Blam!! Swell Maps. 1979. Rough Trade.

 Punk rock is class deprivation made audible. Conceived in opposition to the mega budget brokerage house that Rock was said to have become, punk was, ironically, offered major label legitimacy from almost its very inception. Yet the rich, and the inequity of its economic machine, wasn’t all that fell under punk scrutiny and its critical eye. Bourgeois values often came under punk attack, as did the hackneyed conventions of romantic love. Recorded for Swell Maps’ 1979 debut LP, A Trip To Marineville, Blam!! lampoons the gesture of reciprocity upon which so many sentimental relationships triumph or fail. Structured to impart the tonic of equilibrium to love’s lifelong companionship project the reciprocal is a feat of generosity without—in theory—physical or emotional boundaries. But what if a romantic  relationship were exposed to the destabilizing machinations of sociopathy or psychosis? Would the balance still hold? Blam!! suggests it would, only tortuously so. “I tried to poison you, but you poisoned me,” Nikki Sudden, songwriter, exclaims, and the sublime conceit of mutual exchange between lovers is made savagely, maliciously funny. A comedy of lovers sharing the worst of themselves is necessary not because it’s part of an art form with the power to change the world, but because it imbues punk with the power to prevent the world from changing you. Like rock and roll itself, punk rock came into being because the world cannot be changed. Various parts of it will always be remade to reflect man’s constantly changing fantasy of himself, be it pitifully noble or hideously savage, but the mediocrity of our egos must be replicated in an ongoing competition with nature. Punk’s musics present to you an image of yourself as you were when you first heard it, those vital parts that only came into full focus years later when the folly of individual conviction tricked you into settling upon a ramshackle fixed identity, and, despite the gravest misgivings that still speak with the persistence of a conscience, you hesitatingly joined the world around you. 

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