“Where will you go / if it’s the end of the line
Where will you go / if you’re living a lie”
—Outernational “Where Will You Go?”
Words by Jason Lee. Photo by @podglorious.
The 12 songs found on Welcome to the Revolution which is the new LP by Brooklyn-by-way-of-Bogotá-based-band Outernational released last Friday that’s reportedly been 13 years in the making (or in the releasing, at least!) taken together form a powerful manifesto (manifesto being a word band frontman Miles Solay would likely approve of given his revolutionary leanings but maybe less so the word frontman given that the Revolutionary Communist Party doesn’t so much believe in bosses but does believe in workers seizing the means of production so better watch those bandmates!) a musical manifesto advocating not so much for change in society or changes made to society but rather a more thoroughgoing change of societies….
…so in other words we’re talkin’ real “tear it up and start again” revolutionary type shiz here which won’t take too long to suss out once you start listening to the lyrics and we’re all for it cuz agitprop rock has been in regrettably short supply lately (see NYC’s Latinx punk scene for the some of the best existant stuff) seeking nothing less than the overthrow of capitalist realism dominant since the early days of Reaganism/Thatcherism (“neoliberalism” if you prefer) and which to quote from British philosopher/music blogger Mark Fisher’s book which popularized the term: “there’s a widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it’s impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it…where it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” to which Outernational says phooey on that…
…which isn’t to say Solay and long-time musical partner Jesse Williams nor their current bandmates would likely disagree with the underpinnings of Fisher’s theory, nor the deeply embedded nature of “false consciousness” itself, but still they’re clearly fierce and fiercely optimistic advocates of doing exactly what “capitalist realism” deems nearly impossible namely imagining coherent alternatives to the myth of unlimited growth that grows exponentially in magnitude for all eternity which ya gotta admit sounds pretty unrealistic whatever your political persuasion happens to be but hey we’re just a dumb ol’ music blog and nowhere near on the level of Mark Fisher (RIP) so take it with a grain of salt at least…
…or better yet with a grain of Outernational’s music cuz chances are this clutch of rabble-rousing tunes will change some minds and even if they’re over a decade old in provenance they sound like they were written just yesterday to address the jittery state of the world today rendered sonically in the band’s galvanizing “future rock“™ taking punk rock and progressive ideals pureéd with everything from reggae and hip hop to Latinx music and covers of “Electric Avenue” thus lending support to Solay’s inclusive big-tent street-preacher style of vocalizing and proselytizing for the cause (check out the opening monologue of the not-quite-titular opening track for starters) custom-made for occupying and commanding public spaces thru sheer musical power…
….and that’s not metaphorical either cuz earlier tonight (now yesterday) Outernational used their music to occupy public spaces during a pop-up mobile concert playing on the back of a flat-bed truck that made its way from the East to the West Village ending up on Bleeker Street in front of Village Revival Records where the band held a record-signing (gotta survive in this “shitstem” system somehow!)…
…but not before playing “Further In” with it’s fist-pumping, spine-tingling epic finalé (see below) as fans and passers-by alike bopped and moshed in the middle of the street blocking traffic on a one-way street but no one even honked their horn which says something and bigger-picture wise serves as a radical gesture in today’s society of the spectacle (as well as the passive spectator!_ dominated as it is by screens and by pervasive surveillance which granted we videoed a bunch of Outernational’s performance cuz we just can’t seem to help ourselves playing documentarian tho’ rest assured we bopped around some too…
…or as anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman almost once put it: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” and if you missed the show you should probably head to Le Poisson Rouge tomorrow (Thurs. 9.19) where the OFFICIAL RELEASE PARTY/INDOOR PERFORMANCE for Welcome To The Revolution will take place but we digress seeing as we came here to talk about manifestos with Marx’s being probably the most famous of the bunch and have you ever wondered why so many manifestos are written in bullet point, PowerPoint-ready form like a laundry list of revolutionary observations and insights, protests and calls to action….
