Staff Picks

Alright, I guess it’s time to shake off the cobwebs and write my first staff pick in a couple of months. Do I still know how to do this? We’ll see, I suppose.

A couple of weeks ago we flipped the calendar over to 2026. In early January in years past, Jeff has always quoted Embrace’s song “End of a Year:” “It’s the end of a fucked up year… and there’s another one coming.” I’ve never stopped to think too much about that lyric until this year. While I had some great times in 2025, the latter half of the year was one of the most grueling times I’ve ever lived through. It truly was a fucked up year. And, as Ian said, there’s another one coming. No respite, no turning the clock back, just keep plowing ahead into the shit.

I was thinking the other day about how I haven’t heard the term “new year’s resolution” once this year. Admittedly, I’ve been doing my best to spend as little time as I can with both mass and social media, but I don’t think I’m that disconnected. My theory is that the world has grown so fucked up that no one has the energy to do anything but console ourselves about all the trauma we’ve endured. For the past few years, social media around the new year is a unified chorus of people exclaiming what a shit year it was, and virtually no one expressing hope the next year will be better, much less determination to make it so. I know that, in the past, I’ve dismissed most of the negativity I see about the state of the world as catastrophizing, or at the very least (foolishly) buying into the tendency in mainstream political discourse to treat every moment, every controversy, as THE MOST IMPORTANT CRISIS WE HAVE EVER FACED. But lately when I watch the news I see so much cruelty… so much evil. Our government in the United States is run by a coalition of gangsters, sadists, and people who are happy enough with whatever tiny piece of the pie they’re getting to remain complicit. I’ve always thought this was more or less true of national politics in the U.S., but there’s been a concerted effort in recent years to remove all good-hearted people from positions of power and replace them with the aforementioned gangsters, sadists, and stooges, right down to the humblest, smallest arms of local government. My mom works for the school system in the tiny town in Virginia where I grew up, and she’s told me about how a small group of right-wing activists have taken over the school board and enacted a regime that is basically the local equivalent of Stephen Miller’s wet dream. The world is getting worse, just about everywhere, for everyone but a tiny subset of people whose greed will never be satisfied.

I almost always stick to music in my pieces for the SSR newsletter, but I’ve been thinking about politics a lot lately… not Republican versus Democrat bs, but politics broadly defined, as in how we live together as humans and try to get along. Maybe I’m worried about losing my political compass without Red in my life. They were so passionate and so relentlessly empathetic, and I feel like they served as a bulwark against my natural tendency toward defeatism and apathy. But I also owe a lot of my thoughts about politics to being immersed in the world of Poison Girls for the past few weeks. Which leads me to my double staff pick for this week:

Poison Girls: Where’s the Pleasure 12” (Xntrix, 1982)

Rich Cross with Alec Dunn & Erin Yanke. This Is a Message to Persons Unknown: The Story of the Poison Girls book (PM Press, 2025)

While I’ve had Poison Girls records in my collection for many years, the band never truly clicked with me until I picked up a copy of their 1982 album Where’s the Pleasure sometime this fall. I can’t even remember where I got the record. It must have been during one of my trips out of town. Whenever I travel, and particularly when I travel alone, I tend to come home with a giant stack of vinyl, which I then spend the next few months going through. I did not know what I was in for when I dropped the needle on Where’s the Pleasure. First, it’s not what you would think of as an anarcho-punk record. Poison Girls had released several records by the time they recorded Where’s the Pleasure, and they’d long left behind any interest in catering to the middle of punk’s road. Where’s the Pleasurebuilds a world much wider than punk, taking in a range of styles across its thirteen tracks. The ones that first caught my ear—like the title track that begins the record—feature a crack rhythm section that lives deep in the pocket, and the album’s crystalline recording makes you feel like you’re plonked down in the middle of the studio as the band records. While Poison Girls’ connections to punk were fraying by this point, there’s still a punky sense of energy and directness, and I hear a lot of what I love about more “sophisticated” anarcho bands like Crisis and Zounds on Where’s the Pleasure.

The music pulled me in, but it wasn’t long before Vi Subversa’s lyrics captivated me. Subversa was 47 when Where’s the Pleasure came out, and I’m 46 now, so perhaps I’m in the right place in my life to appreciate where Vi was coming from. There are a few songs on Where’s the Pleasure that deal with “topical” issues: “Take the Toys” is, broadly, about war, while “Rio Disco Stink” is an invective against Rio Tinto, a multinational mining corporation with a long list of sins against the earth and humanity. But most of the songs on the album are about “personal” issues: love, romance, sex, aging, family… the stuff of human life rather than political broadsheets. And of course these “personal” and “political” issues intersect, which Vi has clearly thought about plenty. Take, for instance, the declamation in “Take the Toys (Reprise)”: “for all the money they spend on nuclear weapons, there is still not a safe and effective form of contraception.” Vi is an incredible lyricist, cuttingly direct one moment and oblique and evocative the next, and I am certain I’ll be pondering her words for the rest of my life.

Having been so blown away by Where’s the Pleasure, when I got an email announcing a Kickstarter / pre-order for a Poison Girls book on the long-running radical publishing imprint PM Press, I smashed that buy button without a second thought (and added in a “Take the Toys from the Boys” t-shirt for good measure). I just knew Poison Girls’ story was going to be riveting. I knew a few scattered facts that were intriguing—that Vi’s children were punks and had played in Fatal Microbes and Rubella Ballet, and that Poison Girls had frequently shared the stage with Crass—but listening to Where’s the Pleasure assured me whatever time I spent with Poison Girls, their art, and their story would be well-spent.

This Is a Message to Persons Unknown was all I could have wanted and more. As a punk rock book, it is top-notch. I love punk books, and the crisp graphic design and the reproduction of so much of the group’s paper ephemera—zines, flyers, photographs, press clippings, record sleeves and inserts, badges, and plenty more, all of it in vivid detail and full color—would have been enough to leave me a satisfied customer. But that’s only the beginning. The writing and editing are also top-notch… I try not to be an asshole about it, but as a former English teacher, the sloppy writing and copy editing on a lot of underground and small-press books really bug the shit out of me. Rich Cross’s research is exhaustive, but his writing is skillful enough not to lose the forest (the band’s story) in the trees (all those captivating details). The whole thing is executed to a much higher standard than any other book I can think of, even impressive ones like Crass: A Pictoral History.

And then there’s the story, which just blew my mind. I don’t want to summarize too much because this is already way too long, but my intuition that the Poison Girls were interesting characters was 100% accurate. And more than just being interesting, Poison Girls’ story is inspiring. The group’s key members—vocalist Vi Subversa, but also drummer Lance D’Boyle and guitarist Richard Famous—were dyed-in-the-wool radicals, people who looked at all the fucked up shit in the world and refused to take part. They didn’t just critique the world around them; they imagined how it could be better. And then they tried to make what they imagined a reality, despite an entire world working against them. They were human and had flaws and some things they tried worked out better than others, but they fucking tried. They had hope. The members of Crass found them so inspiring that, from January 1979 until early 1981, Crass refused to perform unless Poison Girls was also on the bill. Crass thought it was that important that their audience heard what Poison Girls had to say.

So yeah, Poison Girls has been my little island of hope in the sea of shit that was the latter half of 2025. I was honestly sad when I reached the last page of the book, but thankfully there are a bunch more Poison Girls records I haven’t yet spent enough time with. So at least I have something to look forward to as the world crumbles around us.