> The punk group have all got normal jobs, which they will continue to pursue, but are pulling out all the stops for one final tour for their army of fans.
Seems in direct contradiction with this anarchist click bait title.
It's a reference to their music, although a very poorly thought out one. But I don't think the result is entirely fair, as Fat Mike is a record label owner. That's not what one may think when you say "a job", these people are all middle-aged and aren't working the cash register at a Walmart or something like that. A job is a job, but NOFX are far past some idealistic idea of "live off the music, skip college" and whatever else people thought of them.
Anarchists' portrayal of themselves is actually much more discrediting than the pop culture version; it's basically an ideology about everyone being in meetings all day.
Unlike some other ideologies they will happily answer any questions about it, it's just that the answers are extremely bad, whether it's "how would you make insulin" (you won't) or "how does criminal justice work" (sometimes meetings, sometimes lynch mobs).
Not my experience at all, esp. in terms of the people/communities I've met or the books I've read.
> Unlike some other ideologies they will happily answer any questions about it, it's just that the answers are extremely bad, whether it's "how would you make insulin" (you won't) or "how does criminal justice work" (sometimes meetings, sometimes lynch mobs).
That's precisely what I meant by pop culture/mass media. At this stage, this is more of a meme regarding anarchy than reality and this couldn't be farther from truth. (and it's quite an old one, think: French enlightenment era philosophers using pre-partition Poland as an example of anarchy).
> Unlike some other ideologies they will happily answer any questions about it, it's just that the answers are extremely bad, whether it's "how would you make insulin" (you won't) or "how does criminal justice work" (sometimes meetings, sometimes lynch mobs).
To be fair, every ideology and/or mode of societal organization sucks at handling the nasty edge cases (even the best organizational mode we've found has a saying encapsulating this fact: "hard cases make bad law"), but yeah, anarchists mainly thrive in places where they aren't subject to the consequences of bad answers (e.g. twitter, reddit, bluesky, etc).
The problem with ideologies is that they work really well in small communities.
Communism works. In a small communjty/village. Same with anarchism. Because that's basically how small villages work. You can adjust as needed in the moment without too much effort.
The problem happens when you grow. What happens when people you are governing you will never meet? What happens when you're busy and can't research all the complexities of local politics and some old person is stirring up trouble with yells for not in my backyard stuff... And one person starts bribing and so on.
The problem is that we want to find ideologies that work across millions of people. Even democracy is pretty terrible in modern countries because of how large they are, so it creates a lot of inequality and centralisation of expenditure.
I think the secret is to make the state smaller, not in the libertarian sense, but in actual geography and number of "subjects". No organisation has any business deciding the lives of tens or hundreds of millions of people. The trend is for governments to become larger and larger, just like any other empire. A one-world government, for example, would not be a utopia, it would be a veritable hell on earth.
(Disclaimer: I'm an anarchist, and as you say, anarchism works only at smaller scales, so I'm biased)
You're probably onto something. Being too big leads to problems. But also leads to power.
You can't fuck with the US/China, even if nukes were removed, because they are a massive force that will crush you beneath their heel. So there is mass power in unity. However you look at europe, and you see a lot of gains as well, where multiple smaller governments exist, and a unifying body was created to compete with the likes of the US without giving up their individuality. But also the US is distributed since states govern themselves with overarching federal oversight.
It is massively complex. At the end of the day we need not only a small anarchistic state, we also need reasons why some cult of personality won't be able to rally his million followers and start guns blazing taking over neighbors. Unfortunately I feel like democracy is the least bad system we got.
As anti-AI as I am, I think democracy might be the best we get until the day we are able to create benevolent machine kings organising our lives. Monarchies/authoritarian governments can in theory be fairer and much more efficient at tackling big problems than any democracy, but fail spectacularly, and with a lot of bloodshed, when paired with human stupidity and greed.
Until then, we're in kind of a political limbo of mediocrity.
The image I have of anarchism is not the mainstream one of "million of people doing whatever they want"; organisation and hierarchy are not in conflict with anarchism, as long as you are free to leave and form your own. So, under that point of view, anarchism-as-political-force is little more than a multitude of small heterogeneous communities collaborating and trading with each other. Maybe the secret is to embrace our tribal nature, but avoiding the issue of cult of personality—this is an interesting dilemma to which I don't have a good answer for, so thank you for the food for thought.
The problem of "free to leave" is that that only works with unlimited resources. Why should I allow a random person into my house to eat my food and promise to assist, only to be free to leave at any time. And they have to go to another house, why would someone there do the same.
Being altruistic is great, but at some point you run out of necessary resources. And altruism dies at scale when resources dry up.
