Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Max Ward, Duke University Press, 2019)

    Before I get to a review of Max Ward's book Thought Crime, I thought it would make sense to offer a prologue in the form of a reflection I wrote about one of his bands (SCHOLASTIC DETH) for additional context. Both that write-up and the subesequent review are lightly edited versions of what originally appeared on facing pages of issue #2 of the zine Anxiety’s False Promise, published February 2023.

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    Although I never really got into a lot of the bandana thrash revival bands aside from TEAR IT UP (they count?) or LIFE’S HALT (they count), I really fell hard for SCHOLASTIC DETH when I first heard about them. They were a band that sang about being a nerd and I was in my first year of college. How could I not love them? I recognized art on the cover of “Shackle Me Not” from my older brother’s skate tape collection. I think it was H-Street’s Hokus Pokus video? I mostly remember the part of that video where the kid dips his head in the gnarly sludge bucket for money. Seeing something like that as a child leaves an impression.

    SCHOLASTIC DETH has also left an impression on me. They’re a rare band that was active while I was involved in the scene that I’ve never seen yet still listen to or think about regularly. That first part is the crucial distinction. I find it hard to hold on to records of HC bands I could have seen, but didn’t, because there’s no memory to attach to their music. For all other genres or for HC from before I was involved in the scene, the same metric doesn’t apply. So, there’s something special about this band. Beyond thinking about them, I’ve also held on to their three 7”s and CD discography for the past 20 or so years. I had a few of the comps they were on, but when weighing the storage volume of one CD versus a few records with only a couple good songs on them it’s clear that the compact part of CD makes a strong argument. I see they have an LP version of the discography out now and I have to say it’s not appealing to me at all. First of all, a CD discography is such a wonderful collection when there are short songs. A 39-song LP just seems silly, but a 50-song CD makes perfect sense. I can’t really say why. The 11 songs exclusive to the CD are the KZSU radio set. That’s Stanford’s radio station, in case you needed any more proof of these dudes’ nerd-dom. The title of the CD version is “Final Examiner,” which references SYSTEMATIC DEATH. They rip off the “Final Insider” art on the CD tray as well. The LP discography is “Book Attack,” which is OK, but doesn’t reflect anything more than a title of one of their songs. There’s also a video available on the CD that I don’t think is even usable with modern video players. Most of all, the CD discography is worth having because of the layout. A band about books wants you to have a modified version of all its releases on a single piece of plastic… what else is a CD discography but Cliff’s Notes for a band? Very clever, but I would expect nothing else from a band whose members studied for the GRE during their final recording session. The style of the Cliff’s Notes isn’t just the cover, either. They nailed the overall vibe of it the whole way through the packaging. My copy has been beaten up enough that its case is cracked and I’ve taped it back together, which is something I can’t say for any other broken CD case I’ve dealt with over the years. So, like I said, there’s something special about this music.

    Part of what makes them so accessible is their liner notes. One of the notes that caught my attention back then was Max’s comment in regard to “Book Attack” that he spent more on books than records in the past year: “This past year was the first time that I spent more money on books than records. My bookshelves are bursting at the seams with books that I have yet to read, or ones that I'm keeping on the shelf for reference purposes. There is not enough time in the day for me to get as much reading in as I want. And I still go to the independent bookstores to browse… I’m like a kid in a toy store. One day I'll win the lottery so I can sit and read books at a rate that I want to. And I'll give some of my winnings to Chris and Josh so they can write more songs with guitar solos.” This was years before tsundoku as a practice came to be discussed widely in various hifalutin papers, magazines, and journals. They were ahead of their time in so many ways. The practice of buying records (or books) is a different practice from listening to records (or reading books), and they wrote a couple songs about this all-too-human foible.

    The music is extremely acceptable—it’s fast without turning into a blur. Some songs have moshable moments. The part of the sonic blur that is most useful for their longevity is Max’s vocals. They’re the kid-on-helium style of high-spirited cheer that makes the vocalist sound eternally youthful. I also love the complete saturation of the recording sessions with feedback—the guitar squeals leading into each song give the sense that these songs were all recorded in six-or-seven song bursts in whatever studio they used. The predetermined endpoint for the band due to their academic commitments gave them a sense of urgency that still resonates and reverberates two decades later.

