This week has gone haywire in terms of listening to new music. I have been working on getting a new day job (imagine the sound of a couple hundred people booing here, knowing a 9-5 could hold them back from everything the Listen Up, Nerds Newsletter has to offer) and have been working on a website for all of my past, present, and future projects (now imagine a chorus of cheers much louder than all of the boos were). I’m available for big projects like merch design and album layouts as well as small projects like writing a bio for your band or setting up a press kit. If you’d like to work together: listenupnerds@gmail.com.
When I need to Do Stuff, I sink into listening to music that I have spent way too much time with already and don’t expand my mind because I don’t want to be distracted by something new. I often think of Henry Rollins’ Music Diet where he breaks every category down to “Protein” and “Carbohydrate.” “Protein,” as Rollins puts it, “is new music, where it’s unfamiliar to me so I’m listening, sometimes taking notes, researching the band while the music is playing. I do quite a bit of this, usually during the week.” Damn! He’s just like me fr!!!
“I will allow for some carbohydrate listening, which would be records I’m familiar with, that I’ve been playing for years. This music is not exactly background, but more of an environmental asset for elevation of mood,” Rollins continues. Hank’s not exactly a guide for my life in that I’m not trying to live like him, but the man is disciplined. That’s something I admire and have been fighting to tackle for what seems like most of my life. Anyway, that’s all to say that I’ve needed comfort food for the ears and beyond publishing a whole piece on the band on Tuesday, I’ve been listening to a lot of Give’s final EP, Electric Flower Cult.
The other album I’ve been listening to a lot from Lockin’ Out Records is my fav hardcore release from 2022: Chewing Gum For The Ears by The Flex. It’s a ripper. It’s not intimidating on the surface but every song is a blitzkrieg of the same sort of hardcore you’d expect from bands like Impalers and Warthog, but somehow harder? It’s this unwavering assault of boot-stomping drums and the vocalist sounds like a jet engine. The whole record is over in a snap and while the title is an insult on thoughtless, mindless media, I quite like chewing gum from time to time. I think this album is like chewing gum in that I find it quite pleasant and I partake in it whenever it’s offered to me. Again, it’s a ceaseless assault on your hearing in the same way those “This is how it feels to chew 5 Gum” ads told me that chewing their mint gum would freeze me from the inside out or their cinnamon flavor would feel like sucking on a hairdryer or whatever. This record makes me feel like the guy from the Maxell logo for all 18 minutes. The breakdown in “Voight-Kampff” was the best 30 seconds in hardcore last year, for my money. On the surface, the lyrics read like a letterboxd on Blade Runner but the band squeezes the life out of the listener, asking in the most punk way possible: do I need to care? Who’s making me care? Why? That breakdown hits and it all comes down like tears in the rain.
Speaking of Maxell, here’s a physical media logistics idea I’ve had forever: if your entire record can fit on one side of a record, you should press both sides with the full album. It would make it so easy for me to throw your record on. People get cute these days with labels and whatnot and I’m sick of it! “Actually side A is the one with the isosceles triangle on it and side B is the one with the square and if you can’t remember that, then you can read the matrices carved into the record and they say A and B on them.” I can barely read! That’s why I listen to punk rock!!!!
I did listen to some new music this week and it’s from Hattiesburg, MS. The Hub City, as it’s called, has somehow become a powerhouse of a punk scene. It’s got Judy And The Jerks at the forefront and MSPAINT is right behind them. I just heard a tape by this band, Primitive Fucking Ballers, who are also from Hattiesburg. The bandcamp description says “NO BULLSHIT. HARDCORE PUNK. HATTIESBURG, MISSISSIPPI.” That’s correct. That is exactly what it is, definitely on the La Vida Es Un Mas spectrum of hardcore punk. The low end is cranked to all hell and the bass has this big round tone while one of the guitars slices through the rest of it like a knife through butter. Maybe more like a shovel through mud. It reminds me of listening to GISM before the remaster dropped. I’m saying it sounds like garbage in the nicest and most complimentary way possible.
