Nofx

Under the wing of Bad Religion and Descendents, the early '80s saw the blossoming of Californian melodic hardcore, a scene moving between Los Angeles and the Bay Area built on speed, sing-along choruses and skateboarding – far removed from the caustic sound of Black Flag and T.S.O.L. or the political commitment of Dead Kennedys, and closer instead to the singalong catchiness of Ramones and Beach Boys. Throughout the decade, records and shows multiplied from bands like NOFX, Operation Ivy, Green Day, Rancid, No Use For A Name, Offspring and Mr. T Experience, thanks to the work of independent labels such as Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion's Epitaph (1981) in Hollywood, Lawrence Livemore's Lookout! (1987) in Berkeley, and later Fat Mike of NOFX and his wife's Fat Wreck Chords (1990) in San Francisco.

This was a musical and cultural phenomenon that – starting out of clubs, squats, community centers and skate parks tied to the hardcore network since the late '70s – spread across the rest of California (Lagwagon, Pennywise, Blink 182) and the wider United States (Screechin' Weasel, The Queers), soon becoming a global phenomenon on the scale of grunge, with the worldwide success in 1994 of albums like "Dookie" (Reprise) and "Smash" (Epitaph), which dominated MTV's schedule with videos in heavy rotation. The record industry had in fact turned to the punk-rock ferment to find the next big thing and escape the gloom of the Seattle sound – in the very year Kurt Cobain took his own life – finding the perfect mass-media formula in Green Day, who had just left Lookout!, and in Offspring, still briefly with Epitaph, who with "Smash" had released an all-time indie bestseller that would go on to sell eleven million copies.

True to their independent ethos, NOFX steered clear of the media circus, turned down major labels and MTV, and set up their own label to channel their creativity through EPs and live releases while supporting the scene, remaining loyal to Epitaph. In that emblematic year of 1994 – which became for punk what 1991 was for grunge ("the year punk broke...!") – NOFX delivered, with their fifth album "Punk in Drublic" – an anagram of drunk in public – one of the masterpieces of contemporary punk: a full 40 minutes (!!!) of adrenaline-fuelled, ironic, larger-than-life music, packed with singalong melodies that never fall back on pre-existing formulas.

Opening the record is a true generational anthem, "Linoleum", a track that stands as a model not only of melodic hardcore but of a creativity that is anything but obvious:

Possessions never meant anything to me

I'm not crazy

Well that’s not true, I’ve got a bed

And a guitar, and a dog named Bob who pisses on my floor

That’s right, I’ve got a floor

So what? So what? So what?

A little over two minutes long, kicked off by an iconic guitar hook, with no proper chorus to speak of, yet certain lines still lodge themselves in your head as instant singalong fodder ("So what? So what? So what?"). A tense rhythmic gallop, often carried by two harmonized vocal lines, that briefly empties out midway through into a kind of bridge, which does nothing but fire the song back into orbit toward its closing, circling back on that opening hook.

What follows are sixteen more tracks, wildly varied and built on fluid, intricate structures, where the rhythm section locks in with Fat Mike's ironic lyrics and El Hefe's inventive guitar flourishes — the band's eclectic six-string voice — which, just like "Linoleum", update punk-rock ("Leave It Alone", "Fleas", "Dying Degree", "Lori Meyers" featuring Kim Shattuc of the Muffs) by injecting it with oi ("The Brews"), metal ("The Quass"), reggae and ska ("My Heart Is Yearning") — sometimes even blended together within the same track ("Dig", "Reeko") — always with a healthy dose of absurdist humor.

While the album's other unforgettable anthem, "Don't Call Me White", carries a defiant political charge ("The connotations wearing my nerves thin/ Could it be semantics generating the mess we're in?/ I understand that language breeds stereotype/ But what's the explanation for the malice, for the spite?"), "Perfect Government" — a cover of a song by Mark Curry, El Hefe's former bandmate — lets the specter of parody creep in, with the perfect interplay of loud/quiet and stop/start dynamics capturing the schizophrenic pull of the lyrics ("How can they sleep at night?/ How did the cat get so fat?").

Finally, acoustic guitar surfaces on "Scavenger Type", a folk-ska chant that closes the album on a note of (seemingly) calm. If you have the patience to let this last track keep playing, you'll even catch snippets of studio chatter in which El Hefe does impressions of cartoon characters, riffing on stereotypes straight out of the punk-meets-Walt-Disney-television playbook.

"Punk In Drublic" leaves behind a collection of lines that add up to a chaotic survival manual for everyday life, for those treacherous years of the globalized economy's latent, persuasive shaping of society, when everything was turning "liquid", to borrow Bauman's term:

Leave it the same, change with the leaves

Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the old

Leave it alone

Looking back on NOFX's discography, the band members themselves see "Punk In Drublic" differently — for Fat Mike it isn't their best work, unlike what El Hefe claims — perhaps precisely because the album best captures the meeting of minds within the group, between more provocative punk visions and a musical hedonism that emerges from the many different approaches at play, recalling the spirit of the Clash.

The fact remains that "Punk In Drublic" — an independent album that has sold over a million copies — left its mark on thousands of teenagers around the world, who picked up instruments to play "Linoleum" and "Don't Call Me White" — yours truly included — collectively defusing the anxieties of a decade as quietly complicated as the 1990s, a time when the tide of rampant 80s capitalism's great con job was building toward the dramatic reckoning of the 2001 Genoa G8 riots.

"Punk in Drublic" reminds us not to take anything seriously and to take everything into account, to deflate the performative careerism that creeps in as early as our school years, to sing and party, going back to punk culture's old motto — that "no future" which might seem to leave us empty-handed, but can actually leave us with everything (we need).

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26/03/2023