Bands I Liked As A Teenager: Le Shok.

Everyone knows the music you listen to as a teenager is formative, to the point that most people refuse to acknowledge anything that comes after. This is the first part of a new series about my own rose-tinted nostalgia. But hey, at least I'm not a baby boomer.

Le Shok were the it band for a very brief moment in the twilight of the 20th century. They were the rare band that managed to win favor from multiple punk factions, uniting stodgy garage turkeys with white-belted screamojugend and gracing the covers of both MRR and HeartattaCk. And like any band that got a lot of buzz, they attracted surly skeptics who thought that they sucked and/or questioned their heterosexuality.

In a pre-9/11, pre-Facebook era, the reigning epithet was "scenester", a term leveled at any kind of fashion-forward, style-conscious punk. And Le Shok were prime targets, since they looked like Ziggy Stardust's sketchy cousin from Huntington Beach.

But there's a big difference between the scenesters of yesteryear and the hipsters everyone loves to hate: unlike the beardos and urban beekeepers we're all familiar with, the guys in Le Shok actually had good record collections. Today's urban dandies take cues from Le Shok without even realizing it, but the music they listen to couldn't be more different. This was a band formed by bin-digging record store employees who listened to bands like The Monorchid and Teengenerate, and they came from a completely different world than bands like this.

Plus, you have to look at it in context: at the time, dressing like a coked-up extra from the Zodiac movie was a new and interesting idea. (So was using the French article "le", for that matter.)

Like the Velvet Underground, not that many people heard or saw them, but within a few years imitators were everywhere. In this ancient Pitchfork interview the Load Records guy draws a line between Le Shok and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, then the toast of the clueless music press; this blogger connects the dots to later hype bands like Mika Miko and No Age, and even credits Le Shok with kickstarting the vinyl revival.

Sounds crazy, right? I don't know: I'm in the oldest bracket of Generation Y (a prime demographic for buying endless reissues of records that sucked to begin with) and the first record I ever bought was a Le Shok 7".

A band like Crystal Castles also never would've happened without Le Shok, who rehabilitated both playing synthesizers and acting like an asshole, two behaviors which had fallen into disrepute since the advent of grunge. And while The Locust and many other Moog-wielding Romulans of the era sounded like Crossed Out crossed with a '50s sci-fi movie, Le Shok wrote livewire pop tunes about S&M and Vicodin, heaped abuse on their fans, and sounded like they never practiced.

In short, they were fucking punk, at a time when punk bands that weren't afraid to be punk bands were in very short supply. Like a blob of white phosphorous, they burned fast and bright: almost all of their records came out in the span of just a couple years, and then they vanished without a trace. In 1999 alone, they put out three 7"s and an LP, the latter featuring some of the very best cover art of its era.

Some of their snotty singles sounded like they were written on the fly, but there's still no shortage of hits ("Electric Digits", "She Prefers Whips", "Telephone Disasters") and the full-length just absolutely slays from start to finish.

There's also a lot to be said for record sleeves you'd actually be afraid of showing to the wrong person—a rare thing these days.

I was lucky enough to see one of Le Shok's few shows outside of California, on a package tour with The Locust and a bunch of godawful spock rock bands who are now completely forgotten by time.

It's still one of the most memorable sets I've ever seen. Hot Rod Todd—who I should also mention is seriously like 7 feet tall—berated the longhair sound guy for failing to procure drugs for him ("I pretended to like speed metal for you, asshole!") and slapped a kid in the front for clapping too enthusiastically. They played for about 10 minutes and sounded sublimely sloppy. It felt like time-travelling to The Masque in 1978 and watching the greatest lost Dangerhouse band of all time; I half-expected to see Black Randy or Claude Bessy bouncing around in front of the stage.

Here's a clip of Le Shok stumbling through a song and talking shit in every direction, with cameos by members of The Locust.



Le Shok were more exciting than like 80% of all the bands I've ever seen, because the ugly truth is that most bands are actually incredibly boring live. The best ones offer something that you can't get from just sitting at home and listening to the records—not every band has to be Gwar or Gordon Solie Motherfuckers, but live music is partly theater, and all the best live bands recognize this to some degree. It's a performance, after all, not a recital.

As Joey Juvenile told the OC Register: "There were some nights where we were so sober it wasn't even Le Shok...You might as well have just listened to the record." But as Todd also notes in the same article:

Some people just missed the point of it...All they expected was some crazy show where stuff gets broken, somebody gets punched, something silly like that. But it wasn't just to make a mess. We played music that I was really proud of—I have no regrets.

Amen. There was a lot more to this band than hype, fights, and skinny ties. The records hold up, and the shows are still worth talking about 15 years later. Can you really ask for anything more?

* A note on names: Le Shok had some of the greatest punk names ever, e.g. "Over The Counter Rusty". I always thought Hot Rod Todd was actually kind of a weak moniker, but he more than made up for it with the name he used in his next band: "Nancy Manhands".

