2/22/07: The Anti-Heros “F#¢K Hollywood” (1997) [Language advisory—perhaps already too late]Plenty of punks have attacked Hollywood in song. For the Anti-Heros, however, it got personal. The Atlanta-based band didn’t have a racist reputation when New Line Cinema released
American History X in 1998. They were just a powerful Oi! band with songs that attacked the elite and ridiculed the failure of feel-good social policies.
Director Tony Kaye filed that kind of thinking under ”Extreme Right-Wing Hysteria.” Here’s how Anti-Heros’ frontman Mark Noah described the situation to us after
American History X hit the multiplexes:
New Line asked our record label at the time, Taang!, if they could use our logo, our poster, and music for American History X
. When Taang! asked us, we said absolutely not. So the movie comes out , and there’s an Anti-Heros tattoo left on the biggest Nazi in the movie. In the aftermath, the Anti-Heros had to placate angry fans who felt that the band had hidden Nazi sympathies. In truth, Mark Noah’s own label featured one of the hardcore scene’s few racially mixed rosters. As the usually-not-litigious band declared in the song “N.L.C.”: “Say we’re the white trash of the lowest class/Our Jewish lawyer will take a bite of your ass.”
The Anti-Heros had already recorded “Fuck Hollywood.” The song merely took on greater urgency after
American History X. Maybe we’re not thrilled about the two gay slurs in the song—although one of them is goofing on closeted celebrities. That line (taking on the Beach Boys, of all people) can be found in the complete lyrics,
as seen here for your reading pleasure.
Unfortunately, the other gay jab is part of the eloquent closing verse that we’re quoting today:
Fuck Hollywood, warped sense of reality
Where the truth is always the first casualty
Fuck the causes and the coalitions
The exercise they get is jumping to conclusions
Fuck the sex and fuck the smut
Fuck the guys who take it up the butt
Fuck Hollywood ‘cause they make me sick
It's like sticking my head in a bucket of shit!We didn’t stay in touch after the interview, and have no idea how things turned out with the Anti-Heros’ lawsuit. We were one of the few writers to do an article on the subject. Rock magazines didn’t care much about the Anti-Heros’ plight. The media weren’t going to rush to cover anyone who’d dissected Bill Clinton in the style of the band’s “Hurricane Bubba.” (“People are crashing planes into his house,” said the young visionaries.)
And yet it’s nice to think that The Anti-Heros' recent low profile is because they all got rich off an out-of-court settlement. More likely, they’re just still working hard for a living.
Make it your own: You can find “Fuck Hollywood” on
American Pie, which is also the band’s strongest album. Don’t forget to check out the Amazon reviews that reflect the fall-out from
American History X. The album also includes “Hurricane Bubba,” plus a very interesting cover of a Patti Smith song.