I looked into the scene to see what sparked it. I couldn’t find anything, really. The only in-depth coverage I can find of the whole scene is from after it started, and that was a 2019 blog post that referenced the author visiting a still-happening house show scene that was going on in 2017. I also found some reddit users from r/punk who were looking to go to Hattiesburg for Scene Tourism and one person mentioned it was a midway point between Dallas and Talahassee, as if that means anything. Frankly, I’ve got no clue. Nothing about Hattiesburg screams “scene” to me but it birthed this freak energy that shows out in raw punk form. There are punks everywhere! Sometimes they start a scene. I think that’s the coolest thing in the world. Community formed by just enough people who realize that they all have a decent amount in common enough to start working together to make art, book shows, and get down. Anyway, I poked around the Earth Girl Tapes bandcamp, which is a great resource for good Hattiesburg punk music, l but I wanted to talk about the Feral/Judy And The Jerks tape.
Feral’s got some serious freakout shit going. I love their side of this tape. “Genocide” hits that stomp-out bridge and I want to do laps around my apartment, making it hell for my downstairs neighbors. This stuff reminds me of Goon and BIB but with gutter punk energy instead of art student energy. It’s egg punk. Honestly all of this stuff is the eggiest of egg punk. Farm fresh.
Judy and the Jerks is punk. Just straight up punk stuff. What a name, by the way. It’s like it was designed in a lab to be a perfect punk band name. JUDY AND THE JERKS!!! The band rocks, they’re punching way above their weight class on this tape, fully matching the freakout vibes of Feral. I think JATJ are the biggest band from Hattiesburg at this point in time. They’re prolific and have more of a reach than anyone else. They’re touring regularly and they’re on bigger shows. The other stuff I’ve heard from them was a little more straightforward and cleaner but their side of this tape is much closer to what I’d imagine a live show feels like, if their live tapes are anything to be believed. I know it’s not always the move but recording live brings something out in JATJ that makes their live releases and this tape special.
Finally, I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries lately because I’m a bit of a cinephile and I love **REAL LIFE** much more than I love ~*CREATIVE FICTION~*. I watched This Place Rocks and I wanted to push the TV out of my window but it’s not my TV so I got a little self-conscious about it and decided against it. Besides, if I threw the TV out, how else would I watch NBA League Pass? What a garbage piece of film. It used 80 mins of my time to say nothing. That’s like the length of a Metallica record and there weren’t any sick riffs or anything.“This Place Rocks”? More like This Movie Sucks! Two Thumbs Down!!!
Last night, I watched Cameraperson (2016) and it was such a brilliant little snapshot of one woman’s life as a documentarian and all of the situations she’s been in, all of the beauty and terror she’s seen in the world. It rocked. It reminded me of how small the world is, but also how big. I find it quite comforting to recognize exactly how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of Earth and history, but how profound we can be in someone close’s life. Sharing the story of each person reminds you that every person in the movie has their own story and their own life, just like the main subject. It’s a beautiful piece of work. It’s streaming on Criterion and in a few other places. As a companion, I would watch Koyaanisqatsi (1983) if you haven’t seen that. It’s a sprawling image of human life and man’s achievements, along with what it means for the world. It’s the wide angle lens to Cameraperson’s macro lens.
While Cameraperson shows you five minutes in the life of a midwife in Africa, Koyaanisqatsi shows the undulating flow of traffic in a metropolis or what a crowd may look like as they all pile through a walkway. These are moments that we don’t get to see from afar since we’re usually in them, and the rhythmic pulsing nature of life set against a Phillip Glass score is truly something to behold. This movie was shot more than 40 years ago and comparing the two worlds, occupied by some of the same people, is staggering. Please do not make the mistake I made when watching Koyaanisqatsi for the first time and find it streaming without ads or pirate it. I watched it on Tubi and there was a beautiful shot of sand dunes that was interrupted by four minutes of targeted advertising for products that end up in the trash, such as paper towels and cat litter that changes color. It made me want to move to the middle of the woods and start sending packages to people, if you catch my drift. Anyway what I’m getting at is that the beauty of humanity and community is inspiring and your fellow man is just like you but also completely different and it’s such a powerful thing to witness in full.