The Nation of Ulysses
13-Point Program to Destroy America

«A violent separatist political party, a terrorist organization active in the Washington D.C. area».

This is not the content of a classified dossier in the C.I.A archives, but what is reported on the back cover of «Plays Pretty For Baby», the second album by the Nation Of Ulysses released in 1991 under Dischord.

The Nation Of Ulysses was the first project started in 1988 by Ian Svenonious, not a rock'n'roll band but a movement aimed at creating a new underground world for disenfranchised youth.

Ian Svenonious is crazy, otherwise how would you define someone who developed the P-Power doctrine along the lines of the New People's Army - the armed wing of the Philippine Communist Party - and published «The Psychic Soviet», a fuchsia reinterpretation of Mao Tse-Tung's little red book?

Ian Svenonious is certainly crazy but his madness goes hand in hand with a penchant for quoting and a sense of irony that led him to christen the new-born party's program «13-Point Program To Destroy America» in opposition to the fourteen points drafted by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson for the moral and material progress of peoples at the end of World War I, and to advocate the liberation theology “gospel yeh yeh” and its spread through a contagious and sensual hickey.

Even that first political manifesto was mimeographed by Dischord's clandestine printers, and it was an easy game to associate the Nation Of Ulysses with the hardcore platoon, but by doing so, the target was missed, because Ian and company were as hardcore as Wire was with «1 2 X U» or as the Adverts were punk: in that scene, in fact, the Nation Of Ulysses represented an enlightening heresy and a splendid anomaly.

Just consider, as you read, that in 1990 Ian Svenonious was voted by readers of the teen magazine Sassy “The Sassiest Boy In America”, approximately the ideal boyfriend for ambitious teenagers; this would never have happened to Henry Rollins, much less to Ian MacKaye, considering they were guests in the Dischord house.

Also consider that the hardcore imagery of the time was shaved heads, imposing physique, and moral rectitude, what Minor Threat first theorized in the straight edge manifesto, and Youth Of Today later impressed in the motto «Phisically strong, morally straight, we're the youth of today»; while Ian Svenonious appeared everywhere elegantly dressed in a suit and tie, with long hair and pomaded quiff like a teddy boy, and on stage, he fiddled with a trumpet and occasionally ventured into disorienting solos.

An hardcore group with a trumpeter in its lineup, nothing more needs to be said.

In «13-Point Program To Destroy America» the Nation Of Ulysses brought back to the forefront rockabilly, soul music, and garage-punk along with the imagery of early-century artistic avant-gardes - futurism, constructivism, dadaism - and communist political propaganda, not to mention the inevitable taste for citation - here Shangri-Las and New York Dolls, even Ornette Coleman in the following «Plays Pretty For Baby».

In 1992 the Nation Of Ulysses disbanded, only to later reassemble under the label Make-Up.

In the meantime, Ian Svenonious continues undeterred to develop new projects, both musical - Weird War and Chain And The Gang - and otherwise, as if they were five-year plans to be completed.

A group to (re)discover.