Heathen Disco Book Reviews #0001 (November 29, 2024)

Free issue alert: This is all about Killed of Kids, the new book about Huggy Bear, written by the band and edited by Ethan Swan.

Huggy Bear came up at a very fruitful time in the cultural roundabout (1991-1994), the pendulum swung towards the righteous and young to hold the line. Curiosity begat friendships, secrets became trust, the world opened in the right direction for a change. The vector was set, then noticed, then populated, and ultimately infected itself closed.

Killed of Kids zooms in close on three intense years of activity as a working band, built from working class means, and opened in that narrow window of the late ‘80s / early ‘90s when timing and opportunity aligned and fell onto our narrators – in the midst of rave culture, punk-seeded noise, and plentiful signposts from previous generations available at the cheap to discover and codify. This was the era of heavy sampling in hip hop in the butter years, right as it entered the mainstream; also just before the crest of building uniforms around castoffs. Repurpose, refit, reinvent. The drive to pursue and discover was strong in all of them, through college and music scenes, but there’s no kayfabe about the identities of each person in this band, how complex they played out, how they needed to exist against ingrained inequalities that had followed them since birth. The members of the band come off as having it all figured out at a very early age, and that is maybe the most remarkable portion of their history: how absolutely sure of themselves they were. If it didn’t manifest as confidence full-stop, then their attitudes surely filled in the rest, their discoveries firmed the cracks between, and their abilities to codify this into a philosophy, an art practice, and a cultural phenom all at once deserves a work of this nature to unpack it.

No one has better qualifications to tell this tale except the band members themselves. Huggy Bear was maybe the most divisive top-level band associated with Riot Grrl, and Niki, Jo, Chris, Jon and Karen are the only ones who can speak to it. Ethan asks the right questions but the prompts are used sparingly — theirs is a linear narrative behind a hidden passage, and the only one way it could’ve went is laid out in a dimensionally exploded mountain of words and artifacts. It’s not impenetrable; the document has been around (though never collected, and still at a remove from their actual music, which you’ll have to find somewhere else), and the work done here completes it. Apart from the extensive self-exegeses, there’s a treasure trail of band-penned zines, articles ranging from opinions out of a zine from North Dakota to the New York Times, and photos of their performances. I still don’t quite understand the issue surrounding their appearance on The Word, but it plays as if you took some of the loudest agents in the counterculture and threw them on a Jerry Springer set, objectified them, then let that narrative run loose throughout UK media to where the group was in harm’s way, and that serves as a fulcrum from which this whole mechanism had to come to a stop. They gave themselves three years to exist in this lane, and took the long, hard way down.

I’m not entirely sure that this book works as a tool for discovering this band – it’s not all that useful if you don’t know about Huggy Bear, what they sounded like, what their times held in store. But it does show the path to get to where they were, and the foundation of that path is built on real human relationships with one another, and seeing others for the people they are. There are so many forces, seemingly benign, in the world today that do all they can to separate people, to keep them alone, guilty, inferior, endlessly spending, working for nothing until they are burnt out husks that’ll do whatever they’re told. One means of challenging that is togetherness – opening up out of passion and curiosity rather than fear or doubt. It’s always been this way but it’s pervasive now to where you would have to try harder than ever to find your way out. We’re never gonna get out of this without each other, and it’s the lesson that kept reverberating through my head as I slammed through this work. The words may slow you down, but your ability to interpret them as the detail of every scale on the dragon they created will determine how deeply you feel what’s in this book, and what you’re gonna do about it after it’s done.

Great book, really unlike so much else out there. Check it out now. – Doug M