Response to Chicago Tribune's Charlie Kirk Editorial

September 11, 2025 at 9:42 PM

Dear Chicago Tribune Editorial Board:

    The editorial regarding Charlie Kirk’s legacy paints too rosy a picture of a man whose main goal in life was relentless antagonism of undergraduates and their professors. His horrific murder was inexcusable. The issue with the editorial is that it frames his contribution to the cultural conversation as “debate.” This is a charitable interpretation of his campus visits.

    There is no form of debate where keeping a running watchlist of allegedly left-wing professors would be an appropriate strategy. To claim that a discredited, racist conspiracy “is not a theory, it’s a reality” demonstrates an intellectual incuriosity that has nothing to do with finding a reasonable answer through discussion. Likewise, believing that the United States is “a Christian state” is a woefully uninformed position.

    These are just a few of Kirk’s beliefs. They are intentionally inflammatory. They do not stand up to scrutiny. Notably, the Tribune’s editorial does not directly quote nor hyperlink to any of the many public appearances where Kirk used these words. The use of paraphrase throughout the editorial elides the harm of Kirk’s words, as well as their consequences for minoritized populations.

    Truly, that harm is the true legacy of Kirk. He thought a better argument was the result of snappy one-liners and a firm grasp of what he considered to be facts. Those strategies may win a debate and convince listeners that the speaker is correct for having won. The truth, let alone the most reasonable answer, remains elusive in such a setting. Kirk excelled not at debate or argumentation, but in disputational talk. His words were loud; his ideas, quiet. 

My best,

Tall Rob (Yes, I used my real name and address in the actual letter; I know the rules!) 

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DEVO (Chris Smith, Library Films / VICE Studios, 2024)

    I lived in central Ohio for 15 years, so I should probably have a stronger take on DEVO than “I like them and they are cool.” Alas, I never took the deep dive into being a DEVOtee (that’s what their fans call themselves, right?). This documentary had me thinking I had the wrong idea the whole time and should have probably picked up their albums while flipping through the bins at Used Kids Records. Those radio station promo copies of AGNOSTIC FRONT’s “Cause for Alarm” and LEEWAY’s “Born to Expire” from WKCO for $2.50 apiece were more my speed at age 19, so “Q: Are We Not Men?” and “Duty Now for the Future” didn’t warrant a second look. Too bad for past me.

    In my time in Ohio, I picked up a stray fact about DEVO here and there through breathing in the atmosphere. Their mascot is Booji Boy instead of Boogie Boy because they ran out of g in the font they were using. There’s a release called “Hardcore DEVO, Vol. 1” that has “the stuff you’ll like” if HC punk is more your speed. They did an Obama 2008 campaign event in Akron and made a version of his O logo wearing the flowerpot hat. I replied to each of these nuggets of information with a disaffected “oh, cool” and moved on with my life. Who cares what that one-hit wonder band did? So much for me being open-minded about music.

    Even though I wrote them off as a novelty band for “Whip It,” at least I didn’t think that song was some kind of celebration of a certain kind of old-fashioned roughneck masculinity. That’s the apparent takeaway many people had from that song’s video on MTV. The “you’ve got the wrong idea” refrain comes up a lot during the documentary. (Just last month the Memories feature on my computer’s Photos app soundtracked a nice montage of my kid’s earliest years to “Beautiful World,” which is such a dreadful misreading of that song that I had to laugh.) They position themselves as, if not intellectuals or nerds, then people who know more than the average folks. Making a brand (or a band!) out of the idea of being “the smartest guys in the room” is dangerous territory. Worse still, positioning yourselves as the ones who decry the de-evolution of humanity means that you must have something special about yourself that makes you able to make that pronouncement, especially when you have a song titled “Mongoloid.” "Trust me, dude. We are the chosen ones and everyone else knows nothing..." (Or something like that.) The inherent disdain that comes along with thinking you’re so clever and above the fray of the general public’s tastes can result in a variety of outcomes. Thankfully, the members of DEVO are oddballs at heart and they channeled that disdain into a creative pursuit. The story of Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale meeting through mutual friends at Kent State bears this out. They were just weird guys that found each other moving in the same elliptical social orbits; they were not trying to start a band or “make it” or do anything like that.

