On my way to the club, I walked hunched in the drizzle behind a fellow in a leather jacket with white paint on the back: "Punks not dead." I pondered this idea and assumed we were heading to the same place, only to watch him pass by Geno's without a glance.
The statement stuck with me as the opening band began to play. Their vocals were right on — a raspy snarl bantered over fuzzy distorted, wailing guitars, and precisely militant drum beats. They covered obscure old-school punk bands, and praised punk legend GG Allin. But ideologically something bothered me about them. Here were a band playing subversive music, but making tasteless jokes about knocking girls up, cancer, and the AIDS epidemic. It struck me that there is a boundary a band should not cross when trying to make statements; "offensive" and "subversive" are certainly not the same thing. I began to doubt the dude's leather jacket's claim. But then, Big Meat Hammer played.
When BMH got on stage a certain energy gathered in the room. It's the kind of feeling you get at a show when you watch a band with strong senses of self and purpose. The crowd and I gathered at the foot of the stage, most knocking back Schlitz and singing along. Since 1989, BMH have been shaking up notions of conformity in a small city where it's easy to get lost in the flow of the next-most-talked-about commodity/band. These types of shows should be unifying, not alienating, and that's exactly what the set got across. You could call them classic, true to their scene, old-school punk rock. Their performance Sunday (my first time seeing them) reaffirmed for me the idea that there is a timelessness to punk rock's original ideologies, and that they are still very much alive.
Related:
Random rules, Holy spirit of the saxophone, Discovering Dilla, More 
- Random rules
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John Coltrane died 40 years ago this past July at the age of 40 of liver cancer.
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As with so many other figures in pop music, death has been good to hip-hop producer and MC J Dilla.
- Opera’s great loss
When the curtain went up at Boston’s Back Bay Theatre for the American premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron , in November 1966, two figures were standing back to back in a spotlight on a small disc.
- In with a bang
It’s only in classical music that we shy away from the new. In theater and popular music something more than seven years old is too old.
- The call of the wild
It’s not easy being in a band whose two primary songwriters have quite different ideas about how to write an indie-rock song.
- Suburban Mozart that swings
It’s a tribute to the quality of Boston’s classical-music scene that a suburban orchestra like the Lexington Symphony is capable of a performance to attract the attention of those who live closer to Symphony Hall.
- Portland scene report: November 28, 2008
The results of the WePushButtons Awards came in just a tad too late to get them in the last paper, so here's a quick recap of who took home what last Saturday at SPACE Gallery.
- Smooth assassins
This could be a defining year for the revered Providence-based hip-hop collective Poorly Drawn People. Or not.
- 87. Don Cornelius
Don, how could you do her like that? Proving that spousal battery isn’t just a young man’s game, this month the 72-year-old Soul Train has-been entered a plea of no-contest to a charge of “corporal injury resulting in traumatic condition of a spouse,” according to TMZ.com .
- The Big Hurt: The week in beef (in brief)
A recessed economy means fewer chains to go around, so it's been a fine week for a-fussin'-and-a-feudin'.
- Less
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