THIS IS AMERICA (A PLAYLIST OF 80s/90s AMERICAN PUNK, HARDCORE + ALTERNATIVE)

My latest, and last, themed Spotify playlist… Captain Beefheart once quipped “I play music, too many work it”. Whereas these guys worked it, just in a way which made it work. First, they worked a stage. Music had to be new and original but still built from blood and sinew. And they took a blue-collar build-it mentality to gig circuits and distro channels, creating facts on the ground which the rock stars airily flew over. Even lysergic-spewing reprobates the Butthole Surfers (handily pictured) were harder-working than anyone in showbiz. They did it their way.

All the other playlists had a sample lyric. For this let’s pick NoMeansNo: “If I could choose to believe or not to believe, I’d choose not to… but I can’t choose…”

“This America, man” (sample from TV series ‘The Wire’)
The Avengers: The American In Me
X: Los Angeles
Black Flag: Rise Above
Bad Brains: I Against I
Mission of Burma: The Ballad of Johnny Burma
Dead Kennedys: Pull My Strings
Millions of Dead Cops: I Remember
Big Black: Pavement Saw
Alice Donut: The Song of Disgruntled X-Postal Worker Reflects On His Life While Getting Stoned in the Parking Lot of a Winn Dixie Listening to Metallica
Fugazi: And The Same
Flipper: You Nought Me
Melvins: Goin’ Blind
Minutemen: Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want the Truth?
King Missile: Take Stuff From Work
Lard: I wanna Be a Drug-Sniffing Dog
Ignition: Anger Means
Girls Against Boys: Bullet Proof Cupid
At the Drive In: Chanbara
Nation of Ulysses: The Kingdom of Heaven Must Be Taken By Storm
NoMeansNo: Rag ’N Bone
Butthole Surfers: 100 Million People Dead

PS Should anyone be bothered about this… yes, of course Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are right. No of course there’s not a ‘right’ to spread dangerous and pernicious misinformation for your personal enrichment, and they people telling you there is don’t really believe it either. And I still say, as Patti Smith once put it, people have the power. But me I’m just a person. And me pulling my little playlists would be gnat’s bite which Spotify might survive.