    The fact that they were university educated is just one part of what made them outliers in the music scene at the time. They leaned into their braininess, but their weirdness seems to have had a stronger pull on their collective vision of social critique. What I’m trying to say is that if they were any good at being public intellectuals, then they would have become pundits (ugh) or authors of general interest subject area books or even professors. As one of my professors further down I-71 once said, “if academics could write, then they’d have been novelists.” Just the same, it seems from this documentary that the members of DEVO did not have the constitution for punditry or other forms of public intellectualism. That’s a good thing, mind you! We’d rather have the music.

    It’s clear they knew how to handle the limelight, if only from the many television appearances that are part of the documentary. They know how to play the media game. They’re media literate not because they are keeping up with the news (they were) but because they knew what was expected of bands on programs like American Bandstand or whatever. Dick Clark saying “Oh, now I know what kind of interview this is going to be” when they gave him an oblique response to a canned question is a perfect example of that. They were aware of their weirdness but it didn’t come off as a shtick; they are just how they are. They wanted you to feel as uncomfortable as they did about the whole spectacle.

    One thing I really appreciated about the documentary was the lack of typical talking head features throughout its runtime. Yes, band members and managers and people in the DEVO universe do appear with their name and credit at the bottom of the screen. But, there are no critics, journalists, fans, or contemporaries in the mix. I’d imagine there is no shortage of people who fall into those categories who could talk about DEVO for days. Instead, what you get is just the people central to the project. Others’ views, such as those of Dick Clark, are present in archival format as part of an existing broadcast or media moment. Just as they did during their career, they presented themselves in this documentary fully on their own terms. Oh, and the early live footage is beyond belief. There are people who saw DEVO at a bar after their shift at Goodyear or Firestone in 1976. They likely wanted to hear someone covering “More Than a Feeling” or “Afternoon Delight” and instead they got “Jocko Homo” and “Mongoloid” played by the guys who were dedicated and desperate about spreading the message of de-evolution regardless of what anyone else wanted to hear.

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So It Started There: From Punk to PULP (Nick Banks, Omnibus Press, 2024)

    It’ll make the reading of this text harder once the links rot, but it’s a nice touch to have QR codes in the text. The first one is a video that shows author Banks explaining how to engage with that extra-textual feature using a smart device. If you aren’t able to get that far or figure out what those weird squares mean at the start of each chapter, then you might persist in your confusion. Those reading this book years after YouTube disappears will simply be out of luck. We all know that a general, if not fanatic, interest in PULP as a band will outlast all forms of social media.

    I hardly think I’m unique in finding the QR codes nifty. When I’m reading a book that constantly references other works in making its argument or shaping its narrative, I struggle to keep my attention on the text itself. I’m mentally cataloging pages I want to revisit as I finish each chapter, then deciding whether to look up the materials the author referenced. I’m also driven to continue reading (in most cases) because I decided to read the book for a reason and still want to keep going.

    I’ve settled on dog-earing pages as I go, and then returning to the book hours or days or weeks later to check on those pages. I have stopped reading with a pen in hand because I get so wrapped up in my own annotations (to say nothing of the desire to investigate the topics the author mentions) that I lose steam with making progress through the book. When I revisit the text, I usually remember why I marked certain pages, but if I don’t, I just chalk it up to past me’s over-exuberance and leave it at that. If that page was truly worth remembering or revisiting, its power would stand out on a second view, right? I hope…

    You can probably tell from my meandering introduction to this review that this book is full of the kinds of references that pull me away from the text. So, the QR codes help, but they are not sufficient to satisfy my curiosity. There is plenty to be curious about in Banks’ life story. He starts with his grandparents’ generation on both sides to establish his working class roots. He also has a famous football playing uncle that I had not known of before reading this book or listening to PULP in the first place. The uncle shows up periodically in PULP history when managers, club owners, bookers, etc., ask if Nick is any relation to keeper Gordon Banks. Nick’s lack of football smarts is a gift to us because he became a solid drummer and an engaging writer instead.

