I never get tired of talking about the Germs, partly because when they were around my reaction to them was so violent. I thought they sucked. The more people would talk about how great they were, the more it seemed to me that everybody was full of beans. People kept calling Darby Crash a genius. What kind of genius does it take to load up on smack and fall apart on stage? I wondered. And then time began to pass, as it will. Satirists always contend that the world is getting worse when the fact of the matter is that the longer you hang around, the more you notice how many things suck outright. As the years click by, things you used to like begin to seem artificial and over-precious; aesthetes who make the case that artifice is something earnestly to be desired in both art and life begin to sound like repetetive bores who missed Warhol’s point. And the Germs, no matter what you may have thought of them in the first place, sound better and better all the time. They may not be able to play guitar; or drums; or bass; Darby’s voice may harp on your nerves like QVC with the volume turned up real high; but at the core of it is a malevolence whose purity is closer to real joy than the approximations thereof that most music is constantly & falsely offering us. |
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