Sunday, February 24, 2013

MARISSA MAGIC - "Infinity Bums" - Tape - 2012

   Last night, I went to see DavEnd's amazing musical, Fabulous Artistic Guys Get Overtly Traumatized Sometimes and it was outstanding. It took me away from my mostly straight, mostly hetero, somewhat confined punk world and set me adrift in the genderqueer, trans, performance art fabulousness of DavEnd's mind for a couple of short hours. It was smart, funny, thoughtful and poignant. I would go see it again right now if someone handed me a ticket.
   It made me feel really good, but I was soon back out on the streets of SF, among the Saturday night crowds of affluent white people, party dudes and drunk assholes. I rode my bike back to my neighborhood, thinking about how everyday it looks more and more like a place that doesn't make me happy, which is a sharp contrast from how I used to feel. There's more people who look like me around: white, kind of vaguely punk the way most young people do now, riding a nice bike, drinking fancy drinks. It makes people that look like me feel safe. Like they're in a safe place. It makes me feel completely and utterly insane. I don't have enough middle fingers for the hate that flows through me on a daily basis. I don't feel this hate just for the damage that tech people are doing to this community. I feel it for a myriad of reasons, like for the continuation of full time war, the shitty writing in the SF Chronicle, men who protest at abortion clinics, people who hate others for being LGBTQ and organized religion. I wish that I could wrap all of these things into one big bundle, stuff it into a large pinata and destroy it with a bat.
   Anyway, I was thinking about all of this stuff as I biked back to my neighborhood and continued to drive myself into an unreasonable frenzy. An old friend had invited me to the queer goth show at a bar, but I soon found myself alone, hiding in the back of a taqueria, listening to cumbia and reading a book about Mormonism. I politely declined the invitation and just went home. In my room ,I wanted to listen to something that was as fucked up as I felt. I looked through the hardcore tapes, the snarling punk anthems and the noisy dirges, but when my fingers floated to this tape, I knew my search was over.
   Marissa Magic and I don't know each other too well, but I feel like we might share some of the same thoughts about the state of the world. This tape is cathartic, uncomfortable and noisy as fuck. I could name some comparisons but this isn't really my world of punk. In different ways, it makes me think about RUSSIAN TSARLAG and the Sonic Death tape, but only vaguely. There are some wild stabs at drums, a soothing blanket of feedback and layered screams that started to pull me from this awful mood. I dreamed of walking into the karaoke bar where 20-somethings had been post-ironically singing Kenny Loggins songs and just blasting this through their PA. In the right kind of setting, someone would want to beat you up for listening to this kind of music and in my mind, that is how I still want punk/noise to be. I don't want punk to sell cars. I don't want punk to reunite to play shitty fests. I want punk to always come out of weird, dirty places and remain challenging, like this.



That's all pretty rambly, but you know what I'm saying, right?
Mormonism is some weird shit.

1 comment:

ryan modee said...

i don't know what this is, but i do love the shit out of it