Fear Is What I Live For

I love the idea of Los Angeles legends Fear: have a beer with Fear, they love you. They hate everyone else, but Fear loves you.

Cautionary tales of despondency, hate, alienation, insanity, and misanthropy (which is putting it mildly) are what Fear were all about. When he relocated to Los Angeles from Philadelphia in the mid 1970s, band leader Lee Ving wanted to put the fear of God into the local punk population. Coming from an industrial blues background, Ving knew his next move had to be singular, a toast to his epiphany upon his arrival to the City of Angels.
"Let's Have A War" is Fear's "1812 Overture;" they have their "Hallelujah Chorus" in "Foreign Policy," their "Pomp & Circumstance" in "I Love Living In the City." Fear's first album, The Record (1982), is surrounded on all sides by perfect songs. The curse of the immaculate debut is always perfection, though. Once you write the best songs you can, what's next? Reflection, that's what.

What I see in The Record is something else all together. I don't hear that album, I remember it:
I see my days in a small dilapidated space, playing fast music for others to see. I see contempt from those who didn't understand and admiration from those who did. I see an understanding of the world void from those who should understand. Humor and anger and love and hate and scorn and acceptance and motivation and apathy and irony and gravity and brevity--even fear itself. John Belushi liked this band for a reason. Fear were in a motion picture - give them your attention. You just may learn something.

At the onset of The Record, we are entrusted with a narrator that cannot be trusted. There is more in "I Don't Care About You" and "Disconnected" than meets the eye. Ving sees all these things and writes them off, supposedly. But why else would he be spewing them back at us if he didn't indeed care?
These are songs and images that, if they were to fall into the wrong hands, would cause serious damage:

Let’s have a war
So you can go die…
Let’s have a war
Rack up the Dow Jones (Ving)

Although they are art seen through the narrowest of spectrums--the ass-hole of society--Fear are a pun of the highest degree, like Slayer or Gwar. Much like every dog thinks itself a wolf, Fear is an LED with aspirations of being a flood light. In fact, they are more of a strobe. Rapid fire percussion from Split Stix supports a blistering attack of Philo Cramer’s lead guitar while Ving rides atop the whole cacophony, telling us everything that's inside his head as fast as he can. And just like a strobe, Fear is nauseating and euphoric at the same time. With death, disease, and misery all around, hysteria can incite bursts of laughter when songs such as "New York’s Alright If You Like Saxophones" come to fruition. And it may be an arbitrary talent, but Lee Ving articulates "homosexual" better than anyone else who's spoken the word.

But that seems to be what Fear aims for; they were the finest shock therapists in the game. The Sex Pistols were a great commercial for the future based on the success of the past, like the Ramones and the Stooges. The Stooges chose exile and expired like the singular firework that they were; the Sex Pistols chose death and collapsed under the weight of their own hubris. But the Ramones disguised their stories of drug addiction and molestation with an amicable front of bizarro humor, a stained white flag of nerdom that all those who recognized its color could rally under. Punk became about community.
In Fear’s camp, however, there were no flags. For what they were, there isn’t even a camp. If not for the fact that their music could not be produced by any other means, Ving, Cramer, Stix, and bassist Derf Scratch wouldn’t have even given each other the time of day. Fear is an inexorable invention—one that exists only to ruin and repel. The greatest achievement of this invention is its power to educate. It was Jane's Addiction that let everyone outside of the underground in on the fact that, indeed, nothing’s shocking. Perry Ferrel and company were reflecting - if the Sex Pistols were the coming attraction, Fear was Daffy Duck, ready for the grand finale, dressed as the devil with a vial of explosive cyanide.

The concept of the abrasive realist has almost become a cliché in the twenty-first century. An anesthetized world cannot learn from its own reflection. The world was different in the 1980s; and if Fear existed in today's America (or if they were notorious enough—Ving still tours the band with a revolving cast of supporting musicians) they wouldn’t even make the evening news. Death, hate, metropolitan affluence and war are all subjects we have come to accept as mainstream grievances. It is no longer taboo to patronize our local or national policies. We are well aware that the yuppies are scum. Thank you, Mr. Lydon, your services are no longer needed.
But is Fear still relevant?

A quick answer would be, 'no.'
"Political" or "socially conscious" performers have become fashionable. Praise is given, clothes are made, and then we are on to the next reality television program about household pets raising children for a week (7 o’clock eastern standard, 9 o’clock pacific). We have enough forward thinking "artists" to last us for quite a while:
What the fuck should we care if Green Day finally grew a conscience? Are Coldplay really controversial because they support free-trade policies? Rage Against the Machine may be back together, but who gives a goddamn except Epic Records?
Where is the Clash when we need them? Crass?

It is not politics that we need but scum. Numbers and figures, ideals and manifestos are simply not as effective as a fist in the face. If you want to get someone’s attention, should you quote them Chomsky or call them a faggot? Try one, then the other, and then get back to me.

Finished? Which one worked?

Of course it did.
Fear is the sort of blatant lack of respect we need implemented into our artistic identity again. Political correctness and deference have softened our brains. The hate mongers are still wrong, but at least they have the courage to speak their minds without apology.
On more than one occasion on and around the campus of Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois I have found flyers bringing attention to local sects of the Ku Klux Klan. Of course I am disgusted by this promotion of intolerance. Of course I wish this mentality of backwards thinking would disappear. But there is an amendment in our country's constitution that protects those bastards' right to say and print those things; and like real Americans they are exercising, even exploiting that right. If they were a punk band, the KKK would probably be Skrewdriver.

What separates Fear from the ignorance of the KKK (and yes, they are different) is their barefaced satire. 1980 was an incredibly ingenuous time. Ronald Reagan had just taken the White House and was buttering the world up for trickle down economics, AIDS and, as an act of legacy, the Gulf War. Fear's mission was to beat him to the punch.

Laughing about a homeless person dying is much easier than watching him do so on the street, or even on television as a matter of fact. If we want to go to war for country, crown and…stuff, why not enjoy it, right? Feel the warmth of the enemies' burning houses and be relieved that it's them and not you:

No more peace talks
No more disarmament
No more Mr. Nice Guy...
No more nothing (Ving)

That is why Fear exists. That is why Fear is important. If these social atrocities have become the norm, then Fear is a rendering of normalcy in all its obnoxious glory.

So go out and buy Fear's first album. Better yet, get on the internet and download it illegally. Fear would have wanted it that way.
Listen to it and get in on the gag. When one understands an anecdote, it becomes easier to relay. The best part in the case of The Record is that it cannot be turned off. Until it turns off, that is. If not for the limitations of stereophonic recording, Fear's magnum opus would go on and on into idiomatic perpetuity, not unlike a tasteless joke. Fifteen tracks of a poignant erection only last so long; but its effects, much like an actual hard-on, can be felt long after it is finished.
Here’s hoping you’re on the pitching end.