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crass - do we owe them a living? by Nick Mamatas (laddertrick@gvny.com) - January 09, 2001 |
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| Punk is dead, but CRASS isn't. They're just nearly homeless. The British punk rock band made up of former hippies enamored of culture jamming and anarchism, are in trouble. Though having sold thousands of records in their career, the band members are better musicians than they are accountants. Dial House, their communal pad over in England, which the band has spent nearly thirty years refurbishing, is only a rental. Years of corporate landlords have failed to evict the band (and thus benefit from three decades of stolen sweat equity), so Peer Group, a London real estate firm and the current landlord, is putting Dial House up for auction on January 23rd, 2001. CRASS has put out a call. Lacking the money to bid for the house on their own, the band wants their fans and activists to pool their money to finally purchase the home. Why not have purchased the home years before? Who knows, though CRASS' status as renters kept the group from having to work out some complicated deed/ownership system with the other residents in the commune, with its constant turnover of members. Also, it isn't unusual for long-term renters to put massive amounts of sweat equity into a home in England, thanks to the ridiculously stratified notions of class in the nation. One personal acquaintance (utterly unrelated to the band) explained that her British grandfather didn't buy a home until emigrating to Canada in his late 60s. He could only rent in England, because he was from a working class district, worked with his hands, and because his parents never owned a home. To buy a home would have been an affront to both the social structure he was trapped in and the identity he embraced. Years ago, CRASS sang a little song called "Do They Owe Us A Living?" with the refrain "Of course they do/ of course they do/ of course they fucking do." Do we owe this band a house? They certainly have done enough to deserve it. In addition to helping build England's anarchist movement and providing shelter for many people over the years, CRASS is a great culture jamming band. They managed to get a flexidisc of an anti-marriage/anti-family song inserted into a British teenie-bopper magazine. Using snippets of new broadcasts, they cobbled together a "telephone conversation" between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan that was realistic enough to fool any number of news agencies, and then to be denounced as highly sophisticated Soviet propaganda. As renters, CRASS successfully took on the monstrous British Telecom, which owned the Dial House at one point, and has roused the rabble for cause and community function after cause and community function. And the band isn't the sort to complain about Napster. Finally, unlike many other way-too-earnest punk bands, CRASS wasn't afraid to let the Left have it, or to poke fun at subjects more prosaic than politics. They're not tedious straight-edgers who scowl at meat eaters, they're . . . well . . . they're CRASS! Do we owe them a living? Of course we do, of course we do, of course we fucking do. |
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Dial House Appeal CrAsSPuNkEr'S PuNk PaGe A Biography of Crass Nasty! Nasty! Punk Rock in the Seventies! Musical Spoofing The Punk Peace Archive 1% Punk 99% Shit FAQ You! |
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