    A casual survey of music created since they broke up in 2002 makes it clear that a new movement of punk bands that are pro-reading hasn’t caught on. Basically, straight edge but for books. No TV, No social media, No venture capitalists. Something like that. They articulated a pro-literacy philosophy as clearly as MINOR THREAT did with a pro-sobriety philosophy, yet they didn’t have the lasting impact of straight edge. MINOR THREAT had good marketing going on, you know what I mean? Maybe if SCHOLASTIC DETH could have toured more extensively. In an alternate reality, Ward et al. could have flexed 625 to focus on a bookstore core movement that disdained screen time, social media, dot-com boomers, and Silicon Valley in general in favor of printed matter, academic achievement, and coffee. They had songs about the effect of the dot-com bust on their skate habits and work choices… the cusp of a social movement in response to Bush II’s bungling, belligerent idiocracy is right there, but something was missing. These guys should have been huge… They even had a member break up the band because he got accepted at Northwestern—just like MINOR THREAT. They have a solid discography CD—just like MINOR THREAT. (They are not as good as MINOR THREAT.) If there are any bands trying to ape their sound and style (mostly the bookish part) in the same way youth crew and OC HC bands did in the late ‘80s with MINOR THREAT, you need to let me know.

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    It’s great that a professor at Middlebury closes the Acknowledgments section of his book published by Duke University Press with the phrase “up the punks.” Could this have been true 20 years ago? Probably not. I bought this book specifically to write this review.

    This book chiefly concerns the Japanese government’s efforts in the years between the first two World Wars to re-educate members of the Japanese Communist Party into citizens full of national spirit. As I am not conversant with Japanese history in any kind of way, I was mostly out of my depth with this book. It winds down as the beginning of WWII approaches, so Ward describes how the Japanese government was learning how to police members of its society who were out of line. Where did they learn this but through classes taught by U.S. police officers.

    It does give a lot to think about with regard to nationalism and what it means to believe in a country. Is a country’s identity forged by thousands of years of history? If so, what does it mean when that identity has to change? (Can it?) Is a country’s identity formed through the creation of documents outlining its rules, policies, and procedures? If so, what does it mean when those documents have to change? (Who decides?) Finishing it as I did on the day the US Supreme Court heard a case about the independent state legislature theory, these questions seem quite relevant. 

    Throughout the book, Ward traces the development of a law that is meant to rehabilitate riff raff into Imperial Japanese Subjects. The concepts in the text that may be relevant to people living in the US are how ideas about a national identity are taken up by governments and put into process through laws and the other apparatuses of the state that act upon the people living in those nations. What it means to be Japanese and what it means to be American are informed by these things and I think about them every time I think about why children in the United States need to recite the pledge at the start of a school day.

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Tonight It’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics (Bill Peel, Repeater, 2023)

    Black metal and Communism aren’t usually spoken of in the same breath. For those who know anything about black metal, it’s probably the violence and the anti-Christian themes that stand out the most. The average person likely doesn’t have much familiarity with blast beats, raspy vocals, and tremolo picking. Just the same, what people (at least in the U.S.) might know about Communism is limited to caricatures of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, or North Korea.

    Peel’s book might seem at first glance to be about a counternarrative for black metal. Those who know a little more of the genre are aware that some of its most influential groups have connections to right-wing or openly fascist politics. They are known as National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) for short. Peel addresses this aspect of the scene early on in the text, explaining the Asgardsrei festival in Ukraine as an annual meeting of current black metal bands with explicit white supremacist messages (p. 3). Shortly thereafter, he clarifies that this book is not meant to be a catalog of bands that are socialist, feminist, antiracist, or otherwise inclusive of gender and sexual identities and orientation. That’s because a book about the “Red and Anarchist Black Metal (RABM)” scene “would be a very short book” (p. 8). Even though the anarchists might be outnumber the Nazis, there’s still not enough of them to document in a book-length rundown. (For the record, some of the RABM bands Peel cites are TRESPASSER, ISKRA, and SKAGOS.)

