BIOGRAPHY
What do you do when you're sixteen and in deep shit? You’re
looking out at the world from the strip-mall and the detention hall,
from the basement and the cul-de-sac and it just looks like there is a
wall around you. Everybody tells you and your friends that
you’re going nowhere, that your lives are already ruined.
What the fuck do you do?
You hang around and smash
stuff and get high and try to be a bad-ass, that’s what you
do. You steal and drink and smash up the car your mom gave you and pull
your pee-pee out in public. You work at sandwich shops and fast-food
joints and try to screw private school girls because they think your
tough and the girls at your school think your gay because you pretended
to give your friend a blowjob at the junior prom. You fuck it all up as
ugly and as dirty as you can because, why the fuck not?
Your parents and teachers
and sandwich-shop supervisors look at you and think, “What
happened to the kid? He has all the advantages in the world and he has
chucked it all in the shitter. Doesn’t he believe in the
inherent goodness of our enlightened society? Doesn’t he
believe in any thing at all?”
It is this question, the
question of belief, nay, the question of faith, that is the crux of the
matter. It is this question that was asked of the Black Lips. And the
Black Lips have answered it. They have answered it in their songs and
in their actions. They have answered it for every shit-assed,
burned-out brat that staggers out of the suburbs. They have answered it
resoundingly and continue to answer it.
“Where is their
answer?” you may ask. Do those psychedelic swamp guitar
drones bear witness to a faith of some kind? Does the quasi-violent
sexual comedy of their stage show underscore a deeply held belief
system? Does their commingling of Deep South, big-tent revival rhetoric
with hoary-throated, drug-haze mumble truly mean anything, to them or
to anyone else?
You bet your ass it means
something to them. How would they have persevered through all the
drudgery and threats of doom if it didn’t mean a goddamn
thing to them? Their adversaries have been formidable and numerous, and
they have bested them all. Why, even in their earliest days, death
itself reared its ugly head to attempt to halt their progress, and was
dismissed directly. How, without faith, could the Black Lips have
carried their message forth into the four corners of the earth?
And so, on the eve of the
release of their fifth album, the faith abides stronger than ever. A
host of influences have passed through their gullet and provided the
sustenance to keep their faith alive. The dusts of a southern back road
and the big-city gutter puke crackle in the grooves of this record as
it did in the previous ones. The shouts and moans and static continue
to bear witness.
“But faith in
what?” the fathers, mayors and captains of industry might
continue to ask. Well, if you’ve never been one of those
shit-assed brats looking out into a world you were already excluded
from, a world that sickened you, but for which there was no
alternative, then you may not understand. But, through the eyes of one
whom, like them, was a go-nowhere from the get-go, the Black Lips
represent the faith that it takes to reject that world of sterile,
futile, servile, silliness and forge your own world based on bravery
and bad-ass-ness. They have carried to fruition the plan that has been
hatched, and will continue to be hatched in the minds of dizzy, dumb
and desperate youth the world over. Now they carry their message of
faith to the world. FEAR NOT! BE BRAVE AND TAKE HEART! THE WORLD IS
YOURS IF YOU ACCEPT THE POWER OF FAITH!!!
(As I record these words
a purple and orange fog engulfs the bay below me. The gin gimlets glide
down my throat and I ponder the freedom that I, myself, have wrenched
from the “enlightened society’ that once oppressed
me. It is good and right that we should live free. I know this, the
Black Lips know this, and the gulls in the bay below know this. Take
this knowledge and go in faith.)
Baby Gusty Accra, Ghana
December, 2008 |
