CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)

By: Anthony Miller
August 17, 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.

“I WANNA DESTROY YOU” | THE SOFT BOYS | 1980

“I Wanna Destroy You” is a jubilant hymn to annihilation. After a seven-second clangor of guitars, singer and songwriter Robyn Hitchcock blares out the title phrase four times, with a three-part harmony on the “I” topped off by drummer Morris Windsor’s falsetto that wails like a siren. The song beckons you to sing along. Bubblegum vehemence.

“I feel it coming on again / Just like it did before,” the singer utters, describing something atavistic within him, a baleful cycle of history about to recur, or both. He excoriates masters of war (“They feed your pride with boredom / And they lead you on to war”). He visits pestilence on propagandists and hidden persuaders:

A pox upon the media
And everything you read
They tell you your opinions
And they’re very good indeed

What other band, then or now, would have opted for ending the line with that “indeed”? Don’t ignore the essential role played by “you,” without whose mindless complicity and abdication of control such subjugation would not have occurred. A final stanza gives the rancor more room to roam, whatever ruin has been meted out only a prelude to absolute obliteration:

And when I have destroyed you
I’ll come picking at your bone
And you won’t have a single atom left
To call your own

Too psychedelic, puckish, and prolix for your garden-variety punk, The Soft Boys emerged from a madcap Cantabrigian milieu, land of J.H. Prynne and Syd Barrett. Their name amalgamates two William Burroughs titles. Their valiantly anachronistic and utterly beguiling Underwater Moonlight (1980) foundered on its release. (Later, the album would resurface like a lost Atlantis for many listeners, college- and indie-rock musicians among them.) This band didn’t haunt outré King’s Road haberdasheries like the Pistols. The Soft Boys were not anarchist ranters but surrealist miscreants, insurrectionists of the psyche intent on lodging the odd image or idea to hatch inside a listener’s brain.

“I Wanna Destroy You” was as straightforward as this band ever got. The song conducts an exorcism of enmity beyond the bounds of decorum and rationality. It is a punk song in all but sound. When The Soft Boys reunited in 2001, an older and wiser Hitchcock resuscitated his old band’s eviscerating incantation and has since cast it in the direction of some so-called “leaders of the free world.” Do you feel it coming on again? The song proceeds on its path of destruction.

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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 (17)

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