    Instead, Peel focuses on the elements of black metal as a genre that might provide affordances for socialists to consider including in their worldview. The five chapters cover the ideas of distortion, decay, secrecy, coldness, and heresy. Each includes an explanation of the term as it relates to black metal, certain bands or songs or movements in the genre that exemplify the term, and discussion of ways socialists might interpret these same ideas for their own ends. In a sense, a reader does not need to have any familiarity with the music of the scenes Peel covers. A more engaged stance on this book would leave a reader with ideas of how to rethink their engagement with socialist politics. If you wanted to learn more about RABM bands, you’ll be let down; however, you might learn a little more about Deleuze & Guattari, Nietzsche, and Marx as you read.

    The chapter on decay was interesting in that it reframed the usual way that black metal bands look at decay. They see it as a form of death or a long for a return to a “supposedly ancient, traditional moment” (p. 69). In this way, the yearning for decay is a desire for the world as it is to be undone. To accelerate the downfall of society so that we can live more simply once more. You know, RETVRN type shit. That’s gross (culturally). What’s also gross (well, also, culturally, but in a different sense) is that decaying fungi can be a source of new life, mutation (p. 64). The idea of flourishing. The possibility of life’s construction.

    Intriguing ideas abound in the chapter on coldness. A cursory thought about this topic as it relates to black metal might call to mind the wintry climate of Norway, or Scandinavia in general. It might also call to mind the idea of growing “cold inside” or dead to the world in some way. To Peel’s credit, he expands his analysis beyond such simplicity. Because this is a book ostensibly about Communism, the importance of heat power to the Industrial Revolution comprises a great deal of this chapter. In his retelling, the success of coal-derived power was not due to its superior output. Rather, the old-fashioned water mills were more than capable of producing the power needed for most uses. The catch is that its hard to monetize the water flowing in a river because it is part of the commons. The “sluice gates and reservoirs” that could be built to manage that flow did not turn into profitable ventures because it was too difficult to determine whether it was better to spend money on setting up the gate or operating it (p. 97). So, coal power won the day because it reflected the individualist ethos necessary for capital accumulation. Dig the coal out of the ground and it's yours. Power your own steam engine with the coal and you can do what you want with the profits and the products.

    What does that mean for black metal, though?

    The coldness of the genre is reflected in the inability to do work or the disinterest in the world at large. Rather that combusting with kinetic energy like thrash metal or speed metal, black metal makes a point of displaying its power, its “puissance,” through inaction or stillness or coldness (p. 123). If still waters run deep, then imagine the everflowing stream frozen. There is a lot of power there (as distinct from energy) but it lies still. Black metal band members are “dominating capitalism by freezing its flows. They work by remaining useless, non-productive, insufficiently profitable. We should ask ourselves what has been gained through our supposedly productive activism, and if we shouldn’t join black metal instead, by turning towards non-productivity” (p. 123). Allowing ourselves to lay fallow and become useless might lead to new growth in our decay that helps to bring a new world into being.

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The KNIFE “Heartbeats” (Rabid, 2002)

    Do you have a favorite song? Do you remember the first time you heard it? Does it count if it wasn’t immediately obvious to you that it would be your favorite song? Does it make sense to have a “favorite” “song” at all? Don’t your opinions and tastes and interests change over time like your palate, eyesight, and flexibility? Isn’t it kinda cringe to think that you have to keep holding a torch for a song just because it was super important to you at one point in your life? Don’t you ever grow up? Isn’t this just a Boomerified nostalgia trap? How late is too late to acquire a “new” favorite song? Do you have to know every fact about a song to make it your favorite?

    One nice thing about living before smartphones and internet connections could be taken for granted was the ability to develop patience. I am sure people can still boost that stat organically, but now there are so many ways to cut short the process of knowing and waiting. It seems quaint now to think that I used to keep scrap paper and a pen in my car so I could write down small parts of lyrics to songs that I heard on the radio so I could search them up later online. Missing the DJ’s rundown of what you’re about to hear or had just heard is as torturous as any ancient curse.

    A different kind of curse is the roommate who will not stop playing the same goddamned song over and over and over again. It gets so bad that you have to kick his door down to tell him to stop because that song is good but he doesn’t need to play it for two days straight.

    You’ll forget about this incident and the song itself for almost a year. Then, as you dine alone, you’ll hear its last few measures while you are finding your seat. There are no lyrics you can make out but you know that synth part like it’s your own heartbeat. You spend the rest of the night wondering whether that was a song you heard as a child that you’ve heard again for the first time in decades or maybe just a song you heard the other day. It is of its time and ahead of its time at the same time.

