Blind Society -- Blind Society

Blind Society

Blind Society

Cruisin' For a Bruisin' Records, 1999

Released in 1999, Blind Society's eponymous debut EP is about as original as Methuselah is young. Musically, these kids aren't inept or anything, but their songwriting is painfully derivative. The tracks comprising the EP are your standard eruptions of loud and thrashy adolescent hardcore with virtually no deviation from the formula outlined in the same moth-eaten blueprint countless mediocre American bands have been following for decades.

Track Listing:

Track 1. "Blind Society." Imagine you've got a Matryoshka doll. Imagine you pop open the outermost wooden figurine only to find an exact replica. Now, imagine opening the second doll and uncovering a third figure identical to the first two in every way except size. Now, picture opening the third one and finding . . . hot air. Listening to a song called "Blind Society," on a record called Blind Society, written by a band called Blind Society isn't all that different. "Blind Society," essentially, laments the entropic decline of American society. Or so it seems. In the song, the generically nefarious "They" repeated throughout the track seems to refer to both the apparently war-mongering statist hegemony of Clinton-era America as well as the "blind society" over whose collective eyes it pulls the proverbial wool, so things can get a bit confusing. Fortunately, though, Blind Society is here to show the blind society the truth!

Track 2. "American Justice." Framed with audio clips taken from Falling Down, "American Justice" takes the opposite stance of the previous song. Here, in a troublingly exceptionalist and prejudiced passage, Blind Society joins forces with the blind society it has just criticized in supporting the military-industrial complex as it sets out to destroy Saddam Hussein:

Fuck the middle east thats (sic) what I say

You've killed enough people now you have to pay

Holding the price of oil over our heads

We're (sic) parade your body when you are dead

Needless to say, the bigotry of Blind Society's synecdochical conflation of Saddam Hussein with "the middle east" is the sort of wince-worthy ignorance punks have tried so hard to eradicate from the scene and its presence here is lamentable. At any rate, the band explains such radical about-faces in a helpful photocopied pamphlet stuffed into the record sleeve:

This is for the people who like to prejudge us without hearing us out. Blind Society is a band of five people; five people who have a lot of similarities and at the same time a lot of different opinions . . . With five different people, you can't expect each song to have the same message as the other . . . we all have differnt (sic) beliefs. That is why our lyrics may not always seem to agree with each other.

Track 3. "Untitled." A growling screed about the same vaguely sinister "They" polluting and destroying our world. Grammatical errors abound.

Track 4. "Red Death." Now that Blind Society has unleashed its quasi-racist rage on the Middle East, it seems, they've decided that it's high time to return to Cold War-era political name-calling and "[b]oycott those fucking chinese commies" so that "our system will finally see / That we used to stand for democracy / Not capitalistic hypocrisy." Again, Blind Society conflates a regrettable element of a society with the overwhelmingly innocent whole, rendering the song disturbingly close to outright hate-mongering. 

Track 5. "Working Class Enemy." A neo-luddite rant about technology rendering "[t]he workers of this country" obsolete. Oddly, the song's focus shifts from the global implications of technological evolution to:

When I think of my boss

I want to shoot him in the face

Making society realize

This is happening all over the place

Show us statistics

How unemployment is

Want (sic) about the 15%

I guess they have no case

Track 6. "No Escape." An attack on both "the machines" destroying the working man as well as "t6he (sic) catholic church," the EP's closing track is about as bafflingly muddled a shout-fest as you could ever hope to find.

Sobriquet Grade: 61 (D-).