In/Humanity - Violent Resignation
In/Humanity is more responsible for how I have turned out than my parents.
Let me explain.
Ryan and I discussed the idea of writing about records that have had a big impact on how we turned out. I like the idea and instantly thought about writing about In/Humanity's "The Nutty Anti-Christ." Really, though, "History Behind the Mystery" could work too. I suppose we can just say I'm writing about "Violent Resignation," In/Humanity's kick-ass discography. The point is that In/Humanity, no matter what record we're talking about, has made me the person I am, for better or worse.
When I was in high school I was in a pretty standard issue hardcore band. We kind of mixed Infest type stuff with old school type stuff. Nothing special, but we had a lot of fun. At the time, the only places to really play where I was from were people's basements. The only real venue in the area closed after a few shows, and we had a lot of trouble getting stuff set up in the city, seeing as we were high school kids from various suburbs of Chicago. My friend Ben had a perfect basement for shows: longer than it was wide, back room to store shit in, stairs that gave easy access both to said back room and the "stage" area. On top of that, the first show we did there got the room so humid that the walls began to drip. All the bands and kids got a kick out of the "sweating" walls which served to convince us that we rocked so hard the room couldn't take it, cementing Ben's basement as the high water mark of friend's basements to play in.
The particular show in Ben's basement which changed my life wa at some point in early 1997, if I remember correctly. I suppose it could have also been late '96, but '97 sticks out to me for some reason. There were a whole lot of bands playing that night. Ben just didn't say no to anyone who asked so half the bands in the area were playing, along with the mighty Charles Bronson from DeKalb. We were all way into Charles Bronson. They seemed, to us, like slightly older versions of ourselves: they had a lot of fun playing, they didn't take themselves too seriously, they wrote songs with goofy lyrics that had this undercurrent of bored, middle-class, white kid rage. We all kind of aspired to be them in a few years, after we graduated from high school and could have a bit more autonomy in our lives. Needless to say, I was fucking stoked about the show.
We fliered it pretty heavily at our school. I must have handed a flier to everyone I came across in the week leading up to the show. Thanks to our efforts, when the show finally came it was absolutely packed. The entire girls' volleyball team showed up, for some reason. At one point we had to ask people from our high school who just came out to hang out and weren't interested in the bands to go outside so kids who actually drove up to see the bands could come in and watch the show. It was pandemonium. Kids everywhere, packed in, sweating, making noise. You could barely move in the basement.
This was an odd time in our lives. We thought we were hot shit because we could get a lot of people to show up to a show. We didn't know that very soon we would have to start competing with alcohol and the attendance was about to drop way off. At this point, however, we thought we were hot shit.
Ben informed me at the beginning of the show that Charles Bronson were bringing some friends of theirs to play the show. Some band from the south who was on tour and had no place to play in Chicago that night. I was actually kind of bummed about this. The show was already packed and had too many bands. Why do we need one more? The band turned out to be In/Humanity from South Carolina. My feelings were not dissuaded when they actually rolled up to the show in their beat up van. The guys who fell out of the van didn't look like hardcore kids to me. Their singer was this tiny guy with a weird-ass bowl haircut and what looked to me like a puke yellow leisure suit shirt from the 70s on. Their drummer had a beard halfway down his chest. He spoke with a thick southern accent. I instantly hated them. Hardcore bands, I thought, don't have bowl haircuts, beards, and weird shirts from the 70s. They have t-shirts with block lettering or pictures of genocides on them, shaved heads, and cargo pants. And hardcore doesn't come from the south, it comes from the coasts. These guys just seemed like some bizarre novelty act that stood between me and Charles Bronson.
I watched them set up their merch in the driveway. Their record was a 12" LP with a naked guy in a bathtub on the back of it. It seemed all wrong to me. It was called "The Nutty Anti-Christ" and I thought that was kind of funny, but I assumed it was just dumb luck that they came up with something that clever. They pulled out a box of their new seven inch and it featured a picture of a giant robot crushing people under it's spiked, metal boot and was called "Your Future Lies Smoldering at the Feet of the Robots." Okay. That was fucking cool. Score one for them. But my 17 year old high school self still knew that they were going to suck. No one with hair and beards like that could rock. There was just no way.
The show was a fucking blast. My band played as well as we ever played, as did all the other bands. Eventually, that band from the south with the weird hair and beards and shirts set up their shit. Almost no one except for a few kids who happened to know who they were payed any attention while they set up. I was standing on the stairs and I could see in the faces of the few kids watching them set up that they knew they were in for something mind blowing. I remember the face of this one kid, grinning ear to ear as he watched In/Humanity set up.
We didn't have P.A. system. We just had a shit microphone plugged into a shit guitar amp that was constantly feeding back. As In/Humanity finished setting up almost no one was paying them any attention. We were all clearly waiting for Charles Bronson to start. I kept looking at that kid's face and getting this inkling that he knew something big was about to happen. The singer switched on the microphone and a blast of feedback screeched out of the amp. He said something along the lines of "thanks for letting us play in this basement full of nice people. We're In/Humanity and this song is called 'Double Digit Fun' and it's by In/Humanity." The drummer gave four clicks and they launched into the song.
