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SWEET SWEETBAND’S BAADASSSSS SONGS The Mekons

Jun 23, 2011
SWEET SWEETBAND’S BAADASSSSS SONGS The Mekons



Melvin Van Peebles chronicler Joe Angio produces a Kickstarter-funded Mekons documentary. Pictured above: Sally Timms, w/liquid friend.

 

BY RANDY HARWARD

 

Filmmaker Joe Angio can't fathom how the only band from the Class of '77 British punk explosion stayed largely intact over 33 years while never "making it." That's why he champions artists like the Mekons, who he documents in Revenge of the Mekons, targeting film festivals this Fall.

 

"The fact that they continue to do this," he says, "especially since they've had to overcome hurdles that would've caused so many other bands to toss in the towel-miserable luck with record companies, living on two continents separated by thousands of miles, the fact that they all continue to do day jobs of varying degrees to pay the bills-makes them a really worthy documentary subject."

 

Don't forget the music. Angio can speak at length of the Mekons' stylistic diversity, or "genre tourism," that continues to find the octet high-stepping through punk, country, electronic, ethnic and World musics. They defy categorization, even by their own friends, fans and members. Angio discovered to what extent this is true when he tried to elicit depictions from everyone he interviewed. "Invariably, they gave some rambling, convoluted reply, with numerous digressions, qualifiers and asides-they're just impossible to summarize succinctly!"

 

 

 

Revenge of the Mekons also concerns the Mekons as an art collective. They're not simply sound sculptors; they're artists, period. It's well-known that front-and-center Mekon Jon Langford does folk art paintings. Angio points out that the entire band collaborated with performance/video artist Vito Acconci in the mid-‘90s as well as "transgressive proto-feminist novelist Kathy Acker," and that the band has held collective art exhibitions such as the multimedia show OOOH! (Out of Our Heads!).

 

Also, the Mekons are probably the only band that earns a comparison to a notorious blaxploitation filmmaker. Angio directed the award-winning How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It), a documentary about Melvin Van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song), and answers a snarky question laughingly but in all seriousness. Why didn't he call this Mekons joint Sweet Sweetband's Baadasssss Songs?

 

"Ha! Funny you mention that," says Angio, recalling a Mekons entry he read in the Trouser Press Record Guide. He quotes author Greg Kot from memory: "[The Mekons] ‘continue to put out records of bewildering variety, erratic musical quality and enormous heart that function almost without exception as critiques of power and the abuse of power, whether in government, the record industry and, less frequently, the bedroom.'" It was early in production when Angio encountered the passage, and it struck him as profoundly appropriate.

 

"Without even searching for it, I'd found an interesting symbiotic relationship between Melvin... and the Mekons. I even started referring to the Mekons (only half-facetiously) as the white, British, eight-person version of Melvin Van Peebles!"

 

Official Web Site:  http://www.mekonsmovie.com/Revenge_of_the_Mekons/Home.html

 


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