    You try to tell your friends about it and ask around about that one song you heard that you can’t hum or sing or mumble any part of because it’s like trying to make oxygen visible. You resign yourself to the fate that you’ll remember it eventually and can take someone by the shoulders and shake them back and forth while yelling, “What song is this? It’s so good!”

    Months later, you’ll be working an office job that has a building-wide intranet where other nerds can share the MP3s they have added to their work computers. You can only seed five listeners at a time, so if you have a cool music library, others need to call dibs on it fast or they will be unable to share your bounty. Most users have created screen names, but others keep the generic First Name Last Name’s Library as their identity. You can learn a lot about a person through what they’re willing to share of their music collection publicly. You’ll get a warning when you are signing off for the day that will let you know you are cutting someone off if you close your connection while a user is still active. We’ve all been on the other side of that disconnection. Given that these files are from various sources, you’ll get the usual improperly tagged metadata during your searches. You would never be so careless with your own files. That annoyance won’t stop you from checking out “Track 01” by The KNIFE on a colleague’s account one morning in the summer.

    Your world will slow down, invert, zoom in, and dazzle with color as your neurons pulse information from axons to dendrites. Before you can form a conscious thought, your cells, your veins, your soul, your self realizes that this is the song. At long last, you have an artist name and an album name. Your life is never again the same. You spend the rest of the morning listening to that song on repeat and then place an order for the CD at the local music shop down the street from your apartment.

    That night is the usual night of the week where you play pick-up basketball on public courts with a group of dudes who are there more for the spirit of youth and the social aspects of the team sport than cut-throat competitiveness. Usually, you won’t want to “run full” with other groups of players because you’re content to play half-court games of two-on-two or three-on-three with your social circle. Sometimes, the nights are so full of energy that you can’t just claim your own part of the court for your good vibes only and you do have to play against these folks.

    They choose you first because you’re the tallest one there, even though if they’d watched you play for the past 15 minutes, they would know better. Your knees are losing their spring even though you’re hardly past 24. The game starts and you are facing off against your own friends and also a couple of dudes who might have been four-year varsity starters in high school. The vibe usually sucks.

    Tonight, though, you have Karin Dreijer’s vocals and Olof Dreijer’s synths in your mind and in your heart and you are unstoppable. You have never played basketball this well in your life. You aren’t just making shots, you’re causing turnovers, stealing passes, and dishing assists. It’s like the game is in slo-mo but you are at regular speed. This is all thanks to the power of music. A song you’ve heard dozens of times already and will hear hundreds of times in the years to come. At the end of the night, it’s not pure dominance that reigns over the court. It’s a gentle, but fierce feeling of peace as you get the twinge of realization that you are a more complete human being only because of music and the ways it connects you to other people.

    You connect with music through files over the intranet or through plastic and vinyl at shops or under hoops after games. You realize “Heartbeats” isn’t just a song; it’s a symbol of how each of us can become a better person than we are through patiently waiting through new experiences and trials that life shows us. Then, at the perfect time, as regular as a heartbeat, a song will come into your life and reveal this truth to you once again.

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Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile (Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaon Naparstek; Thesis; 2025)

    I know from having worked in publishing that the choice of cover art or design is not always up to the authors. Sometimes what is marketable is in conflict with an author’s artistic vision or idea of what might look best. In the case of Life After Cars, I don’t know how Goodyear, Gordon, and Naparstek feel about Joel Holland’s illustration and design choices for the book’s cover, but I love it. Just like Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, the image riffs on a road sign. In Grabar’s case, the red-and-white cover resembles a No Parking sign on a city street in the United States. For Life After Cars, the choice of yellow as a framing color with black text on a white background recalls a road sign announcing the speed limit near a school or a pedestrian crossing up ahead. The real beauty of this design choice and how it relates to the book’s argument is the art within the sign’s image. There’s a four-way traffic signal that is overgrown with vines and flowers. Had you never seen such an object before, you might think it was intentionally designed to be a place for flowers to grow.

