The Sound of a New World Being Born: "Punk USA: The Rise and Fall of Lookout Records" by Kevin Prested (2014).

Gotta make a plan 

Gotta do what's right 

Can't run around in circles 

If you wanna build a life 

But I don't wanna make a plan 

For a day far away 

While I'm young and while I'm able 

All I wanna do is... 

- Green Day, "J.A.R."

I've written before about how I discovered punk, and my own prosaic experience very much mirrors what Kevin Prested describes in the foreword to Punk USA: The Rise and Fall of Lookout Records:

Green Day and Lookout offered something much more than just sound: they opened an accessible avenue into underground music...Lookout's presentation implied a participatory culture, something young people across the world craved, starting bands of their own inspired by this democratic aesthetic. Looking at many of their products, it felt like you could probably make a record too. And while Green Day was mainstream, Lookout was not, so it felt like you had discovered something special that was your own. A new wave of punk was born.

Mainstream outlets like the New York Times scoffed at Green Day. Here, they sneered, is the end result of the Revolution of '77: punk rock as food court wallpaper, sung by some twerp on MTV in a fake English accent.* To such cynical observers, Green Day were Fisher Price punk, wholly inappropriate as a soundtrack to canonical punk activities like participating in Situationist street theater or nodding off at the Chelsea.

Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders.

But Green Day, like Black Flag and Minor Threat before them, opened up a new world of possibilities for kids outside of the hip bohemian neighborhoods where punk germinated. Some of them would grow out of it (like Filth said, the list is thousands long), but for others—such as yours truly—it would be a life-changing initiation, the effects of which would endure long after they shed their leather jackets and mohawks.

(Even for the punk diehards who attended volunteer meetings at Gilman and moshed to Neurosis, Green Day proved tough to resist. The Copyrights, a band more than a little reminiscent of classic Lookout, put it best: "Made excuses to not like Green Day / But we wore the tape out anyway / What our friends don't know won't hurt them / Of course they were doing the same thing.")

Punk USA is also about much more than just Green Day. Their success does cast a shadow over the whole book—it was their decision to take back control of their records from Lookout in 2005 marked the beginning of the end for the label—but Prested covers the whole spectrum of Lookout acts, from Crimpshrine to Avail to The Donnas, with ample space for lesser-known bands like Nuisance and Brent's TV.

Books like this depend heavily on who the author gets access to, and Prested succeeds in getting many important people to open up. Scene fixtures like Jesse Townley and Joe King contribute, as does a certain beloved Italian-American audio engineer who helped define the sound of an era—I speak, of course, of Mass Giorgini. There are some notable (but unsurprising) omissions: Green Day don't talk, and Ben Weasel's absence is keenly felt.

Deep down inside he loves you kids.

But the book's central character is Chris Appelgren, the protégé of Larry Livermore who took over running the label after his mentor stepped down. Appelgren is often called "the Nero of Lookout" for his role in running the label into the ground, and perhaps appropriately, the book contains more testimony from him than any other participant.

The book's second half settles into a comfortable rhythm: band members explain their grievances with the label and Appelgren, and he responds. To his credit, Appelgren conducts himself with an impressive amount of grace and humility, probably owing to his familiarity with being a target. He presents his perspective without making excuses or casting blame, and he owns his own failures.

The Lookout story proves a familiar one for indie music fans: a small scene built on personal relationship and shared aesthetics becomes the focus of global attention, forcing the participants onto a larger stage where much greater sums of money are at stake. Unlike some such stories, most everyone in the Lookout saga acquits themselves well: there are falling outs and grudges, but this is a story with few outright villains (although some involved would likely disagree).

The book's subtitle is apt, but this isn't Scarface; the theme of the story isn't so much Icarus soaring too close to the sun, but the timeless dictum that money changes everything.

It's time to make a change and redefine our roots / We're sick and tired of punk rockers playing in business suits.

