The angel’s schlong

In his book on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin developed the image of an “angel of history.” It’s a being who faces the past and witnesses the long catastrophe that is life itself unfolding in wreckage at its feet. The angel’s back remains turned toward a future that inexorably draws it on and on into whatever future wreckage lies behind.

In many ways, the angel of history is what dictates how we look at the past, although Benjamin argues that we see the past as a series of little catastrophes rather than as one long disaster. Case in point, Jaz Brown’s comment last week at The Distillery: “In 1996, there were no two bands that damaged the mind of a 16-year-old punk stoner as much as Sea Pigs and Schlong.” Brown was midway through an opening set with his band, Sacramento punk mainstays the Helper Monkeys, and his comment was met with raucous and enthusiastic applause from an increasingly drunken audience.

But just because bands were good, influential or even simply entertaining in 1996 doesn’t necessarily mean they are so now. Music culture tends to come to an agreement on the importance of some bands, and that critical understanding makes us sometimes forget how mediocre a band actually is. This happens even on a local level. Brown’s comment was followed by a bewilderingly incoherent set by Sick ‘n’ Tired, a brilliant set by Schlong (a band with long roots into the legendary Gilman Street punk band Operation Ivy, one of the important bands I was discussing earlier) and, in closing, a disappointing set by the Sea Pigs.

Both Schlong and the Sea Pigs were popular (some might say legendary) punk bands well into the 1990s, albeit for different reasons. Back in the day, the Sea Pigs, if we are to believe the stories, reveled in the absurdity of their chosen genre by often performing naked (two out of three are quite large, hairy men—there’s an image for you), while the drummer pounded away at a 16-piece drum kit (with a gong!). It was arena-sized, naked punk rock telescoped down into American dive-bar aesthetics.

I honestly tried to like—or even understand—the Sea Pigs. But without that historical referent, the experience of seeing and hearing the Sea Pigs in their heyday, I could only judge the band on its current state: sloppy, pointless and decidedly not funny. The audience, some of them drunk beyond standing, didn’t seem to care.

But if the Sea Pigs were buried in history’s wreckage, Schlong certainly was flying somewhere up above it. Again, there was no historical referent for me: I had never heard the band before. But Schlong played a set that was tight, frantic, funny and complex—like a punk-speed version of British prog-rockers Yes. One moment, the band was playing ska, and then it was playing hardcore and then disco—sometimes all in the span of 10 seconds. Punk music is (or maybe was) a way to speed the destruction of history itself. But Schlong’s approach is to collect the wreckage and reconstitute it into something new, like a musical collage. The end result even might have made Walter Benjamin revise his thesis. While the angel of history might be facing the past, it certainly has a big, loud schlong pointing firmly into the future. Amazing.