The War on Errorism
NOFX
Fat Wreck Chords
REVIEW BY JAMES VASSILOPOULOS
Veteran US punks NOFX are not your typical band. You will not see the ad for their latest CD, The War on Errorism, on television after the doggy biscuit commercial. NOFX's punk-ska is not mindless and simple, but smart, engaging and complex music.
NOFX have gone through something of a transformation, from fun-loving hedonists to radicals. Before The War on Errorism, as they explain in the album's liner notes, NOFX were not known for expressing political views, but "maybe it's time that we are". The band says it is important for people to share information rather than rely on the government or the corporate media.
The song that explains this change is the widely played "Franco un-American". This poppy-punk song begins with siren-like guitar sounds. The song's thoughtful and clever lyrics explain that the band had never thought about the planet's problems or the wrongs of imperialism. Then the band members read some Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.
Two key events seem to have got up the nose of NOFX and made them interested in the world and politics. The first was the stealing of the US presidential election by George Bush and Dick Cheney. On the enhanced-CD version of The War on Errorism there are excerpts from a documentary called Unprecedented, which exposes the electoral fraud. The second is the post-9/11 US "war on terrorism", which is really a justification for the US to unleash its imperial fist and brutal jack-boot on the Third World.
NOFX continues to refuse to play the marketing game. The band stopped doing interviews because they were tired of being misquoted and exploited. MTV wanted a video of one of their songs, but the band refused to make one.
The War on Errorism has depth, full of really good tunes. There's the hard-core "Separation of Church and Skate", with its almost-nuclear energy and its 1 million guitar strums per minute. The song criticises the current punk scene's timidity.
The softer "Mattersville" is a utopian vision of where older punks end up. There is the boppy "Anarchy camp", which is full of NOFX's brassy and keyboard-fuelled ska."Whoops, I Od'd" is surreal.
Lyrically one of the best songs is "Regaining unconsciousness". This is a 21st century version of the anti-Nazi poem by Pastor Martin Niemoller, "First They Came For the Jews": "First they put away the dealers, keep our kids safe and off the street/Then they put away the prostitutes, keep married men cloistered at home/Then they shooed away the bums, then they bashed and beat the queers/Turned away asylum seekers, fed us suspicions and fears/We didn't raise our voice, we didn't make a fuss/It's funny there was no-one left to notice when they came for us."
Around the time that I had been listening to The War on Errorism, I was also listening to The Very Best of Punk and Disorderly (available from <http://www.cherryred.co.uk>). This is an excellent compilation of alternative British punk music from the early 1980s. This music was influenced by fears of an impending nuclear catastrophe as the US accelerated the arms race, the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US, and the revolution in Nicaragua and national liberation movements in Central America.
Punk and Disorderly contains Vice Squad's enchanting "Last rockers", the Newtown Neurotics' "Kick out the Tories" and The Insane shouts about "El Salvador". NOFX's War on Errorism continues this fine tradition of loud and angry rebel punk music.
According to Punkvoter.com (<http://punkvoter.com>), one of the web sites listed in The War on Errorism notes, only 38% of US young people voted in the 2000 presidential election. The site has an article by the punk band Anti-Flag called "George W. is a Gangsta". It urges young people to get political: "We must organise! We must demonstrate! We must support one another! When you choose the lesser of two evils, you are choosing evil. Don't get us wrong — the Republicans must be voted out of office on November 5! But we want to encourage you to look beyond the two dominant parties when you vote, and think about who will really... fight for what you believe."
From Green Left Weekly, August 27, 2003.
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