Jello Biafra & The Guantanamo School Of Medicine
White People and the Damage Done

Rock Tv is sad. It’s sad because:

- it’s pay-per-view (but there’s no payment);

- Pino Scotto is the only one not taking Pino Scotto seriously;

- Crazy makes me reevaluate Colorado;

- the short hour of Hard Zone (“Hard Zone”, diobono, not even La9) is a mindless cauldron full of everything and nothing, like Ricordi. Moreover, with Avenged Sevenfold and those glam bands that do breakdowns and fringes;

- there are NoFX. The fake-fat small-business-owner NoFX who consume exorbitantly priced drugs. I’ve always felt indifferent to NoFX. I never understood why, apart from a couple of good things, Punk In Drublic had to be a phenomenal album. Folks, it’s just because it was 1994. Had it been released in, say, 1990, they would have been wiped out by Poison Idea. Those guys were truly fat.

On Rock Tv, there’s that thing about the NoFX tour. Like they go to godforsaken places to play. Well, okay, it might be pleasant, aside from the “16 and pregnant” style format. But here: once the wealthy and bourgeois Nofx find themselves in the most God-forsaken place in Latin America: a boasted location, a pseudo-fascist militia thirsty for blood, and a crowd with pitchforks. “What a mess, they’re going to do something cool now,” I thought. But no: the band’s roadies and sound engineers were crammed into a truck to escape the lynching by the (rightfully) enraged people: furious after discovering that the concert they had splurged on was a hoax. The promoter had bluffed, and the place was inadequate. The roadies were out scouting to save whatever could be saved.

But the NoFX? Where were they while Limo&co. narrowly avoided a massacre? At the Hilton. “Tasting sea bass” (sic!) and tweeting. Diobono, a punk band tweeting. The fetid oxymoron that deflowered my subproletarian musical conscience.

Rock in the time of smartphones, scourged by likes and followers swallowing it all.

Now I don’t want to bring up noble utopias like coherence, attitude, and courage (hey, Roger Miret, I found you the title for your next EP). Greg Graffin, with his $5000 a month as a professor, will have a nice row house. Jim Lindberg a nice Mercedes van to shuttle around the fruits of his loins. Pucciato will dunk the biscuit, paying lavish dinners to Jenna Haze.

Okay, but they don’t document it.

You can’t splash your sound engineers’ deaths on the front page while you’re playing the tycoon role.

There is a line (increasingly thin, true, but it’s there) that separates hardcore et similia from the cover of the old enemy Rolling Stone. There’s a difference between owning a duplicate of Jealous Again and mimicking the Crue. It’s not enough to write it in your worn-out little songs, Fatty: you didn’t understand a damn thing (or you understood everything, which is the same in the end).

Jello Biafra would never confuse hardcore with sexdrugandrocknroll: he would do worse things, like dragging a decades-long civil dispute over unpaid royalties or founding a band where his word is law, but he would never sell out his legend to fatten the barn. True Heroes are those who wash their dirty laundry at home, dispensing theological virtues to the rabble and pointing them in the right direction.

The latest album from our guy (and his puppet band) is a nice reminiscence suspended between rock’n’roll, dissonances like Plastic Surgery Disasters, and epilepsies a la East Bay Ray. There is also room for a refurbishing of “Dear Abby” (called “Road Rage”). As well as a chromatic tribute to D.O.A.

“White People and the Damage Done,” it’s called. And NoFX are white, very white.