Smashing the state in my car

So I was in my car today on the way home from work, when something came up on my ipod's shuffle setting. It was fast, heavy, pissed off and exactly what I needed to hear today. The song was called "Poison Corporations". The band, Aus-Rotten. I am going to tell you all a little story. I was in high school, some snot nosed little kid who thought he knew some shit about punk rock. I had been listening to punk rock for a few years by this time, especially the old stuff like Black Flag and Dead Kennedys. I thought I knew what a pissed off band was supposed to sound like. One day, I see a friend of mine in Hell's cafeteria (Carmel High School lunchroom). He's got his disc man (that was that thing we used to use to put those disc thingys in and it played music somehow), and he's rocking out. I ask the obvious question. He says "Aus-Rotten". I then ask the next obvious question, "who?". He then tells me about the band, where they're from, how he heard about them, how he got the cd, what they're about, etc. He then lets me borrow the cd. By that time he had already lost the cover, so he handed me a jewel case that just had the back sleeve and the cd in it. I look immediately at the cd itself. The print on the disc had this odd logo on it, some really serious looking letter "A" shape inside a circle. The back sleeve was black and white with some pictures and song titles like "poison corporations" and "The Flag Will Cover Coffins". Wow. Serious shit. The cd was called "Not One Single Fucking Hit Discography". I took it home, and it blew my fucking mind. The songs on this thing were the darkest and angriest songs I had heard at the time. The lyrics were screamed but you could understand what they were saying. I knew what they were talking about, and there was not one single bit of irony or hilarity about it. It wasn't like listening to a Dead Kennedys record, where the politics were there but it was done sarcastically. No no. This was straight to the point. This was not a band that would ever play Warped Tour. This was not a band that sung about girls or their high school traumas. This was a band with something real to say.




I had to have played this cd a billion times. I made myself a tape and begrudgingly gave it back to my friend. He then had a tape of their current album at the time, "...And Now Back to Our Programming". This was even better than the discography. To this day when I hear the song "Xenophobia Kills" I go apeshit. I did it in the car today. This opened up a whole new world in punk rock for me. I would never have heard of Tragedy, His Hero is Gone, or anything crusty without this band. I still love the songs, and the politics, and everything that made this band cool. I sometimes still try to draw the logo to varying degrees of success. A lot of bands play in this style, but none in my mind are as good as Aus-Rotten.