Music Review: Born Against "Patriotic Battle Hymns"

Sometimes, it's hard to listen to music that you loved as a teenager, sort of like looking at old pictures of yourself with a bad haircut. I have to admit that I thought Judge were a lot better than they were, and I have no idea why I ever bought a Dred Zepplin CD.

So, I was a bit nervous about this CD version of the old Born Against albums that I played to death on the mix tape that my friend Tom made for me in High School. I still wish I had hung onto the Eulogy 45 I got in 1990. Born Against was one of those critical bands of my teenage years- right up there with MDC and Dead Kennedys for me. Their live show was one of the most physically intense things I've ever seen. And then, sometimes, it was Sam leaving the stage to "take a shit" and coming back at the very end of the set for twenty seconds. You never knew what it was going to be.

Stop rambling, Carlton. Does the CD hold up a decade later?

Absolutely. These songs still bury me. Adam is one of the best guitar players in punk rock, and these songs have some of the best, most innovative riffs on any album I own. They're rough and loud and complex, but still sound like the band could come apart at any time. The opening of Shroud is still completely unnerving. There aren't so many great musicians in hardcore, but he is still one of the best. His stuff with Young Pioneers was just as good.

And, yeah, some of the song topics are a bit obvious, but Sam's lyrics are still powerful and meaningful to me. Sure, Jock Gestapo means less now, but how many 19 year olds could write a song about mass-culture (Mount the Pavement) and have the insight to include the lines: "Well, it's the puppets that pull the strings. No one's got the boot to our heads and we still gorge ourselves on their troughs"? The topics include the corporate buy up and grind up of genuine culture and idiotic mass media (Test Pattern, Mt. Dew, Mount the Pavement), execusions (Murder the Sons of Bitches), abortion (Mary and Child) and the measures taken to ensure obediance of children (Footbound and hobbled), amongst other things. There's this hysterical anger to the songs that just beats you in the face with how bad the early 1990s were. I don't know if it's better now though. Let's see- back then, we had radio stations full of idiotic middle aged white men complaining that the welfare negroes and Mexicans were overtaking the country, war in Iraq waged by an incompetant brahmin, self-mutilation for ridiculous television commercial standards of beauty, art turned into ads for cars, a polite tolerance of rape, religious fanatics fighting to reclaim control over other people's behavior, pointless jobs and blue-collar misery, war fever, my Arab friends getting harassed at school by kids who were too stupid to do anything but repeat what they heard on those radio stations... Yeah, la plus ca change...

Sam has matured as a lyricist, but the vitality of these old ditties hasn't faded or dimmed a bit.