Hey "the World"! Check out the first officially streamed song from our new record. Here's something that I wrote about it that I probably shouldn't be posting, but, I'm not gonna just trash the last 20 minutes of my life… So here's this unedited thing. Help me out & point out bad grammar & spelling. It'll be "fucking Interactive"!!!!!! When I really dove head first into punk music around the age of 15, there was this one band that was universally accepted & loved, transcending the boundaries of punk, hardcore & ska, which were so divisive in the early 1990’s. That band was Operation Ivy. You couldn’t escape that record if you were with any group of punks & you never wanted to anyway. “Energy” was an instant classic from the first lines of “Knowledge” all the way through to the tacked on 7” EP’s at the end, it played at every “party” (party in quotes because it encompassed everything from “frats” to us “brats” hanging out on the street with a little “crack box”. Everybody my age went bananas listening to this enigmatic record from this already broken up band (?!?). The mythology was epic in those pre-internet days; "If they’re from the East Bay, then why are they singing about Hoboken, New Jersey?" That was a mile & a half away from my home just across the Hudson river… Years went by & that record continued to influence thousands of bands around the globe, my own included. I used to record 4-track versions of songs like “Junkies Running Dry” & "Take Warning" even before I found other folks to play music with. Tracking down Jesse Michaels was no easy task. It still isn’t really. There was something about Op Ivy that I could never glean from Rancid & it took me over 20 years to figure out why exactly. I met Jesse Michaels through a very good mutual friend & not because I was trying to track him down. It just happened organically. Perhaps because of the lyrics in our song “Gay rude boys unite” which seemed to be the catalyst for LöC's mutual alienation from Rancid & Hellcat records. Semi-quoting parts of “Unity” by Op Ivy, I tried to paint the picture of what seemed like a very homophobic environment at Hellcat records in the late ’90’s. As Tim Armstrong was courting Buju Banton to be on the label I was “treated” with the story about how Buju never apologized for writing homophobic lyrics in his managers misguided attempts to answer my inquiries about the crass homophobia that I heard Buju propel in his lyrics & interviews. The punchline was that Shaba Ranks was a sucker for apologizing about what turned out to be a very fundamental part of “Rude Boy” culture. There was so much talk about unity amongst very sexist & homophobic artists in the punk, hardcore, hip hop & reggae scenes. I wrote that song because I realized that the people I was involved in putting out records with either were these disgusting “things” or they were too apathetic or ignorant to give a fuck. Jesse’s a busy guy. It took several years of planning & practice to lock him down for an hour in a studio in Southern California, which was actually perfect, because I was working on “Constructs of the state” for several years as well & I was forced to finish the lyrics to "System Fucked" in time to record it with him. And in doing so, I found in Jesse what had connected me to Operation Ivy in the first place; a warm hearted person with his head on his shoulders, a social conscience & a wit to be reckoned with (MUST READ: "The Whispering Bodies: A Roy Belkin Disaster" by Jesse Michaels). The result speaks for itself on this ska-punk track about young Americans being conned into joining the U.S. army under the guise of “be(ing) all that (they) can be” & creating a "career"or getting a free education. Essentially the power constructs in this country destroy economies & neighborhoods & create a huge surplus of disaffected & poverty ridden youth who face the choices of being harassed, brutalized or murdered by overzealous under-trained “Peace Officers”, joining a gang of drug dealers with it’s own brutal & lethal possibilities or becoming a respected soldier earning some money to help support their families while avoiding the high possibility of being incarcerated or worse. It’s this over all system that holds “dying for your country” as this amazing alternative to what might become of you if you stick around your neighborhood & community that is constantly being subjugated & torn apart by the very same government that asks you to defend it. Is that “Irony”…? Alanis? Weird Al? Hello… Anybody????