> "Controversies aside — most of which involved drugs, onstage banter taken too far and the unpredictability of both the band and its fans — the members of NOFX managed to do something most people can only dream of: They avoided having a day job for 40 years."
We're going to need some deep investigative journalism to sort this mystery out...
Also, I remember reading when I was young that NOFX quickly abandonned the "drugs/alcohol/sex" ethos and become quite healthy people despite having the opposite branding.
It hasn't exactly been a clean path. Fat Mike has been on and off through the years and they never stopped singing about doing drugs. That said I think they are vegetarians and otherwise relatively health conscious.
Milo Aukerman of the Descendents has a PhD in molecular biology - there's a great interview (maybe in the Filmage documentary?!) where he's discussing a conversation with his colleagues who are asking "what did you do at the weekend?" and he replies "Oh, my band was playing Woodstock..." (or something along those lines!)
Interesting, did not know that. Punks seem to like biology it seems ..
"Graffin obtained his PhD in zoology at Cornell University and has lectured courses in natural sciences at both the University of California, Los Angeles and at Cornell University."
They've toured for 40 years, sold 8 million records and have over a million monthly listeners on Spotify. The singer's label has put out many of the big punk bands for the last 30 years. I agree with your point, but this lot are fine.
They are indeed “doing just fine” which I am sure is what you must have been referencing — from one of their most famous songs:
Buy me a Becks beer
or pass me the bong
Gimme some Bushmills
I'll sing you this song
Open another
big box of cheap wine
We're over 30
we’re doing just fine
The last time I saw them live it was pushing 40 instead of over 30 and that was nearly a decade ago.
Hahaha, yeah, they're a fun band. I saw them (for the last time, I guess?!) a couple of weeks ago (and oddly in reference to the lyrics, I actually saw them tour Pump Up The Valuum as well). Mike is pushing 60 now!
It's not entirely different from all the successful artists who are living lavish lifestyles (for example many musicians are complete car nuts and own insane cars collection [1]) but sing songs criticizing "money" (even though they have plenty) or criticizing "wall street" (even though most of their savings, in addition to cars and real estate, are at their broker).
I have nothing against money or wealth.
But the irony of a musician or a band criticizing money while flying private is not lost on me.
[1] as an example of such musicians (but not that they necessarily did criticize money), Miles Davis used to run vs Herbie Hancock in the streets in a "Ferrari vs AC Cobra" style. And I love that.
To be fair, I don't think anarchism (at least as espoused by the CNT-FAI et al) suggests that anyone can just sit on the couch without doing anything.
If you want that, may I recommend capitalism?
If your expenses are in USD, 30Y TIPS are above 2% last I saw, so putting 50x your burn rate in those should allow you to sit right back, clip those risk-free coupons, and watch the world go by.
I love this song and I feel so lucky I was able to see it live at their final Japan show last spring! They come out for an encore like "we're just gonna do one more song" then play for another 20 minutes.
> Like a show in London in 2000 when Fat Mike, Melvin and El Hefe decided to take ecstasy before going onstage. “Melvin is trying to play the accordion and he can’t,” Fat Mike said, laughing. “It was our biggest show and we took the punk way out. We were all dying laughing.”
> “Who cares?” he added. “Why NOFX are so good is because we’re having a better time than our fans.”
I saw them in Amsterdam. They came on stage and asked the audience "anyone got any pills?". Several baggies rained down on the stage. They went backstage for a bit, and started playing. It was fantastic. But not very musically sound, especially towards the end.
I think being able to sound "the same as their albums" while playing live is a great gesture about how good they are, and how the albums they put out are processed.
Pink Martini can pull off the same trick. They can reproduce their albums live, and without any playback. It shows how unedited their albums are, and how good they are with their instruments and voice.
He seems to be an absolutely terrible human being [0] and absolutely desperate to appear edgy and extreme, which I could maybe tolerate if his music was any good, which it isn't.
How fortunate for you that his moral character is reflected in the quality of his art.
Sarcasm aside, this is a peculiarly modern fallacy. While fanatics have often attacked or destroyed 'secular' art, the coincidental observation that the cancelled or scapegoated artist 'actually was a bad artist all along' seems to be novel. No article or comment vilifying say Woody Allen or Roman Polanski is complete without a satisfied nod towards their supposed lack of skill. Despite or perhaps because of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It's no longer enough to point out that an artist is a bad person, we must also assume that their work was inferior.
Fat Mike is actually a good guy. He's done a lot of shit, but mostly shit you expect from a punk, like this sort of prank (which seems to be the only source for the parent commenter to decide he's a "terrible human being", the sort of hyperbolic, simplistic language you expect from people who are desperate to find something to be outraged about), getting drunk/high on shows, criticizing everything/everyone (just like in his songs) including himself.
