Albums That Meant Something - Part 5 - Dreams of Last Year's Heroes

This poster, hung over the foot of my bed, is what I woke up to every morning for the better part of a decade. It's the backside of the poster-sized cover to The Feeding of the 5000, Crass's 1978 debut.

As I've mentioned in previous installments of this series, I came into punk rock at a time when the scene was at a low ebb, reduced to isolated individuals and small knots of like-minded enthusiasts. Historical documentation and available material was thin on the ground.

Occasionally one might come across some second-hand books or music mags or a rare affordable treasure in the used vinyl bins, but for the most part it was a trial-and-error journey through uncharted territory when it came to discovering stuff outside the Clash/Pistols/Ramones/Dead Kennedys back-catalogues...or the hardcore scene, which had had taken a bad turn towards the metallic. Hard-won and incomplete information about bands or styles or whatnot was passed by word of mouth or the occasional expensive leap of import-record buying faith.

In the spring of 1992, I was a twenty year old enthusiast of 80's Britpunk and Oi with a studded leather jacket and a crest of purple hair done up Misfits style. It was stock template punrockerdom -- aggro posturing, meticulous accessorizing, and provocative (if a tad tired) fashionizing -- and I say that without making excuses for or condemning my younger self. It's all part of being young, but even then I was feeling a bit long in the tooth for the game and with little idea where it was all going to lead.

Then I discovered Crass.

I'm not certain what it was that convinced me to give the seminal anarchopunks a listen. Patches, badges and jacket paintings featuring the band's distinctive symbols and slogans were commonly enough spotted around the scene, though the same applied to Discharge, and I never warmed to their stuff. It was more likely my insatiable hunger for material to listen to, combined with my reading some reviews for Crass gigs (written in painfully earnest anarcho-communist jargon) in some old fanzines I found. In any case, I ended up picking up a copy of Best Before 1984, a 1986 retrospective of the band's career, at In Your Ear on Commonwealth Avenue sometime in the late spring of 1992.

It was the most terrifying thing I had ever listened to.

It was twenty tracks -- taken from the band's singles and topped off with a live cut from their final performance -- of hardcore anarchist politics delivered over crude tribal punk riffs and occasionally garnished with experimental sonic effects. Protest music (or political music in general) is an iffy proposition, as the proper mix of art and ideology is difficult to achieve.

Crass never aimed for a proper balance, and let the musical aesthetics take a back seat to the message. Yet on the best of their efforts, the sheer force of their convictions elevates the material past the level of noisy agitprop. Whether on "Reality Asylum," a scathing spoken word attack on religion, or the more traditionally punky "Big A Little A," about non-violent resistance, the sense of outrage is visceral, palpable, and chilling in a way no cartoony shock value nonsense could ever hope to match.

More so than the music, it was the concepts behind the Crass collective that struck a chord with me during that transitional period. The theories, manifestos and explanations -- packed in as booklets with Best Before and Christ: The Album -- concerning the punk movement, anarchism, pacifism, and activism influenced me greatly even if I didn't entirely agree with their views on politics and human nature. (I'd love to think a society could work on the basis of voluntary cooperation alone, but harsh experience has taught me otherwise, and no amount of utopian cheerleading is going to change that.)

It got me to thinking about what my priorities were as a self-identified punk rocker, which I realized meant more than an elaborate hairstyle and dogmatic adherence to genre orthodoxy...which was great, because I've saved a ton of cash since I've quit buying ultra-super-hold hair gel and Cockney Rejects bootleg live albums.

Here are two of my favorite selections from Best Before 1984. The first, originally from a 1980 split single with the Poison Girls, is a pointed rejection of letting the ends justify the means. The second, taken from a 1982 EP, is a sandblast of vituperative anti-militarism which brought down the impotent wrath of Parliament. (An edited news clip about the controversy precedes the track.)

Crass - Bloody Revolutions

Crass - Sheep Farming in the Falklands