Understand?

DMZ - Don't Jump Me Mother

Pure Stooges worship.

I can’t profess to have ever been smart or clued-in. I’ve always gone where my curiosities have taken me, but that is usually because someone else has taken me there. Maybe one day there will be a slew of Hanoi Rocks acolytes (other than Guns n Roses at best and Mötley Crüe at most wannabe) who drag that phenomenally misunderstood band out of the nerd journals and into the filth-kick of rock n roll rejuvenation. And then I can feel validated as someone in that lovely sweet spot of cult taste: behind the times, yet ahead of the curve. Dated and avant-garde at the same time.

Wait. Rock n Roll avant-garde?

Isn’t that all punk really was, a left turn back to rock n roll roots? What “punk” became, all of its varied bastard radioactive mutations, is really just a constant state of cyclical regeneration, which is why we have the dual taxonomies proto & post (insert applicable genre here) to try to fit weird bands into some sort of enlightened classification.

Bands like Radio Birdman, Soggy and DMZ sit in that sweet spot (particularly Soggy, who were genuflecting at The Stooges altar in the early 80s when being a rock n roll troglodyte seems like, really uncouth); late for the party that really never happened and early for the declarations of genius. The Stooges, of course, were wayyyyyyy ahead of their time which is why people were continually discovering them and starting cult bands worshipping them, leading to people now discovering those misfit children and starting cult bands worshipping them. Or something to that effect.

Look at these guys. Good looking enough to pull off the sort of ugly-cool of cult worship. The only thing in the thumbnail below that suggests the knuckle dragger bludgeoning of this superb riff (because that’s all this song is, a mover of a riff, repeated infinitely, with all the necessary yelps and howls and ugly monotone vocals of vague street thuggery) is that dude on the far left, with his long face, shaggy bowl cut and that ambiguous football jersey t-shirt that seemed to be popular in the late-70s & early-80s. Everything else looks like this could be an excursion into the type of power pop of Cheap Trick, but the little brother version of it like those loveable scamps Milk N Cookies were to say, Roxy Music or T Rex.

This song is basically The Stooge’s Loose churned out at it’s most primitive. This song is full cretin swagger. This is the sound to the words A street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm by the kids who took it to heart.

Bludgeon your week ahead, folks; torch it with all your heart’s burning rock n roll fire.

Like what I’m doing here? Let me know by suggesting it to someone else that may like it. Not into this song? Stick around for the next one, it may be what you didn’t know you needed! Remember, there are only two genres of music here at SERMONS!: good and bad, and I have too much to do to waste time on bad music.