I ain't rappin for God
I ain't rappin for pity
I ain't rappin for profits
I ain't rappin for chicks
I ain't rappin for others
I ain't rappin for money
I ain't rappin for money

The truth is what we make it, not what you see.

Something someone sent me about something important to me.

so we sit and sip morning cups,
bravado keeping us safe from
no news that is good
news as countless
flames burn across
desert lands and infants wash up on freedom's
shores
before the lawns gets
trimmed and a neighbor your
kids played with hits the
headlines only to be
labeled "a nice guy"
you went to church with,
while his petite
wife sent
memos off reminding all
of the annual bake sale,
sure to raise not quite
enough to paint the barn
but more than too much,
as the Mercedes clearly shows you
three small faces deprived
and hand picked for effective
representation of how your
life
is perfectly fine
given the fact that you do nothing for those in need
and repulsive guilt is the
message intended
to open the escape way for your
soul if you
only send twenty three cents a day
multiplied by three hundred and sixty five days
which in exponential terms
becomes so many numbers (608,637,500.00 to be exact)
that a blinded mass
of self indulgent sinners
looks North as ninety six percent of
the till faces a
fate three small faces would gladly except,
for to be burned up as
quickly, would be the easy way out,
for they do not exist unless a humble man walks
them in to your living room
and force feeds them to you
before you remotely
remember that the big game
is on and you change...the channel

What keeps me from giving up on love or a settling addiction by another name.

The perfect can't go on if only one of two wants it to continue. I can't want what I can't have. Well, I can want it, but that would be counterproductive.

We only get live once, we only get old once, we only die once. Some part of me wants me to be thankful for that.

What my philosophy teacher said years ago:

"Better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. Yea right, better to have not loved than to have to deal with losing love." She was right.

Yea I'm gonna quote some girl on Mtv's True Life.

The episode was "I'm a compulsive shopper". THis is what she said:

From the very beginning fitting in is what has been very important to me. I get my images from tv and magazines and movies. So i always feel like im reinventing myself to be popular.

Boom, some fucking 20 year old rich girl just spoke volumes on this nation's consumer culture

A late night Moshpm, this is.

In First Person - Item#14

God, what a great song.

It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. - Joseph Conrad

HOLY FUCKING SHIT

Greatest band ever. Yea, thats right, move over Beatles, Journey, and all you other dead or dying hipsters. This band is the shit, and now you all look like fucking amateurs tickling instruments with redundancy that runs ad nauseum.

I put all of their shit into one rar, you know, for the kids. So this includes their split with Titan, their demo, and another split with Storm the Bastille. It also includes their one and only full length, Lost Between Hands Held Tight.

In First Person - Discography

http://www.mediafire.com/?zu3p3149a1q3m6q

If you want to be a little cunt and not use my link because you're a cunt and downloaded one or another piece of their catalog somewhere else, you can head over to Elementary Revolt to download their shit individually. I just hope you can sleep at night knowing how big of a cunt you are.

http://elementaryrevolt.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-first-person-discography-2006-2009.html

Today's Moshpm brought on by speaking too fast and drawing falling stars into the background of an empty sky.



Enlightened by the storm that feeds the depression the play fell from our eyes build a confession laugh as the sky falls shadows within shadows you see it's not there remember the steep streets none were silent all were frayed I can't sleep in silence it's warm beneath the flames with my torn black sheet looking up to see the bottom too dark to see the gray flames in my hands my nightmares are in color build the towers to the skies I've died trying hide between the cinder blocks and loose gravel when did I become transparent fade in and out between the frequencies never asked to live forever hollow and unfair jump to see if you'll live the story has no ending it just finishes here released from reality and forced into dreams sleep well sleeper the liars wait for the morning then they'll come for you

Bukowski and Fugazi

This is a world where everybody's gotta do something. Y'know, somebody laid down this rule that everybody's gotta do something, they gotta be something. You know, a dentist, a glider pilot, a narc, a janitor, a preacher, all that. Sometimes I just get tired of thinking of all the things that I don't wanna do. All the things that I don't wanna be. Places I don't wanna go, like India, like getting my teeth cleaned. Save the whale, all that, I don't understand that. - Henry from Barfly, an semi-autobiographical movie based on Charles Bukowski's time spent in Los Angeles, getting his wino on, like a boss.



Fugazi- Burning too


Anytime but now
Anywhere but here
Anyone but me
I've got to think about my own life
We are consumed by society
We are obsessed with variety
We are all filled with anxiety that this world would not survive
We gotta put it out the sky is burning
We gotta put it out the water's burning
We gotta put it out the earth is burning
Outrage but then they say...
Anytime but now
Anywhere but here
Anyone but me
I've got to think about my own life
The world is not our facility
We have a responsibility
To use our abilities to keep this place alive
Right here right now
Do it. Now. Do it.

