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By the early 1980s, Southern California was well on its way to becoming the asphalted calamity it now is, and I remember talking with friends about the disappearing fields and orange groves as we hiked foothill trails late at night, with Rush or Led Zeppelin or Peter Gabriel (or Devo, U2, or the Christian "new wave" band Undercover) blasting from a portable cassette player.
Our valley, the San Bernardino one, had never been counted among So Cal's hip sections. The valley of the "Valley Girl" craze (c. 1982)—which, like, permanently altered casual American speech—sprouted in the distant ravines of San Fernando. And while San Bernardino was too much of a backwater for us to be up on the lesser known fashions afoot nearer to L.A.—and especially in The Valley—we heard from to time about the emerging punk rock "scene."
As one would expect, most of the bands that fed that scene came and went—where, if anywhere, are Jody Foster's Army, the Dead Kennedys, Agent Orange, the Minutemen, and China White? But one of those bands, Bad Religion, lives still. As I write this, its frontman, Greg Graffin, is sick at home with pneumonia. He tells me that this is the price he's paying for doing seven west coast concerts without a day's rest. Even atheists, it turns out, need a Sabbath.
Graffin, now in his late thirties, is working on BR's next record, (due in the summer), and he sports a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology acquired last August at Cornell.
It was in the Carter era that Graffin migrated to The Valley from Wisconsin with his mother. According to lore, he started Bad Religion at the age of 15 in response to the mediocrity and brainlessness of late-Cold War suburbia. And as BR became one of the best known (and certainly the most enduring) of the Southland's punk bands, Graffin helped to create a distinct subculture centered on mini-music festivals, angst-ridden song lyrics, skateboarding, complaining, bucking authority, and enjoyment of free speech and capitalist-created wealth.
In the relevant literature (such as it is), BR's music is invariably called "catchy," "hook-filled," and "melody-driven." The band's relentless, hard-edged pace evokes the adjectives "sizzling," "hurtling," "blasting," "rapid-fire," and "breathless." Stranger than Fiction, the only BR record since 1990 to which the steadfastly obtuse Rolling Stone gave more than three stars on a five-star scale (it got 3.5), rips through 15 songs in 39 minutes. Graffin and company are known for plowing through 30 tunes in 75-minute sets. And in the clichéd language of pop-culture journalism, Graffin's message is called "socially conscious"—whatever that means.
But it's obvious that Graffin's lyrics are brighter than the pop music norm—which, on first glance, isn't saying much. And while his observations are sometimes banal ("What the world needs now is some answers to our problems"), sometimes abstruse ("The billions of tiny pinhole embers fade into a morning sky filled with poignant morose wonder"), they often impress with their restless, probing intelligence.
Graffin's 1994 songs, "Television" and "21st Century Digital Boy," along with "I Love My Computer" (2000), do a good job of describing—and mocking—the electronic stupefaction that pervades American life. "Supersonic" (2002) comments on the frenetic pace of American modernity. "American Jesus" (1993) takes a helpful shot at civil religion. "Mediocre Minds" (1998) is the theme song in my honors Western Civ class. And insofar as promoting skepticism toward what someone has called the "government-media complex" is concerned, Graffin's "State of the End of the Millennium Address" (also 1998) gets more done in 2.5 minutes than the editorial pages of The Nation manage to accomplish in years. "Neighbors," he begins, posing as a government humanoid, "nobody loves you like we do."
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