    Turning over to the back cover, there’s a white sedan that has been completely overtaken with flowers and stems. One of the branching parts of this overgrowth reveals a flower that has grown through an orange traffic cone. This image isn’t accidental. In the final chapter of the third part of the book, there’s a section on street-level DIY methods for making streets safer for people who are biking or walking. Tactical urbanism, as the authors deem it, involves taking existing traffic cones and putting flowers in them (or just using small flowerpots from a garden store) to visually mark a bike lane that has only paint separating it from the rushing motor vehicles that are next to it. A related version of that approach involves covering the wooden handle of plungers with electrical tape and leaving them suction-side down in the street. As jarring as that image is, it wouldn’t have made for the prettiest image on the inside back flap of the dust jacket.

    Between the flaps, there is much to enjoy and even more to lament about the presence of cars in our lives. The authors hail from New York City, but they spend plenty of pages discussing the problems cars cause for people all over the world. It’s not just a world city problem, either. Car pollution and production affects all of us quite negatively. Even electric cars or hybrids aren’t the solution either. These cars are still cars at the end of the day, so all of the attendant problems they pose are still relevant. “No one who was ever hit by the driver of an electric car thought to themselves, ‘Sure, I’m severely injured, but at least the driver cares about climate change.’” (p. 227). I mean, there might be someone out there but you get the point. Cars cause more problems than are solved by the electrification of all gas guzzlers. Traffic still happens; crashes are abundant.

    I use crash here purposefully, as do the authors. The euphemism of a “traffic accident” instead of a “car crash” removes the violence of the action and also makes it seem like it’s just one of those things that happens, like spilled milk. Nothing worth getting upset about. Happens all the time. The intent of using crash rather than accident is to illuminate the decisions that went into making the crash happen, whether “the driver did something wrong, or that better road design might have prevented tragedy, or that multiple factors—all of which could be addressed—stacked up to contribute to the outcome” (p. 13). It doesn’t have to be this way and we can do something about it. The smallest thing you can do is to change the way you talk about these violent collisions of metal, plastic, and flesh. A crash has a cause, an accident does not.

    In between this language shift and the DIY approach of tactical urbanism comes the development of laws, policies, and procedures for making the world safer for everyone. There are stories of Vision Zero campaigns, the Dutch Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child Murder) movement, and the creation of bike buses (community chaperoned packs of kids going to school on their bicycles) that all give a strong sense of hopefulness for the future in a world after cars.

    To shake that sense of what Ian Walker calls motonormativity, which is the idea that driving has completely overtaken our moral view of the world (p. 124), it might help to think back to how societies received the integration of cars over one hundred years ago. The book begins with a tale of life before cars. It stars Superman! In Action Comics #6, he decries the “homicidal drivers” who are causing mass death in Metropolis. He even tells an automotive executive that the choice to chase “profits at the cost of human lives” is socially undesirable (p. 4). I’m as sick of seeing ads for superhero movies as anyone but this element of Superman’s origin story could seriously use a reboot or reappraisal. I suppose that’s as likely to happen as a Super Bowl commercial that exalts the importance of taking the bus or walking to a destination, which the authors discuss in a section on bikelash, the eternal complaint of many drivers when they are faced with the prospect of integrating a few bike lanes into local streets or roads (p. 43). We are so used to giving pride of literal place to motor vehicles that even the suggestion that there are alternatives is beyond the comprehension of many drivers.

    My first knowledge of this book happened during my commute while I was listening to an episode of Tech Won’t Save Us that featured Goodyear and Gordon. One of the critiques they advanced in that appearance was that cars make drivers adversarial. Everyone is going to the same place or in the same general direction, so driving becomes a competition for scarce resources. As I merged with the car next to me when the road went from three lanes to two, I realized the wisdom of their words. Commuting in a car is miserable. Bringing that misery into a place of work or into the home pollutes the remainder of the day. I wanted to avoid that stress, so I looked up bus routes from home to work. I can drive to work in 25-30 minutes, but it would take at least two hours to get there via bus, and that includes over an hour of walking. It would also involve leaving my house before 5:00 A.M. instead of just after 7:00 A.M. That’s untenable. It is one more reason that life after cars will be better for us all. Instead of thousands of people taking their “$75,000 living room” (p. 90) from point A to point B and back each day, we could have expanded existing transit systems to make the motonormative era as baffling as the era of smoking on airplanes and in restaurants.

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