    Banks spends a few chapters on family history and his childhood before getting on to his passion for music and participation in the Sheffield scene of the ‘70s and ‘80s. We might know him for PULP, but he spends around 100 pages of this 400-page book on his life before joining the best band Britpop had to offer. It’s great to have this context because it makes their eventual success as a group that much sweeter. (The same goes for Jarvis Cocker’s and Mark Webber’s recent books about their contributions to PULP.) As the subtitle indicates, Banks’ journey starts with punk. He was part of the scene and not just the scenery, too, which makes the stories more interesting than the usual “I heard about this band through friends / siblings / neighbors and bought the record and went to shows, etc.” story. Those pathways into an underground scene are individually important (I mean, I know I feel that way about my story) but can quickly become genericized in a book like this one because they fit a template. Banks has enough personality as a writer and a drummer to make the tales of punk and goth bands he was part of as interesting as anything that happened when he was on Island Records’ payroll. I really hope he shares the FATAL NOISE demo at some point. A six-song demo recorded in August 1981 by guys who had just finished their O-level exams and that sounds “a bit like it was recorded with a thick sock over all the microphones” is a no-brainer for me (p. 67). Release the session!

    A few years on, Banks tries his sticks with a few other bands, but doesn’t cut the mustard. He recounts seeing the “PULP want drummer” ad in a local cafe around 1986 and feeling like his life had been leading to that moment. As with Webber, Banks was a fan before he joined the band. Banks couldn’t have known the heights he’d reach with PULP within the decade; he just wanted to join the cool local band he liked. In recounting a few rehearsal misfires with two other Sheffield bands, he concludes “I always wonder how my life would have diverged from its eventual path had either of those opportunities come off. Narrow margins.” (p. 112). Feels like a “Something Changed” situation, years before Cocker wrote that song. I’ll add that Banks’ use of a phrase such as “narrow margins” at the end of the paragraph is a writing tic that shows up throughout the text. It’s charming and makes me think of how BUZZCOCKS got their name. (This is your hint to start a band named NARROW MARGINS.)

    In a bit of corroborating evidence, Banks tells a story about Cocker and the rest of the band moving into the same place. He explains that Cocker showed up with their buddy’s transit van full of “trash — sorry, my mistake — carefully curated curios and antiques” on move in day (p. 135). After about 20 minutes, another car pulled up and Cocker hopped in for a driving lesson, leaving Banks to move most of Cocker’s belongings into the building. I’m sorry but this is the kind of hilarious and avoidant behavior that seems exactly on brand with the version of Cocker I hold in mind from reading Good Pop, Bad Pop. The fact that this moment probably isn’t even a memory for Cocker is what makes it all the more absurd. When recounting Cocker’s assessment of him as a drummer, Banks reveals that there’s a chance Cocker had never even heard him play before, but knew they’d get on as bandmates, so he was allowed to join (p. 115). Essentially, you had to be willing to put up with Cocker’s nonsense to be part of PULP and it appears that Banks had the requisite patience, if not the drumming chops, to make the grade.

    That patience is an asset for a drummer in a band focused on visual presentation and pop hooks that might pull attention away from the beat. Thankfully, Banks is perceptive and is not as sought after as Cocker, so he is able to observe various humorous happenings throughout the band’s career and relay them in a way that makes him feel like the cool friend you have in a big band. Notably, his invisibility as a performer indirectly led him to the relationship that would become a marriage. He and friends had seen two women crushing it at a pub quiz game and started chatting them up. The group moved on to another pub and the conversations continued. Banks and Sarah (the pub quiz game champ) get to talking about what they were listening to while getting ready for the night. (I’m pleased to know Banks also thinks “Hatful of Hollow” is a better representation of early SMITHS material than their first album.) Anyway, Sarah tells him she was listening to “a song about some bloke hiding in a wardrobe while spying on others shagging” (p. 217). Banks replies that he wrote that song, which is true, but of course sounds completely insane to the person he’s attempting to court. Things work out and they appear to still be married, thirty years on. Imagine someone telling you they had listened to “Babies” earlier while you’re flirting with them and having the relationship work because you wrote the riff that became that song.

