I came late and missed Societal Rot (sorry, guys). Local stalwarts Resist Control played solid; they played loud; they played good. Lotus Fucker, a DC-based outfit, crushed their way through a fast, heavy set. Most people, I assume, showed up for Terveet Kädet: a Finnish d-beat hardcore act founded in 1980, now touring the States with but one original member. Not being an aficionado, I can't tell you if they were good or great. The emotion was there - they seemed glad to be playing, even if it was for a handful of us mostly-sleepy weirdos in a for-rent brick box on the West Side. They even gave us an encore, which was odd, given there was no stage to exit from and dramatically return to, but it was awesome just the same.
What I saw of them, the bands were good. The sideshow for the night, though, were four kids from Rochester (I say "kids," but they might have been 35 and living in Henrietta). They were deep in the thrall of anarcho-punk, or chaos punk, or whatever gnarled branch of the punk rock family tree that bears fruit wearing mohawks and studs and reeking like a soggy scrotum.
There was the well-behaved guy with the ponytail and beard; the red-eyed dude with a nose ring, mohawk, and black vest decked out in spikes; then there was Bi-hawk and his girlfriend.
Bi-hawk had cut a strip of hair down the middle of his head and one off the side, as if to say, "look out, world, this nut's cracked!" The girlfriend, all of maybe 5 feet tall, wore studded bracelets that kept popping off and sliding across the floor in the middle of the flailing, four-man pit.
Bi-hawk set about pissing people off as soon as he got there, pinching butts, flipping the bird in people's faces, and wiping his sweaty self on folks clearly uninterested in a Sunday night throwdown in the mosh pit. The worst came when Bi-hawk pulled down his pants and started rolling around on the floor, followed by some light fellatio by the girl. It was transgessive. Really crazy stuff.
It would have been especially crazy if a guy friend were on the business end of the blowjob, but it would soon become clear why that wasn't the case.
After flipping off the crowd and screaming "fuck Buffalo" for the last few songs of the band he'd come to see (presumably he was upset that no one reacted to his shenanigans), Terveet Kädet wrapped up, and people started filing out. Then I overheard Bi-hawk, pants down, telling some "faggot" to "suck [his] dick."
Cooler heads prevailed, but not before some shoving and the threat, made with a straight face: "watch out, you might get stabbed!"
Later on, I overheard someone telling one of the out of town bands "yeah, we're not really like that . . . those guys look like they came out of the 'punk rock' episode of some '80s TV show."
Yep.
I came away that night with a few thoughts:
1. It's a bad idea to insult the town hosting the show, then threaten a native with a stabbing.
2. If anarcho-punk is about freedom and doing whatever you want, you can't get mad when it turns out other people want to be left alone, and instead of blowjobs in the pit, they'd rather fold their arms, tap their feet, and enjoy the band.
3. If "faggot" exists in your vocabulary as an insult, you're just as bad as any button-down square you're trying to offend with your cock-eyed hairdo and unwashed t-shirt.
4. This is why we can't have nice things.
0 comments
Post a Comment