Along the way there are great anecdotes, like original Green Day drummer and future millionaire John Kiffmyer (aka Al Sobrante) selling T-shirts accusing Samiam of selling out in front of Gilman, or Furious George peeing through the mail slot at the Lookout offices. (There are even pictures of the latter defilement.) And there are interesting factoids, like how it was Green Day, of all bands, that introduced Larry Livermore to infamous NY shit-stirrers Born Against.

Prested is an able researcher, with a journalist's keen eye for the telling detail or interview bon mot, but I can't help but feel that the book might've benefited from another layer or two of editorial polish. The prose is often workmanlike, if not awkward—e.g. when Lookout co-founder David Hayes is described as looking through "negative-tinted glasses"—and there are a number of unfortunate typos in the final manuscript. But Prested is a capable writer, and sometimes his prose really sings: he describes the songs on 1000 Hours as "teen punk heaven yearning to be loved", and aptly characterizes The Queers' Love Songs For The Retarded as "almost painfully heterosexual."

Punk USA may not be the greatest of all punk chronicles, or even the best book on Bay Area punk. But it is a wonderful document of a label that meant a great deal to a whole generation of punx, and a potent reminder of how transformative DIY music can be. If you've ever sung along to "Ursula Finally Has Tits" or worked out the chords to "Knowledge", you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Mom don't like the way you look, you're straight out of a comic book.

* Re: Billie Joe Armstrong's supposed English accent, I've always thought this was a trite and largely fanciful observation. Billie Joe has always sounded like a snotty, good-natured kid from California—no more, no less. And Tim Armstrong, the other Bay Area icon often accused of putting English on it, seems to shift inflections from song to song, coming off less like an Anglophile than a method actor: De Niro with a mohawk. And it goes without saying that the whole idea of punk being essentially English is really only believed by idiot posers (like the staff of the New York Times). Early Rancid sounds more like Econochrist than The Clash!

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: "Clueless" (1995).

At a glance, it might seem like Clueless hasn't aged well. A retelling of Jane Austen's Emma, it reads like a sympathetic portrait of the super-rich, designed to show that their wealth doesn't insulate them from the trials and tribulations of the human heart. But Clueless is much more than clunky propaganda, and its glib appearance is part of the film's design. 

It's a smart, satirical, and devastatingly sweet movie, wrapped in a tartan miniskirt. It's a film about appearances, and the deception they work on us: the film repeatedly finds people writing Cher off as a clueless, privileged airhead—but she turns out to be much smarter, more caring, and more genuine than people give her credit for.

It's about the push-and-pull between style and substance, and finding value in bringing people together instead of stepping on them to get what you want. It's about realizing that the image of happiness can be dramatically different from the genuine article. It's about recognizing that the map is not the terrain—as Paul Rudd's Josh might describe it, quoting ostentatiously from one of his assigned readings.

Revolution is just a T-shirt away.

In a weird way, it reminds me of The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris' epoch-making documentary about LA punk. Featuring performances from bands like The Germs, X, Fear, Circle Jerks, Black Flag, and those other ones you don't remember, Spheeris' pic seems to offer exactly what it says on the tin: a portrait of civilization unraveling, abetted by the bloodlust of a crowd of psychotic teenagers. (That's certainly what LAPD Chief Daryl Gates saw, since he typically responded to Black Flag with a phalanx of armored riot cops.)

But as anyone who's seen it knows, there's more to Decline than that. Despite the violent nihilism of figures like "Mike the Marine" ("X-Head" in the below clip), Spheeris paints a portrait of a group of people who are deeply invested in the creation of a culture they can call their own.


"Where's your sense of pit hospitality?"
Both films were also directed by women. Spheeris and Clueless director Amy Heckerling were part of a group of breakout female directors that emerged in the 1980s, along with Penny Marshall (Big) and Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, Zero Dark Thirty). While Spheeris was finishing Decline, Heckerling was making Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a depiction of kids in America from outside the bubble of punk's avant-garde. It's new wave at the food court, rather than hardcore at Oki Dog—but it's still not too hard to imagine Spiccoli as a Decline interview subject.

