Flipper Sex Bomb Baby (Infinite Zero/American)
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It’s kind of ironic that punk rock is now as American as apple pie and produces multimillion sellers like Green Day and Offspring, considering that it began as an irksome though negligible force on the cultural margins. Themes of boredom remain the music’s vital legacy, but today’s kiddie punks generally opt more for bubblegum melodies amid the bashing than the brutal rants from days of yore. Yes, times have certainly changed. Green Day wouldn’t have dented the charts ten years ago; just look at the pathetic hum-along jokeholes the Dickies, who are still poking around for that elusive breakthrough (they play Crobar October 26 and shouldn’t hold their breath). Now Green Day is a post-Nirvana gold mine setting the precedent for punk rock on the charts. Beneath all the phlegm-hocking and blue hair, though, Green Day isn’t much more than a scruffy pop band singing about masturbation, watching TV, and girls. More than ten years ago the Bay area from which Green Day hails was ruled (in an artistic sense, at least) by Flipper, which made no money back then, and, despite the changed attitudes toward punk rock, surely wouldn’t today. In fact, a couple of new CD reissues of primo early- to mid-80s American punk rock exude a sense of power, character, and danger that’s missing in today’s chart toppers, which, of course, is a large part of the reason they’re climbing those charts in the first place.
While Flipper offered an almost poetic account of humor-laced desperation, its ugly music had no problem succeeding on its own. Flipper was the first grunge band, existing when the word meant only dirt. It’s hard to imagine Nirvana without Flipper, although you’d never confuse the two. While nearly all of its hardcore contemporaries lived by the “loud fast rules” ethos, Flipper often opted for funereal tempos. Both Bruce Lose and Shatter played bass, together creating a gloriously sloppy mess of distorted sonic sludge that was also a crawling grind swinging in drunken unison with Steve DePace’s thundering drums and Ted Falconi’s reckless guitar machinations and sputtering splashes of feedback. Sex Bomb Baby collects the band’s three singles and a number of early compilation tracks, but even with a partly slapdash construction, it provides a potent example of Flipper’s short-lived glory. The band continued to make records, although none of them were very good, including 1993’s feeble reunion album, American Grafishy. But their early work stands alone.
