Word: punk
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...associated with less subversive types of music--pain. In "Broken Home. Broken Heart," Mould sings of the pain of a broken home; on "Whatever," of parent-child misunderstanding. Either way, his howls of anguish sound genuine, with a passion that leaves the listener thinking of Ray Charles rather than punk. Even the album's one great footstamper--Hart's "What's Going On"--stands as a cry of frustrated bewilderment...
...little hokey, no doubt, but then this prodding message seems to have less in common with the nihilism of the punk movement than with the more expansive hippie movement of the sixties. Husker Du's true roots, as this album and their single "Eight Miles High" demonstrate, are set firmly within psychedelia. You can hear it in Mould's leads, which seem to have timewarped in from songs like the Beatles' "I'm Only Sleeping" or the Byrds' "Eight Miles High." You can hear it in the tinkling harmonies and the choruses of songs like "Pink Turns to Blue...
...quarter or hit him with a baseball bat for four bits. When another local loon, the self-appointed Norton I, Emperor of North America and Protector of Mexico, died in 1880, 30,000 people (out of a population of 234,000) went to the funeral. A century later, a punk rocker named Jello Biafra ran for mayor and finished fourth among ten candidates. Rudyard Kipling wrote that San Francisco was "a mad city-inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty." He liked it. Other American cities had their rambunctious phases...
...into a rambling stream-of-consciousness denunciation of American society. The utter weirdness of society, the hopelessness of it all is insistently driven home to us in scene after scene, whether we're watching Otto shovel down his dinner from a can marked simply "Food," or watching Otto's punk friend Duke die after a shoot-out in a liquor store. "I know a life of crime led me to this fate. I blame society," he breathes in his final words...
WHAT IS the point Nesmith is driving at, except the absolute futility of the modern world, as seen through the eyes of a twenty-year-old, out-of-work punk? Is it that life is not worth living? Or that life can't be lived--that events are beyond our control? Clearly, this movie's makers wanted to let us in on some Inner Message, but the connection between the weirdness on screen and this message is never made clear. The opaqueness of Nesmith's vision in the end makes Repo Man--well...dell, with only a very cool hardcore...