On Monday March 18, Ausmuteants announced the impending release of …Present the World in Handcuffs, their first record since 2016’s Band of the Future. The forthcoming record is a “concept album that explores a piss-take look on life from the perspective of a police officer”, according to the band’s Bandcamp page, with all songs written by guitarist Shaun Connor. Along with the announcement of the album came the first single, in typical Ausmuteants fashion, ‘Forever Cops’ is just over a minute and a half of fast, angry and – at times – unintelligible punk.
The theme of cops in punk music has come up time and time again over the years. In the 1980s, as punk progressed in America into faster and louder hardcore music, so did some of the anger cops had towards punks and vice versa. When hardcore music began gaining popularity, the police force became known for brutally beating and targeting hardcore kids and shutting down gigs. This prominence of police brutality in the hardcore music scene was perfectly described by Black Flag with“Understand we’re fighting a war we can’t win/They hate us, we hate them” in the 1981 track ‘Police Story.’
Similar themes came up in other bands of the time, in 1982 MCD provided the brutal and hateful track ‘Millions of Dead Cops’ – “your authority and power has made us sick and sour” – and in 1983 came The Dicks’release ‘Hate the Police’ later to be covered by Mudhoney in 1988. More cop related tracks in a similar vein can be found on the 1983 Mystic Records anti-cop compilation, Copulation.
1994’s ‘The Pig was Cool’ from Killdozer is a humour track describing situations in which the vocalist seems to keep getting let off by a cool cop in situations like drinking in a parked car or having a joint at a Journey show. Unlike the other tracks, specifically targeting nasty cops, Fugazi uses the concept of a cop to take a stab at someone in ‘Good Cop’ with lyrics “you’d make a great cop”.
Touching on different frustrations towards police in America, in 2001 Le Tigre released ‘Bang! Bang!’ a song about the killing of Patrick Moses Dorismond by a police officer in what is believed to have been racial profiling. Taking sound clips from news reports, “In New York the shooting of another unarmed black man raises further questions about NYPD tactics” can be heard.
Closer to home and a differing view of police is ‘Constable’ by The Peep Tempel, written from the perspective of a police officer and his everyday life, and Ausmuteants’ earlier release from 2017’s Order of Operation, ‘We’re Cops’. …Present The World In Handcuffs will be released on April 26 through Anti-Fade Records.
