The women of Sleater- Kinney spewed some grade- A Christmas cheer all over the crowd at Cleveland’s House Of Blues last night when they began their encore by launching into a ripping cover of the Ramones’ “ Merry Christmas ( I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight).” The performance was promptly uploaded to You Tube so that we can all share in Cleveland’s good fortune. It’s a good representation of Joey Ramones’ 1989 contribution to the holiday canon, and Carrie Brownstein seems to be having a lot of fun on the mic. It’s also a pretty good recording—the video was filmed on an Phone 6s Plus by a concert attendee, Michael, udontknowmam on Twitter)—which is almost as rare as a good Ramones cover. Send your Newswire tips to tips@avclub.com Previous Newswire Goodwill apologizes for using “ Resting Kanye Face” to train its employees Next Newswire The Leftovers gets a third and final season, unless we’re seeing things Don't miss a story—follow The A. V. Club on.
May 14, 2008by Michael Croland “ Just where are the limits of taste and irony here? And what should they be? Must a depraved crime always lead to such depraved artistic responses? Can such art mirror evil and remain free of evil’s stench?”— James E. Young, “ Looking Back Into the Mirrors of Evil”1 A half-heeb from Holland, Guy Tavares hoped to use his musical— Cohen, Blood, Speed, and Sperm—to talk about multiracial, swastika-worshipping, drugged-out punks.2 When the film failed to materialize, Tavares salvaged the score for the most logical venue for a Jewish punk using Nazi symbolism: a punk rock band.“ We love to take the piss of both Nazis and anti- Nazis—les extremes se touchent [the extremes touch each other]!” says Tavares, frontman of Johnny Cohen and the New Age Nazis.3 The group, which disbanded in 2004, features controversial but catchy lyrics such as “ A- D- O- L- F P- A / Adolf was a piss artist / OK!” and “ We are [expletive] Neo- Aryans, the rock ‘n’ roll master race.”4,5,6 Tavares’ band, which also goes by the name Johnny Cohen and the Jewish Defense League, is not the first Jewish punk band to flirt with Nazi rhetoric and imagery. Tavares was inspired by fellow Dutch punk-rockers The Jiddische Hitlerjugend [ The Yiddish Hitler Youth], and the punk scene’s connection between Jews and Nazi symbols dates back to punk’s early days.7 In the Beginning Since its origins in the 1970s, the punk scene has prominently featured many Jews. Many of those Jews and their bands have had a striking fascination with Nazi symbolism. The first well-known punk in France was Serge Gainsbourg (a Jew by the name of Lucien Ginzburg whose album Rock Around the Bunker featured song titles like “ Yellow Star” and “ SS in Uruguay” and lyrics such as “ We’re gonna dance the Nazi rock.”8,9 Similarly, “ Master Race Rock” appeared on the debut album of New York’s The Dictators, a mostly Jewish band.
Advertisement Though few people would associate punk rock with Judaism, the punk movement was created by Jews from Brooklyn and Queens. Is punk Jewish? At first glance, what music could be less (stereotypically) Jewish? Punk rock, in its classic, Sex Pistols-and- Ramones form, was all about simplicity, rebelliousness, anti-intellectualism, and shock value. Its foremost practitioners kitted themselves out in matching swastikas or dressed like a white-ethnic biker gang straight out of The Wild One, but it was essential to the project of punk that its musicians appear brutish, Neanderthal, evil-anything but bookish, or well-spoken, or worst of all, nice. And yet, as Steven Lee Beeber documents in his book The Heebie- Jeebies at CBGB's, New York punk was primarily a movement led by Jewish boys (and a few girls) from solidly middle-class families, born and raised in the outer boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn but drawn to Manhattan's club scene like a moth to a flame. The sons and daughters of shopowners and accountants rebelling against their parents' comfortable but too-confined existences-what could be more familiarly, soothingly American? But what is the significance of the Jewish angle, if there is one at all? Advertisement The facts undoubtedly bear out a significant over-representation of Jews in the first wave of New York punks. Lou Reed, Joey and Tommy Ramone, Suicide's Martin Rev and Alan Vega, Jonathan Richman, Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, Richard Hell, Blondie's Chris Stein, CBGB's founder Hilly Kristal-the list of Jewish punk notables is lengthy, and impressive. According to Beeber, the common thread for many of these Jewish punks was a desire to overturn the stereotype of the feeble, brainy Jew, the yeshiva student or the bespectacled clerk, replacing him with a brawny Jew in closer touch with his inner beast, and intent on shocking society out of.
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