A word war will set off the keg**My words of war!**Should a word have two meanings?**What the fuck for?**Should words serve the truth?--Minutemen, "Do You Want New Wave (Or Do You Want the Truth?)"
Let's dance with semantics. Perhaps The Soft Pink Truth's Drew Daniel revised the title of the Minutemen's classic ballad just because it's a clever phrase. Many audiences didn't know what the 80s punk legend was screaming about in concert. D. Boon and Mike Watt hollered blue-collar fuming about bosses in high castles. Their lyrics could be interpreted as Everyman frustration contorted into cubist shapes or mere beer napkin scribbles, but the selected passage from "Do You Want" is poignant. It argues that political language's barrier is its perpetual ambiguity, self-contradiction, and cliches. On his latest album, Daniel tackles that dilemma by slipping a neon-green cassette of house music on the P.A. when a mosh pit breaks out at a hardcore primal scream session.
Daniel's music thankfully never gives easy answers. His solo work and musique concrete tomfoolery in Matmos can sometimes confuse listeners about whether he's expressing genuine affection or ironic commentary. There's his remix of Missy Elliot's "Get Ur Freak On" where he clanged actual gold bars for "bling-bling" beats or his suave microhouse homage to the nosejob on "California Rhinoplasty", sampling godawful surgical scrapes and drills. Do You Party?, his 2003 debut album as The Soft Pink Truth, traced his roots as a go-go dancer in San Francisco's gay disco culture; cartoonishly skewering it all into autistic microhouse with stuttering R & B divas, 80s new wave melodrama, and venereal beats for "Big Booty Bitches". The "genuine affection" factor rang there-- evoking more passion than the electroclash sold at the time. With Do You Want New Wave, his cover album of punk classics, he's on the offensive. Consider his robo-funk cover of the Angry Samoans' "Homo-Sexual", as he deadpans "Screw your wife up the behind and tell your kids everything's fine." Homophobia reduced to a sing-along for any rainbow parade. The irony can kill 20 men with one drop.
Daniel deftly retains punk's spirit of negation. Instead of remixing the originals by underground punk legends like Die Kreuzen, Minor Threat, Rudimentary Peni, and Crass, he pasteurizes their dogmatism and raw vitriol as disco calls. Daniel subverts by stripping away the distortion and lousy enunciation that cloaked the lyrics of these songs on record or in concert, and reveals their kinkiness. His disco element also dents the "punk rocks, disco sucks" ethos of snapping the young n' disaffected outta disco's narcotic escapism with anti-grooves. Although the ever-solemn Crass did release the galloping death-disco number "Walls".
It's difficult to say if Do You Want is nostalgic for Daniel's punk roots (the liner notes dedicate the record to his beloved Louisville hardcore scene of the late 80's), or a mocking bastardization. Hell, the record could be just a distraction from his Ph.D. studies at UC-Berkeley. The CD's inner sleeve features "Dissertation Avoidance," a brainstorm list of the record's possible meanings like "Escapist Nostalgia," "Regressive Fantasies," and "Ruining Sacred Truths."
Daniel's music makes the original songs' social defiance sound terribly cute. Consider his fingerprints on Minor Threat's straight-edge anthem "Out of Step". The song is now a jock jam with a techno-pop rhythm slowed down to allow cheerleaders to stomp and clap along to, and chanteuse Dani Siciliano giving the Mary Poppins treatment to "Don't smoke/ Don't drink/ Don't fuck/ At least I can fucking think." Daniel even mixes in samples of a starch-collared doctor praising the listener for not smoking. "Out of Step" is now a jingle worthy of a DARE video aimed at sixth graders.
More faithful is Crass' declaration of revolt, "Do They Owe Us a Living?", where he razor-slashes with a bare, tech-house beat to let People Like Us's Vicki Bennett tell citizens in the unemployment line to overthrow their society and its ideals of a natural aristocracy. "They'd live to see me dead," she sneers. Unfortunately, Daniel mares the song with wanky lasers and DSP'd ping-pong beats. His digital swordplay fares better on Die Kreuzen's "In School", which sounds like a Do Your Party? b-side with its stitched-together fragments of a dozen singers and robots, and a hypnotic disco cover of Rudimentary Peni's "Vampire State Building", on which he disintegrates the voice of fashion designer Jeremy Scott.
The brazen homophobia of "Homo-Sexual" still nags though. The Angry Samoans always tried too hard to offend for the sake of political incorrectness but Daniel's fellow Matman, Martin Schmidt, diminishes their impact with his rendition of Nervous Gender's "Confession". Singing through a coagulated vocoder over a Valley Girl-charming handclap, he announces, "Jesus was just like me!/ A homosexual nymphomaniac/ Walking the streets of Galilee." And then there's the giddily misogynistic Teddy & The Frat Girls' "I Owe it to the Girls", where Daniel and Blevin Blectum duet to a rump-tickling, tech-house beat, singing, "I can't get no pussy...relief...ride...ice cream/ I owe it to the girls." These three songs are now dancefloor punch lines akin to DJ Assault's "Ass and Titties"-- or "Disco Duck" for that matter. Firing between the eyes is the CD's design that equates a "punk" with a double-arrow bedroom companion.
Ultimately, Daniel seems to be giggling at his punk past. He ends the album with an eerie, androgynous rendition of Styne and Robin's Broadway tune, "Looking Back", once sung by drag icon Carol Channing. The song is now a funeral wake with a dreary feedback tone that places silver dollars on the eyes of a mourning lullaby about how "It's nice looking back at the past/ Full of memories that last/ Souvenirs of a life that was fast and fun/ Now it's done." A fine ending for one of this year's most remarkable "punk" albums.
