CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (15)

By: Mandy Keifetz
August 15, 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.

“FORMING” | GERMS | 1977

At the end of “Forming,” Darby Crash cries plaintively into the mic “ah they’re playin it all wrong the drums are too slow the bass is too fast the chords are all wrong he’s makin the ending too long. I quit.” From this distance, if you listen to it now – go do that – the irreducible fact about it is this: Darby Crash is a dead kid.

And dead kids, with their jarring spooky insistence on not being alive, are really loud. This is intentional, I think, part of the actual song, as Darby Crash’s suicide was, and to get anywhere near what this song meant to me in 1980 — a kid then myself — I had to first sit with that screechy haunting in my head for hours, then days.

My brother kept his records piled sleeveless in the drawers of his captain’s bed. Whenever he wasn’t there, I’d steal a few and play them, then toss them back into that unholy madness. If I bought a record of my own before I was twenty, I don’t recall it. This act of desecrating the secret trove of scratched-up records was the whole of my music process.

And at fourteen, I already had a sinking feeling about all the music I pulled out of those drawers, and all the music on the radio, and all the music my friends cooed over, and all music my mother took me to at the all the hippermost venues of Koch New York:

I wasn’t hearing it right.

I mean this in two ways. I barely recognize pitch. And I’d never know if the chords were all wrong or the drums were too slow and bass too fast. My ears legit can’t hear those niceties. But even more, I don’t feel what I other people seem to be feeling. Not, like, I am unmoved by music — but like I am moved in the wrong direction. I do not experience the mass swoon of the teeny bopper. Or the stirring drama of an unresolved 6th.

But even at fourteen, and even with those limitations, I could hear that the Germs are not using their instruments in the way in which those instruments were designed to make sounds. They appear to genuinely not know how to use them at all, except to make a riveting racket. A riveting racket which screams — yo, this shit is fucked up.

“Forming” is the first piece of music I ever heard right, I think. It sounds to me as it was meant to sound. Fucked up like a dead kid.

***

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 (15)

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