It seems like everybody who’s a fan of music has a small handful of bands that completely define various genres or subgenres to them. For me, MDC is the band that completely epitomized political hardcore punk, alongside bands like D.O.A., Crass, Subhumans (both the Canadian and British ones.), and Jello Biafra’s various projects. Like a tonne of other bands, I first discovered the band while I was shopping at one of my favourite record stores in town, Orange Monkey Music. I was 15 and was at the shop at least a couple times a week, spending what little hard-earned cash I had on learning as much as I could about punk rock.
One day, flipping through the bins of CDs (this was right before vinyl came back in a big way) I came across a copy of the Millions of Dead Cops/More Dead Cops compilation album, combining their debut album with an early singles and EPs collection.
Over the years I’ve built a pretty solid mental punk rock encyclopedia and a pretty decent record/CD collection to match, but to this day there hasn’t been an album that’s thrilled, intimidated, and scared me like that one. Every single track on that album is pure fucking political-as-fuck hardcore gold. Short, fast, lout, and right to the fucking point. I mean, you can’t really get more direct than “John Wayne Was a Nazi”, can you? Sticking the song “America’s So Straight” right in the middle of “Dead Cops” was one of the most spectacular production decisions on a political punk record I’ve ever come across. Songs like “Greedy & Pathetic” and “Multi-Death Corporations” are some of the best, fastest, angriest punk songs I’ve ever heard. Meanwhile, “Corporate Deathburger” and “Chicken Squack” were what prompted me to consider that maybe eating animals might be something to disagree with (I went vegetarian about 2 years after buying this album, vegan about 3 years after that), and the song “I Remember” as well as the album’s artwork really prompt me to think about my position in society as a straight white dude who’d had mostly positive interactions with the police so far in my life. So it would be a bit of an understatement to say this band has had a bit of an impact on me.
Some of their later albums might have been kind of lacking; Smoke Signals is kind of all over the place and not in a good way, and there isn’t much that I find too memorable about Metal Devil Cokes, but records like Millions of Damn Christians, Shades of Brown, Magnus Dominus Corpus, and their split with The Restarts, Mobocracy are all fucking stellar political hardcore.Which is why I was super excited to discover that their singer/lyricist Dave Dictor had just released a memoir, titled MDC: Memoir of a Damaged Civilization, published by Manic D Press in San Francisco.
It became pretty apparent from the beginning of the book that this was less of an autobiography or band history than a collection of stories that really stand out for Dave Dictor throughout his life and career, which I was somewhat surprised by. Considering how boldly political of a band MDC is I expected the book be at least 40% anti-capitalist/anti-police/pro-queer rants. Instead what we get are the kind of stories you’d tell to your friends over pints or to help pass the time on a long drive. It has a kind of “you know who I am and what I’m about so let’s cut that shit. Here, let me tell you about the time the dog I was looking after saved me from getting beaten by Nazi skinheads” feel to it.
For fans of the band, I’d definitely recommend it. If you’re into hardcore left wing political punk and don’t know this band, where the fuck have you been? Get over to my place, we’ll have a beer (if that’s your thing) and crank their records until the neighbours complain, then I’ll loan you my copy of the book.
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