Refused.

[casecandy]

case, I will buy you a beer if you come to America or I wind up in Quebec and we are in the same ish place at the same ish time. We will need a neutral party for the radio, though.

Totally! Although I am like way up in Quebec

Google Maps "Chisasibi"

Get directions from where you live LOL

At least you like Sleep.

And I don't know if you like Boris but if you ever dis Wata the beer is so off LOL

[neonblack]

I never liked DNOTD much or Minutemen in general. Tried. Failed.



OMG no, Daisy is just random noise and shit (coming from someone with over twenty Merzbow albums) and D&G was okay but defines, for me, the word "overrated." It's Deja all the way.

I was sort of on your side until all this. I can't help you anymore.

[neonblack]

what the fuck is this thread even

Just talkin bout Refused, man

[casecandy]

I never liked DNOTD much or Minutemen in general. Tried. Failed.



OMG no, Daisy is just random noise and shit (coming from someone with over twenty Merzbow albums) and D&G was okay but defines, for me, the word "overrated." It's Deja all the way.

I was sort of on your side until all this. I can't help you anymore.

Hahaha, if it makes you feel better, I love D&G. A pretty good BN album is still better than most band's really good albums

To get back on track... can we all agree that this Refused music is real, bona-fide sellout music?

Like I used to laugh at "true punx" but here... I feel their pain

[D.o.S.]

case, I will buy you a beer if you come to America or I wind up in Quebec and we are in the same ish place at the same ish time. We will need a neutral party for the radio, though.

Totally! Although I am like way up in Quebec

Google Maps "Chisasibi"

Get directions from where you live LOL

At least you like Sleep.

And I don't know if you like Boris but if you ever dis Wata the beer is so off LOL

That's like a day's drive. As to Boris: I got into them when Feedbacker came out, so it's been a long time. They are rad. In fact, I would say that one of the records I spent many many hours with whilst avoiding shitty bands like Brand New, (natch) was Feedbacker. They are tremendous, even if I think they more or less peaked with Smile and haven't investigated much of their new stuff.


What does sell out music even mean, though. It's a bad album?

[casecandy]

I think they more or less peaked with Smile and haven't investigated much of their new stuff.

For me the peak was way earlier in their career, with Amplifier Worship, Heavy Rocks, Flood, and Feedbacker

Pink was good, Altar was fucking amazing, Rainbow was fucking amazing, Smile was okay

But TBH everything they do is interesting, incredible live, too

What does sell out music even mean, though. It's a bad album?

The band had certain principles which were integral, which were compromised with this release.

In the case of Refused, they "have a bone to pick with capitalism"... but will work with Swedish megaproducers and churn out radio-friendly drivel, I'm guessing because that'll book them more festivals...? In theory

[D.o.S.]

Shellback? He's like a Refused OG. And I'm not sure that I'd be so quick to tell the band whether or not they're compromising their own principles.

[casecandy]

I'm not sure that I'd be so quick to tell the band whether or not they're compromising their own principles.

So are you saying there's no situation in which a band can compromise its principles? And if there is, when would that be for you, then? I'm just saying if you build a career on hardcore music and you turn around and release extremely polished, essentially pop music... it's somewhat disingenuine.

[D.o.S.]

I think the only people who can really determine whether or not they compromised their own principles that are the people in the band. Like, what are we supposed to get self-righteous about: a bunch of old dudes making an album for the hell of it? The fact that they're selling it as a Refused album? It is a refused album, and you had to pay for your copy of TSOPTC, so it can't be the commodification aspect, right?

So Refused have put out an album. Collectively, we don't like it. Whether you think they're pissing all over their legacy by putting out a bad record (seems to be the consensus from fans) or making another not-so-exciting album to go along with the others, that's what they're doing. I doubt this album will sell more than TSOPTC, I doubt this album was ever created with the idea of selling more copies of TSOPTC, and I can't say they're betraying their principles by making a bad record, which seems to be the beef here. It's not like they're going around saying "I wish Ronald Reagan was still alive so he could crucify Noam Chomsky" or anything.

There was a really good interview with Penny Rimbaud about this sort of thing when the Urban Outfitters/Crass Jacket thing hit. Whole thing is good, this is particularly pertinent:

I know that a lot of the DIY punks and the anarcho punks are going, “Oh, bloody rip-off!” Well, they’re not being ripped off. The anarcho punks have been ripping us off since the beginning of time, doing rather pale reproductions of both our music and our art. So as far as I’m concerned they’re just in for what they can get, and that’s laissez-faire [economics] at its most extreme.

