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{"id":9781,"date":"2015-06-19T20:51:27","date_gmt":"2015-06-20T00:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=9781"},"modified":"2015-06-19T20:51:27","modified_gmt":"2015-06-20T00:51:27","slug":"population-1-a-punk-history-of-the-late-great-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2015\/06\/population-1-a-punk-history-of-the-late-great-usa.html","title":{"rendered":"“Population: 1,” A Punk History of the Late, Great USA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Population: 1<\/em> opens with basically a music video, in which a snaggle-toothed chanteuse wonders why nobody loves her, and then dies on a riverbank. She\u2019s glorious\u2013just enough menace, just enough shriek\u2013but what actually is going on here? We cut to an underground bunker where a scrawny degenerate is watching cowboy films and retailing sarcastic pro-American bromides, in rhyme<\/em>. I started to wonder whether the promise of the opening would be cruelly broken.<\/p>\n

But no! Population: 1<\/em> is a very short (one hour) catastrophic tour of US history, starting with the Old West and weirdly skipping the \u201950s through \u201970s (it\u2019s easier to be a superior white punk about dead buffalo than about the Civil Rights Movement, I guess) before showing us a total nuclear war that leads to mad-scientist experiments in a walled-off refuge.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a lot smarter than it needed to be\u2013there are some great lines, like, \u201cIt is my dubious privilege to inform you that mankind never made anything he did not, eventually, use.\u201d Or, \u201cWe were a people who believed in joy, in fun.\u201d \u201cNobody before us ever experienced such a visually well-monitored way of dying.\u201d Just dripping with doom. The music is without exception phenomenal, including an only slightly punked-out \u201cTen Cents a Dance.\u201d To the extent that there\u2019s a message it\u2019s a more romantic and more nihilist version of \u201cPlastic Bag<\/a>,\u201d or really any song in the X-Ray Spex canon, but you know, I am okay with that.<\/p>\n

I found this via the House of Self-Indulgence, and I agree with the House take: \u201cThe thought that permeated my mind throughout Population: 1 <\/span><\/a>was: \u2018Why hasn\u2019t this film been hailed as a bohemian classic by the demented elite and their midnight movie attending allies?'\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"