Another can of worms[1]Second single from Sonic Youth’s second major-label release Dirty (1992), which title obliquely references the early-’90s ascension of Grunge into the mainstream, whose coattails they were … Continue reading
Another stomach turns[2]The word Catharsis in the original Greek carries connotations of vomiting, specifically to get a poison out. Sonic Youth here is indicating that we have a stomach-turning poison that we must expel as … Continue reading
Yeh yr ghetto burns[3]Recorded the same year as the Rodney King riots, which burned many a ghetto to the ground. And Sonic Youth was right to group these riots as a rage against fascist tendencies; as Martin Luther King, … Continue reading
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate[4]“The Song I hate” is of course is the opposite of the song of redeeming love: “And now behold, I say unto you, my brethren, if ye have experienced a change of heart, and if ye have felt to … Continue reading
You got a stupid man[5]A line that sadly resonates far more today than in 1992; as Helaman 12:4 reads, “O how foolish, and how vain, and how evil, and devilish, and how quick to do iniquity, and how slow to do good, … Continue reading
You got a Ku Klux Klan[6]The KKK was spotted distributing flyers around their old stronghold of Indiana shortly after election ‘24, warning immigrants to “Leave Now, Avoid Deportation.” Listen, I don’t have a … Continue reading
Yr fuckin'[7]I’ll be honest, I’m just totally over caring about swearing; everyone at Church growing up who taught me to never use swear words and avoid “vulgar” media ended up voting for the … Continue reading battle plan
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
A sieg heil-in’ squirt[8]Look, it obviously wasn’t a “Roman salute”–and fascist imagery also heavily mimicked Roman iconography anyways, so that excuse won’t fly either.
You’re an impotent jerk
Yeah, a fascist twerp[9]To quote a recent Guardian headline: “I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers.” But then, authoritarian … Continue reading
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
Black robe and swill
I believe Anita Hill[10]Former subordinate of Clarence Thomas, who accused him of sexual harassment during his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Judge will rot in hell[11]Given how Clarence Thomas was one of many deciding votes that overturned the McCain–Feingold Act intended to prevent corporate money from dominating elections–and who was more recently … Continue reading
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
Yeah, a cross on fire[12]There is a definite preoccupation with KKK imagery among some of these early alt-Rockers (see for example the Ramone’s “The KKK Took My Baby Away,” or Soundgarden’s video for “Blow Up the … Continue reading
By a christian liar[13]As the Church’s own failed “I Was a Stranger” initiative attempted to teach us back in October Conference of 2016, if we do not take in and help the stranger in our midst, then we will find … Continue reading
A black attack on fire
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
Yeah, the president sucks[14]I guess in fairness, when has this line ever not been true? But boy has it been feeling more true than usual lately.
He’s a war pig fuck[15]Reference to George H.W. Bush’s execution of Operation Desert Storm just the previous year. Little did we know how much worse the war-mongering would get scarcely a decade later, such that many … Continue reading
His shit is out of luck
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
Another nazi attack[16]A line that works in the same lineage as Dead Kennedy‘s 1981 “Nazi Punks F*KK Off,” and which serves as another reminder (as with the KKK discussion above) of how overt racism, like the … Continue reading
A skinhead is cracked[17]I can’t shake the feeling that part of why “Youth Against Fascism” failed to chart in the U.S. is because a distressingly high number of young white listeners really did identify and sympathize … Continue reading
My blood is black
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
We’re banging pots and pans
To make you understand
We’re gonna bury you man[18]Possible allusion to Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev’s “We will bury you” speech in 1956. Western interpreters have debated whether it should properly be understood as “we will kill your” or … Continue reading
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
I’m a human wreck
A redneck in check
I killed the teacher’s pet[19]RE: teacher’s pets: The Nazis, after conquering France, were actually shocked by how many French people were willing to inform on their neighbors that were members of the Resistance. The Germans … Continue reading
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate[20]Per Alma 37:32, we are to learn to have an “everlasting hatred of sin”—and racism, fascism, authoritarianism, and cruelty are sins indeed, of which we must needs repent.
References
| ↑1 | Second single from Sonic Youth’s second major-label release Dirty (1992), which title obliquely references the early-’90s ascension of Grunge into the mainstream, whose coattails they were attempting to ride.
