“I learned when I was young, it’s not polite to point and stare/
But I also learned about the same time, sometimes life just isn’t fair/
And I learned that ‘Live and let live’ means one of two things: you don’t know, or you don’t care”
- Ford Pier, in his also-five-star 2005 album Pier-ic Victory

With a band name that’s a portmanteau of “propaganda” and a pacifist rebel, and a new album named after the mythical Russian minister who had fake storefronts and the front walls of fake mansions erected in the towns his czar would visit (so as to cover over the poverty), Propagandhi can't be accused of hiding their outlook on the world. They are a punk rock band, live and livid from Canada: guitar/bass/drums, throaty shout-sung vocals, racing kick drums, with even the cool sung harmonies suggesting no band more than Bad Religion. (If the guitarist sometimes pauses to cop an ominous move from Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi while cymbals hiss and simmer, or the bassist starts to chug along like Metallica’s late Cliff Burton, well, punks were just Satanists plus piercings and bad teeth to the average parent.)

Their melodic sense – which sometimes tails off into a resigned grandeur – and the way the singer fits his words to only semi-related tunes, are both like a non-slick-sounding Manic Street Preachers, who called their own debut Generation Terrorists and claimed it was intended to bring down the entire ruling order. (It didn’t.) And Propagandhi care about punk things: injustice is bad, abuse of authority is bad, the murder of innocent people is bad, yadda whatever. Truths, sure, but perhaps you nod, check off the appropriate boxes.

They _could_ have been accused, until recently, of not seeming very bright. Even when they made me laugh, there was a certain want of subtlety to calling a song “Haile Selassie, Up Your Asss”, “Stick the Fuucking Flag up Your Goddam Asss, You Sonuvabitch”, “Homophobes are Just Mad Cuz They Can’t Get Laid”, “Firestorm My Asss”, “Fuuck the Border”, “Bullshiit Politicians”, or even as wise a titular claim as “Ordinary People Do Fuucked-up Things when Fuucked-up Things Become Ordinary”. Most of those songs, on examination, were smarter than they seemed: you try watching half an hour of Fox News, including the commercial breaks, and see if you feel ready to deny that “This is a world of professional liars: a bleating chorus of tempered truths, who like pealing church-bells echo its virtues over and over and over again”. But with Propagandhi shouting and cussing in triple-time, their songs buzzing by in less than two minutes each, it’s hard to imagine they preached to many people who (1) had fast enough to ears to hear them and (2) heard, in the process, anything new.

So it makes sense that when they finally made what I consider a great record – their fifth, 2005’s Potemkin City Limits – it’s the one with no cussing in the titles and an average song length of 3.5 minutes. Both parts matter.

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The improvement has something to do with dynamics and pacing, even though they may not feel flattered when I compare the major/minor melody and medium speed of “Fixed Frequencies” to, say, some rawer Smashing Pumpkins who realized their pretty “ 1979” side could co-exist with their rock side. Or when I suggest that the dreamy guitar tones in “Fedallah’s Hearse” would fit in one of those guitar-nerd subtle-interplay critics’ bands like Television or Sunny Day Real Estate, even as the drummer fires his stun-gun salutes to speed-metal. Some of “Cut into the Earth” even has busy, syncopated jazz chords, and other parts are in 9/8 and 6/8 time. Often, even when the rhythm section on these four-minute songs barrels ahead in pogo-time, singer Glenn Lambert holds a key soaring note.

Just as often he’s barking up a semi-tuneful storm, though. An exciting one, as often as not: loud fast rules, so does hopping around to barnburners like “Die Jugen Marschiert”, and they switch among several riffs and tempos per song in their own version of verse/ chorus/ bridge structure. But there’s little doubt that the new song lengths are driven, more than anything, by Propagandhi’s desire that we hear what they’re saying. They’re almost* the only band I can think of whose choruses exist _only_ in a musical sense: Jordy Samolesky hasn’t run out of words, you see, so instead of us taking up the old familiar refrain, we listen to the new one he fits to the same soaring melody. The first time it comes up, perhaps an argument calls for a sarcastic “With a rebel yell, do exactly what you’re told: one million douchebags can’t be wrong” ; the second time, for “Music’s power to describe, compel, renew: it’s all a distant second to offers you can’t refuse”, so that’s what he sings instead. If “We may face a scorched and lifeless earth/ but they’re accountable to their shareholders first/ that’s how the world works” is of too different a mood to deserve the same melody, the song gets a darker, more solemn tune to end on.

*(the Weakerthans also affix new words to the chorus melody each time. The Weakerthans were founded by original Propagandhi bassist John Samson.)

The politics themselves are part of why Propagandhi’s words affect me: only part, but they’re worth commenting on. Their view of those in power is a black-and-white and unforgiving one, and while mine isn’t, I think we need extremists to point out things that, whether or not we fully agree, make us uncomfortable enough to need to think. I wouldn’t personally want a world without police, and there might be another side to a song whose liner notes dedicate it “to Rodney Naistus, Neil Stonechild, and Lawrence Wegner, murdered by members of the Saskatoon Police Department”, but any number of middle-class blacks have been stopped and searched enough times to agree that the police “never come in peace”, and whites won’t understand the world as well if we don’t stop to hear why.

Or, liberals as well as conservatives love to wish that U.S. soldiers come home from Iraq safely, and it seems obviously right to do so. But we need someone to remind us that “As the empire (pre-emptively) strikes back and the voice of Luke’s father baritones ‘This is CNN’, I recall Arab kids slaughtered, reduced to sand-niggers and rag-heads. And now I’m expected to mourn dead Americans: the executioner’s willing citizens?” Even if we answer “yes”, we’re better – and more appreciative – if we’re forced to stumble out a how-come.