Soundtracks of our lives: "Angus".

"Girls want guys who are dangerous. Have tattoos, play the guitar."

For a brief window in my youth, ice skating became the cool thing to do. Kid would lace up their skates, hit the ice, and try to "spray" by stopping suddenly and creating a blast of ice chips, a technique familiar to seasoned hockey players everywhere.

At the rink by my house, they would play music as we endlessly circled the ice. This was 1995, so you could expect to hear "Gangsta's Paradise", "Fantasy", and that U2 song from the Batman movie in an endless loop. (After listening to that Mariah Carey song for the first time in about 15 years, I have to say: what a sick fucking jam.)

The video—which features Mariah kicking back at an amusement park full of menacing clowns and overweight children—is also impossibly bizarre by modern pop standards.

But one day I heard something that stopped me in my skates.  It rocked harder than any of the Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins songs I was accustomed to, but it had a wistful edge that left me feeling all nostalgic and reflective even though nothing had happened to me yet. It was "J.A.R." by Green Day, their contribution to the Angus soundtrack.

Green Day had broken through into mainstream popularity a year earlier with Dookie, and I think by that point I was already acquainted with "Basket Case" and "When I Come Around" from the radio—but "J.A.R." grabbed me in a way that nothing else had. It was pretty much the best thing I'd ever heard.

To be fair, the competition at that point was not particularly intense:

When I heard this song on the radio I didn't realize he was talking about the Miami Dolphins, and I thought Hootie just meant that the eerie majesty of dolphins reduced him to a state of infantile wonder. This is still how I choose to interpret it.

That year I received the Angus soundtrack as a birthday present, and found that it featured numerous other gems—and pretty soon I had a copy of Dookie, which led to ...And Out Come the Wolves, which led to Minor Threat, etc. Before long, I was arguing about The Locust and collecting Japanese hardcore records.

You know times have changed when someone's arguing that The Locust are the real deal and some other band is "gay hipster bullshit".

When I was in college, I revisited Angus, with some trepidation. Having long since lost or sold my copy, I picked one up at Amoeba in Los Angeles and hit the 101 to the familiar strains of "J.A.R." But I was afraid that the seminal album of my childhood would have lost some of its luster for me—like the pizzeria you loved as a kid, but revisit as an adult to discover that the pie tastes like cardboard and tire and you really only liked it because they had Street Fighter II.

It turns out that I was totally wrong; if anything, it sounds even better to me now, like the girl next door who grows up to be a total knockout.

Somehow this still makes me feel kind of skeezy, even though I'm only like a month older than her.

To my jaded ears, Angus is as good a compilation as any released in the '90s, and a manifesto for the artistic validity of a style—pop-punk—viewed with disdain by most scenesters. (Very little has changed, other than that nobody uses the word "scenester" anymore.) 

The lineup is a delicate balance of mainstream alternative rock and underground legitimacy, as bands like Weezer and Love Spit Love rub elbows with Lookout luminaries like Pansy Division and the Riverdales.

They didn't use this Pansy Division song, though.

Everybody brings their A game too. Pansy Division's "Deep Water" is an unusually moving song from a band known for their cheeky sense of humor (see above), while Weezer's "You Gave Your Love To Me Softly" is the bridge between the blue album's sunny power-pop and the murky Japanophilia of Pinkerton. (The analog synth also foreshadows the Get Up Kids and their fellow travelers).

And then there's Ash, the only band to contribute more than one song. They epitomize the record's balance of pop-punk and more mainstream alternative: "Jack Names the Planets" is a quintessential piece of '90s slack pop (complete with movie tie-in video featuring bedroom moshing and singing band posters), but "Kung Fu" could practically be a Teenage Bottlerocket song.

I wish you'd come back; everything's ready for you.

And the song that at first seems the most out of place actually turns out to be one of the best on the entire record. "Ain't That Unusual", a deep cut from the Goo Goo Dolls album A Boy Named Goo, is basically the best Replacements song never written, complete with title and lyrics so redolent of Paul Westerberg they should be wearing sunglasses and swearing on live TV.

The album closes out with Love Spit Love's gorgeous ballad "Am I Wrong?", which is used in the movie's opening, with the marching band nicely integrated into the tune. (Notably absent is Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You", which plays when Angus and Melissa dance; it's a very pretty and apropos song, but one that admittedly wouldn't have fit into the album very well. This isn't the Joyride soundtrack.)

This is what high school was like, in my mind.

Of course, your mileage may vary. But for me, Angus is one of the quintessential '90s albums and honestly one of my favorite records of all time. In two years, Angus will be 20 years old(!), and I can't think of a more appropriate comment than what Angus says to the jock bully Rick (James Van Der Beek, in the role he was born to play) at the film's climax:

"I'm still here asshole. I'll always be here."