Rancid: Punk's last stand? by Kevin Bozelka
Without this one-on-one contact with their audience, the Clash would
seem as likely to fall into
elitist alienation as most bands preceding them, but if it gets to the
point that several thousand
people want into your hotel room you've got to find some way of dealing
with it.
- Lester Bangs, 1977
The night before I interviewed Rancid, I ran into someone who had a question
for Tim
Armstrong, lead vocalist and guitarist: "Yeah, we used to talk on
the phone all the time. And now
he never calls and never gets me into shows. Ask him why he's acting like
such a rock star" (or
some such blather), and immediately that nearly 20- years-old Lester Bangs
quote sprung to mind.
As the Sex Pistols would sing, here we go again.
Punk was supposed to be popular music's great leveler, obliterating the
distinction between
performer and audience forever. But once you've put all that overtime into
your instrument,
you're not going to stop at just three chords. So punk evolved into a fancier
sound, courtesy of
Wire, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, the Go-Go's, Sonic Youth,
etc., reinstating that performer/
audience gap once again.
This is not to suggest that the above-mentioned were never raw or punky,
just that they extended
the parameters of punk beyond its "Beat on the Brat" conventions.
Of course, most Screeching
Weasel fans wouldn't even call those bands punk and would probably say
most, if not all, of them
suck. "That's because people have put a sort of rule book on what
you can or can't do. It's
supposed to be about the spur of the moment," Rancid's guitarist and
sometimes-vocalist Lars
Frederiksen explained to me. For years the hardcore punk scene has set
up codified boundaries as
constricting as a skinhead's boot to insure that little encroaches upon
the precious integrity of
their music (and that anyone who ventures beyond those boundaries is never
forgiven). And that's
the purist, elitist attitude you encounter every time you drop the name
Rancid.
Supposedly Rancid has ruined the "spur of the moment" energy
of hardcore because their latest
album ...And Out Come the Wolves [Epitaph] has gone gold domestically.
Did Rancid really
make the album they wanted to make? Well, if they've been seduced by their
Buzz Clip status on
MTV, then unsafety-pinned punk fans are better off. There's no denying
that the music is
explosive and obnoxious the way punk should be rather than implosive and
correct.
You get background harmonies, hand claps, Hammond organ, chants of "No,
No, No!" and "Nah,
Nah Nah!" and, naturally, "Oi, Oi, Oi!" etc. You can skank
to the punkier tunes and slam to the
ska ones. Plus, they trust their songwriting. You can tell by the way they
put their all into the
refrain of "Ruby Soho" or the way Tim sings "doweeyown"
instead of "down." And there's hooks
galore!
Some would claim that these are merely pop music concerns. Perhaps, but
that's what happens
when you come into contact with the outside world, which is exactly what
hardcore orthodoxy
wants to prevent. It seems, for instance, that in order to be a true punk,
you have to take what
Outpunk editor Matt Wobensmith calls a "pledge of poverty." Apparently
there's no way to be
punk and have money, even just enough for a comfortable living.
Thankfully, Rancid never took the pledge. "We want to make a better
life for ourselves on our
own terms," says Lars. "To be punk rock, you don't have to live
in the squats, you don't have to
stay in the fucked-up jobs. That's bullshit - it's about getting out. Half
those people who call you
‘sell-out' haven't moved out of mom and dad's house yet anyway. So walk
a mile in my shoes and
then tell me I'm a sell-out."
Ah, yes, "sell-out," the most despicable, misapprehended phrase
in music. Punks use it a lot but
you don't hear it as much in, say, the rap community. Ever since the Funky
Four Plus One
shouted "Make money!," rap has sustained itself through "Planet
Rock" and "Bring The Noise"
and "Gangsta's Paradise," not to mention such alternarappers
as De La Soul, Digable Planets and
PM Dawn - more stylistic changes than hardcore will probably see in the
next 20 years.
That's the dilemma Rancid faces now: will their audience allow them to
progress as a hardcore
band? "Rap did the same thing punk was supposed to do - it got out
of its rut," says Lars. "The
music has got to keep progressing as a feeling and as a movement. That's
the only way it's gonna
survive and that's the way it's survived for the last 20 years. Now that
we've got our say, we're
supposed to run away from the mic? To me, that would be selling out."
Of course, that entails
the inevitable reinstatement of that performer/audience gap. But until
the Bouncing Souls or The
Voodoo Glow Skulls records a song that fills me with as much joy as "Roots
Radicals" or makes
an album that makes me wanna jump up and down as much as ...And Out Come
the Wolves does,
I'll proudly keep my distance from the stage.
What it really boils down to is that most people have no clue what hard
work goes into being a
band, which brings us back to that "Tim never calls me" complaint.
I didn't get to speak to Tim
about it but Lars offered the following: "Sometimes you can't call
everybody. I'm sure he feels
bad about that ‘cause I know the way Tim is. He's genuine, he's honest.
And I think if he could
get all of Milwaukee on the guest list, he would do that. It's not that
we're rock stars. Sometimes
there's other things that you gotta take care of." Yeah, like taking
30 minutes out of your day to
do an interview. So if blame is your game, then blame it on me. And then
when you blame me, I'll
whack you across the face with my copy of Burning Ambitions: A History
of Punk.