It’s the Friday of what has felt like a very long week, and while I still have a pile of work stuff to do, I am just not feeling the motivation to tackle any of it, at this very moment. Instead, herewith a rumination on a beloved slab of vinyl from eons past.
While arguably not quite as ear-&-brain opening as its forebear compilation Let Them Eat Jellybeans from 1981 (which I wrote at great, sepia-toned length about here back in 2006), the live compilation Rat Music For Rat People provided a more organic taste of early-80’s hardcore punk than I’d previously been privileged enough to experience, capturing several crucial bands in their untethered live element. Much as on storied live albums like It’s Alive by The Ramones and No Sleep `til Hammersmith by Motorhead, the live renditions of these already-frenetic songs were faster, harder, louder and sloppier than their comparatively genteel iterations from humble recording studios. Select tracks on this collection by D.O.A., the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, T.S.O.L. and, most notably, Bad Brains took on furious new dimensions onstage, whereas turgid treks through pieces like “Scream” by Black Flag and “Life” by Flipper toppled out of the speakers as if slathered in hot oil and set ablaze in slow-burning agony. From top to bottom, the music on this LP was executed with bracing degrees of bug-eyed deliberateness. The bands weren’t trying to entertain, they were trying to exorcise.
Technically released in 1982, I don’t think I picked up my copy of it until the spring of 1983, purchased solely on the listing of bands cited above. The album also featured tracks by outfits who were new to me like Crucifix, The Dils and The Avengers, but it was really selections like Dead Kennedys’ “I Am The Owl,” prefaced with an inimitable rant by Jello Biafra about looming Orwellian governmental oversight, a particularly nihilistic bash through “Live Fast Die Young” by the Circle Jerks and a neck-snapping sprint through “How Long Can a Punk Get?” by Bad Brains that rendered the album so incredibly crucial.
Taped onto a 90-minute cassette that somewhat incongruously featured Iron Maiden’s Piece of Mind on the flip, Rat Music for Rate People largely scored my somewhat furrow-browed summer of 1983, wherein I was exiled to summer school for flunking geometry and my mother and step-father’s marriage was steadily metastasizing. It was the music that “got me through it all,” so to speak, and even hearing a fleeting few seconds of those recordings today takes me right back to that era.
Today, my well-loved copy of the LP lives in a flight case in my mother’s basement out on the east end of Long Island with hundreds of other LPs I consider wildly significant. I never re-picked it up on compact disc. I believe they appended two more volumes of the series into a single disc, but even that is invariably well out of print, these days. Not sure if it’s streamable, but you can, for the moment, hear it via YouTube.
THIS is hardcore.
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Rediscovering Rat Music For Rat People
It’s the Friday of what has felt like a very long week, and while I still have a pile of work stuff to do, I am just not feeling the motivation to tackle any of it, at this very moment. Instead, herewith a rumination on a beloved slab of vinyl from eons past.
While arguably not quite as ear-&-brain opening as its forebear compilation Let Them Eat Jellybeans from 1981 (which I wrote at great, sepia-toned length about here back in 2006), the live compilation Rat Music For Rat People provided a more organic taste of early-80’s hardcore punk than I’d previously been privileged enough to experience, capturing several crucial bands in their untethered live element. Much as on storied live albums like It’s Alive by The Ramones and No Sleep `til Hammersmith by Motorhead, the live renditions of these already-frenetic songs were faster, harder, louder and sloppier than their comparatively genteel iterations from humble recording studios. Select tracks on this collection by D.O.A., the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, T.S.O.L. and, most notably, Bad Brains took on furious new dimensions onstage, whereas turgid treks through pieces like “Scream” by Black Flag and “Life” by Flipper toppled out of the speakers as if slathered in hot oil and set ablaze in slow-burning agony. From top to bottom, the music on this LP was executed with bracing degrees of bug-eyed deliberateness. The bands weren’t trying to entertain, they were trying to exorcise.
Technically released in 1982, I don’t think I picked up my copy of it until the spring of 1983, purchased solely on the listing of bands cited above. The album also featured tracks by outfits who were new to me like Crucifix, The Dils and The Avengers, but it was really selections like Dead Kennedys’ “I Am The Owl,” prefaced with an inimitable rant by Jello Biafra about looming Orwellian governmental oversight, a particularly nihilistic bash through “Live Fast Die Young” by the Circle Jerks and a neck-snapping sprint through “How Long Can a Punk Get?” by Bad Brains that rendered the album so incredibly crucial.
Taped onto a 90-minute cassette that somewhat incongruously featured Iron Maiden’s Piece of Mind on the flip, Rat Music for Rate People largely scored my somewhat furrow-browed summer of 1983, wherein I was exiled to summer school for flunking geometry and my mother and step-father’s marriage was steadily metastasizing. It was the music that “got me through it all,” so to speak, and even hearing a fleeting few seconds of those recordings today takes me right back to that era.
Today, my well-loved copy of the LP lives in a flight case in my mother’s basement out on the east end of Long Island with hundreds of other LPs I consider wildly significant. I never re-picked it up on compact disc. I believe they appended two more volumes of the series into a single disc, but even that is invariably well out of print, these days. Not sure if it’s streamable, but you can, for the moment, hear it via YouTube.
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