Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
The Melodic Scheme of the Queers
Maybe we all hold a certain fascination for bands with offensive names. That, and there always has been, at least on my part, a compulsion to hear the inner voice of a class of people one would otherwise not care to hang out with. “I was born to do dishes,” Joe Queer sings, “And my mom’s really bummed out.” But when you get past all of the shock song titles and boil the Queers down to the actual nuggets of what their songs are about, you find the usual themes of unrequited lust/love, cheating, chemical indulgences, along with lapses into racism and homophobia and internet porn, or other modern themes, such as the late punk-rock cophrophagist GG Alin: “He always had injuries. He wasn’t too cool.”
From New Hampshire, the Queers started in 1982 but did not break out for over a decade. In 1993, Love Songs for the Retarded put them on the post-punk map. True to punk form, I don’t think there’s a Queers song longer than three minutes, but what they bring to the table is a melodic scheme culled from old surf-flick soundtracks and surf records from the 1960s. Their tribute to surf pioneer Duke Kahanamoku was not by accident: “He can shoot the curl around the world. He’s cooler than you and me.” You get the feeling that a young Tom DeLonge must have spent long nights in his teenage bedroom in Poway watching Queers videos on YouTube before he put blink-182 together.
Had schedules permitted, I’d have loved to ask Joe King — he’s Joe Queer, the only founding member still in the band — about life in the shadow of the Ramones, with whom the Queers are doggedly compared, and about the notion of rocking the teen locker-room humor well into the spread of middle age. Can it be done well? We’ll find out.
D.P.I. and Guttermouth also perform.
The Queers: Sunday, October 7, Brick by Brick, 8 p.m. 619-276-3993. $15 advance/$18 at the door.
Here's something you might be interested in.
The Melodic Scheme of the Queers
The Melodic Scheme of the Queers
Maybe we all hold a certain fascination for bands with offensive names. That, and there always has been, at least on my part, a compulsion to hear the inner voice of a class of people one would otherwise not care to hang out with. “I was born to do dishes,” Joe Queer sings, “And my mom’s really bummed out.” But when you get past all of the shock song titles and boil the Queers down to the actual nuggets of what their songs are about, you find the usual themes of unrequited lust/love, cheating, chemical indulgences, along with lapses into racism and homophobia and internet porn, or other modern themes, such as the late punk-rock cophrophagist GG Alin: “He always had injuries. He wasn’t too cool.”
From New Hampshire, the Queers started in 1982 but did not break out for over a decade. In 1993, Love Songs for the Retarded put them on the post-punk map. True to punk form, I don’t think there’s a Queers song longer than three minutes, but what they bring to the table is a melodic scheme culled from old surf-flick soundtracks and surf records from the 1960s. Their tribute to surf pioneer Duke Kahanamoku was not by accident: “He can shoot the curl around the world. He’s cooler than you and me.” You get the feeling that a young Tom DeLonge must have spent long nights in his teenage bedroom in Poway watching Queers videos on YouTube before he put blink-182 together.
Had schedules permitted, I’d have loved to ask Joe King — he’s Joe Queer, the only founding member still in the band — about life in the shadow of the Ramones, with whom the Queers are doggedly compared, and about the notion of rocking the teen locker-room humor well into the spread of middle age. Can it be done well? We’ll find out.
D.P.I. and Guttermouth also perform.
The Queers: Sunday, October 7, Brick by Brick, 8 p.m. 619-276-3993. $15 advance/$18 at the door.
Comments