We Are LA?
Purported Punk Rock Fire Victim Fundraiser Video Crashes & Burns
This is dreadful. An amelodic humiliation ritual, shot in rig-mo B&W, piteously beholden to 1985 all-star charity embarrassment “We Are the World,” the entire proceedings are breathtaking in its perfidious inanity and ashen tone.
The premise, of course, is eminently laudable, raising funds (to be administered through long running musician support np Sweet Relief) to assist last January’s fire displaced diaspora—no complaints there.
But positing the affair as some kind of well-muscled assemblage of firebrand veterano punk rock dissidents converging at an SJW epicenter to set right the arson sparked, dry reservoir, inoperable hydrants and stand down wrongs of the Beast is something the participants assiduously avoid.
These include project overlord Charlie Overbey, with such sterling originators as Screamer Paul Roessler, Minuteman Mike Watt, Go Go Jane Weidlin, Horsehead wrangler Texacala Jones, Bangle-BOTS siren Annette Zalinskis, TSOL’s Ron Emory and Greg Kuehn, SD’s Jonny Two Bags along with additional performers Rami Jaffe, Johnny Witmer, Kimm Gardner, Tim Hutt, Atom Willard, Christian Fuhre, Aaron Rev Peters, Jake Margolis and a half dozen or so others. Yet it must be noted, in today’s climate of diversity is our strength, that the whiteness here is blinding, save for a Triple A Trifecta of Tokenism embodied by awkward adolescent Asian Eloise Wong (Linda Lindas). Someone forgot to dot their DEI’s i.
Be that as it may (and it is), the complete failure to address the staggeringly glacial pace of reconstruction, our torso-tossing Governor’s coincidentally pre-fabricated ‘response team,’ the missing eleven million dollars from the Fire Aid concerts (mostly hoovered up, we now know, through a host of do-nothing NGOs with extraordinarily high administrative budgets), the nefarious presence of those Kiwi billionaire bro’s snapping up beachfront Malibu lots by the dozens, is nothing short of nauseating. Punk rock to the rescue? Really? The lyrics are a godawful confection of “LA strong , we stand together blah blah blah” cliché.
What would former Los Angeles resident Joe Strummer have said?
Strident, whiny, wooden, “We Are LA” is a truly wondrous exercise in homogenous, puerile creative seppuku—so rich an opportunity squandered, such a grave matter addressed with thundering, dispassionate naivete and howling a Look at Me Doing Big Good schtick which totally eschews the punk rock ethos in favor of stupefyingly MOR maundering. The only thing missing is fists full of flower sprinkles.
To close on a personal note, in the months leading up to Gun Club founder Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s 1996 death, we all knew it was coming and I took it upon myself to reach out to Sweet Relief, describing Pierce’s circumstance, rapidly failing health and pleading for some sort of badly needed support. They basically said “Never heard of him. Goodbye.”
Punk rock to the Rescue!
Bullseye.
Sharp dissection here. The irony of calling these folks firebrands then showing how they avoided any actual confrontation with systemic failures is pretty brutal but accurate. I've seen this same tension in disaster relief circles where being seen helping can overshadow actually fixing the structuralissues that made the disaster worse. The Jeffrey Lee Pierce anecdote at the end cuts deepr than all the critique before it.