California Uber Alles

I recently got back from California and, like I imagine is true for a lot of folks who have left the land of their birth, I identify more and more with my home state as the years go by. Don’t get me wrong, I am still ambivalent about the place, and I think that L.A. is one of the most unlivable cities on the continent, but there are a lot of things that I love about it, too.

Most important is music, which after all is the lynchpin of the human experience, maybe the only thing, with the possible exception of Hegelian logic or the scientific method, that has redeemed our species, and which would be Exhibit A if mankind ever had to defend our existence before a cosmic tribunal.

I find it comforting when I’m in Southern California to hear Green Day coming through speakers at the local supermarket or hamburger joint. Unlike in the Midwest, I can go an entire week without hearing a single classic rock song in the public space, serving as the background for our collective lives. Sometimes I think that purgatory may consist of an unwinding of all the crappy songs trapped in the recesses of our memories, that God won’t let us pass through the pearly gates until all the dross we’d heard blasting through the speakers at crappy bars or poker parties has been unwound and expunged into the ether. I know that if I were an all-powerful deity, I certainly wouldn’t let even the faintest memory of “Peaceful Easy Feeling” into my heaven.

I don’t think that the pop music is objectively superior in California, but it is different, less fuddy-duddy, less stuck in the muck of the Baby Boomer. One of the things that drives me crazy living in the Midwest is how a lot of folks assume that the music made by people born and raised in other parts of the country is actually indigenous to my native land. So here is a brief primer:

The key members of the following bands are NOT native Californians: the Doors (Jim Morrison: Florida; Ray Manzerak: Chicago); the Eagles (Don Henley: Texas; Glen Frey: Michigan; Joe Walsh: Kansas); Steely Dan (Donald Fagen: New Jersey; Walter Becker: New York); Guns and Roses (Axl Rose: Indiana); Poison (the singer is from Pennsylvania, the lead guitarist is from New York). Most of the cornball country balladeers, noodling instrumentalists, and overwrought hair bands that have plagued the “L.A. music scene” for much of the past forty years were the products of other parts of the country. I guess it’s the burden of growing up somewhere that people want to move to, which is all fine and good, but don’t try to hang these gaggle of stinking musical albatrosses around our necks: blame New York, blame Indiana, blame Texas (generally the best option, no matter what the malady). Most native Californians are used to the tawdry shenanigans of these folks; “inlander kooks”, we used to call them on the beach, as we put up with the spoiled detritus of less enlightened climes, spending Daddy’s money on Marshall stacks, overpriced hair stylists, and tainted blow.

The following bands are native Southern Californians: the Beach Boys, Van Halen, Oingo Boingo, the Germs, Social Distortion, No Doubt. Fast, loud, but melodic, that’s the Southern California sound. Are No Doubt superior to Guns and Roses? Maybe not, but at least they are indigenous to the culture, a mixture of rock, punk, ska, and R&B, not the overblown country guitar shit that passes for “classic rock” in most of the country. Thirty seconds watching Axl Rose, from how he walks to his ignorant racist rants, and its clear that he is pure hillbilly. Keith Morris and Brian Wilson: just by the slant in their voice or the glide in their strut, you can tell that these dudes grew up on the beach.

Back in 1979, the Dead Kennedys parodied Governor Jerry Brown’s run for the Presidency with the song “California Uber Alles.” It is a pretty funny parody of hippy fascism, imagining what would happen if they actually took over the country, when the suede denim secret police would come for your un-cool niece. While I appreciated it on the level of satire, I also saw it as a call to arms, It was a time when you risked getting jumped on the boardwalk by a bunch of dumb jocks for the cardinal sin of dying your hair yellow and wearing an earring, or maybe a bit of eyeliner. And here was a song that, even though it was outwardly about politics, was secretly about something much more insurrectionary, namely the right of self-determination. I took it as an anthem for all of us California beach kids trying to be ourselves. “California Uber Alles”, Jello Biafra screamed over and over to the throbbing bass, “Uber Alles California.”

Fuck the Eagles. Fuck Led Zeppelin. And fuck all the stupid pot smoking jocks that listened to them. We were a bunch of California beach kids, and we were going to do things our own way. California Uber Alles.

Jello Biafra took exception to the fact that some SoCal skinheads had taken to shouting the slogan while sig heiling at shows; Jello couldn’t handle the taint of being associated with anything that politically incorrect, so he quickly tamped down any notion that the song was anything but a political parody. You see, Jello wasn’t from Southern California; he grew up in Boulder. I still consider him an adopted Californian, the same as I do with X. Unlike Don Henley or all of those Hollywood hair bands, Jello and Exene didn’t come to L.A. to live out their warped Middle American dreams, they came to California to actually become one of us. And I love them for that. But they never understood how much their music meant to us as a cultural statement. They blanched at all the anger, and the idiocy, and the blood at shows, not seeing that the source of it was the same youthful adrenalin that fueled our ecstasy, our belief that the world could be anything we wanted it to, that we could be free.

California Uber Alles… Maybe it wasn’t the best choice of words for folks to glom onto. And maybe California is not an objectively superior culture. But it is mine, even after 20 years in the Midwest. Chicago may be my home now, but there is part of me that will always feel most at home hanging out in West Newport, listening to some ska coming from one of the beach bungalows, diving in the surf, lying in the sun. It just wouldn’t be the same if the neighbors were playing Reo Speedwagon.