Matching Drapes – Pink Tax
Nobody was ever really free. Yet, for a while during the last century, the world benefited from a beautiful charade. Everyone with any power agreed to pretend to play nice. People used to say “thank you” and “hello.” Old empires used to apologise for enslaving whole civilisations or issue a public “oops!” whenever they would start a coup on a foreign continent.
But, it’s over. Everyone’s done pretending. Religion means nothing. There are no more career politicians, just TV hosts and spies who end up in government. And, the people too ashamed to admit their hatred are selling online courses on how to be like them. What to do but be equally afraid, confused and amused? That’s the sound of Matching Drapes.
Sure, Matching Drapes are polite punks from Berlin. They’re the kinds of people who’ll say sorry if they accidentally bump into you. But that’s a rarity. In fact, the anxiety-driven dance-punk of “Pink Tax” is a song about a world ruled by aggressive boneheads mining the insecurities of others. What’s a better protest than a dance and a laugh about it? It’s not like anything ever changes.
Mögel – Vad händer?
Most people do it for a while when they’re kids. Most kids get involved with music during some Summer holiday for a chance to impress their friends and to be able to tell the story somewhere down the line.
And, of course, the vast majority of punk-rockers change as they get older. The minute they start owning things, they become conservative. They demand politicians who will keep them safe, secure and unbothered by the noise of the world.
We should treasure the ones who don’t adopt these tactics, who are all-in the whole way through, who never give up on the anger that initially fueled their interest in music and their concerns with the state of the world.
Mögel’s “Vad händer?” is an important song for precisely these reasons. But, thankfully, it’s also quite the earworm, the kind of song that you can sing back to yourself and find some comfort in. It’s music meant to accompany a world that’s spinning off its axis, and that’s begun doing so for an awful long time. Those who can still recognise this are the ones we should always listen to, don’t you think?
