Descendents
Bonus Fat

THE REVIEW

Nostalgia, in my opinion, is the feeling that makes you live worse. It alienates you, estranges you completely from reality, and often ends up becoming unbearable. Raise your hand if you've never thought about throwing out of the subway window a groaning old man who keeps repeating: << In my day... kids today... blah blah blah...>>. Those who say that when He was around the trains ran on time should be tortured directly, as only Mr. Blondie knows how. Nostalgia is a pain in the ass, but nowadays, where life is rushed, where everything must be beautiful and clean, where a communist is necessarily a reactionary, it is absolutely inevitable; and what's even sadder is being nostalgic for something not truly experienced... in this, I am a champion. No one beats me.

Many now believe that today's music, regardless of genre, is bland or almost nothing. A friend of mine says it's a physiological thing because, for historical evaluation, things need to be cataloged and judged with a certain emotional and temporal detachment. For me, it's gross nonsense. Today's music, more than for the work itself, is crap due to the format issue. Now there's eighty minutes available on a CD, and any label demands at least fifty, meaning a double vinyl, a "Zen Arcade," a "Double Nickel On The Dime"... basically, they demand an overhuman work.

Victim of modernity [or rather post-modernity (post always sounds very intellectual)], besides the man, is the EP, the best medium for miniaturized hardcore songs.

The Descendents, before creating their masterpiece ("Milo Goes To College"), so useful for the qualitatively underground American "punk-rock" (note the quotes, please) bands in the 90s, published, in 1981, this EP: "Fat" (later expanded to Bonus Fat).

There are eight songs in just six minutes and they are pure hardcore, so no relevant verses or choruses, zero solos, zero of everything, and if you have nothing to say, you stay home without calling so-and-so to produce, such-and-such to hold the guitar and what's-his-name to press the distortion. Their melodic vein, science fiction for the hardcore of the time, is not yet present in this EP. If you want to show off, you might say that they weren't a mature band yet, but who cares. The Descendents were a group of super nerds and they were people without mohawks or piercings (Milo, the singer, left the group to return to university. After getting a Ph.D. in biochemistry, he's now a researcher).

In short, hardcore was purely passion, anger, unawareness, honesty, and adolescence... which is everything I am nostalgic for.