Ironically, the Fast Times soundtrack (which featured artists like Don Henley and Jimmy Buffett) ended up pretty far from what Heckerling originally imagined:

I guess a lot of people like that stuff, but being young as I was at the time, I really wanted a new edgy eighties music soundtrack. I wanted Fear, Oingo Boingo, The Go-Gos, The Talking Heads, and the Dead Kennedys. I was one of those obnoxious teenagers that thought that the music I liked was great and everything else sucked. Getting that Oingo Boingo song in the film was a big fight. But I had to make some compromises and put in some songs that I didn't like at all.

Just think: instead of Jackson Browne's "Somebody's Baby", Stacy could have lost her virginity to the strains of "Beef Bologna".

The guiding theme for the Clueless soundtrack is a marriage between the new wave of Heckerling's youth and the alternative nation that the film was released to. The friction between artifice and authenticity, upmarket and thrift store, etc. is woven through the soundtrack as well as the film; the meticulously couture'd Cher still isn't too cool to go see the Mighty Mighty Bosstones in a warehouse.

The transformation of history into a series of stylistic pastiches is one of the trademarks of postmodernism, and since new wave was all about decontextualized stylistic gestures, Clueless is actually the ultimate '80s new wave movie—despite being released in 1995, deep in the grunge era. ("I don't want to be a traitor to my generation and all...") But this is also a bit of sleight-of-hand, since the film's message is pure flannel: think globally act locally, mean people suck, come as you are.

Stylistically, the soundtrack is kind of all over the map, from electronic beats to weepy acoustic ballads to spiky pop-punk. But it makes sense, as this phenomenal piece by Elizabeth Sankey argues, because many of the songs also work as themes for the individual characters.

"Where shall we see a better daughter, or a kinder sister, or a truer friend?" 
(Emma, Volume I, Chapter V.)

Thus Amber—Cher's catwalk frenemy and full-on Monet—gets The Muffs' take on Kim Wilde's all-surface "Kids in America", while Cher herself gets Cracker's version of the Flamin Groovies' "Shake Some Action", because she's cooler and more reflective, and lots of hip people listen to her.

The musical turtleneck of Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees"? That's Josh, all the way. The Beastie Boys' "Mullet Head"? That's chronically tardy skater boy Travis Birkenstock. (I totally forgot his last name was Birkenstock until I watched it again, it's a nice touch.) That one is apparently a B-side from Check Your Head, but it sounds very much like the pre-rap, NYHC version of the Beastie Boys—again, you get the present gesturing with the past.

Elton doesn't get a theme song, because he left his Cranberries CD in the quad.

I like to think that World Party's "All The Young Dudes" (originally by Mott the Hoople, written by David Bowie) is the anthem of Ms. Geist, Cher's impassioned English teacher; it was what she listened to during her wild, younger days. And the Smoking Popes' "Need You Around" feels like Mr. Hall to me, because he's also good-natured and old-fashioned, and their singer is sort of the Wallace Shawn of pop-punk—endearing bald guy with a one-of-a-kind voice.

Fun and relevant fact: Twink Caplan, the actress who plays Ms. Geist, appeared in an episode of Who's the Boss (and one where Samantha goes to see the Beastie Boys, no less) that also features Lee Ving.

(In case you don't know, Lee Ving was the singer from Fear, the band who closed out The Decline of Western Civilization. He also appeared in Flashdance and Clue!)

Possible future post: "punk" episodes of '80s sitcoms.

Of course, there's not a 1-1 correspondence for songs and characters. Some of them are just killer jams, like The Lightning Seeds' "Change" or Supergrass' "Alright", two Britpop gems that are too often overlooked (although "Alright" turns up in commercials now and again). 

Perhaps best of all is the effervescent bubblegum of Jill Sobule's "Supermodel"—which, as Sankey notes, accompanies one of the finest makeover montages you'll ever see. The song's actually a pretty biting satire, a la Frank Zappa's "Valley Girl", but Heckerling knows this, and is foreshadowing Cher and Tai's realizations later in the film.

