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Discharge
wrote songs like "Decontrol", "State Violence,
State Control", "Free Speech for the dumb", "Drunk
with Power" and other protest classics.
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BACK
TO PUNK ALBUM COVERS
The
music of the UK band Discharge was brutally
fast and angry. The band's brilliance lay in it's
sparse use of lyrics... the songs were almost like
Japanese haiku poetry, but were concerned with the
horrors of the modern world and the drive towards
war. Sample
lyrics; "The savage
mutilation of the human race is set on course. protest
and survive, protest and survive. It is up to us to
change that course. protest and survive, protest and
survive." These words would be sung
(shouted), over and over to the machine gun like staccato
of roaring guitars.
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| The band
released this album, titled Hear nothing, see nothing,
say nothing in 1982, and the stunning photomontage
that served as its cover was created by the band's vocalist,
Cal. The artwork's anti-apathy message being, those
who hear nothing, see nothing, say nothing have heads
of cabbage. The stark imagery harkens back to the brilliant
photomontage work of the 1930's German artist John Heartfield.
In fact the band used Heartfield's famous 1932 image of the
white dove of peace impaled on a fascist bayonet as the cover
for one of their other record releases. In
yet another comparison to rebels past... before the outbreak
of the Second World War, some adherents of the dada surrealist
movement chastised popular music for being a bourgeois distraction.
Likewise, Discharge advocated noise, not music in their
total aural assault against the status quo. |
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