I could actually feel my life change forever at that moment.
For real. Literally.
In/Humanity rocked that set like they were trying to beat their worst enemy to death. They didn't so much play their instruments as torture them. They didn't so much perform a song as birth it, cesarian style. Their guitar player thrashed and writhed around like he was in the process of trying to self-immolate himself but ran out of matches. At one point their singer pantomimed burning a flag. I got it. I just got it. It was like they had seen inside my head and taken my thoughts and translated them into something that could, very loosely, be called music.
In that basement, on that night, it was like In/Humanity knew the world was ending tomorrow and they were collectively sacrificing themselves to the Gods of Rock to prevent the apocalypse and save all the rest of us, like that guy at the end of The Black Cauldron.
A friend of ours was filiming the show. After the first song you can hear him say "should I be filming this band" to me. My reponse is something like "are you fucking kidding? Don't take the camera off them for a second!" I felt like we were capturing Kennedy's fucking assassination on film.
The guitar player's amp broke and while he switched amps the singer told stories about stealing Anton La Vey's mail, and getting stopped by cops and only getting away because he convinced the cops they knew Hootie and the Blowfish. The guitar player pulled a fast one on all us hardcore kids by claiming, during their set, that he was in Agnostic Front. I was old enough and smart enough to realize that this guy from South Carolina who didn't look that much older than me was clearly making this shit up, but some of the younger kids ate it up with a spoon. They covered "Victim in Pain" and it was like a bomb went off in the basement. After the set some kids got the guitar player's autograph, not realizing he was making that shit up. I like to think he signed it Todd Youth or Rob Kabula.
In/Humanity probably made a killing that night. I think everyone there bought everything they had. We gave their singer a t-shirt for our band and he put it on right away, smiling broadly and joking about how it went with that bizarre shirt he was wearing. I felt conflicted when I saw him wearing it. On one hand, he seemed genuinely into the shirt, and it was a real nice gesture to put it on. On the other hand, I knew that we were a joke compared to In/Humanity and I felt a bit like a fraud handing him that shirt. He had to know that we were just some bullshit hardcore band and they were... something beyond that. Something far beyond that.
I took their records home and listened to them until I wore them out. "The Nutty Anti-Christ" came with about a bazillion inserts that had all manner of random shit on it. One featured design ideas for D.I.Y. In/Humanity shirts that said things like "Minds are like parachutes- they only work when they're open, ASSHOLE" and "God is my co-pilot and I'm getting a blowjob." I put that insert on my wall in my dorm room when I went to school and it freaked the fuck out of this girl who was friends with my roommate. That's what In/Humanity was good at, though. Dividing the wheat from the fucking chaff. 99.9% of the population is going to hear this abrasive, violent shit and say "no thanks." Even most hardcore kids weren't about to take them serioiusly. But if you were one of that .1% that heard them and just got it, like I was, it was life altering.
What really worked for them was how, for lack of a better word, beautiful the music was. Most people are going to hear it and say "wow... this is just noise," missing the point. But underneath that there's this real swell of a kind of fucked up melody that comes out. Listening to In/Humanity is a lesson in enlightened nihilism: there's beauty in chaos.
I began to think like In/Humanity. I "embraced smashism" as they asked their listeners to do, tounges firmly planted in cheeks. I began to see music differently. Precision was no longer as important as chaos. Clarity no longer as important as ambiguity. In/Humanity ironically called their music "emo-violence," an attempt to take two totally at odds genres, so-called emo and so-called power violence, and merge them into something with such a ludicrous name that no one could possibly take them seriously. It's a great testament to In/Humanity that bands actually began, totally unironically, calling themselves "emo-violence." They had a way of making that kind of shit happen. In/Humanity's singer, Chris Bickel, was sort of like a punk rock Ron Jones, converting kids to some club which existed just to demonstrate to them how gullible they really were.
After that show I was never quite able to look at a band the same way again. All bands have been measured against that standard set in my head by the mighty In/Humanity. Chris Bickel went on to "sing" in Guyana Punch Line and wrote a pretty good column in MRR that I always enjoyed reading. Actually, it was, at one point, the primary reason I bought that thing. He's now doing a noise project called Anakrid. The guitar player, Paul Swanson, played in a pretty good band called Black Merinos. I have no idea what anyone else who was ever associated with In/Humanity could possibly do with their life. I'm not sure I want to know.
What I do know is that In/Humanity has never got the credit they deserve. They don't fit easily into a story line. There's a million shit bands that kids still eat up because you can say "oh, they were from New York and played with Gorilla Biscuits in the late 80s," somehow making them eternal. In/Humanity doesn't have a story line like that, so most kids now getting into stuff like this won't even hear of them.
That's a fucking shame.
So I guess that's my story line. One day, four weird guys from the south rolled into town with their weird band and I was never the same. It's now 11 years later and I still get a chill when I put on the In/Humanity discography and hear that opening blast to "Double Digit Fun." That day Jesus Christ knocked on the door to my heart and the Devil answered the door with a churlish grin.
Giving you some idea.