Clueless also came out just as ska-punk was poised to take over the airwaves (it hit theaters three months before the release of No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom), and appropriately the film features a cameo by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Their two contributions, "Where'd You Go?" and "Someday I Suppose" (not on the disc, but in the movie), are excellent songs, and they honestly feel a lot less dated than most of the limp indie rock from this era that nerds still salivate over.

The ska revival has long provided an easy target for snobs, but compared to modern fads like grad student black metal, the Bosstones feel bracingly sincere and charming—even with (or especially because of) the dancing guy.

"One man's style must not be the rule of another's." 

(Emma, Volume III, Chapter XV.)

There are some other pretty clutch songs in the movie that didn't make it to the CD. The most obvious is No Doubt's "Just a Girl", which could easily serve as a manifesto for the whole film. But the biggest omission is "Tenderness", the sparkling General Public single that plays over the final scene at Ms. Geist's wedding. Tellingly, "Tenderness" also appeared in some of Clueless' brat pack forerunners like Weird Science and Sixteen Candles (which also ends with a wedding).

But good news: here's a Spotify playlist of the soundtrack that I made for you, with those three missing songs added back in. Accept no substitutes! ("No shit, you guys got Coke here?" "Yeah, this is America.")



It's not quite as sterling a listen as Angus—the Luscious Jackson tune feels really out of place, and I'd definitely scrap that stupid fucking Radiohead song, Josh be damned. But it's still a quality collection of tunes that's worth revisiting...and hopefully not just sporadically.

Soundtracks of our lives: "Judgement Night".

"Before the beginning, after the great war between Rap and Rock, God created the Earth and gave dominion over it to the crafty ape he called man."

September, 1993.

In Washington, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shakes hands with PLO leader Yasser Arafat, renewing hopes for peace in our time.

In Norway, Varg Vikernes (aka "Count Grishnackh") is arrested for the murder of bandmate Øystein Aarseth (aka "Euronymous"). A police raid on Vikernes' home revealed 150 kg of explosives and 3,000 rounds of ammunition.

And in comic book shops across the country, a mysterious new card game called Magic: The Gathering was bewitching young people with its hideous, Satanic power.

But even these momentous events paled in comparison to the release of one of the most pivotal artifacts of the 1990s: the Judgement Night soundtrack.

Appropriately, Google retrieved this image from "soulhonky.com".

Director Stephen Hopkins, fresh off the dystopian urban nightmare of Predator 2, was tapped to helm Judgement Night, a thriller about a group of hetero lifemates being hunted by a gang of drug dealers. It's a classic story of average bros caught in the wrong place at the wrong time—kind of like North By Northwest, if Cary Grant was replaced by Jeremy Piven, playing an RV test driver named "Razor".

It's a solidly workmanlike picture, but one that failed to connect at a box office still dominated by Jurassic Park and The Fugitive. But the soundtrack was another story, thanks to a dazzlingly audacious premise: put rockers and rappers in the same room together, roll the tape, and see what happens.

So how does Judgement Night sound, nearly ten years later? Let's find out. (Spotify playlist is at the end.)

Artwork courtesy of Sam McPheeters, god among men.

1. Helmet and House of Pain - "Just Another Victim"

This is basically a Helmet song until the chorus, which features a time-stretched sample of what sounds like a mewling kitten while House of Pain mutters the title. The song's rugged, streets-is-watching vibe is kind of undermined here. 

Then about halfway through, HoP regrettably takes the lead while Helmet's trademark chunky guitars recede into the background. The kitten sample recurs, but now it sounds like the kitten has wandered down the street, perhaps put off by HoP's awkward flow. 

"Next time come strapped with a fuckin' Pamper."

2. Teenage Fanclub & De La Soul - "Fallin'"

Teenage Fanclub are really the odd band out here, much like they are in real life, where I'm pretty sure they're only remembered by indie rock diehards (or tryhards). Sandwiched in between bands like Slayer and Biohazard, they seem unusually out of place here. I'm also not really sure what they contributed to this song, because it definitely sounds like De La Soul could've produced this track without any assistance.

