Efficiency and progress is ours once more!

You have to admit that this is an unforgettable opener to a record -- even if you're used to the loud-guitar drone that even pervades Ashlee Simpson records. There's four chords, and some madman discussing salvos of economic efficiency (did you know that a Neutron bomb would kill people, leaving the buildings intact, apparently?). But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Writing these posts makes me all too sadly aware that I didn't really experience any of this stuff first-hand. I can't write about the day that The Queen Is Dead came out (though I can state that the new Morrissey record is coming out in October, yay), and I didn't burn my draft card or any of that stuff. I just discover this music, and it changes my life, but I certainly am not the second, or the third, or even the fourth person to discover it. I can just sit back and revel in the fact that I know Panic at the Discowas first a Smiths song, or 59 Times the Painwas first a Husker Dusong, not just a band. And there I go getting ahead of myself again.

The weird thing is that I have these sad little pathetic stories about how I got into this music, and I guess music has always been a really personal thing for me -- I go and listen to some bands and listen to some more and they mean a lot to me. So the bass player in my punk band (you can read about that in my note about "Anarchy in the UK") and I were at the local shopping mall in his brother's Dodge Pinto. (Or was it a Plymouth?) I went and bought this record having never even heard the Dead Kennedys before, and we go to leave the place, and the bass player stalls out the car right at the intersection when we're trying to leave. So here we are, listening to the ultimate plan for ridding the city of its poorest inhabitants, nearly run over by several large pickup trucks coming up in our wake. On the way home, we would later hear about "Stealing People's Mail" and about people who "Kill Children". What fun.