…which maybe cuz it allows authors to get down their revolutionary thoughts on the back of grocery receipts and the like while going about their day which is highly identifiable at least and goddam if Marx wasn’t expert at composing pithy, memorable lines like, “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism” (first sentence of the entire Communist Manifesto!) or the bullet point he uses to open Chapter One which reads in its entirety, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” which is a technique known among professional copy editors as getting straight to the motherf*cking point…
…with another good example being French philosopher Guy Dubord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967)being organized as a series of over 200 numbered statements, aphorisms, and hypotheses all a paragraph long and no more but with some being one or two sentences and others going on for an entire page or more depending on your edition’s font size with Dubord’s first #1 observation being: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”…
…which is one way we turn ourselves into exchangeable products a/k/a commodities you see with the salent point for our purposes here being how LPs a/k/a record albums (fun fact: the first albums were literally just that—multiple vinyl records housed in paper sleeves that you had to flip through like pages in a scrapbook) are truly the perfect format for creating and distributing manifestos given their enumerative format with each song on a good album standing alone as a pithy statement on its own terms but taking on added resonance in introducing some new angle to a larger narrative or thematic whole like a missing puzzle piece sliding into place…
…and guess what Welcome to the Revolution serves as an textbook example opening with “Welcome” which acts as the musical manifesto’s introductory chapter laying out its overarching goals and the passionate determination driving it forward as signified by the song’s restless musical pulsations and tumbling cascade of words with the next track retreating just slightly inward and taking on a more specific mission and perspective with “Women on the Edge of Time” arriving as a cri de coeur protest song in the guise of a punky-Clashy reggae party…
….followed by “The Walking Dead” which is more about brutal self-reckoning in the face of the coming struggle and the potential danger of self-doubt and disassociation (“you built a prison all around your head”) alternating musically between boomy-doomy drums and trumpet fanfare with more psych-laced guitar and keys perhaps standing for a mind divided against itself and so on and so forth as the LP progresses all the way thru to the penultimate battle hymn of “Whirlwind of Change” with it’s Pogues-playing-a-sea-shanty vibe complete with a beer-hoisting singalong chorus as encountered frequently across the album which are not infrequently wordless in a gesture of pure human connection and communion…
…finally concluding with the emancipators of humanity being celebrated on “Le Genie Nueva” like handing the baton over to the next runner fittingly for a closing track cuz any good revolution oughta end with “new generation” of youngs who’ll keep the revolutionary fire burning with Outernational playing up their Latinx music influences on the track…
…and inspired by the album’s manifesto format we’ll close things out with a little list of our own in the form of 12 observations, aphorism, and stray thoughts inspired by Welcome to the Revolution with a final postscript being that after meeting the members of Outernational last night at the record signing (including Chad Smith—yes, that Chad Smith!) we think it’s safe to say you should watch this space for a sequel to the piece digging into the how and the why of the album taking 13 years to see the light of day and we’ve been tipped there’s a juicy story waiting to be told but until then we’re guessing it’s safe to say capitalism may be to blame…
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#1
As it turns out, 2011 was the perfect time to write, record, and (not) release an album that would arguably become more relevant than ever in 2024 cuz while the early 2010s saw a volley of grassroots social movements launched in the U.S. and abroad from across the political spectrum including Occupy Wall Street (the movement officially kicked off 13 years ago to the day of Outernational’s own pop-up occupation), the Tea Party, the Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter all pretty much fizzled out within a few years except for BLM tho’ they’ve all had an impactful, lasting legacy for better and worse—morphed, splintered, and pushed to greater extremes cuz those are the times we live in…
#2
Here’s our totally unsubstantiated “theory” on the name Outernational: While the word INTERnational refers to global relations typically centered around a relatively small number of geographic and class-based power centers set against a vast array of “margins” (helping lead to #1 above) we can only but guess OUTERnational is intended to describe global relations which deliberately seek to de-center the aforementioned power centers and to spread the wealth more equitably given that the prefix “outer” literally means “outside of” and “being away from a center” so anyway it’s a theory…
#3
Eddie Grant is a badass. Track five on Welcome to the Revolution is a cover of Grant’s 1982/83 hit “Electric Avenue” which has always been a great tune and innovative for its time but we never realized it was inspired by the 1981 Brixton uprising responding to rampant violence and mistreatment by police plus somehow we never realized the Clash’s “Police on my Back” was an Eddie Grant cover itself (with The Equals) or that Grant’s music was in general so sociopolitically engaged so we’re grateful and what’s more he invented a whole new musical genre called ringbang in the ‘90s so yeah Eddie’s a badass…
#4
While the Revolution LP deals lyrically with being trapped in the pocket of entrenched political interests and socioeconomic forces and empwering oneself to get out of that pocket, drummer Chad Smith is super in the pocket at all times on everything he plays which we now realize even more than before after seeing him play livea and close up not to mention his mastery of so-called ghost notes so due respect to the man for being RHCP’s secret weapon for decades running not to mention having a fascinatingly diverse career since the Chili Pepper’s heyday and supporting many a good cause…
#5
Communists really love themselves some Bob Avakian.
#6
We know we already sorta covered this but the lines “earthquakes, lightning and southern tornados / the wind in my face as the Northern air blows / doctors in back-alleys and air-raids that don’t stop / hunted like animals, chased by the cops” from “Welcome” sure sounds prescient today even tho’ they were written 13-ish years ago as climate disasters persist and worsen (ditto police brutality) and with the overturning of Roe. vs. Wade etc. etc.
#7-12
Coming soon…