Bad Religion: “The Defense”
The one and only. Show some respect! Image sourced from loudersound.com
By C.A. Ramirez
Culture is our predator.
Anyone can find just about anything wrong with a band or song. Their sound might be “off”, or maybe the lead singer is too much of a silk-blouse wearing dandy. It is even possible that somewhere, in some far reach of Hell itself, there resides a creature so foul as to regard Queen as simply generators of a flawed noise. Lyrics are just as important as the melody itself. When it comes to punk rock anthems, there is something timeless about Bad Religion’s sentiment, and it’s time to explore why.
“We are the prey and culture is the predator. I’m running out of time where conditions are positional. Shadows of a doubt cast reluctance and depravity. There’s got to be a way to overcome this grim reality. Is there an option left for me. I’m not immune to despondency. There’s no way.”
I grew up in Southern California in a city called San Gabriel, nestled in the heart of the Los Angeles suburbs known as the San Gabriel Valley. Living here allowed me a great deal of exposure to Asian cultures along with a myriad of South American ones. By the time seventh grade rolled around, I could tell someone from Mexico, China, or Taipei to, “go fuck your mother,” in their native tongue, with proper tonal inflection no less.
We exchanged our ideas and cultures freely and without reluctance of whether or not it would make us more or less accepted by the status quo. My entire school would have laughed its ass off if there was some sort of wave of cultural appropriation being cast over us. We had first generation immigrants for classmates that loved Korn, Britney Spears, and Eminem, and had no problem humming their tunes out of key and heavily accented. Some would snicker but most didn’t care because our neighbors and parents did the same thing with The Beatles and ABBA.
“Nothing comes easier than madness in the world today. Mass paranoia is a mode not a melody. Yea, I’d like to watch a thousand cable channels but there’s nothing on. And my high-speed connections monitored daily by the Pentagon.”
The current onslaught of social media influence is full-tilt when compared to the amount of advertising that used to saturate older generations through TV and radio. Their ad-generating behemoths have condensed themselves into our pockets, nagging us with alerts and notifications that neither warn us nor inform us. It casts a yolk of manufactured urgency that updates and refreshes itself like some kind of zombified, technological allergen, transforming opinions into matters of contention with sharp points forged to assassinate character.
I left Facebook the week “the wall” was revealed. I couldn’t believe the deluge of sanctimonious, self-righteous, and superfluous minutiae that my “friends” were vomiting out into cyberspace. Privacy was never stolen or violated. We gave it away with a smile. 20 years ago, the idea that the government was watching your every move would have had to be delivered by the actual “Smoking Man” in order for even part of it to be considered a possibility. Today, we are shocked to learn that Big Brother was, has, and is monitoring our internet activity. Though, I wonder, “How hard could it be for them now when nearly everyone on social media is constantly tweeting, posting, and streaming what they are doing and where?” All of it is time stamped down to the atomic second.
“Nothing’s plainer than the madness in the world today. I must conceal myself and steal myself and break away. I seek initiatives in matters that are black and white. So I’ll construct this sound defense.”
Hell has fewer horrors than the cacophony of an entire country engaged in a perpetual contest where the accumulation of points is paramount regardless of how temporary your possession of them will be. With the right state of mind, you can hear it, faint though it may be. It wanes with persistent strength. Angry clicks and clacks emanate from equally disturbed minds controlling well-worn smart phones, computers, and tablets, all striving for the same goal: conflict.
The game is either rigged or the scoreboard stopped working a long time ago, and no one seemed to notice. One thing is certain; we didn’t notice until it was too late. It took the intervention of a deadly pandemic to keep people inside long enough and with enough time to realize that the culmination of this great experiment called America is coming to a head. When Louis XVI asked Alexandre del La Rochefoucauld d’Enville whether a revolt was happening in Paris he responded, “No, Majesty, it is a revolution”. January 6th was our revolt, and we allowed it to happen just as we allowed Facebook and all the other social media platforms to steal our data.
The coming revolution won’t be televised. It will be streamed live, shared, circulated, and sustained by emoji’s and upward pointed arrows. The monuments of Egypt are inscribed with esoteric emoticons that exemplify the pinnacle of ancient technology and economy, social order, and the rule of law. The United States was known as a bastion of these principles. Those of the future will come across our remains, and they will share the same puzzlement that we are exploring now. I just hope that the excessive memes are not as off putting to them then as they are to me now.
This article originally appeared on Medium.com (2/24/2021).