At The Drive-In - One Armed Scissor: youtube.com/watch?v=7NYbojdoAQE
I’m all for the propagation of degeneracy. I’m barely a degenerate but I do hold certain tendencies; I do like to drink, I do find people throwing up to be funny, I do hold a certain amount of violence in my actions, at times. I am though, mostly, of the romantic tendencies, consider myself more a pacifist, and I help people when they need helping, as much as I can. However, I’m all for the propagation of degeneracy.
There is a difference between being a degenerate and being corrupt. Charles Bukowski was a degenerate, Charles Manson was corrupt. Those who hold the characteristics of a degenerate will do things that hurt themselves, can hurt others through their actions, but are not malicious. Degenerates prefer the despised forms of life for the joy of challenging systems and preconceived ways of life, it’s not an act of ill will or hatred to choose these forms of living but it can be difficult, challenging.
I grew up in a very Roman Catholic town where sex was a topic barely mentioned, mostly repressed and generally regarded as a great act of ones ruin. We had sex-ed in grades 7 and 8 where we watched laughable educational videos from the 80s that were worthy of parody, where we learned biology of the body but little if anything about homosexuality, sado-masochism, anal penetration or anything else non-hetero normal. Following this, until I graduated from public school, I remember a general assembly on the virtues of celibacy, given by over-enthusiastic, white Christian teens that were so out of touch they performed an insulting rap song (insulting, I mean, to the rap genre in general), as well as an afternoon assembly for my class given by a “sexpert.” This woman came in and talked about genital biology, sexually transmitted diseases and infections and pretty much everything else I had learned about sex when I was 14 years old. The whole thing was a joke. Does one expect a 16 year old to go to one assembly on sexual education in a years worth of school and take it seriously? Had it been a semester-long course then yes, it would be something ongoing and daily touched upon bringing about a certain amount of understanding. But one assembly was something we could go to and walk out of and never think about again. It was a joke. And so, at the end of the assembly, I raised my hand and asked, “If a man and a woman are having anal sex and the woman farts, does the man’s penis explode?” This “sexpert” then threatened to walk out on the whole thing, despite the previous question to mine being, “Can a man’s penis be too big?” Of course, the proper answer to my question should have been, “No, but her strap-on might fall off.” And I got in a lot of trouble for this but so what? It was worth pointing out the ridiculousness of it all.
If one is not respected by a person, a system, a society, why not act against it? However, I think it important to approach degeneracy from some kind of intellectual stand point. Degeneracy for the sake of degeneracy can be stupid and pointless and destructive. There was lately a protest against the G20 in this city where a lot of destructive people ruined my neighborhoods, black-bloc window smashers and authoritative head smashers. This is a form of degeneracy I cannot stand behind. There was a guy, though, who climbed onto the head of a statue and balanced on one foot, danced and made a spectacle of himself during all of this. He was shirtless and ragged and I was behind him.
And in music I’ve always felt that the same sort of recklessness is under-represented in my tastes. I was turned onto At The Drive-In when I was 17 and they resonated with me heavy. They were a force I’d never seen, almost destroying themselves every performance, challenging the audience to implode and approaching it all from an intellectual level. And it was a form of degeneracy I respected and admired.
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