Another State of Mind, part 6 Note: the sound on the video is out of sync, which is annoying, so all the more reason to get the whole thing and just watch it.
As a follow-up to the Heavy Metal Parking Lot post, here’s my favorite punk documentary of the 80s, Another State of Mind (1984). It follows Youth Brigade and Social Distortion on a national tour in 1982, and it has some of the best talking heads and vignettes of the punk scene I have yet to see. Check out the kid talk about his idea of punk at 2:36 seconds of the above video clip, and don’t miss the Circle Jerks‘ Keith Morris talking about religion either.
Another gem of this video is watching Mike Ness compose the song from which the video takes its name. it really endeared me to him back in the day, although I was never a big Social Distortion fan. Also, the first 2:30 of this video is absolutely priceless in regards to religion, punk, and the larger questions of family values and the idea of punk as an embodied reaction to the family values agenda and moral order of the Reagan 80s. In my opinion, no sequence captures the complex social relations and realities such a scene evolved out of and into better than this one.
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