CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

By: Devin McKinney
August 5, 2020

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite punk songs, c. 1974–1983.

“NEVER SAY NEVER” | ROMEO VOID | 1981

One of the sexiest and darkest records of its day, “Never Say Never” is some rough porn. Its electric charge comes at the contact point between unity and disunity, between music that is instantaneous and unrelenting and lyrical images that are fragmented and discontinuous, separate stories occurring on the same street. I’ve never looked up the lyrics: reading them in sequence might give false glue to words that have always flown free of one another, as if glimpsed from a speeding car, or from an upper story after nightfall: windburned skin could give a fuck about ugly as sin warm in your coat —

Here, that wild fragmentation is life itself, and life comes through a single pair of eyes on the street. Those eyes belong to singer Debora Iyall, then a 28-year-old from Soap Lake, Washington. She ranges fearlessly up and down her street, appraising the sleaze, coaxing the danger; and her voice, for all that it might evoke a perverse Valley Girl, in this setting becomes a noir voice, voice of both the detective and the femme, the dick and the killer. Her eyes have seen it all, and her hand grips a gun, and the gun is the band: the stop-you-dead guitar intro, set off by that single shard of harmonics at the twelfth fret; the bass like the pounding heart of a terrified body; the convulsive spurt of an abstract saxophone break.

I might like you better if we slept together: who doesn’t know what that sentence “means,” and who, listening to it here, its repetition and insinuation, would claim it means exactly that? Or only that? Who doesn’t hear that, as much as sex, it promises murder?

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CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2020): Series introduction by Josh Glenn | Mimi Lipson on Flipper’s “Sex Bomb” | James Parker on The Jam’s “Going Underground” | Dan Fox on The Cramps’ “Human Fly” | Adrienne Crew on Bad Brains’ “I and I Survive” | Devin McKinney on Romeo Void’s “Never Say Never” | Deb Chachra on The Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love” | Mark Kingwell on The Demics’ “New York City” | Jessamyn West on Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor” | Douglas Wolk on The Homosexuals’ “Soft South Africans” | Josh Glenn on The Freeze’s “This is Boston, Not L.A.” | Stephanie Burt on Sorry’s “Imaginary Friend” | Luc Sante on Public Image Ltd.’s “Public Image” | Miranda Mellis on X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” | Adam McGovern on The Clash’s “Washington Bullets” | Mandy Keifetz on Germs’ “Forming” | Gordon Dahlquist on The Sex Pistols’ “Problems” | Anthony Miller on The Soft Boys’ “I Wanna Destroy You” | Deborah Wassertzug on The Mekons’ “Where Were You?” | Tor Aarestad on Gang of Four’s “Return the Gift” | Marc Weidenbaum on The Pop Rivets’ “Dream of ’63” | David Smay on The Rezillos’ “(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures” | Vanessa Berry on The Cure’s “So What” | Chelsey Johnson on The Slits’ “Typical Girls” | Lynn Peril on Crass’s “Smother Love” | Mike Watt on The Dils’ “You’re Not Blank”.

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

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