I’m quite sure some people who follow us will be pissed off. But they’re not looking at the bigger picture. The sort of people who will be pissed off are the sort of people that are very happy to be working on a very small, almost ghetto existence within a particular genre of thought, a particular genre of action, a particular genre of behavior, and particularly a predictable set of political ideas. Well, the world’s changed a lot in 30 years and I think we’ve got to get hip to that.

http://www.vice.com/read/crasss-penny-r ... bands-name

[goroth]

Shellback? He's like a Refused OG. And I'm not sure that I'd be so quick to tell the band whether or not they're compromising their own principles.

A band like refused has a lot more to lose going with a dude like shellback than doing it diy, and they'd know this.

Shellback is fully legit in my books. Cool duder.

[casecandy]

don't know where to begin re: that interview! Yuck!

I wouldn't buy so much as a pack of gum from Urban Outfitters if it was literally the last store on earth. Its sins are legion and I've never set foot in one and never will. What group has it not offended? East Indians, check. American Indians, check. Palestinians, check. Women, check. Jews, check and check and check... I think they've had no fewer than three "Auschwitz uniforms" on their shelves. Every time they say they didn't notice the similarity. Mm-hm. They scour every fucking nook and cranny of the globe for cultures and subcultures that they can dumb down, repackage, and sell to teenagers who don't know better. For me that place is like the nadir of society. You can't be less punk than Urban Outfitters.

So for the singer of what a lot of people consider to be a real punk band to espouse or even be indifferent to that shit is just anathema to me. I never liked Crass at all (as you can probably tell, I think punk began with two dudes named Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto in a city called Washington). But I respected their fans. And he just shit all over his fans, there. To characterize this group of devoted, awesome people whom he energized and inspired as "ripping him off" is just a slap in the face and frankly, if I was a Crass fan, I'd feel like I'd wasted a fuckload of time on them. Punk used to be about making shit, changing shit, doing shit, smashing shit, ANYTHING but going into an Urban fucking Outfitters store and paying $300 for a piece of shit jacket "decorated by hand" by Indonesian kids probably, when you could have gone to a thrift store or raided your dad's closet and decorated it yourself, in the process creating something and at no point selling your soul to some major corporation.

I'm not perfect. I drink Starbucks. I drive a car. I use an iPhone. I'm not saying that you should or could pull out of consumer culture, wholesale. But neither did I build my career on standing in opposition to those ideas and things. For Penny to say those things is just bullshit. He can say he's "spreading ideas" or whatever but I think anyone with half a brain can see he's got the dolla dolla billz on the brain and he's rationalizing why his band is now scarcely more than a marketing ploy. And you're right... I have no right to tell him how to live his life or oversee his music, but fucked if I have to give him so much as a dollar, and fucked if I have to listen to it.

If you don't stand for SOMETHING, you will fall for ANYTHING. Cliché? Sure, but obviously what happened to him, and what happened to Refused.

Refused were not just a punk band, they were THE punk band that broke up BECAUSE they had become too commodified. They were the band that dared to be "fucking dead." And as far as I'm concerned, that was self-fulfilling prophecy, because they're fucking dead to me. And that's my prerogative, I guess!

I like listening to bands who make music that means something not just to me, but to the musicians making it, and I like knowing that tomorrow they're not just gonna throw everything I loved out the window in a hateful display of enmity towards everyone who got them where they are...

Just my two cents...

I drank a lot of vermouth before i wrote this LOL

[D.o.S.]

If you reread that interview: Crass didn't have anything to do with the fact that their name was on that jacket, or the creation of their jacket. That's sort of the crux of the issue, actually. Someone put Crass on a jacket that was sold in Urban Outfitters without consulting the band, and everyone expected dude to react... well basically how you just reacted.

Put another way: Do you get mad at Noam Chomsky because his books are sold in Barnes & Noble? Or do you accept that places like Barnes & Noble are where people buy books, and that having the ideas in a Barnes & Noble is about as subversive as you can get?

[resincum]

what if fugazi headlined coachella

[neonblack]

Then I would go there.

[D.o.S.]

I would even pay multiple increments of $5 to go there.

And then I would rationalize it by pretending that I was secretly paying for everytime I could have seen them and didn't.