How does one arrive at nihilism? It can’t be the origin point of a belief system. Surely there was light along the way. Was it hope dashed, snubbed out like a cigarette on the sole of a boot, that caused the black veil of ennui to lower? Or could it be that societal abnegation is a direct cause of listening to too much Flipper, the Bay Area punk band who in the 1980s took potshots at mindless happiness with their nonstop morose couplets? “Ever wish the human race didn’t exist,” begins one of the rhetorical questions posed in their song “Ever,” “and then realize you’re one too?” Quite frankly no, I hadn’t, until you brought it up.
“Ever” is the first song on Flipper’s 1982 debut, Album – Generic Flipper, and it’s a doozy. In three short minutes, vocalist Bruce Loose (formerly Lose; he added the extra “o” later in an attempt to be less of a bummer) spews a series of scenarios that make it clear he wouldn’t be too much fun on a first date. “Ever live a life that’s real, full of zest, but no appeal?” “Ever play the fool and find out that you’re worse?” “Ever look at a flower and hate it?” It feels like Anne Sexton wrote a children’s book.
Flipper’s music is correspondingly off-putting. The band members were ostensibly punks but avowed fans of the Grateful Dead. The blend of those jammy instincts with punk attitude is surreal and often weirdly dazzling. On “Ever,” the downbeats and handclaps are like something out of a Frankie Avalon movie, but it’s not beach music, unless a typhoon looms. Ted Falconi, on guitar, sounds like a drunk trying to play a Buddy Holly song. Drummer Steve DePace keeps time, barely. Loose has a depraved yelp whose disgust subsides only at the song’s end. “Well, have you?” he says. “I have,” he answers, with a touch of shame. And the echoed rejoinder: “So what.”
The song makes a solid case that the world’s gone rotten, but instead of offering resistance or condolence, it gives you a wedgie. Still, it’s that final phrase that gets you: So what… After all the buildup, after all the flowers and ugliness, nothing really matters anyway. Those two flippant words get to the core question at heart of Album – Generic Flipper: Is it better to have hope and be disappointed or not to care in the first place?
Flipper formed in San Francisco in 1979, a time when punk was bleeding into hardcore, and Jimmy Carter was losing reelection. The American underground had anger on its mind; indifference was uncommon. The puckishness of punk, a snotty new genre that had grown out of rock a decade earlier, was beginning to evolve into hardcore, a steelier genre, with more fury and less fun. Originators on both coasts ripped through songs in two or three minutes, vocalists yelling invectives, while the drums marched along, unsettled. Minor Threat, Washington, D.C. hardcore originators, had vicious and obstinate songs like “Screaming at a Wall,” “I Don’t Wanna Hear It,” and “Seeing Red.” Los Angeles’ Black Flag had “Nervous Breakdown,” “Life of Pain,” “Thirsty and Miserable,” and “Depression.” It was impassioned music, and listening could be cathartic, if not exactly joyful.
But alongside the self-righteous rage was dark humor, as with groups like Flipper’s Bay Area compatriots Dead Kennedys, who had songs like “Kill the Poor” and “Let’s Lynch the Landlord.” Dead Kennedys were close with Flipper—when Dead Kennedys’ singer Jello Biafra was married in 1981, Loose officiated as a minister of the Universal Life Church. Both bands’ songs contained all the tenets of hardcore punk; they’re loud, catchy, and repetitive. But they aren’t particularly tight, with a wobbly constitution of careening guitars and wandering basslines. Biafra sang in a faux-operatic lilt—a spoonful of sugar to make the class war go down. This is where the two acts diverge: For all their jokes, the Dead Kennedys were trying to get a point across. Flipper’s point was that points are stupid.
That’s not to say Flipper were without an ethos. They just preferred you figure it out for yourself. “What we try to do in our music and lyrics is, we try to be honest,” Will Shatter, Flipper’s second vocalist, told the NME in 1982. “We don’t appreciate bullshit. We try to be straightforward with people and not play games.” Inward reflection was important, details were not. Where the Dead Kennedys sang about genocide, Flipper sang about being irritated by people kissing. Extrapolate at your own peril. That’s one side of Flipper. The other, from Loose in the same NME story: “We’re all crazy.”
Cue the excessively catchy “Life,” which sounds like a Ramones cover performed by jubilant children. “Life” actually begins with Loose’s relatively sober statement of intent: “I too have sung death’s praises/But I’m not going to sing that song anymore.” In a different context, this might be a revelation. But the songs’ insouciant sloppiness punctures a hole in its gravitas.
And if there is a moment of levity there, you don’t get much time to stop and smell the flowers before you get trolled again. A tautology arrives, sneering: “Yes, I’ve figured out what living is all about/It’s life!/Life!/Life is the only thing worth living for.” Loose’s vocals are slurred and off key. He bellows, he wails. The guitar screeches like a car fishtailing across the lanes. “Liiiiife,” he says. “I know it’s got its ups and downs!” Understatement of the century. Of multiple centuries. To make sure we get it, Loose repeats himself over and over and over. The song is almost five minutes long and I have literally quoted all of its lyrics.
So what are the characteristics of this life, with said ups and downs? To answer that, they give us “Life Is Cheap.” This song, a meandering dirge, sung by Loose, is a bit more specific in the targets of its discontent: mainstream society, with sheep people deluding themselves. “People cling to things to make their lives seem real/Crawling like bugs at some fool leader’s heels/Boasting of freedom when they’re tied down with chains/It’s time to give it up, here comes the death rain.” These complaints are less self-critical, if no less acidic. That some of their hatred is directed outward makes the band feel less depressed and more angry. If there’s a difference.
