[!@#$%!]

(cont.)

Jerry Lee Lewis? He's living proof that rock 'n' roll can only be improved by the total lack of a moral compass. This is a man who has never done the right thing in his life—that is, unless you can be convinced that shooting a member of your own band in the chest is doing the right thing. But I'll be damned if ornery ol' Jerry Lee, who may or may not be the most fucked-up-on-drugs person ever to walk the face of the Earth, didn't record a whole shitload of great rock 'n' roll records that will still be around long after Fugazi has been relegated to a footnote in rock history as that band that tried to save us from the unspeakable evils of band T-shirts.

And why? Because Fugazi cares! Well, great rock 'n' roll doesn't care. The notorious dopers in Flipper didn't give a flying fuck, and the world's a more interesting place for it. Flipper understood that what the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards once sneeringly dismissed as "petty morals" were completely beside the point, the point being to make music so loud and terrifying our animal brains would be fooled into thinking dinosaurs had come back.

And the last time I checked, the Ramones didn't care, except maybe a teensy little bit on "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg)," and even then they had the eminent good sense to leaven their protest with a healthy dollop of humor. So why is it that such sociopathic ditties as "I Wanna Be Sedated" and "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue" are great and funny and stick in your head the way "Suggestion," with its undeniably important and socially redeeming message, never will? Simple: Rock and morality don't mix. Never have, never will. Morality says, "Let's be better people." Rock says, "Let's all go to hell in a hand basket, preferably after having totally meaningless sex and snorting enough crank to keep Red China grinding its teeth for a week." Now, rock may not necessarily mean this literally. Good rock, unlike the kind served up here in D.C., is as likely as not just doing what the British quaintly call "taking the piss." Because rock is a prankster, and anybody who hasn't caught onto the fact that rock doesn't always mean what it says by the time he's old enough to vote deserves whatever he gets.

Of course, not everybody agrees. Guy Picciotto once said, in reference to his pre-Fugazi band Rites of Spring, "I mean everything I sing, and we mean everything we play." Well, isn't that precious? One hundred percent sincerity guaranteed, or your money back! But if Picciotto was suggesting that rock is or should be a matter of sincere expression, he's skating away, as that weird flute-playing guy in Jethro Tull once sang, on the thin ice of a new day. Randy Newman has made a career—and some really tremendous music—out of not meaning a single thing he says. Rock is performance, pure and simple, and though playing with passion is great—and nobody can deny that Fugazi has always had passion to spare—sincerity is beside the point. Truth? Yeah, right. That's the wonderful thing about rock: There's nobody standing by the side of the stage to administer a lie-detector test. Why, you're encouraged to just make stuff up as you go along. Rock loves the pathological liar, the disingenuous man, the shameless prevaricator. Look at Bob Dylan. Nobody—least of all Bob Dylan—has any idea when Bob Dylan is being sincere. He has a gift for telling great stories, and that's precisely what makes him such a great artist. He doesn't let sincerity, morality, or any other damn thing get in his way. When it comes to rock, sincerity may sometimes be an asset—U2's Bono has done all right in that direction, certainly—but it's certainly not a prerequisite.

Thanks to MacKaye & Co., the city that once brought us the great Angel—the fantastically coiffed anti-KISS whose elaborate live shows in the '70s were most likely the inspiration for some of Spi¨nal Tap's proudest moments—is now overrun by earnest people who support earnest music, form earnest bands, come together to hold earnest benefits for earnest causes, and in turn encourage whole new generations of impressionable kiddies to do the same. Why, it's enough to make a body ill. One can only imagine what it would be like to live in a town where the pool of rock is untainted by integrity. D.C. is the Vatican of earnest rock, and we kindly ask you not to smoke, snicker, or mosh.

It has to stop. Somebody has to give the deprived children of Washington, D.C., the chance to grow up to be depraved, no-account rock 'n' roll animals. Somebody has to teach them that rock is not about increasing awareness of social injustices or about making better citizens—it's about having fun and making a fool of yourself before life gets around—which, believe me, it will—to doing it for you.

Of course, there are signs that Fugazi's long stranglehold on Washington is coming to an end. The band barely performs locally anymore—it didn't even play its time-honored annual gig at Fort Reno this year. It'd be nice to see something a bit more dangerous come along. It'd be nice to see D.C. become the nation's next hotbed of old-fashioned, juvenile-delinquent-friendly sleaze rock. What better place, after all, for a teenage riot than right here in the World Capital of Sleaze, where life is cheap and lies with George W. Bush's face on them are the coin of the realm?

In the meantime, we wait and we wait and we wait and we wait. Who knows? Maybe our saviors are already out there. Slouching, like W.B. Yeats' rough beast, towards D.C., to be born. It's about time. They're long overdue. But they may be coming, coming to wrestle the crown of rock away from Fugazi and hand it back to the Devil, to whom it rightfully belongs. Together, hand in hand, perhaps we can make Frank Sinatra's foul vision of rock a reality in our too fair and far too boring metropolis. Our young people deserve no less. CP