I'm a proponent of subtlety. A Propaghandi show is probably the least subtlety infused event one could choose to attend - it's more like the riotous, public beheading of subtlety and its kind. I present, as evidence, lyrics from The Only Good Fascist is a Very Dead Fascist, off the Less Talk, More Rock album: Swastikas and Klan-robes. Sexist, racist, homophobes. Aryan-Nations and Hammerskins: you can wear my nuts on your nazi chins! God, I love a man in uniform! (But, uh, before we get too intimate here, big fella): what exactly are the great historical accomplishments of “your” race that make you proud to be white? Capitalism? Slavery? Genocide? Sitcoms? Guns? War? Pollution? Addiction? NAFTA? Thigh-Master? This is your fucking white-history, my “friend”.
It's not that I disagree (though I do find the listing of slavery and the thigh-master in one fowl swoop of misdeeds a little jarring), rather that the complete lack of story-telling or mystery or nuance or poetry is a turn off for me; it's sloganeering. (In the song Less Talk, More Rock, they sing, "We wrote this song because it’s fucking boring to keep spelling out the words that you keep ignoring," though it doesn't really hold for the rest of the album[s]). I guess this would disqualify a lot of punk rock all together [for me], though the lyrics aren't what attracted me to it anyway. What's strange, though, is that John Samson (who is now in the Weakerthans, whose lyrics I like and do find appealing) was still with Propaghandi at that time. What gives?
Either way, it is what it is. I went [and had fun] and took photos, mostly of the psyched kids going crazy up front, which is simultaneously sweet and poisonous to a perpetually mid-life-crisis-ing 24-year old like myself.
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