Old Time Relijun's
insane, inspired new album, Uterus and Fire, is on
Olympia's K Records. A new single, also a K product, is set
to drop June 30.
The moment of silence is over. Arrington de Dionyoso
makes sure of that.
The 150 or so well-scrubbed Linfield College kids milling
around Saturday's Wildstock '99 music festival in
McMinnville pause their Ultimate Frisbee games to mourn
for two local teenagers killed in a recent murder-suicide.
Seconds after that observance ends, de Dionyoso caterwauls
and hammers his guitar. Olympia's Old Time Relijun
launches its untamed testimony, a brand of punk apparently
raised by wolves. A ragged Old Testament beard fringes de
Dionyoso's cherub face, and his singing, which soars in
psychotic shouts and crashes into almost mechanical growls,
makes a perfect vehicle for prophecy.
It's frightening, exhilarating, dread-soaked music. From
baffled sorority chicks to bemused cops, no one can take
their eyes off de Dionyoso's seizing face. As the shrieks
ring out, though, I can't stifle a half-mischievious, half-chilling
thought.
If either of the McMinnville murder-suicide victims have
an Old Time Relijun record kicking around their bedroom,
de Dionyoso and drummer Phil Elvrum could be in for it.
It's the legacy of the Trench Coat Mafia: Guns don't kill
people, people who listen to weird music kill people. The
instant news of last month's Columbine High School massacre
broke through the TV haze, I figured pop culture would take
the blame. Sure enough, like Mussolini-coordinated mass
transit, blame arrived promptly.
Ingenious media sleuths were quick to finger a few leading
suspects in that tragedy, and if there's the slightest hint
that McMinnville's Ashlee Marie Langsdon and Jeffrey James
Cooley ever messed around with heavy metal, freaky Goth
or hip-hop, you can bet more of this courageous detective
work will go forward.
Since Columbine, most talking heads have been content to
nod along with all the eager, earnest condemnations of violent
movies and perverted music. Very few people have suggested
that perhaps--just perhaps--Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
shot up their school not because of evil cultural influences,
but because they didn't really have any home-grown cultural
influences.
Like the great majority of Americans, the Columbine killers
were effectively disconnected from any real, grassroots
art. It's easy to romanticize the past, but the fact is
that before mass-produced culture permeated our lives, people
created entertainment for themselves to a much greater extent
than they do now. Rather than passively receiving the soundtrack
to their lives, they often played it themselves.
These days, music might as well have dropped from God's
lap--most of us have nothing to do with its manufacture,
that's for sure. On the other side of an opaque wall, someone
decides that Marilyn Manson or Shania Twain shall be the
flavor of the month, and voila, it is done.
Which is why de Dionyoso's howl in the Wildstock afternoon,
as fearful and far from the cozy mainstream as it is, offers
hope of deliverance. You can detect a lot of different influences
in OTR, from the plaintive spiritual wails of Appalachia's
Old Regular Baptists (that's a sect, not a band) to performance-art
shock tactics. Mostly, though, what you hear is a couple
of guys' response to a messed-up world.
Punk rock's Thrift Store Mafia isn't for everyone. But
no matter what kind of art people are into, I'd argue that
it would be a better world if they could create that art
and witness its creation free from the pointless mystification
of media hype. To that very end, a couple of things happened
in and around Portland last week.
Meredith Brooks, the Corvallis-born pop hackstress
behind the brief hit "Bitch," dropped by Jefferson and Roosevelt
high schools to encourage kids to take artistic matters
into their own hands. While a cynic could suggest that Brooks
is chiefly interested in reviving her flagging career, her
message seemed genuine and valuable enough at Roosevelt,
a school plagued by a high drop-out rate in the past. Meanwhile,
students at Troutdale's Reynolds High School released
Deep Roots II, the second compilation CD featuring
their lyrics and area musicians' sounds.
Neither event makes for a revolution, but perhaps these
kids will go forward feeling considerably less awed by the
pop machine and better able to grab the controls. At Linfield,
meanwhile, Wildstock organizers rounded up some of the Northwest's
hottest alt-punk bands--Seattle's Murder City Devils
and Portland's Quasi, for example--for their low-key
afternoon. Wildstock is as far from overblown Lollapalooza
as you can get, but it's still an artistic powerhouse.
Saturday's high point, to my mind, came during Old Time
Relijun's final song. De Dionyoso, the alarming, feral wildman,
sang alone, his voice the only instrument. "Everything's
broken," he proclaimed in a defiant, terrifyingly direct
and intimate shout. "Everything's broken except my red,
red, beating heart."
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Willamette Week | originally
published May 19, 1999
|
