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There was an online conversation after a Compromised Position set about the set going too far with shoving people around and being extremely aggressive. There was an opinion that I was only able to get away with it because the venue was across the street from a police station. After watching a lot of people chime in on the topic I decided to clarify my stance and approach. The intent was indeed to be be aggressive, to coax somebody to fight, knowing full well they would not. I did not get away with this action because of the police building across the street, I got away with it because of peoples fear to escalate and use counter violence.

People witness horrible things all of the time and do nothing. People watch people get murdered, get raped, get bullied, kill themselves, and other horrible things because it is too uncomfortable to get involved. This phenomena has been examined in countless classes with some very well known cases, one of which is referenced in this song, that being Kitty Genovese. What can be expected from somebody who survives a horrible trauma while plenty see it and do nothing?

This song is about a specific event in my life which left a lot of damage. There was a stretch of 5 years or so where I had no friends, got called faggot hundreds of times every day, got kicked, got beaten, got harassed everywhere I went. In school the only teacher that tried to help me died in a car accident. The principle and administration did nothing, and the parents of kids that used to be my friends were in total denial of it all.

This incident happened when I was probably 13 or so. I was riding my bike through a park that was a couple blocks away from home. At the entrance road I saw a group of four kids that were people that would regularly be at our house, or I would be at theirs. They were walking up ahead and I figured I would just bike passed them. It did not happen that way though. They saw me coming and were able to get hold of me, stop me, and surround me.

One of them grabbed my bike by the handle bars and pulled it up in to my groin causing me to fall over, and off the bike. These four then started to spit on me, kick me, shout things, and then wrestled the bike from under my body and slammed it down on top of me. To make things more humiliating and ruthless, one of them started to urinate on me as I laid on the ground.

This attack happened on a street that goes in a park, in the evening while the sun was still up and people were still in the park. I could hear people playing basketball and tennis. It seems improbable to me that somebody did not see this attack, or hear it as I screamed.

No help came.
Those kids walked away laughing and eventually I pulled myself up, covered in spit and soaked in piss. It hurt to move but I turned around and got on my bike and left the same way I came in. I felt ashamed as I thought about what I would tell my parents when I got home. It was hard to see the road through the tears in my eyes. The weakness that I felt in that short ride home culminated as I rushed through the house to my room and just said that I fell off my bike.

This is not abnormal in many ways. As stated, it happens all of the time. For me, this was just one incident in a string of thousands of days, and countless incidents of brutal trauma. I do not understand how our world can hold to the opinion that one should just move passed it. I like to use the analogy of a still pond which gets a rock cast in to it. The waves are relative to the size of the rock, but they WILL reach far out, all the way to the edge of the pond. And it will take a long time for that water to become still again. If another rock disturbs it, the water becomes more violent and takes longer to become serene.

So too, I find, is the human psyche.

lyrics

I remember your names
I remember your faces
I remember the taste of your piss

Genovese, how I know what you felt

Black, cold, abrasive October asphalt
Four faces that once were friends
The playground near my house
where we often played

Surrounded now,
testicles slammed by steel
did the sunset catch the glint of my tears
as you kicked, as you beat?

The shame of going home
"I fell in to a puddle"
the lies I had to tell
not to protect you, but my own dignity

you stripped it from me
you washed it away in golden streams

credits

from The Exposing Of A Man (2016), released November 26, 2016

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Black Bloc Fredonia, New York

Emotionally devastated heavy electronics.

pro action.
anti hope.

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