3. Living Colour & Run DMC - "Me, Myself & My Microphone"

Now this is more like it. Run DMC are obviously old hands at this kind of bleeding-edge stylistic fusion, and Living Colour's crunchy guitars and tasteful funkiness are a natural fit. It's a solid jam, but also one that's characteristic of the two bands in question, rather than pointing towards the brave new world of nu-metal. But just keep listening for portents of the nu to come.

"So this is what it's like when worlds collide."

4. Biohazard & Onyx - "Judgement Night"

Formerly sketchy New York hardcore band Biohazard had already added urban accents to their rugged pit riffment by the time Judgement Night dropped, having demonstrated their style with Urban Discipline a year earlier. But that record (which is excellent) mostly just sounds like punishing NYHC, closer to Age of Quarrel than the hordes of DJ-equipped nu-metallos that would follow.

But this song is pure rap metal avant la lettre. Onyx's style of strenuously belligerent hip-hop is a perfect match for Biohazard's no-bullshit mosh. It's appropriate that this is the title song, because when you think of the Judgement Night soundtrack, this is probably exactly what you imagine.

5. Slayer & Ice-T - "Disorder"

Apparently feeling that this soundtrack wasn't high-concept enough already, Slayer and Ice-T decided to team up for a suite of Exploited covers. It goes without saying that it's fucking awesome, and it's really kind of inspired because the Exploited—being one of the most gloriously ignorant bands ever—translate well into the idiom of ignorant mosh. "UK 82" becomes "LA 92"—love it. Slayer should've had Ice-T back when they did their punk covers album.

ACAB.

6. Faith No More & Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. - "Another Body Murdered"

I had no clue who Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. were, beyond having one of the most annoying to type and quintessentially '90s band names ever. After Googling them, I discovered they're a group of four Samoan brothers who at one point released an album called Angry Samoans, earning them immediate blanket amnesty from me for any typographical misdeeds. And they sound pretty legit here.

Mike Patton's epic crooning on the chorus is definitely the weakest link, but he also does his full-on, sputtering cartoon character thing at a couple points in the song and it actually works perfectly, sounding like just another layer of Bomb Squad-style noise. Pretty sick stuff.

7. Sonic Youth & Cypress Hill - "I Love You Mary Jane"

This really feels like Cypress Hill produced a more or less complete track, and left a bemused Sonic Youth to add a handful of Artforum feedback squiggles over the top of it. It works fine as a Cypress Hill song, but as a collabo it wipes out like one of the skaters in this Unsane video (to be spotlighted in a future N4N post).

Now that I think of it, why isn't Unsane on here, doing a track with Mobb Deep?

8. Mudhoney & Sir Mix-A-Lot - "Freak Momma"

Everything about this suggests that it's going to be awesome...and it pretty much is. It's exactly what you would expect. I like to imagine that there's an alternate universe where Mark Arm became the Puff Daddy to Mix's Biggie Smalls, standing in the background of all his ass-heavy videos muttering "uh huh, yeah".

A match made in heaven, or possibly a men's room.

9. Dinosaur Jr. & Del Tha Funkee Homosapien - "Missing Link"

So these guys have aged better than just about everyone else on the disc, but I was still actually a little surprised by just how well this one works. They really meet each other halfway: you get a dose of Del's brainy pop verbiage ("now when I phase in / like Kitty Pride / city-wide"), and a wailing J. Mascis solo to boot. It's a lot less dated than most of the material here, and plenty listenable, but it still raises the burning question of whether either party is notably enhanced by the pairing.

10. Therapy? & Fatal - "Come and Die"

Talk about a deep album cut. A team-up of two acts largely consigned to the dustbin of history (he says as Therapy fans everywhere gnash their teeth), this number is appropriately buried in the order, taking the plate right before cleanup hitters Pearl Jam.

I don't really know what to say about this; there's a lot going on and the end product is pretty annoying. I remember once reading someone describe GISM as "like listening to Venom with the TV on"; I always thought that was pretty inaccurate re: GISM but also a hilarious way of describing a band. This song reminds me of that.

