ARCHITECTS OF SELF-DESTRUCTION: THE ORAL HISTORY OF LEFTÖVER CRACK - BRAD LOGAN & JOHN GENTILE

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Here’s my LÖC story and some background: I’m not a huge fan of punk or ska (especially the non-Jamaican waves) but I do like the look and the ethos and the sorts of people that populate the scene. In High School, punk-wise, I was basically just into Dead Kennedys and LÖC. Both had catchy music and political lyrics that managed to be interesting and funny. I learned about the MOVE bombing from LÖC. Anyway, when I was 18 and living in Chicago I wanted to go see them on their tour. Turns out their anti-cop stance had actually cost them something and they couldn’t play a show within Chicago proper. The police would shut down any club that would book them. So they booked a gig in some shitty south Chicago suburb that took me forever to get to on public transportation. When I got there the show was still being harassed. The fire department was there to shut them down, despite the crowd being normal-sized for a show. The bands on the bill, I can only remember Citizen Fish, eventually decided to play the whole show, then switch out the audience and play the whole show again. Then there was debate about whether or not the second show would be all-ages because of how late it would be starting (some dumb rule in this dumb suburb) which made it unclear if LÖC would play the second show since their politics precluded age-restricted shows. Either way, I got to see them and they were, as advertised, dirty dudes who looked like they lived in abandoned buildings. It didn’t seem like an act. The show was wild and a ton of fun and it took me over 2 hours to get back on various Chicago buses and trains on the Southside in the middle of the night. I say all that to say that I love LÖC and was very excited to hear that someone had written a book about them. The book is what it promises to be, a long oral history of LÖC and the scene around them. It goes from the Choking Victim days up through right now and hits all the major milestones. We hear about LÖC’s label issues, the response they got releasing an album called “Fuck World Trade” on Sept. 11. As an aside, a member of LÖC was working in the towers, on a floor that got obliterated by the planes, up to the Friday before the attack, when he quit to tour behind the FWT album. It’s an oral history so it reads super, super fast and sticks to the most exciting anecdotes. There’s lots of great stories about getting in fights on the road, starting riots at shows, crazy drug stuff, life in a squat and all that. There’s an interesting story about Stza writing “Gay Rude Boys Unite” after confronting the manager of Buju Banton about Banton’s homophobia. I wish more time had been spent on the larger squatting scene in NYC at the time. I realized I’m asking for a different book but I would have liked to know more about the history of LES squatting and C-Squat in particular. It’s a strange moment in American history, Seattle has a worse homeless problem now than NYC did then and yet there are basically no squats here, the police are very aggressive against anything resembling such a situation. I’ve seen them deploy the SWAT team on groups who’d occupied a building less than a day. I’m just intrigued by that world. Likewise with the train-hopping, which we only hear about in this book, the authors don’t go deep into it. If you have any interest in LÖC I’d recommend this book, it’s an overgrown magazine article but if you care about the subject it’s a nice little stroll down memory lane. 666 crack rocks.