Outside The Academy’s Raucus “M.Y.O. Fiction” is a Much-Needed Pinprick to This Era’s Political Pomposity

OTA_Upside-DownLayeredCosmic_sm — OTA, photo courtesy the artist

“You’re a fuckwit” is not a line you hear in many songs. But in Outside The Academy’s “M.Y.O. Fiction” the band lays out some serious sarcasm wrapped up in its wiry and urgent noise punk. In doing so the group bares an understandable frustration with a political milieu where everyone imagines themselves an expert no matter what they know or their relative level of knowledge and forget remember one’s humanity when dealing with “the other.” It doesn’t sound like some simpering centrist call for “civility” in an era when a mythical notion of such went out the window given the corruption rife in the economic and the political system most places even in the face of environmental breakdown threatening all life as we’ve ever consciously known it. The internecine strife when actual fascists seem to operate openly and protected by the police. The insistence of purity in some realms of one’s life but not others and holding everyone to a standard you couldn’t adhere to if the tables were turned with a different set of criteria thereof. And to top it all off that the drudgery of the political as we know it now needing to dominate and permeate all art and creative expression or it has to be seen as some low rent version of “counter revolutionary.” We are there and Outside TheAcademy’s “M.Y.O. Fiction” (presumably “Mind Your Own Fiction” but interpretations will vary) is a send up of all of it. You can tell from the lyrics that all of that matters but to survive these times intact we’re going to have to not dissect everyone and everything all the time in the process. In a crisis it’s too easy to forget that your knowledge of everything is as limited as your universal expertise so best to maintain a little existential humility. Listen on Soundcloud and follow Outside The Academy at the links below.