Common Blood

No.221, aired July 3, 2013. Began as a primer for the SNFU concert at the Exchange on Friday July 5. Lead vocalist Mr. Chi Pig, once the epitome of the leaping high-energy skate-punk, now 50, performed in a Chinese dress and demonstrated his cock-sucking skills with both ends of a beer bottle. All of SNFU’s live songs sound like fist-pumping anthems for the end of the world, but in this show the apocalyptic chorus “This is The End” was revealed to be about the back end of your body. The show also included She’s Not On The Menu, Joyride, Cockatoo Quill, and Painful Reminder. Regina’s Royal Red Brigade opened for SNFU, and will be featured in the July 10 program.

This episode held several half-formed thematic elements that simmered & threatened to bubble up into a conceptual umbrella. The “common” theme took shape after hearing Jungle’s Common Blood, when I impulsively shared a passage in Marx & Engels’ The German Ideology I had read earlier in the day on the historical relationship between individuals and their classes. The quote begins -

“The separate individuals from a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; Otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors” (82).

And the theme really took shape when the following passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (as always, selected at random) came up near the end of the program:

“Why do you deny me water? The enjoyment of water is a common right. Nature has not made the sun private to any, nor the air, nor soft water. This common right I seek.”

As the ancient “right” to water now lives under global threat by 21st century robber barons, it is time to ask why should anything not be common to all?

Part 1

1. Don’t Count On It – Swelter
2. She’s Not On The Menu – SNFU
3. Naval Aviation In Art? – Frank Zappa
4. Money Matters - SNFU
5. Prophesy (Albert Ayler) – Eugene Chadbourne – Metamorphoses - Ovid
6. Whatever Would Beckett Have Said – Swelter
7. Common Blood – Jungle
8. Ochre Ringlet – Eugene Chadbourne -- on Individuals, Class and Community – Karl Marx & Frederic Engels, from The German Ideolgy / “Out of hill mist as often before” – Colin Simms (from Angel Exhaust 22, The Romance Of Insects)
9. Misfortune – SNFU

Part 2

1. Plastic Surgery Kept Her Beautiful – SNFU
2. The Man With The Prosthetic Head – Swelter
3. I Wanna Be Your Bicycle Seat – Acid Mothers Temple And The Drowning Paraiso UFO
4. Seeing Life Through The Bottom Of A Bottle – SNFU
5. Attack From Planet Hattifatteners - Acid Mothers Temple And The Drowning Paraiso UFO -- Wintering Snowy Owl In The Snowfields Above Eden - Colin Simms (from Angel Exhaust 22, The Romance Of Insects)
6. Desirade – Swelter
7. This Is The End – SNFU
8. The Walking Dead – Eugene Chadbourne
9. It’s So Fucking Great To Be Alive – Jungle
10. Exit Plexit - Simply Saucer