The Comedy of Errors: Naked Aggression - Revolt (15 May 1992)

Buy this on Discogs

The band are Naked Aggression and the song is called Revolt.  You can probably guess what you’re getting without hitting the play button, but I hope you will.  Peel compared the spiky, angular, agit-prop sound of the Madison, Wisconsin band to early 80s UK band, !Action Pact!.

While the sentiments expressed in Revolt may sound like Revolution for Dummies (“Break it down/The system/Break it down/The system...” “Revolt against big business...”) I find myself sympathetic to the track for two reasons:

1) It contains a line which should be manadatory and printed in 10 foot high lettering in the office of any group that agitates for political change: “Stop fighting among ourselves/Stop fighting among ourselves”.  It reminds me of a meme I saw recently, which seemed to sum up the mindset that has propelled us towards the Western nervous breakdown that has been drawn out over this decade.  Using a still from The Frost Report’s Class sketch,  the meme stated “The problem with the UK is that people earning £1000 an hour have convinced people earning £12 an hour that people earning £7.83 an hour are the problem.”  The last three years of sound and fury over Brexit, especially the screams of “betrayal” as the government finally comes clean about just how difficult this is all going to be to pull off have almost, but not quite, caused us to forget the narratives that drove us here: demonisation of immigrants, the unemployed, benefit claimants etc.  Stoking the fears of the JAMs and the squeezed middle that their money is going to support those worse off than them and draining resources from the country that should be spent on...well no-one ever specified quite what the money should be spent on.  Well, not until Boris Johnson hired a bus.  It was all soaked up by a readership, who were encouraged through front pages and editorials to see those with less than them as a threat, something to be despised and castigated.  A mindset that said, “The system may not allow me to better myself, but I’m damned if I’ll lose what I have or let anyone below me get past me or level with me”.  In an aspirational society, such thinking made no sense, but it ensnared such numbers of people that the battles were fought not against the “system” but between those whose greatest difference was their postcode.

2) This blog has often touched on the sense that 1991/92 represented The End of History and with the major Western post World War II political battles having been fought and seemingly decided in “our” favour, then any bands who were reacting to the glorious new era of peace and optimism that the decade promised by continuing to turn the mirror on to “us” and pointing out “our” faults, were regarded as something close to cranks.  “Lighten up, crack open a drink and enjoy the party, guys.  The hard work has been done.  Why are you getting so angry?”  Bill Maher described it as the Left’s tendency to take a victory lap and go to a party, once they have managed to gain any semblance of demonstrable power.  Revolt makes the point that these battles are never won finally and conclusively.  If you want change, it has to be perpetuated and protected.  Sitting back is not an option.  It’s interesting that Naked Aggression make no obvious reference to political change in Revolt instead focussing their eye on business.  They seem to see that in the 90s, people’s fates would be decided in boardrooms instead of in government chambers.  Whatever political gains had been made by this point would be rendered worthless if the next battleground was not taken.  Revolt was a call both to vigilance and continued action.  Sadly, in the early 90s, too few people were listening.  If we ever see the West return to that optimistic mood again, pray that lessons are learned and that the battle goes on.  Feel confident about that?

Video courtesy of Rodgerio Tasalco
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.