reviewed by MC5
This CD is proof that hard-core punk is still coming out as it has since the late 1970s. It's not grunge, metal or other "alternative." Hard-core punk songs share the commonalities of being the fastest rock music, often with simple but repeated and loud guitar riffs accompanying vocals screaming to the point of hoarseness. The Fartz are a hard-core punk band, four guys sporting anarchist symbols just like the rest of the Alternative Tentacles releases.
Aside from the low-life name of the band, the CD jacket sleeve makes no attempt to hide that the album is an amateurish production. Typos are rife in the lyrics printed out. The album screams out that anyone could have made it. Yet all that is part of the whole allure of the punk movement--an end to heroes and mega-corporations doing record distribution. The hard-core movement produced some people who went on to become regular bourgeois rock stars, but for the same reason that people should exercise and play sports instead of spectating all the time, punk bands are a part of the people's culture that can contribute to the actuality of socialism and then communism. It is a part of how the people become prepared to rule themselves and dispense with the capitalist class.
The reviewer is not aware of what the band is doing now. The Fartz made their music in 1981 and 1982 and now Alternative Tentacles is making enough money to be releasing their CD. A homosexual who spent most his life in the Mormon Church claims that The Fartz revitalized him at a depressing stage of life after becoming an H.P. Lovecraft fan. No doubt the following review is what many progressive musicians are working hard toward hearing: "I went to the International Punk Explosion, at the Showbox theatre, in April of 1981, I saw the FARTZ, and my life was forever alter'd. The noise wash'd over me like some storm of emotion. . . . I found something to get excited about, to feel intensely with a sense of lust. Punk smash'd my apathy, and --shaken-- I awoke with a new lust for life."
From what we can see in the lyrics, the Fartz are pacifist-anarchists. They criticize the pseudo-Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (R.C.P) right in the misspelled lyrics of their song "Don't want no gun": "Bloody bodies, children die/ more solgers bullets fly/ have a stand off in the street innocent victims at your feet;/ all these things will be done through the R.C.P.'s revolution/if sacrafice is in the plan/I'm not going to lend a hand."
In some songs they say they are just humyns and should not be labeled politically as communists or anarchists. In another song titled, "Questions and Answers," they say "let's unite in revolution/anarchy is my solutions." At the same time, they are calling for "individuality."
Most of the album is opposing militarism and bigotry. We have very little concrete difference with the songs. The lyrics run more like short essays than most rock songs that make it big in the mainstream. Many artists would agree with the Fartz that rock should be used to pound in a straight-forward message that the audience would not otherwise listen to. We call the pound-it-in-their-skulls approach in music "didacticism," and we do not agree with that approach to music or most art. On the other hand, we are not going to go out of our way to oppose it either. Music expresses sentiments and plays on emotions, and there is a fairly vague unity possible through it.
It would be hard to say what role in the world journalists have if music should be about how analytical messages are pounded into the audience's brains. There is some useful boundary between prose and poetry/song-writing. The didactic line takes a masses-are-asses approach that can set back the revolutionary struggle. While it is true that the masses have had poor education, much of the reason for why progressive activists become frustrated from the poor reception they receive is rooted in the real world of comfort in the U$A, not just stupidity. The Fartz spread some illusions about this point by calling the working-class "poor" in the song "Happy Apathy." From the Fartz's point of view, the poor reception communists and anarchists get in Amerika becomes a matter of the first song's title: "You got a brain (use it)."
As a genre of music, hard-core lends itself to this sort of didacticism. In fact, with such a heavy proportion of anarchists with the "masses-are-asses" line in hard-core, it might be the case that the politics created the musical form and not the other way around. The screaming and energy are the exaggerated essence of rock's rebelliousness while the simplicity of the music and its usefulness for shouting out borderline poetry reflect more on a certain niche of political activists' views of their audience.
The title of the album pretty much sums up our difference with anarchists, nihilists and other idealists. Although the world does suck, we must look in it to find the good things that are worth fostering, nurturing or even imitating. Although the Fartz sing much against religion, complete negativity is also a religion simply because it offers nothing in the real world as a solution. It becomes simply another way that the Mind attempts to detach itself from Nature--criticizing reality from the vantage point of Ideas.
"How long?" had already complained that the working-class does not rule. Later in the album, in "What's Wrong," we see the typical ambiguity of anarchism. We at MIM were wondering how it is possible to rule and have anarchism, since anarchism is the lack of a state. Apparently, the Fartz did not know either: "We don't change a thing (Im sure there is an answer/I don't know do you?)/lets all fight the system/have a revolution, are you really sure this is the solution/Shout out all this crap bout what we want to change, haven't got the foggest how to rearrange/What we want is freedom to live the way we like how we gonna get if we don't stand up and fight/Kill everybody on sight put 'em in the ground, gonna kill ourselves if we mess around."