I could spend 2000+ words on this post, and I did, but the director’s cut of this is a play-by-play recount of a 35-minute set that I have watched/listened to countless times. Each step of the way, I can zoom out and talk about what this meant in the grand scheme of internet/punk subculture.
I wasn’t there that day, but I showed up to Krazy Fest the next day and asked all of my internet friends if Self Defense Family played a good set. Everyone agreed that it sucked.
I watched the set a couple of days later and I was blown away. For the most part, festivals serve a neutral-to-excited audience to the artist and the artist makes a proposition: Here are our best songs, we have records and shirts in the back, do with this information what you will. What Self Defense Family did was the opposite. They served up their artistic thesis and acted upon it, thinning a herd of potential listeners in real time with provocative stage banter and music that nobody in the room had ever heard.
A couple of quick things to know before you watch any part of this video.
Self Defense Family stuck out like a sore thumb at this festival but they are on the big stage, inside of an airplane hangar, at like 5 PM. This is a dinner break band for 85% of the attendees BUT the bar was in this area. If you wanted to drink, you’re in this room.
Pat Kindlon had riled up most of the punk-adjacent internet by taking his shirt off at shows in a time when people were calling that action sexist. I cannot find the tumblr posts, I assure you they existed.
If people didn’t like SDF on record, they hated them live for Kindlon’s banter. The band opened up with a song that nobody in the crowd knew, and not five minutes into the set, Kindlon fires off a monologue:
How many of you are deeply married to the idea of subculture? Nobody gives a shit, right? Here’s what I say: BETTER A CHILD SHOULD DIE THAN LIVE BEREFT OF SUBCULTURE. It is simultaneously the greatest gift you can give someone, because they then understand the world on a different level. Have you ever raved?... I’ve never raved either, but I fucking get it. You know why? Because I understand subculture because I was fuckin’ in one for so fuckin’ long. That’s the point. It’s a sociological thing. You get nothing out of it. It’s like sending your kid to college. Does it get anything at college? No. It gets high at college, but it also gets a broader idea of the world. And that’s what subculture does for you. Granted, when have to you enter the real world, and make money, you have these weird sort of hangups in your life, these barriers, because subculture put it in your head that doing the stupidest, lamest thing in the world is not cool. And the world wants you to do the stupidest, lamest thing in the world to make money. So it is an impediment to your cash flow, but it is good for you spiritually. Give the gift of subculture.
The band cranks through two more songs that nobody in the crowd knows, including a then-unreleased song, “I’m Going Through Some Shit,” from a titular 7” recorded at Tuff Gong in Jamaica. The set thus far is bewildering and confrontational, but not in a traditional way. You don’t know these songs because you’ve never heard the band, and even if you do know the band, you don’t know that song.
SDF plays a slowed version of “Eric Hall” off of their recent full length, You Are Beneath Me. I don’t remember a single band at the time making any of their music slower like this, opting for a legato instead of the jagged album version. On wax, Kindlon cries out, “Reach out to me when you have nothing at all, I’ll be reaching right back with razor-sharp claws.” At Krazy Fest, he chants it and channels Dan Higgs from Lungfish.
I’m not going to write the whole thing out, but the next five minutes of the set is dedicated to another monologue. Kindlon mentions that he’s organizing a show at a strip club while they’re in town. This does end up taking place the next night and I’m unable to get in because I’m not 21. Bane and Make Do And Mend played that show, maybe Fireworks did as well. The strip club advertised it and put up the name “DANE” on their marquee. If I can remember some accounts of the night correctly, some of the dancers attempted to dance during the show and gave up after noticing that the crowd was too busy piling on each other to tip the performers in residence. I don’t have a ton of critical nonsense to say here but it’s a funny little story.
The last four songs go off without much ado but the band does play “I Can’t Work A Straight Job,” another unreleased song, ostensibly about prostitution (See above). The festival crowd skews a little more Punknews than AbsolutePunk (these were the two websites at the time) and the audience can be described as “neutral-to-hostile.” The targeted use of a song about prostitution in front of this crowd may have missed the mark live, but it hits a different spot watching it at home.
SDF promised that night that if any fan of theirs had expectations of the band, they’d thin that fanbase to zero. They challenged the crowd with harsh statements and unreleased music you couldn’t sing along to. The music was altered and jammed out in ways that you couldn’t follow even when you knew the songs. They asked you to follow along in good faith and trust that they wouldn’t suck. Their records would only get more challenging in the coming years and they would test that faith. Some were challenging to purchase (The band’s splits with Fires and Stalwart Sons come to mind), and some were challenging to listen to (The Power Does Not Work In The Presence Of Nonbelievers).
The set ends with a nearly six-minute version of “All Fruit Is Ripe,” another track off of a 7” that isn’t out at the time. At the time, it probably felt like it went on forever at a fest where most bands were playing songs topping out at three minutes. The set ends, the music fades out, and Kindlon yells into the mic one last time, as if it’s a dying cry on a battlefield, “BETTER A CHILD SHOULD DIE THAN LIVE BEREFT OF SUBCULTURE.”
It’s hard to imagine, but at the time, the creeping influence of technology meant that punk was becoming apolitical and more personal. Sure, the personal is political, but what I mean is that the rise of social media meant that everyone in the scene shared more and more about themselves rather than about their environment. Traditional subculture, in that it’s a culture with definition and boundary lines based on lived experience and shared beliefs, was on the way out. Subculture based on the idea that we like the same things and disagree on the same things was on the way in. That evening, Self Defense Family asked people to believe in subculture and I think that’s a more worthy proposition than t-shirts and records in the back.