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My Brain’s Been Dropkicked
See, I have this pattern with music: I go on binges. It’s a pattern I’ve learned to accept and live with. Most of the time, I have a variety of cd’s in the car, and my mp3 player set firmly on random. All is in balance, and the center holds. But every couple of months, I’ll rediscover an artist I haven’t listened to for months, and I’ll drag out every one of their disks and play them incessantly, listening to nothing else, for a week or two, sometimes a month in extreme cases. Morning, noon, night, I listen obsessively to this one artist. Eventually, I get burned out, and file them away for a few more months.
Normally, these binges revolve around an artist or band whose entire catalog I already own. Radiohead, for example. Every album, EP, single, import, bootleg, mp3 of some weird cover they did in East Armpit, Nebraska in 1996; got ‘em all. Neil Young is another popular binge target, as he’s released 38 albums during my lifetime, and his concerts are bootlegged more heavily than any artist not named “Garcia” or “Dylan.” And Josh Homme has approximately 53 different bands and side projects ongoing at any one time, so there’s a new cd coming out on some obscure label every other week, seemingly.
But right now, I’m on a Dropkick Murphys binge. This is unusual. You see, prior to three weeks ago, I only owned one of their cd’s, Blackout. A fine album, to be sure, and one of my favorites of 2003, but just one album. I had listened to it quite a bit when it came out, but not much in the last year.
And then one day, I was over at Tom and Kim’s house, and Tom said, “Hey, burn me a cawpy of that theah Drawpkicks cd.” So I did. And then…something snapped, and the binge started. It got a little out of control. Within a week, I had bought three other cd’s: Sing Loud, Sing Proud, Singles Collection Vol. 2, and their magnum opus, Live on St. Patrick’s Day From Boston, MA. They’re all on shuffle as I type this, as a matter of fact.
What is it about this band? Is it the fact that they’re unabashed old school punk, in an era when people have been brainwashed into thinking that Green Day and Blink 182 actually play “punk rock?” Yup. Is it the fact that they’re the only punk band on the planet featuring a bagpipe and a mandolin? Damn straight. Is it the fact that that they do punk covers of Irish folk tunes? Shit yeah.
Story time: When I was a kid, my mom kept a roof over our single-parent-household asses, supplementing her piddly teacher’s salary by singing in an Irish folk band on the weekends. I always hated that music. Still do. So, to hear those very same songs again, 20 years later, sped up to 900 mph and screamed over electric guitar riffs, is a revelation. Not to mention that half of the Dropkicks’ originals sound like speeded-up versions of Irish jigs, anyway.
Some of their appeal may be plain ol’ New England homesickness, too. These guys are the biggest Boston homers imaginable. Every other song namechecks the city, they sing in an unapologetic Southie snarl, they play Bruins fight videos during their concerts… shit, they open their shows with a thrashy BC fight song cover, and close them with “Charlie on the MBTA” (slightly reworded, of course.) They even dug up an old baseball chant that Red Sox fans used to sing back in the pre-Babe Ruth era, and re-recorded it. Can you imagine that kind of pride existing here in Seattle, where everything was built last Tuesday? Nah, neither can I.
And if that isn’t enough to convince you, they even do punk covers of old union anthems. Hardcore punk is often (and usually unfairly) lumped in with ugly right-wing idiocy, but there’s no chance of that with these guys. Nazis don’t cover Woodie Guthrie and Creedence, folks.
So, yeah. These guys fuckin’ rawk to wake the dead, theah pally. And there’s a new album out in a month. I’m wicked stoked. And no, they didn’t pay me for this blog post, but after re-reading it, they prawbly should.
