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Stuart Schrader of SHIT-FI.COM returns today to give you a lesson on AK-47’s “The Badge Means You Suck” single. This is a tier one material for the KBD game, and though it may not be the most strictly hardcore release, it more than has a place here. Without further adieu:

I once made the pronouncement, as I have been wont to do, that the single best anti-cop punk song is “The Badge Means You Suck” by Mikhailt Kalashnikov’s AK-47, released in 1980. To the question, “What about Black Flag’s ‘Police Story’?” my response was simple: “AK-47=smart. Black Flag = dumb.” (The equation may have been more complicated if the response had been “What about The Dicks’ ‘Hate the Police’?”) “Police Story”—with Dez singing, natch—does conjure up memories of getting nailed in the head by a police truncheon outside the Starwood, mostly among those who hadn’t been born yet. What’s more, name me one city that is not run by pigs. But AK-47’s power was in its refusal to attempt to beat the cops at their own game. They wouldn’t fight the cops in the streets. They would brilliantly channel their rage into a 4-minute tirade and match their rage with intellectual acumen by writing caustic lyrics and a chorus that diverted a Houston Police Department slogan. No, the badge doesn’t mean you care. The badge means you suck.

What may be a bit embarrassing to the LBS&A crowd is that the best anti-cop punk song was penned by hippies. Check out the background on the front cover. Then check out the photo of the guitarist printed on the insert of the estimable compilation “Deep in the Throat of Texas.” Then listen to that guitar solo—almost a minute of wild guitar licks played with aggressive reckless abandon. By a hippie. So the best anti-cop song and the best punk guitar solo this side of “Death, Agonies, and Screams,” or perhaps “Warsystem.” It’s starting to sound like I think this record is essential.

So what is it about this song? Well, the bile, the seething hatred of cops, is off the charts. The riff and the hooks are beyond the pale. Great use of phaser too. Actually, the intensity of the song makes me want to call it proto-hardcore, but it’s also punk and hard rock at the same time. And the lyrics. Oh lawd, the lyrics. AK-47 named names—not of cops but of their victims. The front cover of the record lists nine people murdered by the Houston Police Department, a notoriously racist and trigger-happy institution in the 1970s. The song itself details the murder of Milton Glover, a Vietnam vet shot eight times. A bullet, the listener is reminded, pierced the Bible he constantly carried with him. It also mentions Carl Hampton, perhaps the most famous victim of the Houston PD in the 1970s, a black radical who was assassinated after a long stand-off. AK-47 sing, “The man who killed Joe Torres / Never went to jail / The sniper who picked off Carl Hampton / Never paid any bail / The killers of Milton Glover / They might be pulling you over tonight / And if you happen to get shot / Well I guess you started the fight.” Impunity is the essence of state power, and cops are its chief beneficiaries. Perhaps the best defense we (meaning the entire public) have against police excesses is memory. That’s why naming names matters.

Punk songs by definition should not take into account posterity, and AK-47 were clearly engaged in agit-prop for the immediate present, when the Houston PD’s slogan was fresh in the minds of the citizenry. That the band managed to create a historical artifact of unmatched power was actually incidental. Aiming to do so would obviously have resulted in abject failure. But the band did get the attention of the Houston Police Officers’ Association, who sued, to the tune of a million bucks. Problem was, John Law couldn’t figure out the identities of the band members, who used pseudonyms on the record’s insert. So the lawsuit was eventually dropped. The suit, however, did help give the record legendary status—probably not what the boys in blue had intended.

As Texas punk records go, this one is in the mid to low range of rarity and price. It’s no Vomit Pigs. But, yes, in my opinion, it is essential. No serious punk collection is complete without it. This record exemplifies original vinyl’s superiority to latter-day reissues, with its crystal-clear and loud mastering. There were apparently two pressings, but no one seems to know how to differentiate between them. Copies of the sleeve without the back side printed (ie, blank on one side) circulate. A second insert has been spotted in some copies; it must be posthumous because it includes some info about the lawsuit. I’ve seen inserts printed on a variety of paper colors, too. The copy for sale here includes the insert on yellow paper; like most copies I’ve seen, the fragile sleeve appears to be slightly rumpled. I should mention that this record’s sleeve, besides being a brilliant and somewhat bizarre piece of political art, leaves the band name off the front, which is something I love. In this case, the band was subordinating itself to the message, it wasn’t just because they huffed too much glue or something, like Chemotherapy.

I’ll leave you with a quote on the contradictory nature of police under capitalism from The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of the U.S. Police, published in 1975: “Although the police are . . . a repressive institution that operates to contain the poor and powerless, they are themselves exploited, not only by miserable working conditions and social isolation but also as instruments of laws and policies which they neither control nor benefit from. The police protect private property but do not own it; as guardians of the peace, they defend government policies of imperialism and racism but do not derive any significant benefit from them; and in their repression of popular movements, the police legitimize a political order which they did not create.”