"
Don't count on me, 'cause I'm the worst
If I'm there, it'll be a surprise to so many other friends that I'd call first
It's not that I don't care, I just don't care very much
'Cause I'm either on the spectrum, or just plain out of touch
That's who I am, that's what I do
I could change if I wanted to, but I don't
"
That was a double prank. He made it look like he peed on a bottle and then served its contents to some people, but there's a video where you can see how he switches it by a regular bottle last minute.
Most people who achieve great things or stand out far from their peers are not nice people. It is almost a prerequisite. Musk, Gates, Jobs and pretty much every really successful artist are all monumental assholes.
If you can't seperate the person from the art or achievement you can't really enjoy a lot of things.
where did you get the impression that i spend time hating people? I'm saying that you shouldn't normalise being a shitty person "because you have to be shitty to be great". There's tons of amazing artists that are generally known as being all around great people
(I'm not even referring to fat mike here, I have no idea if he's a good person or not)
never thought i'd see "NOFX" here hah. I was skating with the littler brother of one of my friend's girlfriend when he casually said "have you ever heard of NOFX?" and that was that.
I don't really care about the politics but one of my favorite lyrics of all time is from Dig
My new "feel soo old sentence" is that when I recently asked someone if they'd ever listened to "Me First and the Gimme Gimmes Love Their Country", they replied oh yeah, totally, they used to listen to it all the time ... in elementary school.
I’ve probably listened to this band more than any other. I was born and raised in Los Angeles and grew up on it along with similar bands. I actually ran into Fat Mike totally randomly out in public this past year. I introduced myself, he’s a nice guy and exactly what you’d expect.
Maybe he's changed, but he was real entitled in Seoul back in 2007\08. Guy from the band RUX -- who owned a punk club in hongdae and a tiny DIY record company -- tried bringing him over and he was an elitist princess. I can distinctly remember the slackers were the opposite and they stayed in a hostel popular with the locals. Mike wanted big money and a four star hotel experience. Which I think they eventually got just for him (out of their own pockets). I wouldn't get a job either if I got to jet around the world and stay in baller hotels on somebody's dime.
Pump up the valuum was one of my first punk CDs I listened to, I didn't know the sound was punk at the time yet since I was immersed in my new nu metal phase. I've been punk rock since then.
About living from band.. last time I spoke with Eyehategod bassist, then these guys live from touring. Most of the year, they are on the wheels. Didn't seem to close to retirement yet \o/ \w/
The title assumes being a working musician is not a job? That's pretty insulting. While some seem to coast along, the bulk of them work pretty damn hard.
A “name” band gig like this is a job with almost no job security and a high chance of eventual failure.
Setting rock stars aside, regular working musicians are everywhere, performing, teaching, composing. It’s a job, but building a whole career on workaday activities requires a lot of DIY and resilience.
Yeah, NYT butchered that. The actual statement was
> Fat Mike’s main argument — “You are getting into bed with a corporation. You are not an artist. You are an employee.”
He was talking about being an employee, not "having a job". Being signed to a label means that they call the shots, and you record albums when they demand even if you want to tour and you have to write albums that they are happy with.
Maybe it’s a reference to one of their songs? Not really familiar with NOFX (aside from them being the favourite band of some of my favourite bands), but maybe they have a song about jobs or having a job.
It comes down to what you mean by "job". As distinct from "work". We all -work- (they certainly do) in the sense that they add value, and are paid for that value.
A "job" though is an indication of who you work for. You might get a job at a bakery, selling buns. You got to work, add value, and are paid by an employer. She decides if you're on the register, or loading the truck, or whatever. You are selling time and she can do (more or less) what she wants either it.
To avoid this lack of personal agency people start their own business. Now "no one tells them what to do". So they don't have a "job" but there's actually more work.
So there's a "job" and there's "work" and they're not the same thing.
The band (correctly) recognised that signing for a label means you are an employee of that label. They may give you some autonomy, but its not all fairies and rainbows - there's a business to feed. So there will be requirements from their side.
Indie bands work a lot more, but they have complete freedom to do whatever however they like. If they serve the customers well, they do well. If they don't, then it reflects in pay this month.
A "job" is when you work for someone else. But when you have autonomy, and do what you love AND make enough to thrive, then you are truly blessed. Its a lot of work, but it doesn't feel like it.
First Google Result for "nofx retire":
> The punk group have all got normal jobs, which they will continue to pursue, but are pulling out all the stops for one final tour for their army of fans.
Seems in direct contradiction with this anarchist click bait title.