    For me, the most powerful anecdote concerns the recording of “Common People.” (I’m basic, I know.) Banks relates how they’d road-tested the song and knew its features forward and backward, but it was a challenge to get right in the studio. The issue is that playing to a click track with a consistent tempo is a problem when you have a song that starts out at a certain speed and gets faster as it goes. He explains how they tried troubleshooting it by playing at the opening tempo throughout, the closing tempo throughout, and an average of the tempos throughout. Nothing worked, so they had to have their drum programmer make a click track that “increased in tempo every few bars” to match the way PULP played the song live (p. 251). I’d never sat with a stopwatch and metronome to clock the song’s beat, but the story of this recording session matches my experience of the song. In 2011, Mrs. Tall Rob and I saw one of PULP’s reunion gigs at the O2 Academy in Brixton. When they played “Common People” and the lead-in to the last chorus hit, I thought I was going to die. The drum beats, synth stabs, and light flashes were among the most overpowering I’ve felt at a gig, and we were in the balcony. We should all be so glad that they were able to capture a shred of that power in the studio. There’s not a QR code in the world that can capture that embodied rush of live music propelled by a hard-hitting drummer. There’s no substitute for the real thing. At least we have the records and the books and the memories to keep us sharp.

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Badges without Borders: How Global Insurgency Transformed American Policing (Stuart Schrader, University of California Press, 2019)

    There’s an evergreen relevance to books about the nature of policing in the United States and its history in racist vigilante violence. When I bought Schrader’s book in late 2019, I was thinking it would be an insightful read on the history of policing in this country with a particular focus on the beginning of Black Lives Matter as a social movement. That’s not quite what this book addresses. Still, Schrader tells an informative story through his research into connections between the professionalization of U.S. policing that came about as a result of military occupations overseas. Given the recent deployments of National Guard members in U.S. cities, Schrader's is a useful text that can help make sense of how this situation came to be.

    Because I am an asshole, I emailed Schrader about his book after I read it in the summer of 2020 to say I am also a former punk zine editor who has a Ph.D. Who cares? I thought it would be cool to tell him I thought of AGENT ORANGE (DEN) and NEGATIVE APPROACH after reading the intro paragraph to his book’s conclusion. (It mentions The Exorcist stairs.) Not only that—I also told him he had misspelled counterinsurgency on one page. I’m really helpful, you see. He graciously (and within a day!) replied that getting people to listen to those two bands was the precise reason he wrote the book—tongue firmly in cheek, I am sure. Like I said, I am great at making friends.

    Overall, Schrader's text discusses the racist roots of U.S. policing; how law enforcement became professionalized overseas; how law enforcement became professionalized and enmeshed domestically; how everyday experiences complicated police reform efforts overseas; how policing lessons from overseas came back to the U.S. in the form of “tear gas,” riot control, and SWAT teams; how counterinsurgent policing informed “broken windows” policing in the U.S.; and how the overseas counterinsurgent reformers came back to the U.S. to continue implementing counterinsurgent police practices on the streets of this country. 

    On the “fun fact” side of things, I learned that 911 did not exist as an emergency response number until 1968, five years after a similar service debuted in Venezuela. If you want a more succinct idea of the book’s thesis than the above road map paragraph, here you go: “Training, technologies, and tactics for emergency situations grew from overseas counterinsurgency and became integrated into everyday policing in the United States, recalibrating racialized social control” (p. 23). What does that mean? Could he put it to you any simpler? How’s this? “Keystone Kops could not catch Communists” (p. 14). That’s about it, really. And don’t get it twisted—police have always been militarized. No system works.

(This review originally appeared in a slightly different version in issue #2 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in February 2023.)

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