11. Pearl Jam & Cypress Hill - "Real Thing"

A much more successful collabo than Sonic Youth's attempt, although PJ still sound fairly awkward and the "rock" breakdown toward the end is really gross. Again, Cypress Hill aren't really enhanced by the pairing, and Pearl Jam are definitely devalued by their choices here.

So there you have it. Judgement Night is still a pretty enjoyable listen overall in 2013, and more of the tracks connect than you'd probably expect.

Although now I can't help wondering what other earth-shaking collaborations might have taken place. Gehenna and 2 Live Crew? Integrity and Notorious B.I.G.? Burzum and 2pac? The world will never know.

Pictured: 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted.

"I taped it for fun": a requiem for Freddy Got Fingered

When Hermann Nitsch does this, it's "art", but when Tom Green does it, it's "the worst movie ever made." 

Freddy Got Fingered was released in 2001, but it also marked the culmination of Tom Green's brief moment of mega-stardom, which began in the twilight of the '90s with The Tom Green Show. It was also pre-9/11, so it was still basically the '90s. (Trying to imagine a post-9/11 Freddy Got Fingered is impossible.)

Freddy garnered almost universally negative reviews, with New York Times critic A.O. Scott as one of the few holdouts. The film chronicles the misadventures of an aspiring animator named Gord (Green), and his fraught relationship with his disapproving father (Rip Torn). For Gord, the path to success is long, and littered with horse dicks, blowjobs, and cheese sandwiches.

In a mostly negative review, Roger Ebert conceded that maybe he just didn't get it, and that one day the film would be viewed as a "milestone of neo-surrealism." Freddy Got Fingered won 5 Razzies, and when onstage at the awards ceremony "Green began to play the harmonica and did not stop until he was physically dragged off."

Pictured: a winner.

Here's what some of the critics had to say:

"If ever a movie testified to the utter creative bankruptcy of the Hollywood film industry, it is the abomination known as Freddy Got Fingered." (Stephen Hunter, Washington Post)

"Tragically awful." (Wesley Morris, San Francisco Chronicle)

"Nothing onscreen is abused quite so savagely as the audience itself." (Susan Wloszczyna, USA Today)

"A movie so unrelentingly gross, disgusting and imbecilic that one mourns for the state of humanity while watching it." (Steven Rosen, Denver Post)

"Many years ago, when surrealism was new, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali made 'Un Chien Andalou,' a film so shocking that Bunuel filled his pockets with stones to throw at the audience if it attacked him. Green, whose film is in the surrealist tradition, may want to consider the same tactic. The day may come when 'Freddy Got Fingered' is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny." (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

"Bet your boots it's a Le Baron. Good car. Convertible."

The day Ebert prophesied may have come at last. The Wikipedia page for Freddy Got Fingered now has a section for "Resurgence", which refers to how this initially reviled opus has won cult status thanks to a sensibility that some consider avant-garde or akin to performance art.

Nathin Rabin of the A.V. Club (who coined the phrase "manic pixie dream girl" in his review of the treacly Cameron Crowe pantload Elizabethtown) neatly summed up Freddy's exceptionalism in a fantastically on-point review:

Studios exist precisely to keep films this audacious, original, and transgressive from ever hitting theaters. I've never seen so much as a single episode of any of Tom Green's various shows, but I watched Fingered with open-mouthed admiration. It's the kind of movie you feel the need to watch again immediately just to make sure you didn't hallucinate the entire thing the first time around.

...I think it helps to see Fingered less as a conventional comedy than as a borderline Dadaist provocation, a $15 million prank at the studio's expense. Fingered didn't invent the gross-out comedy, but it elevated it to unprecedented heights of depravity. It might have killed Green's career, but oh what a way to go.

If a toilet can be a fountain, why not an underwater cave?

