![]() It was–except the part about dressing cool–all bullshit, of course, but it was good bullshit, and the conviction with which Svenonious sold it to the scene made it great: like a pro wrestler, he’d never admit it wasn’t real. This holiday season, save a space for local journalism.Īround this sound Svenonious built a whole imaginary revolutionary movement whose complete history was documented on record sleeves and in liner notes, as well as the zine and pamphlet series Ulysses Speaks! Included with the band’s very first release was “The Grand Scheme for the Fate of Things Great and Small,” a five-point program to live by that included a directive to “dress well, as clothing and fashion are the only things that we, the kids, being utterly disenfranchised, have any control over” and the promise of “violent destruction of the new urban bourgeoisie and the playgrounds and monuments which spring up all over this city and country, marring the landscape unforgivably, while forcing rents up and the dispossessed out.” Not content just to put out a record, he had to create what one of the song titles dubbed “The Sound of Young America.” “I’m an atom bomb,” he sang, and the music–a strangely ordered cacophony of guitar feedback, driving drums, and an apocalyptic trumpet bleating in the distance–hit like one. But Svenonious went right for the jugular from Nation of Ulysses’s first release. ![]() Most bands toss off a few seven-inches before really finding their sound, cementing their ideology. ![]() It seemed to come out of nowhere–even in the context of the relatively progressive underground in Washington, D.C., at the time. Svenonious’s first band, Nation of Ulysses, emerged at the start of the decade into a scene that was caught up in tough-guy hardcore posturing and a dry political discourse that had grown outright stale over the last decade. But we like it, and we like Svenonious–one of a handful of visionaries, along with Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and Outpunk fanzine’s Matt Wobensmith, to make a real musical and philosophical mark on punk rock in the 90s. Yeah, we have seen it all before–the white-boy soul dressed out with just enough distortion to make it seem relevant, the James Brown tiptoe posturing, the organ pumping, the pegged black pants, and yes, even the gravity-defying do Svenonious is sporting up there onstage.
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