#92: I make harmful content. That needs to change.
#92: I make harmful content. That needs to change.
Human Missile Crisis; Femcel; the Dandy Lions; the Casual Sexists; Queef Jerky; Sex Mex
Human Missile Crisis
Google is certain I mean Cuban Missile Crisis when I search for this band, because it defaults to results about that time in 1962 when the U.S. and U.S.S.R. nearly kicked off a nuclear war. Even after I reiterate that I’m looking for Human Missile Crisis, it gives me links about the Cuban one. Listen, Mountain View, I recognize it was one of the defining events of the Cold War, but you should know by now I’m into weird shit.
Granted, there’s nothing particularly weird about Human Missile Crisis. Per their bio, they play “punk-infused garage-rock” and hail from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, a suburb of Halifax. This year’s Liquor Store Stories is solid, meat-and-potatoes rock that would sound at home in any Midwestern rock venue.
The album closes with a song called “Mr. Pryor,” which begins with the lyric, “Richard Pryor / Did stand-up sitting down / and if I was there, I would have / Stood up proud.” I can’t make out all the lyrics—they aren’t posted online—and it sounds like there’s a reference to court jesters?
Wanting to know more, I reached out. Guitarist-vocalist DJ Vaters quickly responded, as he’s a polite Canadian. He’s also a lifelong comedy fan, particularly of Pryor’s. Vaters mentioned how, toward the end of his life, Pryor sat during stand-up performances because of his failing health. That memory of Pryor tied into what was happening in the world at that time.
“I found myself watching on TV what was going on with the BLM movement and the #MeToo movement and being enraged by the way people would treat each other,” he says. “I just wished we could all move past the racism and sexism and unfair treatment of our fellow humans and just laugh at something together.”
While I had Vaters, I asked him about the name Human Missile Crisis. It dates back a decade-plus to when he was writing instrumental electronic music and giving the songs random titles—including “The Human Missile Crisis.”
“Around that time when Obama was in office, it came out that he dropped more bombs on people than any other president,” Vaters says. “So that was more political in nature, but I always had the idea of using that for a band name at some point. When I started writing more personal songs, I realized that it didn’t have to be political, and the human-nature side of ‘human missile crisis’ could be something I could lean into as well with my songwriting.”
It’s heady stuff for a name that sounds like a simple play on words. Less heady: Spotify telling me Human Missile Crisis can be discovered on a 455-song 30-hour playlist called the Ultimate Divorced Dad Rock Playlist.
Femcel
By now, even the moderately online among us are familiar with the term “incel,” but what about femcel? It’s exactly what you think, but more dispiriting. According to my limited research, it’s typically deployed by men to insult women. Because of course it is. I could go down the rabbit hole of think pieces and subreddits, but I’m good, thanks.
With that context, this trio’s succinct bio makes sense: “NYC femme rage.” So does the title of their new album, Piss Baby. I won’t link to the definition of “piss baby” by the seldom useful Urban Dictionary, but this take by writer Visakan Veerasamy seems reasonable (emphasis his):
A pissbaby is a person who is crying because they’ve pissed themselves. With actual infants, this is literal piss. Which, while annoying to deal with, is understandable, because infants are works-in-progress and they do not yet possess the capacity for self-regulation. This is key.
An adult pissbaby is a person who is crying (whining, complaining, expressing discomfort) because of the consequences of their failure to self-regulate appropriately. This failure of self-regulation could be emotional, psychological, social, you name it. Whatever the reason, this person has pissed themselves and they’re crying about it.
That fits Femcel’s whole femme-rage vibe, or as much as I can make out from their songs. To call Piss Baby “lo-fi” is generous, as it’s a notch above a boombox recording. Titles include “Cat Ass,” “Anxiety Song,” and “Penrose Everdeen,” by which they probably mean Primrose Everdeen, sister of the lead character in The Hunger Games. I don’t think the name change is commentary or an artistic choice. Maybe Femcel’s YA knowledge is simply slipping.
You know, Katniss Everdeen was the original femcel. In this essay, I will…
The Dandy Lions
Taking a hard left turn from femcels, incels, and piss babies, let’s talk about this kids-stage-at-the-festival moniker. Sit with it a moment and its inherent obviousness quickly emerges, which means lots of bands have claimed it. Among them:
A British “function band” (i.e., a cover band you hire for your work party or whatever), whose recent appearances include the Malt Shovel Malt Festival!
A Strokes-esque group who hasn’t updated their web presence in years, but released an EP called Sensi Boy in 2023. Opening track: “New York Shitty,” so give them another point for Obvious Takes.
