1978 was a pivotal music year for me. I was 15 and distinctly remember Never Mind The Bollocks supplanting Night At The Opera on my mother’s living room stereo (I didn’t have my own yet). Moving away from the apolitical heavy metal, rock and blues of my formative years , when Mike Nicolosi (RIP) and I went record buying we’d return laden with songs that questioned authority and blind acceptance. From Tell Us The Truth to Know Your Product to Do They Owe Us a Living? to anything by X-Ray Spex (or a dozen other bands), rebellion in under 3 minutes radicalized us and set the stage for Nihilistics. That’s why I’m still baffled that some “punk rockers” or hardcore types are political conservatives and even MAGA. I hadn’t experienced this until I shared an office with one such deeply-confused blowhard at Sirius Satellite Radio (this is pre-merger, when XM was still its own company).
I was brought to Sirius by the late, great Jeremy Tepper, who I knew from WFMU. He’d been given the trucking channel to revamp and decided to team me with another WFMU “personality” to present a daily 3-hour talk show. As Sirius added subscribers and the staff expanded to meet the need, my co-host and I were regularly shuffled around the 37th floor. From an open-plan shared desk to a glass-walled corner unit to a narrow office across the hall, the arbitrary command to uproot ourselves always landed just as we’d settled in and the mailroom finally knew where to find us. I’d pack up a well-worn Banker’s Box with all my office tchotchkes, plop it on my Aeron chair and roll myself wherever directed. As I arrived in the narrow office, The Blowhard greeted me enthusiastically.
You on the trucking channel? Truckers LOVE the Patriot channel. I bet we have lots of the same listeners!
I introduced myself and we fell into conversation about the Social Distortion poster above his desk. A bit younger than me, The Blowhard shared that he was into Social D., The Ramones, Agnostic Front, etc. When I mentioned my old NYHC band he said Never heard of the Nihilistics. You guys were in New York?
Unlike my co-host, who usually arrived mere minutes before showtime and whose desk served as loading dock for all the illicit swag she solicited from potential sponsors, I worked in our office. Showing up daily by 8 AM to prepare for our 11 AM show on the “Road Dog,” I soon found it impossible to concentrate. As one of the interchangeable right-wing gasbags bloviating endlessly on the “Patriot Channel,” The Blowhard would audition his full-volume on-air rants mere inches from the back of my head. One of his glorified call-screeners (there was a constant turnover of underpaid youngsters, forced into producer roles) would come in with research or notes or a rundown for that day’s show and The Blowhard, all excited, would say Ooh.. what about this?! Then he’d launch into some standard-issue The Demonrats are destroying this country with their socialism! bullshit. Initially, I’d engage, going point, counter-point on whatever nonsense he spewed. Like the time he started waxing rhapsodic about Ronald Reagan…
The greatest President of my lifetime! The one who restored America and REMINDED THE WORLD what we’re made of!
I squinted hard.
Ronald Wilson Reagan, AKA “666,” the evil fake cowboy Dead Kennedys and a thousand other hardcore bands – including Nihilistics – excoriated in their lyrics? The former B-movie actor elected the same year I graduated Lindenhurst High School – 1980 – and committed myself to the band Mike and I started a year earlier? Mr. Trickle Down, who hollowed out the middle class by instituting massive tax cuts leading to the greatest wrong-way transfer of wealth this country had seen? THAT “Beginning of the End” piece of SHIT?!
When I realized I was spending more time refuting The Blowhard’s proto-MAGA garbage than working on my own show, the Sony MDR-7506 full-coverage headphones I used on air would be quickly clamped over my head. But drowning out The Blowhard was impossible. Determined to force anyone within earshot to become his first audience, he came to see me as his Resident Liberal Guinea Pig. Not willing to serve as his test pilot, I’d routinely complain to my manager Dave, the guy who hired me, pleading to be moved someplace, any place else. By the time Donald Trump rode down his golden horseshit elevator, The Blowhard and I had finally parted ways. I’d pass him in the hallway on the way to our studio and it was all we could do to nod at each other.
Within two years of Donald Trump’s first election our Road Dog show Freewheelin’ was canceled and my co-host and I fired. No one’s ever told me the real reason but I pieced together a theory, based on what the obsequious ad sales guy insinuated. Several large trucking fleets, based on supposed “Christian Values,” didn’t cotton to politics creeping into our show. It began in earnest the day after the election, with truckers calling in to gloat.
We had to put up with Obama for eight years! Now you get to see what it was like for us.
I always preferred a scalpel to a cleaver, responding with I don’t think this well end well. My co-host, butcher that she was, hacked away at the caller, unloading all her bitterness and frustration and – after hanging up on him – turning to our call-screener to declare He’s BANNED.
The blacklist kept growing and whenever I’d cross paths with Obsequious Ad Sales Guy at a truck show he’d confide about being caught between squeamish sponsors and new management forever pressing him to crank up the “spend.” Because my co-host and I hated each other (YOU trying working in such an intimate way with a dark triad personality), management saw us as problematic beyond what the truckers labeled our “Libtard” leanings. Given the opportunity to replace us, in April 2018 we were given the We’re going in a new direction… heave-ho. Our slot was taken over by an anodyne “by-the-numbers” host who didn’t require a salary (he flogged his own products) and kept his politics to himself… until two years later, when he mused on air about shooting a Democratic member of Congress and was also fired.
Now Donald Trump is back and I find it difficult to modulate my anger at my fellow Americans. As I predicted the day after the 2016 Presidential election, this will not end well and we didn’t need a second bite of this shit sandwich to find out.
My new (used) electric car came with SiriusXM and I was tempted to check out my old haunts (I was on the Blues Channel, Outlaw Country and Road Dog) and also see if The Blowhard is still on the Patriot Channel. So far, I’ve listened to some Outlaw Country, a few other music channels (the audio quality has degraded even further and is now indistinguishable from poor-quality MP3s) and a bit of Howard Stern (in full-blown Reformed Interviewer mode). I can’t bring myself to tune into Patriot because I know what I’ll find: The Blowhard, or someone cut from the same cloth, who might consider themselves “punk rock” but ends up sucking corporate dick while singing the praises of anyone who “…owns the Libtards.” I’d rather fire up my FUCK THIS SHIT playlist:
Blank Generation – Richard Hell & the Voidoids
God Save The Queen – Sex Pistols
Know Your Product – The Saints
Rip Off – Sham 69
(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais – The Clash
Welcome to the Working Week – Elvis Costello
I Live Off You – X-Ray Spex
Down in the Tube Station at Midnight – The Jam
Do They Owe Us a Living? – Crass
Typical Girls – The Slits
California Über Alles – Dead Kennedys
Decontrol – Discharge
Final Solution – Pere Ubu
Bored Teenagers – The Adverts
Johnny Was – Stiff Little Fingers
A Message To You Rudy – The Specials
Teenage Kicks – The Undertones
Shot By Both Sides – Magazine
Making Plans For Nigel – XTC
Emergency – 999
Society – Subhumans
Nihilistics – Welfare For The Rich
If you’d like to add songs to this playlist, click here.