This week, we'll be running a series of essays from the next issue of our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review, in which writers discuss political music that opened their eyes. Read them all here.
Poster Children have lived up to their name. Formed in 1987 from the ashes of a group that covered Joy Division and Butthole Surfers, the Champaign, Ill., quartet was, in many ways, an archetypal indie rock band of the time. They used punk’s vitality and power-pop’s sense of melody. They toured relentlessly and took a do-it-yourself approach to tasks like artwork and merch design. They recorded with Steve Albini and joined a major label during that crazed post-Nirvana moment when majors were signing everybody. And then, at the end of the 1990s, Poster Children returned to independent life.
In those first 13 years, Poster Children released seven albums and an EP, plus another two LPs under their ambient-instrumental alias, Salaryman. They took a breather in the early 2000s, when cofounders Rick Valentin and Rose Marshack had a child. The band resurfaced in January 2004, with an eighth album, No More Songs About Sleep and Fire, that brought previous political undertones explicitly to the foreground (“The leader represents the one percent who pay his rent,” Valentin declares on “The Leader”). Then, in September 2004, Poster Children put out one more release: an EP called On the Offensive, consisting of six politicallythemed cover songs, pegged to President George W. Bush’s bid for reelection against then-Senator John Kerry.
At the time, I was 22, and despite college years spent constantly downloading music, I was still pretty freshly acquainted with the group. I was also intensely focused on that year’s presidential election—a kind of referendum, in my view, on an incumbent who misled a grieving nation into a disastrous war, dismantled environmental protections, fought with particular cynicism against gay marriage, and lavished tax cuts on the wealthy while wrecking the economy. In other words, this was an election that mattered. While getting paid through a temp agency to edit AOL’s soon-to-be-defunct city guides hadn’t exactly allowed me to start up my own 527 lobbying fund, writing an obscure progressive political blog, with a friend and co-worker, felt like a small way of making our voices heard in the electoral process. In fact, it was a pen pal from the liberal blogosphere who introduced me to Poster Children in the first place.
Coming a year after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, 2004 saw no shortage of political music. The same day Poster Children unveiled On the Offensive, Green Day issued their much-ballyhooed “punk rock opera” American Idiot. Everyone from Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M., and Dixie Chicks to Bright Eyes, Death Cab for Cutie, and My Morning Jacket hit the road that year with MoveOn’s Vote for Change tour. Steve Earle dropped an LP proclaiming, The Revolution Starts Now. Fat Mike of NOFX put together two Rock Against Bush compilations, featuring big names like Foo Fighters and No Doubt.
On the Offensive was different. It wasn’t a grandiose concept album auditioning for a short run on Broadway. There was no instantly dated subject matter, like Earle’s song devoted to “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh. Valentin and Marshack co-hosted a progressive radio show on Poster Children’s website, but they weren’t famous people. On the Offensive channeled the band’s righteous fury through music that had already proved it could last—but instead of the usual Vietnam War-era relics, these were songs born out of punk: the Clash’s London Calling capitalism critique “Clampdown,” Heaven 17’s BBC-banned Reagan diss “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang,” X’s disillusioned Election Day anthem “The New World” (with its heartbreaking mantra “Don’t forget the Motor City”), Fear’s jingoism-eviscerating “Let’s Have a War,” Hüsker Dü’s paranoid guitar-riff clinic “Divide and Conquer,” and XTC’s Left-vs.-Right brooder “Complicated Game.” All were songs I wanted to know better, all seemed to apply to the Bush administration, and Poster Children played their mostly faithful renditions with sweaty, hard-hitting urgency. “What are we gonna do now?” Valentin and Marshak began the EP in half-shouted harmony. The answer was in their music: This. Something. Whatever they could.
The punk ethos and progressive ideology of On the Offensive were related. Poster Children arose out of an epiphany that bands didn’t have to sound ready for corporate rock radio. “You could make up for technical talent with energy and directness,” Valentin told the New York Times’ Jon Pareles in 1991. “It was the realization that, ‘Hey, I can do this.’” When I had my own opportunity to interview Valentin, ahead of an October 2004 gig in Chicago, he cast his EP’s political goals in a similarly participatory light. “There has to be a groundswell of voices rising up against the current administration; it’s so much easier to voice your opinion and exercise your rights when you see someone else doing it,” he emailed. “We want this EP to be one of the many little angels standing on the shoulders of potential voters, telling them to participate and make a difference, fighting off the noise from the mass of little devils whispering that they have no voice in our society and have no reason to vote.” Valentin had been a strong supporter of third-party candidates, objecting to the idea of picking “the lesser of two evils,” but that year he didn’t think he had that luxury. “I feel like we’re approaching the last exit.”
No one then could have known how much innocence we still had left to lose. To many, the 2016 election feels like an even more final choice, perhaps an apocalyptic one, between a pathologically bullying, Putin-embracing, undisguised-racist troll and a deeply unpopular, yet thoroughly experienced, mainstream political tactician. Online, the decentralized world of individuals finding each other through blogrolls has long since given way to the top-down proclamations of celebrities and brands on social media, which has turned into an echo chamber where you could pretty much exist seeing only opinions and biases you share, or interests you already have, indefinitely. Even rock’s response to the general election has been mostly limited to a political EP from a supergroup of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, and Cypress Hill members, which stinks. But On the Offensive sticks with me. And now—when it really feels like we’re approaching the last exit—it inspires me. There has to be a groundswell of voices rising up against Trump’s for-real fascist groove thing; it’s so much easier to voice your opinion and exercise your rights when you see someone else doing it. “Don’t forget the Motor City/This was supposed to be the new world.” What are we gonna do now?
Poster Children, for their part, are touring again this fall. What are the rest of us gonna do now? Hopefully, remember that change still begins with the realization that, “Hey, I can do this”—and then, whatever little bit we can, while we still can.