The Mekons – "The Mekons Rock’n’Roll" (A&M/TwinTone)

By the time the Mekons finally got signed by a major label it was 1989 and the band, art-school mates born of the punk fury in 1977, had already weathered through a vile decade or more of populist neo-punk subversion. So when someone at A&M Records bought off on the band releasing a major work on their imprint, you have to wonder just who the fuck it was that fell asleep at the wheel. No matter who the sap (or would it be savvy?) was, no one could have been remotely prepared for the cultural drubbing the Mekons were about to deliver.

Growling, ragged guitars, scowling in pain, sounding like someone violently and maliciously tuning the damn things sets off a fuse on "Memphis, Egypt". The song opens the record with a furious kick ("Destroy your safe and happy lives, before it is too late") and the door comes quickly off its hinges. The Mekons sound like a band that had lay in waiting for this sort of moment for a very long time; the snake had finally gotten loose in the halls of a distinctly capitalist (and entirely unsavory) industry that had turned "rock and roll" into a inconsequential brand name.

Knowing, perhaps, that the mirage of being on a major label would dissipate quickly, the Mekons vented all of the frustrations that art tends to have with commerce in a bloody howl that indicted music, sex, drugs, America (which the band had always harbored a love/hate relationship with), and even U2 demi-god Bono ("Blow Your Tuneless Trumpet" hears the band opine "We don’t want the glamour, the pomp and the drums, the Dublin Messiah scattering crumbs, just blow…blow your tuneless trumpet"). But it’s the bands unrelenting drubbing of "rock’n’roll" itself (the r’n’r tag is mentioned in at least half of the records tunes) that serves the records most damning volley. The Mekons aren’t questioning the validity of rock and roll as an art form (one listen to the raging rockroll racket they make on the record and that debate is quickly settled), they are deliriously slashing away at an industry which had turned their beloved rock sounds into so much corporate muzak mush.

So it was, the Mekons serving up their most subversive treat while sitting squarely in the lap of the industry they lay waste to. Rock’n’Roll was the first and last moment that the Mekons had within the beast. A&M tossed out a sloppy (and again they were subverted by the bands keen sense of humor) supposed "dance mix" record by the band titled F.U.N. ’90, and then sent them on their merry way. It was too late though; the patient snake had left its indelible venom – a record that will forever poison an industry that’d been, for a brief moment, had by a bunch of silly art students from Leeds, England. Indispensable.

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