And Ebert found himself haunted by the film's dazzling audacity:

But the thing is, I remember Freddy Got Fingered more than a year later. I refer to it sometimes. It is a milestone. And for all its sins, it was at least an ambitious movie, a go-for-broke attempt to accomplish something. It failed, but it has not left me convinced that Tom Green doesn't have good work in him. Anyone with his nerve and total lack of taste is sooner or later going to make a movie worth seeing.

Chris Rock is a confirmed fan, and no doubt others will come out of the closet eventually. But you don't have to look far to find evidence of Freddy's influence; the heirs to its deranged brand of humor are everywhere. It could be argued that shows like Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Wonder Showzen, and just about the entire lineup of Adult Swim original content since Freddy owes a significant debt to Green's over-the-top, absurdist aesthetic.

You know "Zebras in America" would fit in perfectly between "Beat Kids" and "Winobot".

Vadim Rizov makes exactly this point in a spirited article for IFC.com (IFC!):

“Fingered” would probably do at least a little better if it were released today. For one thing, the animated show Green’s character/stand-in Gord creates (“Zebras In America”) is full of the kind of deliberately abrasive non sequiturs and were-they-stoned? moments that typify the “Adult Swim” line-up; the idea of someone having a show like that now isn’t far-fetched at all.

And even if you hate all of those shows (as plenty of people do), there's actually a lot more to Freddy than meets the eye. As Rizov smartly notes, beneath the film's jizz-stained surface is a "nakedly sincere" story about growing up, following your dreams, and yearning for parental approval.Or maybe all the horse dicks are cover for an even more disturbing Freudian subtext, as this article from Cinema de Merde suggests.

Either way, there's a lot more to the film than the juvenile gross-outs that many viewers dismiss it for. It's like Breaking Away (swap bikes for doodles, and both are comedies about eccentric heroes following their improbable dreams despite the discouragement of a disappointed father) as directed by Luis Buñuel, with funnier jokes.

"I'm sick of symmetry."

In a featurette on the film's DVD, Rip Torn—with an absolutely straight face—even calls Green the best director he's ever worked with.

And Torn is not exactly an actor known for his easygoing manner with directors; when outraged by his direction on the set of Maidstone, he hit Norman Mailer in the head with a hammer, while Mailer's children screamed for mercy. (Perhaps this was karmic retribution for Mailer headbutting Gore Vidal.)

Killing cops and reading Kerouac listening to Madball: punk rock video game soundtracks.

August, 1999. Moviegoers were abuzz about the shocking twist at the end of M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, where you find out that the whole thing took place in the mind of an autistic child (played by Bruce Willis). Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? was a TV sensation, Madball was hard at work on their opus Hold It Down—and a young cyclist and cancer survivor named Lance Armstrong had just won a glorious victory in the Tour de France, inspiring viewers around the world.

"How is it possible for your body to be stronger now, than it was before the disease?"
"I have no idea. I can't answer that."

But the US Postal team capturing the maillot jaune (French for "victory blouse") wasn't the only sensational story happening in the world of wheel-based athletic pursuits (which at the time were called "Xtreme Sportz"). At the end of August, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was released.

There had been skateboarding video games before THPS (most notably the Skate or Die games on NES, the second of which actually features the guy from from Leviathan on the cover), but THPS rendered them all obsolete. It was a perfect example of "easy to learn, difficult to master": just about anyone could pick it up and start kickflipping, but scoring million point combos took real (by which I mean fake) skill.

Rip, skate, never hesitate.

While THPS' infectious gameplay soon embedded itself in the muscle memory of a generation, one of the best things about it was the soundtrack. Instead of the generic rock and sampled grunting of earlier skateboarding games, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater featured a soundtrack full of licensed songs from real bands—and most shocking of all, some of them were actually, you know, good.

Let's take a closer look.

It's hard to imagine now, but it really was pretty shocking to start playing THPS and hear the echoing chords of the Dead Kennedys' "Police Truck". Not only was this a totally legit punk rock anthem, but it also had some seriously biting lyrics that were just filled with swears.