The irony is that Sonic Youth had at least as much to do with the mainstreaming of Grunge as the other way around: Geffen Records had signed the band after the underground success of their double-album Daydream Nation (1988)—not so much because they thought Sonic Youth would ever break big themselves, but because their coolness factor was such that Geffen bet they could attract some bands who would. Their gamble paid off almost immediately when one of the first bands to follow them over to Geffen was Nirvana. But now that Nirvana’s rising tide had lifted all boats, both the band and the label were curious to see if Sonic Youth could score a genuine crossover hit as well. They even brought in Butch Vig and Andy Wallace—who had produced and mixed Nevermind itself—to see if they could work the same magic on Dirty. Spoiler alert: they never did land that elusive crossover hit, and the selection of “Youth Against Fascism” certainly didn’t help things, as it became the lowest charting of the album’s four singles. Per Geffen executive Mark Kates, the decision to release “Youth Against Fascism” as the second single was “one of the biggest professional mistakes of my life.” From a commercial perspective, yes, it was probably a mistake (certainly a track repeating “It’s the song I hate” doesn’t subconsciously predispose the listener to love it); but from an artistic one, well, let’s just say it was only two or three decades ahead of its time—and serves as an important reminder that it took no great prophetic gift to see where we were all headed, though the track is prophetic indeed. |
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| ↑2 | The word Catharsis in the original Greek carries connotations of vomiting, specifically to get a poison out. Sonic Youth here is indicating that we have a stomach-turning poison that we must expel as well. |
| ↑3 | Recorded the same year as the Rodney King riots, which burned many a ghetto to the ground. And Sonic Youth was right to group these riots as a rage against fascist tendencies; as Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in The Other America: “In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide. Hitler was a sick and tragic man who carried racism to its logical conclusion. He ended up leading a nation to the point of killing about 6 million Jews. This is the tragedy of racism because its ultimate logic is genocide. If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him; if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.” |
| ↑4 | “The Song I hate” is of course is the opposite of the song of redeeming love: “And now behold, I say unto you, my brethren, if ye have experienced a change of heart, and if ye have felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I would ask, can ye feel so now?” (Alma 5:26). We are frequently taught in the Church that Satan constantly creates gross perversions of the celestial order, e.g. communism is a perversion of the United Order—just as fascism is a perversion of Zion, wherein the scripture to “be one, for if ye are not one yet are not mine” is twisted away from a call to love one another into instead a call for oppressive conformity and genocide. A fasci in Italian after all is a bundle of sticks tied together. The central idea in Italian fascism, then, is that sticks which break easily when alone can become unbreakable when united together—can in fact become a club by which to beat someone else to death with. The call to absolute unity also inevitably entails the expulsion and extermination of all peoples who can’t or won’t conform. Hence why all calls for mass-deportations of immigrants who (in the words of a certain president) “poison the blood of the country” are easily classified as fascist in tendency. Hence also why, in fascism, the song of redeeming love gets transformed into the song I hate. |
| ↑5 | A line that sadly resonates far more today than in 1992; as Helaman 12:4 reads, “O how foolish, and how vain, and how evil, and devilish, and how quick to do iniquity, and how slow to do good, are the children of men; yea, how quick to hearken unto the words of the evil one, and to set their hearts upon the vain things of the world!” |
| ↑6 | The KKK was spotted distributing flyers around their old stronghold of Indiana shortly after election ‘24, warning immigrants to “Leave Now, Avoid Deportation.” Listen, I don’t have a lot of hard, fast rules in my life, but “Don’t support whatever the Ku Klux Klan is supporting” has been a pretty safe one for me. |
| ↑7 | I’ll be honest, I’m just totally over caring about swearing; everyone at Church growing up who taught me to never use swear words and avoid “vulgar” media ended up voting for the forcible breaking up of families and stochastic terrorism. To yet again quote Joseph Smith, Jr. himself: “I love that man better who swears a stream as long as my arm yet deals justice to his neighbors and mercifully deals his substance to the poor, than the long, smooth-faced hypocrite.” And mass deportations are neither just nor merciful. |
| ↑8 | Look, it obviously wasn’t a “Roman salute”–and fascist imagery also heavily mimicked Roman iconography anyways, so that excuse won’t fly either. |
| ↑9 | To quote a recent Guardian headline: “I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers.” But then, authoritarian tendencies have always been fundamentally cringe–a symptom of one’s complete lack of self-respect–as Sonic Youth here reminded us clear back in 1992. |
| ↑10 | Former subordinate of Clarence Thomas, who accused him of sexual harassment during his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings to the U.S. Supreme Court. |
| ↑11 | Given how Clarence Thomas was one of many deciding votes that overturned the McCain–Feingold Act intended to prevent corporate money from dominating elections–and who was more recently exposed for accepting bribes from billionaires, and whose own wife supported the attempted coup of 1/6/21–we are still dealing with the long-range fall-out of our national refusal to believe Anita Hill over three-decades later. As Helaman 8:1 and 3 Nephi 6:20 warned us, corrupt judges have long sought to overthrow the liberty of the land.
