Punk luminary, and certified scary guy with a spooky book collection, Glenn Danzig has had it up to here with your “woke bullshit.” Joining the ranks of Slayer’s Tom Araya and the guy who created Entourage, Danzig is the latest to say that the work he made decades ago could not have come out today. Perhaps forgetting that culture changes, and, yes, there are still plenty of sexist, offensive songs, Danzig told Rolling Stone that he finds it hard to believe that anyone would allow him to record songs like “Last Caress” today because of, you know, the lyrics about raping mothers and killing babies. Curiously, he didn’t comment on the lyrics to “Return Of The Fly,” which includes verses about the film Return Of The Fly with Vincent Price.
“It’s just a crazy-ass song,” Danzig said of “Last Caress.” “We would do things just to piss people off.” When asked if the lyrics were just an exercise in “Let me think of the most fucked up things I can think of,” he responded, “Part of it, yeah. Like, ‘Fuck everybody. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck the world.’ It was just like, ‘Fuck your system, fuck all this bullshit.’ It was something else.” That certainly sounds like the thinking of a 23-year-old, which is precisely how old Danzig was when he first recorded “Last Caress.”
Danzig goes on to complain that the whole “punk explosion” never would’ve happened in the modern age because kids today, God bless ‘em, are too concerned with treating people with respect. They’re all about holding people accountable for the social infractions, and that’s the last thing a punk needs (of course, that is, if you ignore all that punk music that doesn’t just wage reactionary wars against marginalized people). “People don’t understand, because everything’s so cancel-culture, woke bullshit nowadays, but you could never have the punk explosion nowadays, because of cancel culture and woke bullshit. You could never have it. It would never have happened.” Of course, this isn’t entirely true. There are still plenty of buttons to push. For example, last month, Lil Nas X caused wealthy dowagers across America to drop their monocles into their martini glasses with a music video in which he seduces and murders the devil.
“We’re lucky it happened when it did, because it’ll never happen again,” he said of the birth of punk. “You won’t have any of those kinds of bands ever again. Everyone’s so uptight and P.C., it’s just like, ‘OK, whatever.’” It is a shame to think that something that’s already happened won’t happen again. Sigh. Guess we’ll just have to wait for something original to come along. Oh well.