sonofapunk

The Wrecktals

Here aaaaaand here on FaceCrack.

Alright... The boys and I think alike, so I think it's pretty much okay to start what I'm saying without stepping on any toes...

This is where I'm going to think out loud, and maybe you'll find some entertainment in here, or learn from our mistakes, or whatever the fuck. Who knows, maybe our ideals will appeal to you. Haha!

After our last two shows, we've learned some things. An important one is GO TO FUCKING BED AFTER A SHOW! Jesus Christ, we fucked that one up... We managed to find a girl's hardwood floor to "sleep" on, but we ended up staying up all night, naked (for no fuckin' reason), giggling away, discussing how we should be responsible and go to fucking sleep for the show the next day... Whoops!

We payed for it. Our performance suffered tremendously. I know a lot of people came up to me and said that it was still good, and fun, and the gold shined through - Thanks to those of you who did! But on some level I feel you're just yankin' my chain. I know how bad it was. If you did enjoy yourself, you're a fucking trooper, and we fucking love you. But we OWE you better. We really do. And for that, we apologize. We promise to have learned from our mistakes, and will perpetually play better and better. I know it wasn't an entire disaster, but I've learned that being your own harshest critic is the easiest way to seek-and-destroy the obstacles in between you and your goals. We continuously strive to do better. Even if we do play punk-ska-reggae-metal. And even if we'll amount to nothing. And even if our name is a fucking Bum-Joke. Haha!

But I saw a lot of singing-a-long and arm-in-arm-skanking. Thank you. We fucking love to see that. Whereas we fucking sucked yesterday, it's a goal of ours to not play "bad" shows, but if we can't play a good one, we might as well play a fun one. Think about it as, you're shredding a riff and you accidentally hop into the chorus from the bridge one bar too early, or you hit a really sour note or something. You can either bitch and moan about it, or you can fucking laugh at yourself, and laugh with your bandmates laughing at you about how you just fucked up and you all know it. You know what I mean? We're laughing at how bad that was too. But that's what matters - staying positive. It was a fucking joke, so we're laughing. But that doesn't mean we won't continue to strive for constantly better performances each and every time. We want to be your friends. We want you to enjoy us. We want you to like us.

Another thing I gotta touch on is our... Attitude, I guess you can call it. Personally, I think it's more our moral-core than attitude. We're not too much for simple shock value (the song "Clown Dick" is a retarded inside joke, and the first song we wrote, if you wanna know what it's about, pull one of us aside and we'll gladly let you in on it). So when we use harsh language and rip into prejudice, we're not simply swearing about anti-establishment or "the man" simply because it's the punk rock thing to do. No. Hell no. That shit's fucking lame. We're not doing this to apply to any pre-established demographic or hop on any band-wagon (pun intended). We mean what we say.

We're all big boys now, and whining about mom and dad and school and whatnot has all been done before, time and time again. That's not what we're about. There's moral content behind us. And it all comes down to Unity.

I don't wanna call anybody out, and I sure as hell am not going to be naming any names, but we've heard some criticism about our anti-homophobic message in "Nothing More". So let me set some shit straight...

Homophobia is a form of prejudice. Prejudice is bad. We are anti-sexism, anti-racism, and anti-homophobic.

(We're sure an actual "phobia" of homosexuals does exist somewhere out there, but that's not what this is. No homophobe hears a lisp, starts crying and shitting his pants out of fear. That's what a phobia is, "an irrational fear". Gay-bashing doesn't mean you're afraid of homosexuals, it means you're an intolerant, ignorant fucking prick who's probably more afraid of the instability of their own sexuality more than anything.)

You wouldn't like someone discriminating against you for whatever or whoever you are, so fuck off and don't do it to someone else. Especially if it doesn't fucking concern you, or anyone else, for that matter.

"But aren't you discriminating against people for the beliefs they choose to have? They have a right to believe what they want to."

Yes and no.

Of course they have that right. If we were all forced to think the same way, the world wouldn't be a very dynamic place at all. But go fuck yourself if you think that prejudice and oppressive views are anything but destructive.

People can believe whatever the fuck they want to believe. I don't care if you really are convinced the sky is green and the grass is blue, that's really none of my concern. To each their own. That is your right.

But when your views/actions are against a certain type of person (be it creed, race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual preference), you better fucking believe we're going to take it upon ourselves to have you snuffed out. Not through violence, but through education.

Nobody's born with prejudice in them. Nobody. There isn't a baby that is born that grows up to be racist. You have jaded, closed-minded hate within you, because you are the product of conditioning. This is something we're trying to eliminate. Through education and bringing the people together, we can make the world a better, harmonious place.

So whereas our message is aggressive and angry, we're not actually that aggressive and angry of people. We hate to be anti-anything, but we can't stand a lot of the shit we see. It's unacceptable to say the very least. We'd rather be pro-peace than anti-hate... And really, that's the core of our being... But we need to act on how we feel and address certain issues for what they are.

There are no black problems, or Hebrew problems, or homosexual problems, or poverty problems, or womens problems... There aren't. These are all PEOPLE PROBLEMS. Things we need to work TOGETHER to fix.

