When the former drummer for The Offspring asked if I wanted to be on the guest list for his new band’s show in Maryland, I jumped at the opportunity.
I’d never been on a guest list for a concert before, although I’d been to plenty in the past. I’m just some guy from the high desert of Southern California who happened to be plucked out of obscurity to join one of the leading alternative media companies. In the nearly two years I've worked with Timcast and SCNR News, I’ve had the opportunity to meet a ton of interesting people—some of whom I hardly knew prior to their IRL appearance, and others who I had been a fan of for years, like Pete Parada.
Parada's new band, The Defiant, formed last year with a handful of other outcast musicians who pushed back during the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine pressure campaign that followed. I was familiar with Dicky Barrett, the former lead singer of The Mighty Mighty BossToneS. I listened to ska here and there and was a fan of their tunes. I also recognized Greg Camp as a founding member of Smash Mouth and the man behind their infamous “All Star” song. I’d never heard of Joey LaRocca or Johnny Rioux who performed in Los Angeles and Boston-based bands, respectively. They just never hit my radar, though being a Los Angeles native myself, I quickly became a fan of Joey’s work with The Briggs.
We pulled up to The Fillmore in Silver Spring just after the doors opened with plenty of time to explore the venue and browse the merch table. Without counting Aaron Lewis’ acoustic show at the Charles Town casino in December 2022, I hadn’t been to a proper concert since before the pandemic.
We were seated at a private table on the upstairs mezzanine overlooking the venue. I had a perfect view of the stage and was out of reach from the inevitable mosh pit.
My colleague, whom I brought along as a plus one, was keeping up with the Bruins game as the opening band, UltraBomb, took the stage. I laughed and asked what the score was, but I was here for business. I was a disciple of the church of rock and roll and was there to study liturgy. My chest thumped and the room vibrated with energy as the opening band launched into their first song.
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UltraBomb[/caption]
I’ve listened to punk as far back as I can remember, but it didn't immediately click with me. The fast-paced aggressive sound was aesthetically fun to listen to—it was like angry pop rocks and soda for my ears—but I couldn’t care less about the lyrics.
I didn’t have my "A-ha!” moment with punk until 2015. Back then, I considered myself a liberal guy, but even I found the burgeoning social justice warrior mind virus annoying.
One sunny summer day while attending university, I was listening to Dead Kennedy’s N-bomb track “Holiday in Cambodia” when a line bonked my forehead like a V8 juice commercial.
You're a star-belly sneetch, you suck like a leech / You want everyone to act like you
They were fucking everywhere, and I couldn’t unsee it. The Star-Bellied Sneetches drained the soul out of everything they touched while LARPing as The Resistance ™. The entire landscape of popular culture—music, movies, television, books—had become saturated with the same condescending, pompous progressive messaging. The animosity was palpable.
Suddenly, the ethos of punk made sense.
"Fuck these people," I thought. I hated everything they stood for.
I began listening to anything and everything punk and fell into a downward spiral of biting contentious lyrics delivered with dissent, angst, and aggression that spoke to me like no other genre had before. It was the natural extension of rock and roll.
“I wrote this song about my dog,” UltraBomb’s bassist said introducing their next song before shouting, “Fuck Kristi Noem!”
I chuckled.
Usually, I hate when artists get political in their performance, but this was a punk band so I let it slide. Besides, I agreed with him.
In 2016, I saw Rise Against at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Frontman Tim McIlrath went on some self-absorbed diatribe about rejecting fascism, and racism, blah blah blah, Trump is literally Hitler. It was already wildly unpopular to like Trump, so what statement did he think he was making? I wasn’t a fan of Trump myself at the time, but it was the safest thing to come out and say “Orange Man bad” like all the other celebrities and mainstream outlets were saying. If he really wanted to make a statement, he would have said: “Fuck Hillary Clinton, too.”
The deeper I got into punk, the more I noticed that somewhere between Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen” and Green Day's “American Idiot” punk had become a shadow of what it once was. A skinsuit for record labels and musicians to slap on a steaming pile of pre-approved messaging to help sell their flavor-of-the-week social justice cause. It felt like a dead genre. No longer was punk performed by the ugliest, skeeziest dudes you’d ever seen who whine into the microphone about anarchy and thumb their nose at The Man. Punk bands became consultants of The Man who went on to receive rave reviews from critics and win Grammy Awards.
It was antithetical to the entire ethos of punk: Why would a punk band accept awards and praise from organizations full of people they were supposed to hate in the first place?
There's a reason why people say Rage Against the Machine has become Rage on Behalf of the Machine. Punk thrives on authenticity—we can tell when you're faking it.
After a 14-year tenure with The Offspring, and despite being diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, Parada was let go from the band after refusing to take the Covid-19 vaccine in 2021.
That’s the most badass thing I’ve seen in a long time, I thought, knowing I also faced termination from my then-employer because I refused to disclose my medical history.
Parada has described himself as more of a metal guy who happened to fall into the punk scene, though ironically he was the most punk member of The Offspring.
