On their latest album, Good Luck Everybody, AJJ’s social consciousness, and their coarse sense of humour yield disastrous results. The reason for this is because of the record’s main subject matter: Trump, and the social climate surrounding his presidency.
On ‘Normalisation Blues’, a Woody Gutherie-inspired folk song, Bonnette laments the learned helplessness and general despondency that have become part of daily life in Donald Trump’s America:
“And when we talk about the president, we’re either pissed off or we’re giggling
About an atrocity he’s committing or some stupid shit he’s tweeting
…
They try to divide us, and largely they’re succeeding
‘Cause they’ve undermined our confidence in the news that we are reading
And they make us fight each other with our faces buried deep inside our phones”
Despite these diagnoses, AJJ doesn’t transcend the shouting match. Instead they follow the trend towards polarisation, where every issue is reduced to a matter of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. This is seen throughout the album’s political songs, but none so strongly as in ‘Mega Guillotine’, where AJJ puts to music a stale leftist-Twitter meme about using a guillotine on the super-rich.
It’s embarrassingly on-the-nose. Does AJJ hope to address the problems they’ve identified with novelty songs? It appears so. If not, the irony is so many levels high that the real belief is indiscernible.
Another song without about as much thought behind it is titled ‘Psychic Warfare’. Here, Bonnette fantasises about killing Donald Trump with his mind.
“Psychic warfare, painted a portrait of you in pastel
Red and yellow and orange, this picture that I painted of you is you burning in hell, hell yeah
And then I set it all on fire, this is psychic warfare”
Even as a long-time fan of the band, this is almost unlistenable. Nuance has never been AJJ’s strong suit, but on these songs they abandon it altogether.
As if anticipating criticism, Bonnette wrote the following on the album’s bandcamp page: “I don’t particularly enjoy writing topical, political songs, but I have no control over what I write. We can only hope that this material will be dated next year and AJJ can move on to worthier subjects.” Is it really the subject matter, not the approach, that’s the problem? Punk can never be apolitical. Nevertheless, topicality doesn’t doom you to being ephemeral.
The album’s not all bad. If you skip past the worst offenders, you’ll find that there are some good sad songs on there. Highlights include ‘Feedbag’, ‘Maggie’ and ‘Your Voice, As I Remember It’.
Still, this album is scarcely half an hour long. Inconsistency, tone-deafness and misguided lyrics might be excused on a sprawling double album, but not on one this short.
“Ben Gallaty and I have pieced together an album that is reflective of our times.” continues Bonnette’s post. “It’s pessimistic and sad, with small pockets of love and grace. It’s bitter. And funny. And scary, like a scroll through your endless feed.” I don’t understand how AJJ expects to tackle the problems in our discourse by reproducing those exact conditions on Good Luck Everyone. There are a few songs here which can’t help but charm with their sweet clumsiness, but as a whole, this is neither a coherent album, nor is it the best representation of what AJJ can do.
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