You can just imagine some unsuspecting mom buying THPS for little Jimmy, thinking "oh, this looks so much more wholesome than that dreadful Mortal Kombat." Little did she know that little Jimmy would soon be bombarded with lyrics about KICKIN' ASS and SUCKIN' DICKS.

With "Police Truck", the message was clear: THPS wasn't kidding around.

Unfortunately the game also sent some mixed messages; "Police Truck" could easily be followed by something like The Ernies' "Here and Now", which seemed to suggest that it was totally fucking kidding around. And then there were the unforgettable stylings of REO Speedealer—who contribute a two-song suite that ends up actually sounding kind of like the New Bomb Turks or the Candy Snatchers, but unfortunately starts off sounding like somebody farting in your face.

"Fuck, I just couldn't concentrate with that stupid song playing!"

But as good as THPS was, it was the sequel where everything really came together. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 took the mechanics of the first one and refined them with tighter controls, better levels, and all the trimmings necessary to ensure countless productive hours lost. (Most notably, it added the ability to connect long strings of tricks with manuals, making you feel like Rodney Mullen on an ice skating rink.) The overhaul also included a much better soundtrack.

Millencollin. Lagwagon. Swingin' Utters. Bad Religion. It was like a symphony of '90s skate punk symphony. (Also, some hip-hop songs.) Best of all was a song from Consumed, a Fat Wreck Chords band from England. Just listen to this shit:

Don't be alarmed if you look down and discover you're now wearing a World Industries t-shirt.

The THPS soundtracks ignited a revolution, displacing whole cadres of Japanese men who'd made their bones composing MIDI symphonies for games like Castlevania and Final Fantasy. Tragically, their bleep opuses were no longer needed, and they were reduced to begging for change from drunk salarymen.

Video games would never be the same. The fondest dreams of children everywhere were finally fulfilled with the release of Grand Theft Auto III, the long dreamed of game where you could "do anything"—which in practice meant blowing up cops and killing prostitutes. Most of the music in GTAIII and the earlier games in the series was produced in-house, and the licensed tracks were often by unknown artists. But all of that would change with the sequel, Vice City.

Vice City's soundtrack transformed the game from a run-of-the-mill murder simulator into a day-glo time machine so authentic it made your teeth numb. You couldn't hijack a car in Vice City without hearing some iconic signifier of the 1980s, whether it was "Love My Way", "Raining Blood", or "Clear".

The core game still revolved around murdering hookers, though.

The sequel, San Andreas, followed suit with a perfectly imagined suite of 1990s radio fodder. There was a dedicated new jack swing station, generous amounts of Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, and rock jams ranging from "Mother" and "Unsung" to "Cult of Personality" (the radio edit version, for maximum immersion). And, naturally, Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" made an appearance—except in GTA, it's not a good day unless you use your AK to kill numerous people in south central L.A. (Sorry, "Los Santos.")

After that, curated video game soundtracks where everywhere, and they just got more and more detailed. Case in point: by the time GTAIV came out, there was a dedicated minimalist ambient station featuring Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Roach. I'm sure it was really popular with the game's fans.

This guy is into atheism, Game Of Thrones, and aleatoric minimalism.

But a crucial (in every sense of the word) development in the field of deep licensed soundtracks came with the True Crime series, and particularly the second installment, New York City. Just look at this lineup. If hearing "Police Truck" in THPS felt surreal, it was nothing compared to beating up old women to the strains of Youth of Today and fucking Madball.

This forced Rockstar to step up their game for GTAIV, and in response they included a ripping NYHC/metal station (in case you somehow got tired of listening to Aphex Twin and jazz fusion).

This flyer is actually a viral advertisement for the next GTA game. In one mission you have to dress up as a crusty and infiltrate ABC No Rio.

The surprisingly good licensed video game soundtrack is now a sort of fait accompli; we don't even really think about it anymore. They could come out with a hovercraft racing game featuring tunes from Infest, Nocturnus, and Masonna and I wouldn't even blink. What a time to be alive!

Can a Skate or Die reboot featuring music by Leviathan and Sockeye be far behind?

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."