Trashcan Lives

the wind blows hard tonight
and it's a cold wind
and I think about
the boys on the row.
I hope some of them have a bottle of
red.

it's when you're on the row
that you notice that
everything
is owned
and that there are locks on
everything.
this is the way a democracy
works:
you get what you can,
try to keep that
and add to it
if possible.

this is the way a dictatorship
works too
only they either enslave or
destroy their
derelicts.

we just forgot
ours.

in either case
it's a hard
cold
wind

Mike Armine = the fucking man

From an old interview from some Metal Odyssey

Mike: Musically, I can only speak from a lyrical standpoint. I can say that my lyrics are taken from my daily interaction with people, judgments that I make, and things that I see. My feelings on these matters come out during practice, get internally processed, then edited, and come out in song. Every lyric has something behind it and some connection to my life. Personally I can say that we are all "glass half empty" kind of guys, and view our environment with our own sense of skepticism, distrust. None of us really interact with our environment because we are uncomfortable in it, and we judge it. So when things are crushing, strange and intense, it's because the judgments we have made of our environment have made their way into our
music. We're people too, and we can't hold onto that type of bitterness--it has to come out somehow, Rosetta is our outlet. At least that's how I see it. That's how I feel when we play: bitter at all I have seen, and I feel overwhelmed at work trying to change it.

http://www.sonicfrontiers.net/php/story-23.html

Well done, ol chap.

Power Violence Band United Nations Frontman Geoff Rickly Urges Followers to Drop Cameras, Pick Up Rocks, Get Active
09/8/2008



There is a vacuum in the center of our music culture. Whatever the genre — metal, punk hardcore, dance, pop or rock — the trend remains the same: leave your beliefs at the door. Our 21st Century promise seems to be that of a society in the advanced stages of decadence and social apathy. Not only has our music been stripped of any message that it might have had, but it’s now packaged as being “beyond message” — irreproachable in its indifference.

In the recent past, bands as diverse as Fugazi, Megadeath, Pearl Jam and Ministry all had songs that raised questions about political corruption, social inequity, personal responsibility and artistic freedom. Today, we see artists more concerned with friend requests on MySpace or wanting to “shake it” than with the problems of our lives. This isn’t to say that there’s not a place for celebration, joy, silliness and fun in pop music. That would be a frightening vision in its own right. We just have to ask ourselves, if we’re not facing the big issues then who are we leaving them to? Politicians? Lobbyists? Maybe it’s time to quit f—ing around and wake up.

Where did it all go so wrong? Although there seems be be a cavernous gulf between the glory days of Dischord Records to the vapid careerism of today’s mall-centric punk and nu-hair-metal, the transformation took place in less than 25 five years. Were we all tired of being earnest? Was sincerity unflattering? Was a compassionate world merely a naive dream or is it something that we killed with in-fighting and ego-stroking?

It’s quite possible that the dialectic of our progressive music movement was responsible for its own demise. The conversations in ‘zines and at shows resembled the discourse of a University debate rather than the concerned talks at a town meeting. People were discussing the politics of language instead of volunteering at soup kitchens. Arguments over patriarchy and masculinity took precedence over starting women’s outreach centers. The intellectual one-upsmanship became a rhetorical nightmare; many young kids came to shows energized and ready to start making a change and left feeling drained and humiliated. In short, we liked to talk about the revolution more than we worked for it.

Our own philosophies have been used against us. Canadian ’70s media theorist Marshall McLuhan once famously contended: “At the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message.” As a counterculture, the underground punk movement simplified this message to “the medium is the message” or “the music is the message” and adopted it to mean that the message and music were one and the same and wholly indivisible. It seems obvious now that the shortened version isn’t the same. It’s missing an essential word: content.

Various groups, including The Nation of Ulysses and Refused made a study of the aesthetic of revolution, and so did many underground artists such as Sheperd Fairey and Banksy. These artists explored the links between advertising, propagandizing, evangelism and philosophy. As a subtle and complex exploration of art, commerce and humanity these artists were very successful. Unfortunately, this may have been an important turning point in our culture — the point at which the image replaced the message.

In the years since, we’ve been given bands that retain the sound and image of our counterculture but forget the politics and leave out the distasteful bits of reality. If Milemarker and Q and Not U put some dance into modern punk, it wasn’t so that they would be replicated sans-politics by third rate impostors being blasted in every Urban Outfitters or American Apparel. There has been a domino effect: Political punk gets more accessible, accessible punk gets less political, punk becomes completely apolitical and irrelevant. The tiger has been declawed and we’re all wasting time in our twenties pretending not to care about anything but ourselves.

Recently, the magazine Adbusters, published an article railing against “hipster culture,” saying, “We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality.” While this may be true, we need to investigate how we got to this point. We have to face facts. We have let the “hipsters” down. By not presenting a counterculture movement worth caring about, we’ve railroaded them into a subculture of not caring. We need to reach out to our DJ friends and organize events that are socially conscious. We need to inject a sense of urgency into all our mediums of expression. It’s not like all hope is lost. Le Tigre has made feminism danceable. Verse put out, in the form of a record called Aggression, a political protest you can feel, not just think about. Darkest Hour and Lamb of God are continually blasting a message into the headphones of metal lovers around the world. And everywhere in the world, kids are starting bands in their basements and they are pissed off.

We have been attacked repeatedly as a generation and as a demographic. We have been derided because of our looks and attitude. At the end of the Adbusters article, the writer, Douglas Haddow, tellingly concludes, “I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, ‘If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.’ But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet –oblivious to our own impending demise.”

Pretty glum. He writes something so insidious here, it’s easy to miss: “…if only we’d carry rocks… we’d look like revolutionaries…” Maybe looking like revolutionaries isn’t enough anymore. We have to start thinking like revolutionaries. The only sane response to criticism is activism. Let’s get active.

Contact me: www.myspace.com/unitednations and I’ll write you back.