• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• The Mighty Hunter
• The Orphan: Victim or Commodity?
• Sex and the City, Victorian Style
• Choose Your Own Victorian Adventure!
• Letters to the Feditors
• Lay A (Caucasian) Burden Down
• Missives From My Mother
• A Cautionary Invective On Throttling One's Own Fowl
• Change Comes To Constants
• London's Burning!
• "Green Sickness": For That Vintage Venereal Burn
• Dear Fundamentalists: Get Down And Get With It
• Fed Sudoku Challenge!
• Connect-the-Dots
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 21.6

Michael Bredin

I'm sick and goddamn tired of punk rockers trying to convince me of how hardcore they are. Let me tell you, those little punks think they're really tough, but they ain't got shit on the Victorian Era.

Yeah, you heard me. The Queen-Mother-fucking Victorian Era. Silver Jubilees and imperialism, pomp and circumstance, Pride and Prejudice, corsets. You thought the Victorian era was all tea and crumpets? Think again. There was tea, all right, and plenty of crumpets too, but that was like the afternoon aperitif to the main course of hardcore later in the evening.

OK, You know all that social satire about "kill kill kill kill kill the poor?" Well, the Victorians actually did it. Yeah. Chew on that one for awhile. The Dead Kennedys thought they were tough, but how many Irishmen did they actually kill? Sure, sure, they had their goofy little shtick going, but last I checked, Sirhan Sirhan or Lee Harvey Oswald weren't in the Dead Kennedys, and they only got one Irishman a piece, anyway. Victorians: Untold thousands of impoverished dead. Punks: Zilch, unless you count the guys who die of shame after realizing what a soft and easy lifestyle they lead.

So punk rock's all into odd piercings, right, and lots of them? Well, I don't want to sound crass, but you know who the husband of Queen Victoria was? Prince Albert. You know what a penile piercing's called, right? Huh? Look, I don't wanna insinuate anything, but I think Queen Victoria was getting a little something extra when she went into the baby-making business. No wonder she was so distraught when the guy finally croaked. Let's see John Lydon put some holes in his urethra for the crown! "God Save The Queen" indeed.

Speaking of her august majesty, are you familiar with the antics of so-called punk "superstar" GG Allin? Well, William Shakespeare once said "All theworld's a stage," but that's not an adequate excuse for being unable to tell a real stage from a chamber pot, a failure which Mr. Allin would echo several times throughout his apocalyptic career. Now, moving one's bowels on the stage may excite some of you who're curious as to the dietary habits of punk rockers, but I wouldn't call it as hardcore as Her Majesty Queen Victoria's bowels of steel. See, she didn't relieve herself on any stages. Or anywhere in public. Or private, for that matter. Or, in fact, at all. Think about it - you ever hear any stories about Queen Victoria being excused for the powder room? I think not. She is far too proper to even consider giving a thought to her large intestine - and by proper, I mean properly hardcore.

Some believe the prevalence of so-called "uppers" or drugs designed to artificially allow their consumers to stay awake and jittery much longer made the punk movement a jittery mass of success. I'd call them the shakers of shitsville, the twitcher bitchers. The Victorian era had no need for that shit. You passed out, you got smelling salts, you were cool. But what if you wanted to be creative? Laudanum. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wasn't talking about a real journey in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and I bet your sorry ass the "pleasure dome" decreed by Kubla Khan was probably one where psychotropic medicine flowed down the waterfalls. Here, wait, let's compare some lyrics from late-era-punk heroes The Replacements to Lewis Carroll. Both authors are widely-acknowledged drug abusers. Lewis Carroll says:

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

Holy shit! Decapitation and eyes of flame! Tulgey wood! The possibility of whiffling! It doesn't get any more hardcore than that. Let's compare that to the Replacements.

So the next time you see a punk walking down the street in their chains with their barbed-wire necklaces and their leather, just shake your head and sigh. Those little pricks may think they've got everything going for them, jangling down the street, but they will never be as hardcore as the Victorian era's legions of sinners, who were so much more hardcore than the punks that they did it all while wearing corsets.