Oh yeah, the record has a flipside too.

Thanks to Ryan Richardson for spiritual guidance.

I’m classin’ up the joint here! Stuart Schrader of http://www.shit-fi.com produced an entry for me today on the infamous Chemotherapy 7″. You get not only detailed information about the actual record, but also an explanation of what exactly “shit-fi” is, and for once, some college level writing.

Stuart: German rare punk “jeweler” Ingo Eitelbach’s offerings have not been up to the standards he set at the end of the 90s/beginning of the 00s, when it seemed every sale list he published contained Jackie Shark and the Beach Butchers or Tapeworm. Well, times is tough. Recently, he’s been auctioning a lot of hardcore that no one cares much about, but there are still a few jewels to be found. For example, Chemotherapy.Chemotherapy’s lone 7″ is one of the, if not the, earliest examples of shit-fi American hardcore. By that I mean a hardcore record released with a malicious lack of pretense of “quality” after it was already possible, and preferable, to produce “quality” hardcore records. Gang Green’s earliest recordings were works of accidental genius but there was talent and intention underneath there. In 1983, polished hardcore records and even post-hardcore records were beginning to appear, changing expectations for listeners. (In my opinion, within a year, the US hardcore scene would become a shadow of what it had been in the three years prior.) Chemotherapy’s record is a work of intentional talentless teenaged garbage. They aimed to produce an extremely simple, primitively recorded, tuneless, ugly, offensive hardcore record, and they succeeded. Why? Perhaps to do so was to be punk, to reject what was already becoming hardcore punk dogma (ie, fast, tight, well-recorded and/or innovative, intelligent, lefty). Maybe they were a caricature of hardcore punk. If so, the joke’s on them because lots of people actually like to listen to music this rough and consider it innovative and brilliant in its own way. Still, with a “musical” interpretation of the Pledge of Allegiance as one song and another with lyrics that include a racial and homophobic slur—in reference to the singer’s cell mate after getting busted for underage drinking (uh, yeah, right)—it’s hard not to think that this band still would manage to alienate the alienated. When they sing “all my friends are dead” (their melodic hardcore tune), I can’t help but think that it must’ve been repeated listens to this record that killed them off. Oh yeah, the longest song on the record, at 48 seconds, is the Pledge of Allegiance. I know of two sleeve variations for this record. The rarer one, which I bought some years ago from another German dealer, has no back sleeve. Rather, the band’s address and the members names are typed directly onto the dust sleeve, which is glued to the front of the picture sleeve. (This sleeve could be a fake, but, in my opinion, it’d be a very high-quality fake because it appears accurately aged. It did come from a dealer with a mild “rep,” so maybe my caveat should have emptored.) In fine noncommercial fashion, the front of the sleeve doesn’t say Chemotherapy on it. Though the comic of a character with a Hitler moustache holding a giant syringe is great—if you hate oncologists. Like I said, offensive to the core. My copy did not include an insert, but the copy on auction does. I know of two variations for the insert. The copy of the record in Maximum Rocknroll’s collection has two single-sided sheets as inserts, with lyrics for each side of the record printed on them. With this one-off type of insert and the sleeve that I have, it’s possible the band made other unique variations that have yet to be discovered by collectors. Ingo’s auction copy is presumably the regular-sleeve version, with a normal back listing the song titles and band member and the note “Rights reserved so go ahead and copy it for a friend.” Too bad there’s no photo of the back of the sleeve with the auction.

This record has always been tough to find, and its price has been increasing in recent years as it has become more well-known. I’ve heard that only 300 were pressed, which is plausible but unconfirmed. I doubt many that actually made it into stores were ever purchased. There’s little to recommend the record to the average hardcore punker by looking at it—though the skull/syringes logo is pretty cool. Tim Yohannon’s review in Maximum Rocknroll nailed it back when the record was released: “Totally crude and psychotic garage stuff here. They’ve got amazingly primitive drumming, raw guitars, and lots of super-short outbursts of madness called songs. A delight for NEOS and early HALF-JAPANESE fanatics.” Too true.

One final note, a certain notorious punk detective tracked down a band member a few years ago. The band member was getting ready to move to Uganda to work in microfinance. Because he was leaving the United States, he mailed a box of all of his records to the punk detective in question for free. Talk about a guy who was not in need of microfinance. Here are some excerpts from their conversation:Q: This may seem like a strange question, but I’m trying to locate a member of an old Indiana punk band called Chemotherapy.

A: Wow, Good detective work! Yep that was me, though we recorded the record when I was in high school in Indianapolis. I don’t know if I even have a copy anymore.

[…]

Q: You mentioned that you hadn’t been in contact with the other members for years. All of the other names listed on the record are pseudonyms. Can you tell me the first and last names of the other 3 members?

A: To be honest, I can’t even remember those guys names right now. I’ve been racking my brain and came up empty. Its funny I can picture them, but can’t for the life of me remember their names. I’ll let you know if my memory returns.