Incidentally, Ian MacKaye contributed guitars to this track, whose band Fugazi had also recorded “Dear Justice Letter” just the year before, excoriating Justice Brenner for retiring, which had opened up the vacancy for Thomas to fill. They too could foresee the wrath to come. |
| ↑12 | There is a definite preoccupation with KKK imagery among some of these early alt-Rockers (see for example the Ramone’s “The KKK Took My Baby Away,” or Soundgarden’s video for “Blow Up the Outside World” [2:35-4:10]). Indeed, one can accuse this predominantly-white scene of being too fixated on the overt and obvious symbols of racism, to the neglect of the more subtle and pernicious forms that most of us are more likely to encounter instead. But then, as both those Indiana fliers and the most recent election have taught us yet again, all those much more vicious and overt forms of racism were always lurking just barely beneath the surface, and not even all that well hidden. As this site has published before, from micro aggressions are macro aggressions brought to pass. |
| ↑13 | As the Church’s own failed “I Was a Stranger” initiative attempted to teach us back in October Conference of 2016, if we do not take in and help the stranger in our midst, then we will find ourselves on the Savior’s left hand on the Day of Judgement (Matt. 25:43), and will have made our faith vain and our Christianity a liar. As future Apostle Patrick Kearon said of refugees at the time, “This moment will not define them; but our response to them will define us.” He said that very kindly and compassionately, but there is a definite divine threat in his words. |
| ↑14 | I guess in fairness, when has this line ever not been true? But boy has it been feeling more true than usual lately. |
| ↑15 | Reference to George H.W. Bush’s execution of Operation Desert Storm just the previous year. Little did we know how much worse the war-mongering would get scarcely a decade later, such that many Americans would later recall with fondness the comparative competence and brevity of Desert Storm. But then, Sonic Youth even then recognized the dark path that normalizing “preemptive” warfare would take us.
Recall too that when the last Nephites “did swear by the heavens, and also by the throne of God, that they would go up to battle against their enemies, and would cut them off from the face of the land,” that “I, Mormon, did utterly refuse from this time forth to be a commander and a leader of this people, because of their wickedness and abomination” (Mormon 3:10-11). He knew where the dark path of preemptive war led, too. |
| ↑16 | A line that works in the same lineage as Dead Kennedy‘s 1981 “Nazi Punks F*KK Off,” and which serves as another reminder (as with the KKK discussion above) of how overt racism, like the past, isn’t dead, it’s not even past. |
| ↑17 | I can’t shake the feeling that part of why “Youth Against Fascism” failed to chart in the U.S. is because a distressingly high number of young white listeners really did identify and sympathize with the skinheads deep down; they would never openly confess it, of course, but I was a kid in the ‘90s, and I distinctly recall all the tough white guys in my rural high school in the Pacific Northwest using the words “Mexican” and “Jewish” as insults. If you ever tried to call them out on it, they would just laugh and claim they were only joking, to not get so offended. Well, over 30 years later, those kids are long since grown up, and it’s now stupidly obvious that they had never been joking at all. |
| ↑18 | Possible allusion to Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev’s “We will bury you” speech in 1956. Western interpreters have debated whether it should properly be understood as “we will kill your” or “we will survive you,” as in, “we will attend your funeral.” Both interpretations, incidentally, are what the Lamanites did to the Nephites before promptly turning on each other. |
| ↑19 | RE: teacher’s pets: The Nazis, after conquering France, were actually shocked by how many French people were willing to inform on their neighbors that were members of the Resistance. The Germans naturally assumed they’d have to get far more threatening and bribe way more people to encourage that level of informing—that the French would have more self-respect than that.
Not that the Germans acquitted themselves any better once the tables were turned. In a 2020 Atlantic article, an East Germany historian was asked why so many Germans collaborated with the Soviet regime. She dismissed that as an uninteresting question. “90% of everyone collaborates,” she said, “What is always more interesting is those who don’t.” That Atlantic article, by the way, was about why Mitt Romney was the only Republican senator to vote for the first impeachment. All of this, incidentally, is why students have always despised the “teacher’s pet” and flung it as an insult: it’s not the sucking up per se, but the impulse towards collaboration with authority, that children instinctively despise—and they are right to. It is part of how we must all become as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven. We must kill the teacher’s pet within us; we must refuse to collaborate. |
| ↑20 | Per Alma 37:32, we are to learn to have an “everlasting hatred of sin”—and racism, fascism, authoritarianism, and cruelty are sins indeed, of which we must needs repent. |