Dicky similarly faced cancellation after The Mighty Mighty BossToneS released "THE KILLING OF GEORGIE (PART III)" in 2021. The song's title was a play on Rod Stewart's "The Killing of Georgie (Part I and II)" and took a sympathetic view of the infamous death of George Floyd in May 2020. Critics panned the song as insensitive to Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. The Mighty Mighty BossToneS later disbanded in 2022 after Dicky partnered with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vocal critic of vaccines, for a "Defeat the Mandates" rally.
After UltraBomb finished, The Defiant took the stage and Dicky kicked off their set with “Everybody Loves Me,” the first track off their debut album, If We’re Really Being Honest.
Dicky opened the song with a guttural scream in his signature gravelly voice. This is a fantastic tune, and although the song has some great allusions to overall political oligarchy running the United States, there seems to be some obvious jabs at celebrities and other elites with perceived legitimacy.
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The Defiant[/caption]
The song was followed by a cover of The Mighty Mighty BossToneS’ “How We Got Away.”
“We Make Drugs” was a fan favorite as the crowd visually bobbed along to the back-and-forth rhythm as Dicky warned of the ever-growing medical industrial complex. The song is a refreshing and well-deserved thumb in the eye to Big Pharma.
The band cranked the energy up to eleven with their anti-World Economic Forum anthem “No Nothing”—a personal favorite of mine. Johnny kicked off the song with an ominous bass line. “Imagine having nothing and you love that," the gravel-voiced frontman said, mocking Klaus Schwab and WEF’s infamous video.
“And if you don’t believe me, listen to Joey LaRocca,” Dicky said as Joey belted into a nearly 30-second sermon on WEF’s goals:
They want you owning nothing / No argument or discussion / It's corporate media-funded / Oh, did I mention you love it? / They want you locked in your homes / They tracking you on your phones / They hacking humans like clones / Until you acting like drones / Do not think for yourself / We profit when you're not well / You’ll beg to live in a cell / You'll think that heaven is hell / You know nothing and you love it / These celebrities are puppets / The Industrial Revolution is here / And you're the subjects
The Defiant followed up their fiery anthem with “As One,” a feel-good rocker that takes some jabs at tyrants and useful idiots of the pandemic.
“Let’s stand together my sisters and my brethren,” Dicky sings. “Learn the lessons and count our blessings everyone. Before it’s too late!”
As the show wound down, the band played the third single off their album, “Where Did Lady Liberty Go?”—another personal favorite.
WATCH:
The song opens with Dicky recounting the March 2020 nationwide lockdowns as he notes, “The rogues did resist,” and “the scoundrels insist,” while others shrugged their shoulders and went through the motions without question.
The song also gives a hauntingly beautiful description of empty arenas and concert halls as stay-at-home orders were issued.
The silenced were silent / The sidelines were full / The stands they were standing room only / A spectator sport / That you couldn’t cut short / In a league where you’re left out and lonely.
The collective cathartic release I felt watching them perform while surrounded by fellow punks knowing I never gave in to the tyrants was long overdue.
“Keep your eye on the shepherd / And not on the sheep,” Dicky said, reciting a nugget of wisdom gleaned from the mass formation psychosis. “Just be happy you finally found them.”
"It Is Over,” the lone ballad from The Defiant, is the soundtrack to post-pandemic life.
Where do we go now / That it is over / We can’t stay here / They’ve made that clear / It’s time we say goodnight.
By now, life has mostly returned to normal. Concerts are being held. Crowds gather to watch the game. At this point, even the most ardent COVID-compliant suckers have given up on social distancing and masking. But there’s an elephant in the room and nobody wants to acknowledge it. As time progresses, it gets easier to move on with life, but from time-to-time I can’t help but think to myself, “Now what?"
The Defiant closed their set with their lead single, “Dead Language.” The song is a commentary on our terminally online and anti-social culture, which magnified during the pandemic.
In April, the band performed the song during their debut network appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
WATCH:
Off the heels of The Mighty Mighty BossToneS' split, Dicky once again faced cancellation from Jimmy Kimmel Live! for his refusal to vaccinate for COVID-19 after a nearly 20-year tenure announcing for the program in 2022.
Some criticized the band for their Kimmel performance as a pyrrhic victory, but I couldn't think of anything more punk rock.
Kimmel is the embodiment of a corporate sellout. He built a career on raunchy comedy and hot women while hosting The Man Show with Adam Carolla, only to reverse course the moment The Resistance™ became the dominant narrative. Then he began shaming and demonizing the same audience that held the ladder for him as he climbed to the top. Kimmel was the same guy who said people refusing to vaccinate for COVID-19 should be denied a hospital bed, calling them "wheezy."
"FREE SPEECH IS FOR EVERYONE. EVEN PEOPLE YOU DON'T AGREE WITH," read Parada's shirt as the band performed on one of the biggest establishment network programs—somehow, this is a hot take in 2024. Dicky ended the performance by giving two middle fingers with his back turned to the audience.
That's punk rock.
The Defiant's show truly made me feel like a proper dissident. Like I was part of a bigger movement of people unwilling to bend or break under pressure.
I haven't been this excited about music in a long time, and I can't wait to see what's down the road for the genre.