We, as a people, need to be ever-adapting, ever-evolving, and ever-learning. Which means, we need to take the views and feelings of others into consideration. There is always something to be learned. Influence may take the form of anything and everything. Just because something is entirely shitty doesn't mean you won't learn from it. And just because someones an absolute-fucking-moron, that doesn't mean that you won't learn that you shouldn't act like them. (Triple Negative!)

This being said, nothing we say is entirely set in stone. Whereas we mean what we say, and say how we think and feel, we are perfectly fine with admitting we are wrong. If you can prove to us that what we say/think/feel is entirely wrong, we won't simply not listen to you. Everyone deserves a voice. We'll hear you out, maybe have a friendly debate, and who knows, maybe by the end of it one of us might take something from the other and learn from it. We are always learning, and maybe what we'll learn will disprove something we believe. We are okay with this. We will apologize for being wrong, and move on with our lives.

What we say and convey in our message is what we feel right now. Where we're pretty certain we're on the right track to making the world a better place, we can't completely eliminate the possibility that we might be wrong. We're not closed-minded douches.

"The biggest diss is indifference."

This is something some fucking loser said to me once. It's stuck with me for years. It is one of the most moronic fucking statements I've ever heard.

If you feel passionate about something, fucking act passionately about it. If you have a fire inside you, set the fucking world on fire. Do yourself a great service and act on how you feel. Just make sure what you feel, is the right thing to be feeling.

I'm supposed to act indifferent when I see my gay friends, my foreign friends, and my female friends are being discriminated against? Fuck you.

I'm supposed to act indifferent when I hear some fucking neo-Nazi bash Jews? Yeah, okay, and then we'll just lay down a welcome mat for the fourth reich.

Hopefully I've explained the "hypocrisy" of how we think... I hope you understand what I'm trying to say and where I'm coming from:

We are intolerant to the intolerant.
We are prejudice against the prejudice.
We hate those filled with hate.

An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind in most cases, but that's not how we see these things. If I see you shitkicking innocent people, I will shitkick you.

Another thing I have to touch base on is religion. We aren't against religious people. We have lots of religious friends.

There is absofuckinglutely nothing wrong with having faith in whatever deity you choose. This is your choice. You are not hurting anyone, you are a friend to me.

All people need faith in something. It's human to do so. But to ditch all faith in yourself entirely, and depend on rules you-never-discovered-for-yourself is fucking lazy. You are responsible for your own actions. It is a damn shame to see people live their entire lives devoted to an organized set of morals they did not discover themselves. In our opinion, there is no such thing as a "sin". Just "mistakes" that you can fucking learn from and never do again, if it's so bad.

The Wrecktals aren't religious. We don't believe in a higher power. We believe in ourselves. (Now, please, if you have a problem with this statement, go back to when we said "We could be wrong...") We wish more people would believe in themselves too. As long as you make a conscious effort to be a good person, you don't need some invisible being in the sky taking all your money and one day a week from you. We did our research, and evidence shows that fables were taken way too fucking literally and that "religion" was a system invented by people who wanted to control large masses of people. That sounds pretty fucking lame to me.

Over history several billion lives (lives that are no different from your own) have ended because of it, and even more people endured oppression because of it. Even today this shit still goes on. It's pretty sick.

I've never met this Jesus guy, so please don't expect me to do whatever some chump tells me to. I think for myself.

But have faith in whatever you like, as long as you don't push it on me, whatever form of spirituality you choose is your business and your right. I don't mind you as long as you don't go around trying to assimilate people and make the whole world like you. I got friends that are in love with this Jesus dude, and I get along with them just fine. We respect eachother's wishes and beliefs, and no toes are stepped on. It's when you push your views onto others that we'll have an issue.

So if you hear something in one of our songs that offends you, sorry, but it's how we feel. As long as you're not an oppressive dickdouche, you can pretty much believe whatever the fuck you want and we'll still call you a friend. We poke fun here and there, but that's different. You gotta admit the whole God-thing is pretty funny. But what we poke fun at (and strongly dislike) the most is self-interest, really...

All the evils of the world begin with self interest.

There is more to life than self-pity and superiority.

Greed, tyranny, the lust for control and power over others, being better than everyone else, jadedness, closed-mindedness... All these begin with self-interest. Get over yourself. You're sharing this big floating rock with a lot of other fucking people and you're no different from them, so share the fucking toys in the playpen.

To keep it short and sweet, we poke fun at scene/emo kids and Default-Theory-of-a-Nickel-Creed, and "new hardcore music" because they're all pretty much fucking cop-outs.

Scene kids are confused so they look to MySpace to find out "who they are". That's fucking stupid.

Emo kids live a life of self-pity for the sake of attention, and reverse-psychological-emotional-abuse of spouses. That's also fucking stupid.

Music that capitalizes on trends and takes advantage of the unknowing public rehashed-radio-bullshit, usually the product of a corporation, and the only inspiration behind their "songwriting" is money (greed) and fame (self-interest). This is really fucking stupid.

And pterodactyl screams and growls (not exercised in moderation) in lieu of actual lyrics, actual inspiration and poetry... every... fucking... song... is a cop-out and is no worse than the radio-phenomena that is capitalizing on trends. This makes that post-punk-hardcore shit fucking funny!



In the end... Don't take us so fucking seriously. We don't even take ourselves that seriously, so don't harsh our mellow. Have some fun. Don't be a dick. Do unto others that you'd like others to do unto you.



Unity.

Live. Love.

- PunkerSlut