Propagandhi's Less Talk More Rock Was Too Incendiary, Even For Punk
The 1996 punk rock tantrum repudiated its own genre as much as everything else
Tristan Young @talltristan
The rural outskirts of Winnipeg may not seem like a historically noteworthy breeding ground for cultural upheaval or political resistance. That’s because it’s not; not historic, at least. However in the early 1990s it was almost put on the map as a site of insurgent rebellion and ferocious progressivism. We may look at the town with more storied reverence had the arbiters of such social disruption not flamed out and crashed landed under the weight of their own chaotic delinquency. We are of course talking about Propagandhi. The Manitoba punk band with an insatiable appetite for verbose confrontation had more to say than most, but cast a shadow over the punk genre only as large as their own ambition. Which is to say, not very. Propagandhi had no plan, no business sense, no discipline, and no logic- beyond pissing off local skinheads. What they did have was an ardent sense of uncompromising virtues, and a borderline nihilistic brand of fearlessness in the face of a cross section of problematic cultures that wanted to eat them alive. Their 1996 album Less Talk More Rock, in its spartan 26 minute run time revealed a band with a metabolism that burned too hot to instil any kind of longevity in such a form, but for the brief time in the 90s when they had their shit together, did they ever.
The bumbling and problematic early history of Propagandhi is classic punk rock. Formed by Chris Hannah and Jord Samolesky, the duo attracted other members that would come and go less through their own magnetic personality or the gravity of their group’s mission statement (there wasn’t one), and more due to there just not being much to do for the disaffected youth of 80s suburban Winnipeg. While figuring out their sound would come with much in the way of awkward growing pains- one of their demo tapes was titled We Don’t Get Paid, We Don’t Get Laid And Boy Are We Lazy- they knew what they wanted to say. Against a sea of apathy in regards to everything ranging from disenfranchisement of minorities, violence against the gay community, and political corruption, they wanted to, somehow, fight back. Their early years saw little in the way of cohesion or forward momentum. There was a lack of stylistic or even philosophical unity amongst its members. Despite the bands incendiary political rhetoric, former member Mike Braumeister was decidedly agnostic on such issues; “I didn’t give a fuck about Haile Selassie or veganism or any ism.”
A volatile cocktail of persistence and luck eventually worked in their favour however. Playing a gig at local venue the Royal Albert in the 1992, the group caught the attention of none other than Fat Mike Burkett from NOFX. Mike signed Propagandhi to his burgeoning punk label Fat Mike Records. Had they played their cards right, this would be the point where you could utter, ‘the rest, as they say, is history’. Hannah and co had no such common sense. The professional relationship with Mike would eventually deteriorate due to caustic personality clashes, and Propagandhi would be ejected into the wild of an industry they never truly understood. Before that however, their eyes would be opened to just how toxic a culture they were combating was and find a way to finally articulate and purpose their reckless storm of moral outrage that motivated them.
The uncomfortable epiphany began to form in their collective psyche after the release of their debut LP How To Clean Everything in 1993. Its release introduced them to a wider community of punk rock, thrasher punk, and skate punk, and it to them. They were appalled by what they observed. The casual apathy in their so-called contemporaries was rank. The acquiescence to debilitating status quos in service of surf rock friendly bangers. The ensconced prejudice against the LGBTQ community. This was supposed to be a broad and raucous collective geared towards pushing progressive boundaries, thought Propagandhi. Instead they observed groups up and down the Pacific Northwest more than willing to compromise their alleged values, or even worse only masquerade as bearers of them for calculated and commercial purposes.
What was worse was the crowd that How To Clean Everything brought out; the new make up of their alleged fans. “Everybody was just into snow boarding and eating fried chicken”, mourned Hannah on the early shows they played in support of their debut. Skaters, Surfers, and Jocks; banging their heads to the bangers, paying not the slightest attention to the lyrical content Propagandhi deployed to highlight the myriad plights of the world. Fuck them, they thought. For their second album, they would no longer be so lyrically restrained or meek. They would force all that listened to their new album into direct confrontation with lyrical discomfort. They would alienate their fans and their punk brethren. They would piss off far more than the local Winnipeg skinheads this time. They would ruminate upon and dissect fucking everything. They had opinions and you were going to hear about them.
So was the inception of Less Talk More Rock. A cheeky reference to their already well-worn and obnoxious penchant for political diatribes between songs during their live sets. They would double down on their confrontational proselytizing, turning such Orwellian double speak against those that had used it to gaslight everyone for so long. Less Talk More Rock would become a furious document of grievances that maligned the world, and who was responsible for them: you, them, us, everyone. Its soundtrack is a serrated mixture of adolescent fury and dire finality. Apparently I’m A P.C. Fascist sets its mood with gurgling and anticipatory bass guitar that leads into the pop punk sugar high of a beat. Later on State Lottery shreds with more urgency and dread, a rhythmic metaphor for time running out set against a lyrical backdrop that highlights the pessimism surrounding the pageantry of the sham that is modern democratic elections. The singular unison, like barrelling tunnel vision, between Hannah, Solemesky’s galloping drums, and the deathly serious guitars is really striking. There’s a churning, pulsating, factory like output of the guitar riffs in tracks like And I Thought Nation States Were A Bad Idea, however without the productive efficiency such imagery implies. Instead there is just enough chaotic mismanagement of melodic streams, reigned in by Somolesky’s restless and occasionally balletic drumming.