A group just going by Dandy Lions—no “the”—with the bio, “Woah! Watch out! We’re Dandy! and We’re Lions! We're the Dandy Lions!” They don’t seem to be active, not that they did much before. “We don’t play live,” says their bio.
And, finally, the classic “Such and Such and the So and So’s” construction of Dandy and the Lions, a South Carolina band whose 2022 EP, PDA (Public Displays of Aggression) has excellent artwork. Take note, Pkew Pkew Pkew.
The Casual Sexists
While on vacation in London years ago, New Yorker Varrick Zed and Ed Zed crossed paths, if you know what I mean. Their band name references that hookup—though it became a lot less casual when they married three months later (!)—along with the usual stuff, per an interview in Clunk Magazine:
The meaning is twofold: ‘The Casual Sexists’ appealed to our sense of humour as a young married couple to have a collective name with such unchaste implications—with a nod to the inception of our own relationship—but it also confronts the ugliness of misogyny still so prevalent in our world, and that meaning has only become stronger over time. A lot of our songs address issues of everyday ‘casual’ sexism, and we’re never short on material.
If you, like me, think of Nigel Tufnel asking “What’s wrong with being sexy?” when you hear the word “sexist,” the Casual Sexists are right there with us. In 2018 they released a single called “What’s Wrong with Being Sexy?”
Queef Jerky
As a Person of a Certain Age, I’m predisposed to dislike the content YouTube creators make off-platform as much as their hammy videos. Unsurprisingly, my interest in Queef Jerky cratered once I learned the duo consists of YouTubers Nick Green and Devon Vonder Schmalz and not, like, bearded dudes playing sludge metal.
That said, Green maybe even isn’t a YouTuber anymore? After some drama with other YouTubers that I can’t even pretend to understand or care about, he made an apology video titled “I make harmful content. That needs to change.” A comment below it made me laugh: “this is like your 4th apology video lol. take a break from the internet my dude.”
“Take a break from the internet my dude” is excellent advice and should be emblazoned on a T-shirt.
Whatever Green is or isn’t doing these days, Queef Jerky is active on YouTube. In May they dropped the video for “We Robbed a Bank,” accompanying the release of their fourth album, Absolute Madness.
The sound is overprocessed, grating, and hip-hop-adjacent, which the band describe as “post-music music”:
“It’s the kind of music that will happen after music happens. We make the kind of music that happens when everyone runs out of ideas for modern music as we know it.”
A person in the Nick Green subreddit put it another way: if “100 Gecs if 100 Gecs had zero talent or redeeming qualities.”
That is undoubtedly the point. When a different person in that same subreddit lamented Queef Jerky’s name, someone replied that it’s “supposed to be cringe on purpose.” As Queef Jerky themselves said in that interview, “Seriously, I don’t know who would want to listen to some of the stuff we say.”
Me neither, y’all. Me neither.
Sex Mex
If you hail from a hotbed of Tex-Mex cuisine like San Antonio, I guess it’s okay to make this pun.1 Clark Gray is from there, and he started Sex Mex in 2021 “with the idea of doing as much as possible with as few people as possible.” That sounds like smart pandemic thinking, but in reality was just a personal preference.
Since then, Gray has released a ton of overdriven poppy punk songs with titles like “Nerds Who Play Guitar,” “Fucking It Up,” “Max’s Mom,” “Shit Me Out,” and “Dubble Bubble Blowout.” You won’t be surprised to learn another references The Goonies.
The nerdy vibes don’t quite jibe with Sex Mex, a hand grenade of a name for web searches. Even if you append “band” to it, Google all but says “Yeah, right” and delivers links to Spanish-language porn and “Milfs from Mexico and Spain.” Max’s mom, indeed.
POST-SCRIPTS
Greetings from Band Name Bureau’s new Chicago HQ, though this incredible city has always been BNB’s spiritual and ancestral homeland.
For some reason, Bandcamp embeds aren’t working with Substack at the moment, hence all the Spotify.
Speaking of Canada, I recently listened to a great CBC podcast called Come By Chance that has the most preposterous Canadian accents I’ve ever encountered. If it were a comedy sketch, it’d seem like too much, but these are the real deal. I’m guessing Newfoundland—where the engrossing switched-at-birth story takes place—has its own flavor of accent too. Because it’s a CBC podcast, the episodes are shorter, and there are no commercials. Check it out.
Queef Jerky recently wrapped their first tour, and some fans posted reviews on Ticketmaster (which is a thing you can do?). The Denver show “was queeftastic,” for instance. The NYC show “demolished ate no crumbs queef jerky to the moon!!” Go touch grass, etc.
I grew up with Tex-Mex, and I was deep into my 20s before I realized all Mexican food wasn’t like that. “You’re telling me queso doesn’t come with everything?!”