For that matter, maybe it’s too easy to wave off an easy excuse for why Islamic extremists die to kill Americans. Canadian extremists don’t, but their polls show a lot of indignation about their Superpowerful southern neighbor, so why not an anthem for Canadian independence, for revisiting the war of 1812 and burning down D.C. again? “Just a speculative fiction, no cause for alarm”, they sing: just a cause for Americans to wonder what we’ve done to annoy those nice “Eh?”-saying peaceniks who let us buy Celine Dion records but keep the Rheostatics to themselves. If we ask, they’ll tell us: maybe we should listen.

Plus, sometimes, we might have to fully agree with the extremists. “Fixed Frequencies”, sung from Israel’s settlers in Palestine to the Canadian and American governments who condemn them, reminds us how white Judeo-Christians took over a land that, in 1491, had likely been more populous than Europe: “We both profess noble itent as we civilize human impediments … So wipe that ‘Who, me?’ look off your face, and admit our designs are separated by no more than place or time … We want nothing more than what you have: a comforting set of exculpatory ‘facts’ like, say, the myth of an empty land, and a conquest so complete that we can pull those tanks off our streets”.

Anyone tempted to argue the truth of the point is invited to read the journals of Christopher Columbus and Bartolo de las Casas, of the Pilgrims and of Alexander Hamilton; to read Gary Nash’s Red, White, and Black, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jack Weatherford’s Indian Giver, and the primary documents collected in Karen Kupperman’s Major Problems in Colonial American History, and see if they still feel like arguing. True, it’s not clear what we’re supposed to _do_ with the reminder that American democracy was built on genocide, or with the unsustainability of modern resource use, the vapidity of modern media, or the rest of the points so energetically sung on Potemkin City Limits. Which is why the other part of the lyrics’ power, for me, is that the band don’t know either, and they spend many of the songs considering the question aloud. The song title “Name and Address Withheld” may be a lie, but the nervousness behind it isn’t; the vengefulness behind “Iteration” may be fair, or unkind, or both, but when we “can’t gouge 10,000 eyes from a single head”, how is Biblical justice to be enacted?

The album’s most inspirational lyrics are the ones that lead to “I won’t pretend that we’re on the winning end, but when did that matter before anyway?”. The most exhilirating, happy sing-along on the disc goes “We’re doomed! Fuucking doomed! Fuucking doomed!” We’re awake; we’re thinking; we’re disconnecting from what we’re supposed to think, and connecting to a bunch of weird outcasts whose guitars sizzle and distort in the higher frequencies. Is this supposed to make anyone’s life happier?

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I submit that the answer is yes. Taking a break from this review, I watched (with Cindy) the movie the Secret Lives of Dentists, another excellent movie to remind us that being married and hoping for kids may not _necessarily_ be the secret to our eternal bliss. Towards the end, David (Campbell Scott) explains to his skeptical hallucination (Denis Leary) why he doesn’t dump his cheating wife – why, indeed, he can’t even risk confronting her. “Everything I’ve done in my life, I’ve done for this” [indicating home/ kids/ wife]. “Medical school, dental school – nine years – putting up with my father, all of it has been so I could reach the life I have”. “Had”, the hallucination suggests; “whatever”, David responds.

A home is an important thing, and can be a wonderful thing, but it is a small thing, buffeted by huge forces, and it is fragile. The problem isn’t that David cares about his family, but that if he loses it he has nothing; that he’s allowed himself to unplug from the larger world.

I have a dear e-friend who’s living on disability, a left-leaning friend who’s smart and writes well and is bored without a job. I want to convince her that if she went into the world and acted on her political beliefs, she’d join losing causes sometimes, but she wouldn’t be bored. I have another e-friend, smart and argumentative, who gets frustrated by online flame wars with invisible strangers who mean nothing to him. I want to convince him that he’d feel more satisfied if he learned enough to turn his anger on the invisible strangers who have the power to shape his life – and who will lose that power if enough people don’t like how they’re using it.

I’ve had a hideous toothache for over a week now, one that won’t be fixed until my wisdom teeth are removed on the 17th. When I’m teaching, or (it turns out) when I’m writing a Propagandhi review, trying to nudge the world into seeing itself a little more like I do, guess what? No toothache. I don’t have time to notice it.

Of course, the same effect can follow from nodding and waving my arms as Propagandhi’s bassist varies the rhythm and order of the four main chords on “Iteration”, as the guitarist solos on the high notes like he’s auditioning for Van Halen. I don’t know whether Propagandhi’s music, lyrics, and world-aware weblinks have led anyone to run for, and get elected to, office. It wouldn’t surprise me, but it’s a mystery. I don’t know whether they’ve changed any laws or motivated any initiatives. I know they’re vegetarians (leading to the classic early song title “Apparently I’m a P.C. Fascist Because I Care about Both Humans and Non-Humans”), but I don’t know many animal lives that’s saved or how many tons of toxic chemical cowpoop that’s kept from being dumped into the rivers: maybe only a very few. Which I’d celebrate, but perhaps I’m too easily impressed.

I don’t know how many fans they’ve inpsired to take up guitar, or well those fans play. Maybe few and badly. But if nothing else, Propagandhi’s devotion to the larger world – no matter how much of it they disapprove of – has led to that world containing Propagandhi albums. As of 2005, I’m considering that a far more than sufficient gain from their efforts.

Recommended: Yes