By Keith Walsh
One doesn’t need to look far to realize there is, now more than ever, a need for challengers to the credos of Adam Smith and his successors. One vehicle for dissent is the Texas-based industrial punk rock trio LENIN, who with guitars and brash attitudes break through the narrow discourse of mass media and present alternate views.
LENIN’s debut album, F$#K It, Times Have Been Worse…(PT 1) features hard rock and punk interspersed with satiric imitations of Donald Trump. There are moments on the album that are offensive, for sure, particularly in dramatizing the subtext of racism that informs too much of politics. But none of this is unexpected where hardcore punk is concerned.
I spoke with vocalist/lyricist Steven Blind, whose trained baritone (he was a choirboy, and studied Italian opera) is a fitting compliment to the brash guitars of Simon Rook and pulsing bass guitar of “Just” Jeremy. Rook also programs the drums, using a VST in Logic’s DAW. Blind told me that LENIN’s sound has relics of his previous band, Shut Up Sidney, along with a drum machine named Angelo Sasso.
Blind explained: “It was supposed to be like Dead Kennedys meets something like The Plasmatics, you know, just because I’m really into heavy metal, (Judas) Priest, and all that.” Blind’s voice is similar to Jello Biafra’s of DK, and the song “Yuppie-Ki-Yay” quotes “Holiday In Cambodia.” And like the Dead Kennedys and so much of early punk, LENIN is shocking.
While forging his way with punk rock, Blind is aware of the genre’s virtues as well as pitfalls. He said: “I do think that the boyishness of a subculture like punk rock does still have a certain viability in that it does away with the shams of politeness and, you know, lets you kind of get to a more sincere, you know, presentation as it were. I do think that lifestylism as a whole is somewhat overstated, and I do think it has its glaring limitations. I mean, just look at the state of street punk bands, or most punk scenes- full of sexual assault, racism, things like that. It’s a low barrier to entry, if nothing else.”
After being disappointed by OG punk rockers’ takes on the Trump Era, Blind, Rook and Jeremy started work, creating something new out of the ashes of Shut Up Sidney, a band that Blind admits he’s disappointed that people didn’t get after 10 years of playing with a rotating cast of guitarists and drummers. “They thought we were a street punk band,” he said. Coming at the end of the Trump Era, F$#K It, Times Have Been Worse follows on the footsteps of LENIN’s first single, “Rolling The Plastic Dice,” which addresses a litany of modern problems, including the perceived need for a hero, that play out over history’s repeating scenarios.
“Enforced More Softly”
The album’s opening soundbite addresses one of the band’s main lyrical concerns. “We’ve had just years and years of what’s called neoliberalism,” said Blind.“After the 60s like no one really, at least not in the Anglosphere, not the U.S. or Britain or Japan and what not the Western imperialist block — basically, we don’t really produce things anymore. Everything’s financialized. It’s a financial economy. It’s all stocks and bonds, you know, it’s all speculative. Financial risk assessment. All that sh@t, you know.”
I asked for a further definition of neoliberalism and why it’s so harmful. “Basically, it’s still capitalism, but instead of diverging into full-on jackboot authoritarian fascism, it’s softer. More sophisticated. Whereas Fascism becomes a series of cartels manipulating things in the private sector, neoliberalism enforces corporate hegemony more softly, through propaganda, and the sorts of things Engels would call social violence.”
I asked Blind if art could be the powerful change agent that leads to a fairer world. He said: “Everything we do is basically a distraction. I was giving-out about the old punks like Jello (Biafra) a going-on about ‘infotainment’and ‘becoming the media’ and all that stuff, and without politics to reinforce those ideas, it’s all kind of old-hat. It doesn’t make the difference the initial sensationalisms might sell you on at first… But, not all distractions are created equal: When it comes to choosing between, say, us, or some like, stodgy little folk-punk band whinging about how sad they are, I think we at least better prepare you for when the sh@t hits the fan, so to speak. Even that is kind of a misnomer though; The Apocalypse does not happen all at once. I mean, if you’re a black kid in America, you’re basically already living in Afghanistan. It’s not one big boom… It’s all going to be gradual and anti-climactic.”
Quantum Computing?
Given that Vladmir Lenin was a revolutionary, and the band LENIN is a communist band, I wondered exactly what was being proposed here. Disavowing the tactics of communist dictators like Cambodia’s Pol Pot who massacred their people, Blind points out that “People can use whatever rhetoric they want. That’s just the nature of a nation-state. That’s not to say it’s good, but every state has a period where it has to industrialize. And that seems to displace a lot of people, especially if they’re farmers, or kulaks. That’s just the way it is, if you’re farmers, or pilgrims, or Indians….”
I asked, What made Vladmir Lenin special enough that Blind named a band after him? “I just really like his writings,” Blind said. “He had the combination of being very intelligent and being in the right place at the right time, to do the most successful blow against western capitalist hegemony.” I suggested that most of us wouldn’t want October-Revolution style changes coming to our neighborhoods. “Right, people talk about this stuff very nebulously. Lenin had guidelines. You had people who were professional activists, and every worker at the steel mill isn’t going to understand Marxist theory. But they’re going to understand their material needs and understand that this will benefit them ultimately in the long run.”
As Blind calls it, capitalism is in its late stages. I asked him what comes next? “That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to get some grand alternative,” he said. “We might just get a new economic form of organization. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be something like socialism. It could just be like, some new form of Quantum Computing. I mean, yeah, maybe we’ll have like a rational price signal. I don’t know.” I suggested it’s impossible to avoid inequality at some level, for which Blind had a qualifier: “Marx wasn’t an egalitarian,” he said. “But if you look at economics through that Marxist, working class lens, then you might at least be able to turn abject misery into ordinary unhappiness”
LENIN on YouTube
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Shut Up Sidney, On Bandcamp
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