MÖSH YOUR ENTHUSIASM (20)
By:
March 6, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of metal records from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Heather Quinlan. Also check out our MÖSH YOUR ENTHUSIASM playlist at Spotify.
THE AFFLICTED | “HERE COME THE COPS” | 1985
There is a poem in this series of titles circa 1985 — cops; affliction; mental health — that feels so 2023! Some things never change. The song goes, here come the cops / this is where the party stops. The cops make fun of the singer’s hair. They take the punks to the police station. The song has a sense of humor about the inevitability of this: running from cops et al (neo-nazis), living to mosh another day.
I remember being picked up by the cops (age 13? 14?) when they raided a show at the Tool & Die on Valencia Street. We were hauled in for being ‘out after curfew’ (is that still a thing?) and several of us put into a small cell where we loudly sang Pink Floyd. My (no doubt stoned) father picked me up at two in the morning and didn’t bat an eyelash. He was a civil rights lawyer who spent most of his career fighting police brutality and picked up my friends too, who had less understanding (‘chill’) parents. Did we have school the next day? Who knows. For me and many of my feral friends, school was basically optional by that point, and I often took the option.
Punk shows, thrifting, dying our hair, doing drugs, this was life! What was school? Who knows. I mean, it was fragmentation. Wholeness was music, friendship, fashion such as we could cobble together out of stinky garments from Salvation Army we didn’t bother to wash. My mother’s wardrobe provided too–hippy ornaments hybridized for headbanging, a white leather fringe jacket, dangling earrings and giant rings, capes, ornate skirts, anklets.
If I understand correctly, we were given the keys to the kingdom, but the cops changed the locks. Rumi says: more keys, less cages. Here come the cops, all over the world. Big cop, little cop. Tyrant, despot, writ large, writ small. Who cops the cop, who is ‘the cop’? There’s rubber, wood, and finally lead.
The cop as gun/man. The gun brings about what is most dreaded. The cop’s paranoid style; his paranoid aesthetics.
To drop your guard, O Cop, is the prerequisite to dreaming.
The second amendment is when — so that guns can circulate in the ‘free market’ — everyone plays cop, patrolling the borders of categorical certainty.
Making sure there’s an inside and outside, a not-you and a not-me.
One doesn’t want to be looked at, one doesn’t want to be seen by the cop, by any gunman, one fears being reproduced in his gaze as the object of his paranoid control, his domination, his jouissance, his cop city, so one goes anamorphic, trying to be a smear, unreadable. Keeping the head down. Masking to throw off misrecognition.
It only works so far. The indeterminate is the bane of the gunman’s existence, trained to interpret every rope as a snake, every horizon as an enclosure. His affect summons the affective counterpart he expects. His gaze conjures trembling, or screams. The gun, the stick, the cuffs: all his metonymies. To a hammer, every enigma is a nail.
MÖSH YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Heather Quinlan | Crockett Doob on Metallica’s ENTER SANDMAN | Dean Haspiel on Mötley Crüe’s HOME SWEET HOME | Jack Silbert on Poison’s TALK DIRTY TO ME | Adam McGovern on Dio’s INVISIBLE | Mariane Cara on Faith No More’s EPIC | Heather Quinlan on Blue Öyster Cult’s SHOOTING SHARK | Steve Schneider on UFO’s DIESEL IN THE DUST | Carlo Rotella on Primus’ JERRY WAS A RACE CAR DRIVER | Erik Davis on St. Vitus’ BORN TOO LATE | Greg Rowland on Motörhead’s ACE OF SPADES (remix) | Kathy Biehl on Twisted Sister’s WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT | Nikhil Singh on G.I.S.M.’s GAS BURNER PANIC | Erin M. Routson on Metallica’s ESCAPE | Holly Interlandi on Helmet’s MILQUETOAST | Marc Weidenbaum on Celtic Frost’s I WON’T DANCE (THE ELDERS’ ORIENT) | Amy Keyishian on Living Colour’s CULT OF PERSONALITY | Josh Glenn on Scorpions’ STILL LOVING YOU | Alycia Chillemi on Danzig’s SOUL ON FIRE | James Parker on Godflesh’s CHRISTBAIT RISING | Miranda Mellis on The Afflicted’s HERE COME THE COPS | Rene Rosa on Type O Negative’s BLACK NO. 1 | Tony Leone on Slayer’s SOUTH OF HEAVEN | Christopher Cannon on Neurosis’s LOST | Brian Berger on Black Sabbath’s HEADLESS CROSS | MÖSH CONTEST-WINNING ENTRY: Tony Pacitti on Metallica’s THE CALL OF KTULU. PLUS: CONTEST RUNNER-UP: James Scott Maloy on Accept’s MIDNIGHT MOVER.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!