If you would've asked me back in 1988 if I was a fan of Flipper, I would've been
dumbfounded. "Err..the show about the dolphin you mean?? Are you kidding?".
Plus, I was too busy listening to Guns N Roses and the Beastie Boys. But anyway,
I found out about San Fran's infamous hardcore legends quite late in the game.
Like some, I did notice that Kurt Cobain wore a Flipper t-shirt during Nirvana's
North American television debut in 1991 on Saturday Night Live, and listened to
him praise the band in many subsequent interviews.
So when I picked up this copy of Flipper's best of, I really hadn't heard one
Flipper song. I was going on pure word of mouth and integrity. Actually, I do
remember my friend Sally's brother describe to me once how the song "Sex Bomb"
sounded. He kind of scrunched up his face and was like "there's this really
bottom heavy bass that goes 'duh, duh, duh, duh, duh' and a lot of screaming and
some loser growling 'SEX BOMB' over and over again." Which was a pretty acurate
description now that I think of it. I think he forgot to mention the car crash
sound near the end of the song, which sort of just adds to the general mayhem.
If you've heard the song YOU know what I'm talking about.
I didn't really like the album when I first heard it. It was too messy, not
catchy enough, and just really sprawling and annoying. But after some thinking,
I began to realize that this was what the band was about really about. One
shouldn't really approach Flipper with catchiness in mind. With its snarky
chorus of "hee hee hee, ha ha ha, ho ho ho", "Ha Ha Ha" is probably the
catchiest song, but everything else just sounds like a band taking an eternal
piss at everything and everyone. Which is the true punk rock spirit really, but
Flipper's existence really divided up the hardcore fans of the early 80s.
Flipper did not want to play harder faster and louder. Flipper wanted to play
until they annoyed the hell out of you and you wanted to bash the shit out of
them. It was confrontation as an art form. At their gigs, Flipper were the Don
Rickles of punk. They taunted, baited, insulted you there standing in the crowd
with your shaved head or mowhawk or whatever.
Such crowd baiting techniques are evident on the live version of "Ever", in
which late "singer" Will Shatter (or is it Bruce Lose??) concludes the
unfinished song by screaming "you fucking bunch of creeps!!" at an obviously
unimpressed audience. The band had some issues with younger kids being pushed
around at that particular show.
But Flipper were funny in a very cynical way. Like their rewrite of "The Old
Lady Who Swallowed A Fly", which is recited over a backdrop of noisy screeching
feedback. "Lowrider" is another proud live moment in the Flipper archives. This
intentionally tuneless and unfunky cover ends with the singer again criticizing
the crowd for "standing there like a fucking bunch of dolts". Classic.
Not virtuosos by any means, I often wonder if Flipper could actually play. Part
of me thinks that they could, since it obviously takes a lot of effort to make
your songs sound so out of tune, yet so catchy somehow as on "Ha Ha Ha".
Actually, that song is a classic example of a guitar being played SO out of
tune.
Even though I like this album, I myself was sucked into being pissed off with
the band when I heard the song "Brainwash". It just contains a simple riff being
played over and over for six minutes with a guy muttering "um...so anyway...see
there's this...and uh uh...never mind you wouldn't understand". Unless you're a
little crazy, there no way this song CANNOT annoy you.
An acquired taste even for die hard punkers, I really believe you either get
Flipper or you don't. I still wish they'd done a cover of Scott MacKenzie's
flower power anthem "San Francisco" though. I'd love to hear the changed lyrics
on that one. But through the band, suburban American teenage malaise never
sounded so slow and draggy and druggy.
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