The melodic makeup of the album reveals a group finally developing a sense of timing and finesse, as well as letting their rhythmic creativity blossom, if only a little. Most of the tunes are buried under Hannah’s relentless verbal onslaught, but it’s in there, like the celebratory and body high euphoria of the brimming percussion in Refusing To Be A Man. Despite being less than two minutes long, Gifts takes enough time to breath with a build up outro solo that exudes enough cathartic charisma to remind us that Propagandhi actually liked making music throughout this tumultuous and disenchanting lyrical process.
Such conceits do take a considerable back seat elsewhere on the album, with Hannah at his most ferocious and dominating on the tracks Rio de San Atlanta, Manitoba and The Only Good Fascist Is A Very Dead Fascist. In the former, Hannah channels some eviscerating anarchist sentiments atop a beat best described as paranoid schizophrenic. Hannah deleteriously screams about the impoverished being subjugated by the middle class, hysterically concluding, “the system cannot be reformed”. In the later song he’s even more apoplectic, if that’s possible. Among an ironically jingoistic marching beat with queasy, minor guitar notes, Hannah lectures, “Just what exactly are the great historical accomplishments of your race that make you proud to be white? Capitalism? Slavery? Genocide? Sitcoms? This is your fucking white history my friend”. On the question of white supremacist neo Nazis, he is wonderfully succinct with possibly the best line of the album, “Kill them all and let a Norse god sort them out!”
That reckless provocation is surprisingly tempered by softer toned tracks Anchorless and Gifts; interestingly, the pair was written by at the time member John Samson. Samson’s more velvety and introspective touch creates a strange asymmetry in the album, however the anxiety of Anchorless, revolving around the fear of living an irrelevant life in an irrelevant place touches upon a vital subset of North American punk, motivated less by political instability and more by suburban existential malaise. The rhetoric and more vulnerable composition recalls a prototype for seminal modern day punk heroes Cloud Nothings, and one can’t help but wonder if they studied this album in detail. Samson would eventually leave the band over ethical misgivings regarding just how dangerous an environment Propagandhi was cultivating at their live shows. Venues became a powder keg of antagonism during their sets where injuries and close calls were common. Samson couldn’t reconcile his role in it all and left the band, eventually becoming part of Canadian indie darlings The Weakerthans.
Of course, antagonism was integral to the agenda in Less Talk More Rock. This is no more apparent then on the eponymous track where Hannah takes aim at the superficial fans that paid little more than surface level attention to his painstaking attempts at curated lyrics. A deceptively inviting and testosterone fuelled guitar riff, one that begins with benign, superfluous writing, transforms into intimate and graphic anecdotes of Hannah discovering he was gay. He lures the bro culture into actively cheering on his homosexuality, “Cause if you dance to this you drink to me and my sexuality, with your hands down my pants by transitive property”. If that last line seems equal parts a triumphant ‘fuck you’, and a bit of a clunky word salad, that’s Hannah for you. His technically baroque word choice and labyrinthine syntax recalls a young partisan discovering his passions and also a thesaurus at pretty much the same time. The verbal thicket in the opening of And We Thought Nation States Were A Bad Idea is so obnoxiously dense one cant help but kind of appreciate it. Also, ‘bury our heads in the bar codes of these neo colonials” is a pretty good line,
Bouncing back and forth from the tactics of melodic vision to incendiary verbal berating implies a group still searching for the best way to get their point across. One of the more experimental approaches to this was A Public Dis-Service Announcement From Shell. A brief spoken word segment reciting a callously evil bit of propaganda from Shell, trying to manipulate public opinion in favour of their exploitive practices in the third world, the group recruited Ramsey Kanaan of A.K. Press for the dubious honour of reading it for the album. A.K. Press was an underground co-op publication focusing on anarchist material. This was no mere stunt, as members of A.K. Press toured with Propagandhi on the regular, selling books at their shows. The group didn’t want to put so much energy into these exigent issues only for people at the show to buy a shirt or a button and that’s it. They thought it would be great for the fans to have the opportunity to buy literature on these topics at the show after the lights went up. A more practical way of merging music and activism.
For all the juvenile delinquency of Less Talk More Rock, there remains a true nobility in such aspirations. To offer something to those that would listen to their music beyond a banger and a catchy line bellies maturity the group is not often credited for. Its no wonder that this is the earliest Propagandhi album that Hannah claims to still be proud of even 25 years later. While they have since evolved into a very different kind of speed metal organization, so much of their early years are described by Hannah as ‘lo-fi four track horridity’. It’s hard for a grown person to look back on their own overly agitated but underdeveloped political values as one awkwardly transitions into adulthood. Few of us did so with such theatrical exaggeration as Hannah, and even fewer recorded it all. Every first year university student goes through a Noam Chomsky phase, but not everyone samples him for a track. It’s easy to understand that a lot of 90s Propagandhi would be a little cringe inducing to a matured and seasoned Hannah, but it’s reassuring to know that he can look back on this album with some adoration still. It deserves no less- even if there’s no getting around the truly awful band name. On that, Hannah is repentant; “I was teenager very much impressed by names like Ludachrist and I thought Propagandhi was as genius as that at the time. The entire world now understands that to be untrue.”