HARDLY BAKED: February 2022

Sunday, February 27, 2022

the sound of the suburbs (RIP Nicky Tesco)

Same old boring Sunday morning

Old man's out washing the car

Mum's in the kitchen, cooking Sunday dinner

Her best meal moaning while it lasts

Johnny's upstairs in his bedroom

Sitting in the dark

Annoying the neighbors

With his punk rock electric guitar

Every lousy Monday morning

Heathrow jets goes crashing over my home

Ten o'clock broad-moor siren

Driving me mad, won't leave me alone

The woman next store

Just sits and stares outside

She hasn't come out once

Ever since her husband died

Youth club group used to want to be free

Now they want anarchy

They play too fast, they play out of tune

They practice in the singers bedroom

The drums quite good, the bass is too loud

And I can't hear the words

Family shoppers crowding out the center of town

Young blokes sitting on the benches

Shouting at the young girls walking around

Johnny stands there at his window

Looking at the night

I said, hey what you listening to

There's nothing there

a song in the tradition of

My father's name was Dad

My mother's name was Mom

How can I take the blame

For anything I've done

See the hollows of my eyes

Make my career of empty skies

I'll laugh at it all

a song whose contemporary cousins include

"I swallow my dreams like my beer

Sunday dinner with the wife now

Cos nothing new happens here

This is my life!"

and also

Hello darlin', I'm home again

Covered in shit and aches and pains

Too knackered to think so give me time to come round

Just gimme the living room beat to the TV sound

My hard earned dough goes in bills and the larder

And that Prince Philip tells us we gotta work harder!

It seems a constant struggle just to exist

Scrimping and saving and crossing of lists

From this window I've seen the whole world pass

From dawn to dusk I've heard the last laugh laughed

a song whose transatlantic cousins include

Your mindless devotion

To lack of emotion

Is no kind of religion for me

and also

Suburban Dream

You won't get mugged

Suburban Dream

No cockroach bugs

Suburban Dream

It's really true

Suburban Dream

Everybody's like you...

Television living takes up all my time

Making the suburban dream

Suburban Dream

It's really nice

Suburban Dream

Now this one I find very inadvertently funny (and don't get me wrong, I love the Descendents, or at least I love this one album of theirs Milo Goes to College) because it starts with this sneer about suburban voidoids - "I want to be stereotyped / I want to be classified" - but what could be more stereotypically punk, more classifiable as a generic lyric subject and angle of attack, than this song?

I want to be a masochistic

I want to be a statistic

I wanna be a clone

I want a suburban home, suburban home, suburban home, suburban home

I don't want no hippie pad

I want a house just like mom and dad

Of course, I'm barely scratching the surface here in terms of anti-suburbia songs in punk / New Wave / hardcore / Mod (original and revival)

Thing is, what with being thoroughly ensconced in Pleasantville myself these days, I'm sorta wondering what exactly they've all got against suburbia? It's a little placid, I suppose, that's true...

But then I guess I'm very very far from adolescence - and quite content to be somewhere the action isn't....

(perhaps I'd have a different feelin about it if I was a commuter - but going to the office for me is walking about 40 feet from the bed to this desk..)

Bonus beat / postscript

And here's a Members song/promo I never saw before, actually about commuting - but commuting within the city - and about how living in the city can be just as dullsville and depressing as living in the suburbs.