Plus: The Psychology Of Steve Albini
1. Vic Mensa: Down To Start A Riot.
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2. Viet Cong Changing Name.
“Our band lives to play music. We don’t particularly like doing press, most of us are fairly private people and we have social media for the band only reluctantly. Most of us generally don’t follow online criticism. Over the last year we have essentially lived our lives in a tour van and in music venues, playing over 130 shows. In that time we’ve met many amazing people and had many great conversations with people in person,” the band says in a Facebook post.
“Over this time we’ve been listening, talking and having lots of valuable conversations with the members of the Vietnamese community about the name. Through this dialogue and hearing about what the name means to so many people, we have decided we will be changing the name of our band.”
Highly recommend:
* Not Yours To Play With: Why Viet Cong’s Name Offends.
The journalism surrounding the band Viet Cong has been no different. Claudine observed that it has mostly been white people – who lack a deep understanding of the Vietnam War, or don’t come from an anti-racist perspective – who’ve written about the band. People have written about the possible offensiveness of Viet Cong, but I haven’t really seen anyone write about it being racist. Charlene Hay at the Centre for Race and Culture, an organization that does anti-racist research and education explained that, “the word racism frequently elicits powerfully resistant emotions. Racism is an emotionally charged term. White people often resent the implication that they may have prejudice and discriminate against non-white people. Charges of reverse-racism and political correctness gone wild are common.”
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Here’s Viet Cong at Pitchfork this year.
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Here’s Junior Wells with “Vietcong Blues.”
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3. Psychology Today: Steve Albini Shows Punk Rock Ethics Are Good Business.
“The remuneration [at his studio] is very equitable. Everybody gets paid the same. I make the same amount of money in a month as the newest employee that we have. So there is a fundamental difference between that and virtually any corporate structure. But you can’t expect people who feel like they are less valuable to a corporation – who feel like their effort, their input, and their opinion means less than someone else in that corporation – you can’t expect those people to jump in and all be pulling for the same results, team players. Because you have defined for them that they are not all pulling for one thing, that they are not team players. You have defined their role for them as subordinate.”
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4. Eradicator.
“Eradicator is a Chicago-based band that is made up of members of Direct Hit! and Galactic Cannibal,” Ricky Frankel writes for PunkNews.org.
“Some might call their new self-titled EP a pop-punk release and some might call it a hardcore release. Honestly, there is so much of both subgenres in these songs that it falls right in the middle of the two.”
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Comments welcome.
Posted on October 7, 2015