The chorus returns, a bleak singalong. “Life is pretty cheap, it’s sold a decade at a time/Life is pretty cheap, it’s so easy to find.” It’s an almost childlike slant rhyme, nearly meaningless. Or is it? On its face, what Loose says is that the world contains many people, and time moves quickly. Fair enough. But when he sings, there’s an effect on the vocals, so it sounds like he’s dueting with a mechanized version of himself, an evil alien bemoaning the overarching stupidity of the human race, a whole globe full of dummies marching toward death. The music, with a meaty bassline that feels about as subtle as Cro-Magnon man beating his big Stone Age head against a cave wall, feels dialed up for maximum repulsion.
The sister song of “Life Is Cheap” is “Living for the Depression,” also sung by Shatter. It’s Flipper’s fastest song, their most retrograde punk, their most overtly contemptuous, and thus the least interesting. “Who needs a cancerous boring end/When you can die from misery and following the trend?” Compared to Loose’s vague and bleak pronouncements, Shatter’s complaints sound trite. But they also sound like a relief. If you have a specific complaint, it’s easy to try to remedy it. Shatter is a typical young punk, sickened by consumerism. Being in Flipper, singing about it, he’s working to manifest an alternative lifestyle. It’s actually a pretty healthy thing. But if, like Loose, your complaint is the unknowability of life itself, you’re in a bit more of a pickle.
Despite the hamfistedness of most of “Living for the Depression,” there is a revealing moment when Shatter asks, “Who cares anyway? Who listens to what I say?” If you take his self-doubt at his word, as I do, it’s a sad thing to say as a lead singer of a band with a devoted audience.
There are spots like this strewn throughout the album, the diffidence at their core. “Nothing,” for example, begins with shrill, piercing feedback before Loose counts everyone in. “Okay, one…” and then he interrupts himself. “Wait, everybody start at the same time. Ready?” Were they…not going to do that? To include that moment from the recording sessions, which very easily could have been edited out, feels like a tell. Like they’re rushing to assure you they’re amateurs whose art and feelings don’t matter, discounting themselves before you get the chance to.
Album ends with what is likely Flipper’s most famous song, “Sex Bomb,” an eight-minute double-saxophone assault of “Louie Louie”-like vamping. It’s the ne plus ultra of Flipper songs, with a performance so giddily slack that it feels engineered to be boneheaded. One early review, by longtime critic J.D. Considine, said, paradoxically, that the “music is pretty dense,” with, “a lightheartedness that puts most hardcore to shame.” It’s existential party music. Shatter is more an MC than a singer, letting go a wordless, scraggly yawp while the sax goes shrill and the band pounds away like it’s playing a frat party at the end of the world. Shatter does eventually form some sentences, though they’re fairly base. “Sex bomb baby, yeah! Sex bomb mama, yeah!” It’s a stupid song, raunchy and loud, long and louche. In a way, it’s an anti-song. Who listens to what I say? You can avoid worrying about that question if you’re not saying anything in the first place.
Sometimes they did just that. In a Boston Globe review of a December 1984 Flipper live performance, critic Brett Milano seems frustrated. He admits the band’s “snarling vocals and rough playing turned into an effective kind of musical anarchy.” But he didn’t know what to make of the fact that, when they played it, “‘Sex Bomb’ became an instrumental because nobody seemed to feel like singing.” Honestly, I think it’s pretty funny, but I wasn’t there.
So why does this album survive as a hardcore punk touchstone more than 40 years after its recording, while many of its contemporaries are lost to time? Partially because the music is good, reliably loud and a touch funky, a bottled version of Flipper’s finer instinct. But the words are better, capturing a smart young adult’s combination of powerlessness and ambition, a desire to live an important, valuable life and no real clue how to do it. It’s told with spunk and sadness, moments of extreme earnestness slipped in between the overall theme of “fuck it.” You can imagine them, California kids, discovering injustice in real time and writing “Way of the World.” “There are eyes that cannot see/And fingers that cannot touch/That’s the way of the world/There are dreams left empty and blank/And legs that have ceased to walk.” I have no idea if it’s on purpose that the song echoes both the Bible and Langston Hughes, but it does.
We now have some hindsight about how it all turned out. How did time square these moments of revelation with the moments of vile disgust? The glib humor with the deadpan depression? Are the jokes harder to stomach if I tell you Will Shatter died of a heroin overdose in 1987 while his wife was pregnant? That Bruce Loose is now 65 and not physically well enough to perform in the reformed Flipper, and that his Instagram bio states, “I live. For now. Wait for my return to [a] state of NOTHING.”
In a 1983 television interview, Ruth Schwartz, one of the original co-editors of Berkeley punk zine Maximum RocknRoll, struggles to get the band to answer her questions about their vision and purpose. It’s clear the band was gaining a following and they were struggling with how much credence to lend their own proclamations. You can feel their embarrassment at having their serious statements actually being taken seriously. “You have a message in your songs, right?” Schwartz asks. In response, Loose offers another tautology: “We’re just trying to show the absurdity of whatever it is we’re trying to show the absurdity of.” It’s funny, and would have made a great lyric, but it’s not helpful outside of a song. Nihilism is not a long-term strategy. You have to act. Inaction will kill you. The thing about life is that it keeps going.
