Sheer Mag - Suffer me

Sheer Mag might be a hard rock band, but what lies beneath their music draws them much closer to garage punk bands than what it makes to their soundalikes, and their new track dealing with how the queer movement has evolved from the Stonewall riots to the present day, is proof of that.

If hard rock and punk might be both music for outcasts, they are very different in their politics. Hard rock (in general terms, and with its notable exceptions) is the music of the social renegades, those who don't fit the social order and segment themselves out of it, creating their own groups and codes and avoid contact with the social mass. Punk, on the other hand (and again, generally speaking and with its exceptions) is the music of the social transgressor, those who are angry on how society work and set themselves as opposition figures to the regime. Rock isolates for the individual sake; punk confronts for the social sake.

But if Sheer Mag sounds could sound like a lo-fi Led Zeppelin mixed with some Black Keys, Suffer Me is lyrically more The Clash meets Sleater-Kinney. Following the band's stand on use their music as a political weapon, Tina Halladay's powerful voice starts remembering the bloody Stonewall riots that denounced the oppression to queer people in 1969; she laments "There's a fear you can define, there's no peace and there's no crime in living this way", because almost 50 years after those protests, even if some battles have been won, being queer still means being different and having to endure judgments and assumptions, or, in the worst cases, physical violence and at times death. So their answer to any bigot is taking the oppressed role (Matt Palmer, the lyricist and guitarist is a cis straight man) and telling them that they'll have to "Suffer Me, you got to let me be and keep me outta your fantasy", of course this fantasy is their sick view of a world were diversity is non-existent.

In a world that keeps showing their hostility towards those who are different to white straight cis male supremacists, when a band acknowledges what privilege means and decides to stand with those who are oppressed, it feels like a boost of hope. And if they do it while performing some of the best hard rock that has been produced in recent years, it feels even greater.