they stop, nuclear winter sets in. Although almost the entire book takes place on a US naval vessel where they have no idea what it’s like on land outside the underground American command centers (i.e. Cheyenne Mountain), at one point a soldier who spent weeks at the beginning of the war outside those command centers talks about what that was like in the aftermath of such a total nuclear war. The breakdown of society and the freezing conditions that would be part of a nuclear winter are well illustrated.

Both the President and Vice-President are killed and the “government” is made up of the military and national security bureaucrats, all unelected. After the conventional war is over and the nuclear war winds down, they spend their time debating whether or not to start things up again with the Soviets. Before the story starts the “soft-liners” or “‘no more war’ people” in the places like Cheyenne Mountain are eliminated and the debate shits to those who want to wait and see what the Soviets do, and on the other side those who want to start the war again immediately. One of the only significant military units still capable of attacking the USSR is the Vindicator, a futuristic surface ship with a small number of offensive jets and Anti-Submarine Warfare helicopters and the Fire Lance system- hundreds of nuclear armed cruise missiles.

One of the two main characters is David Drexel, a British national working for the US government on national security matters. Although he’s primarily a survivor and bounces between the two factions in the US “Government,” he also has some good progressive commentary about American politics and foreign policy. He criticizes us for supporting totalitarian anti-Communist governments and on a related note for enforcing a foreign policy that is pro-life when it comes to abortion.

The other main character is the Vindicator’s Commanding Officer Captain Richard Bedford. He’s pretty non-political and doesn’t side with either faction. But after learning that the Fire Lance attacks his ship is making on the USSR are not in response to recent nuclear attacks by  the Soviets, he tries to stop the series of missile launches after the first third are launched. A hardliner shoots him for this. The second in command takes over and finishes the three-part series of launches partly because he's a technocrat and partly because the hardliner brought a squad of elite Army soldiers with him and the new CO wants to avoid further bloodshed on the ship. Bedford has some good thoughts about the need to stop the nuclear war.

There’s some interesting scientific commentary about whether or not life on Earth will survive a nuclear winter. Drexel says that the radioactive dust in the atmosphere that blocks out the sun won’t go away but at some point will come down- which I assume means human survivors would be breathing it and it would get into our water. If what Mace has Drexel say is accurate, that can’t be good. I’m also uncertain of this next thing, but it might be true. Drexel says that the radioactive dust in the atmosphere will also destroy the Ozone Layer and that means that undiluted UV rays will get through and destroy almost all life on Earth.

At the end, the Vindicator, once thought to be unstoppable, is stopped by various Soviet attacks and is abandoned. At the very end, as the survivors use life rafts to get to a frozen island nearby, it’s clear that they’re all going to die. If what Drexel said about the ozone is right, everyone is going to die. Overall it’s meant as a very damning illustration of nuclear war.

Three other things I like about it:

1) As I sort of already said, I like the stuff about how the military works and how the Soviets try to stop them.
2) At one point the ship is very close to Ireland and the Captain considers as likely the idea that the Irish would be very hostile to his ship. He thinks- “It wasn’t Ireland’s war. It was Ireland’s planet.”
3) At one point when US military spending is described by the author, the defunding of social programs is mentioned as something that allowed that military spending to be increased.

It’s 314 pages long. I do recommend it for any progressive who enjoys stuff about the military.  You might be able to find it at a used book store but your best chance is probably a library or Amazon (if it becomes ethical to buy from Amazon).

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I wanted to offer some thoughts about nuclear war.

Although I believe that any movement towards a nuke-free world is positive, I DO focus mostly on the US. We started it, and I’m an American. For multiple reasons I would like to see the US change it’s foreign policy in a progressive way and gradually reduce it’s conventional military. It should, at the very beginning of this process begin getting rid of it’s nukes. As that process is going on, they should negotiate with almost every country on Earth to form a new global alliance. This global alliance should be about a global response to any use of nuclear weapons, where the guilty party will be shunned. I would support getting rid of American nukes right away but I think it would be very difficult for a majority of politicians here to support that outside the context I just described.

Tom

 

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 UPDATE 6/30/22

A friend suggested I read some stuff by a CU-Boulder scientist named Brian Toon. I read a CPR article about his work on nuclear winter and watched a TED Talk he did on the same topic. I then exchanged a few emails with him. I read another article about his work on nuclear winter.

The CPR article is here. The TED Talk is here.

 

As far as the ozone layer, here's what I read in the novel: "Now Ozone is particularly susceptible to chemical degradation, especially by nitrogen containing compounds- and there'll be an awful lot of those in the dust veil, because you get such nitrogen compounds in the smoke produced by combustion.”

Above I wrote: "I’m also uncertain of this next thing, but it might be true. Drexel says that the radioactive dust in the atmosphere will also destroy the Ozone Layer and that means that undiluted UV rays will get through and destroy almost all life on Earth."

I am not sure how much I screwed up (the "dust veil" is the radioactive dust in the atmosphere (actually, although I confirmed that the book says the veil is radioactive, Toon sounded less sure about that, like maybe it's not radioactive)).

Although I wasn't going to ignore that part of the book (the part about humans surviving nuclear winter), I also tried to make it clear that I and the book are not great sources of scientific information (some of what Toon wrote in his emails I didn't totally understand). But Brian Toon IS a great source of scientific information. If you read the two items above and want more, he forwarded to me two articles as attachments that I can forward to you. Let me know.

I'm not saying I have done a great job of this so far, but the more I think about it, the more I think we need to encourage awareness about this issue.

Tom

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UPDATE 7/1/22

One last thing from Prof. Toon:

There are 4 sorts of radioactivity in a nuclear war.  There is prompt radiation released when the bomb goes off.  This would kill a lot of people near ground zero, but they likely die first from blast and fire.  Second if there is a ground burst radioactive isotopes will attach to dust lifted from the ground.  The dust is relatively large and so it falls out fast (hence the name fallout).  This fallout can make a  strip of radiation hundreds of miles long downwind of the explosion.  Anyone in that who doesn't shelter for a week or so is potentially in trouble.  Ground bursts go after things like missile silos so most bombs are air bursts.  The isotopes from these will not attach to large dust particles so they will float around in the air until they get rained out, likely in a week or two.  By the time they reach the ground the radioactivity level will have fallen and so exposure will not be very dangerous.  For instance this happened from a Nevada test, which resulted in a radiation dump in a rain storm in upstate New York.  No one has looked at the rainfall frequency and the deposition of the radiation on the ground so the odds of radiation poisoning are not clear.  Generally the military says don't worry, no one will be hurt.  The forth type of radiation is long lived isotopes that can take decades to decay.   These isotopes explain the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty.  Kids teeth and bones were picking up this radiation.  Generally however, it is believed that this radiation is not much above the natural levels.  So again the military says don't worry.