YouTube’s algorithm has led me to some unexpected places. Last September, it had me travel 2,000 miles, in the real, physical world, to the back patio of an Irish-themed sports bar in Cleveland, Ohio. Lake Erie loomed on the horizon past trees and buildings, and although it looked pleasant enough, it was also easy to picture the gusts of cold air that must swoop through these streets every winter. I’d been born near here, so I kept viewing my surroundings with an eye toward the life I might’ve had. When our waitress mentioned she was from nearby Lorain, I said I was too, but then added that I moved away in 1972. She gave me a confused smile, perhaps thinking I was making some sort of joke that didn’t land.

I’d come to meet the group of young men now assembled around me: Mike, a carpenter with an easy, goofy smile and an alter ego of Man Who Screams Crazy Things In Public; Conner, at 28 the newest and youngest member of the gang (although an old friend to all at the table), bespectacled, an engineer, the kind of fellow you’d want to show up at your doorstep with a bouquet of flowers for your teenage daughter; Jo, the only member of the group who actually looked like someone in a band (a funny trick, as he plays in 70-80 bands at any given time) and who spoke with the cadence and quick wit of a beloved supporting character on a long-running sitcom; Nathan, a family man and truck driver who later told me of his failed struggle to unionize his company; and Alex, a children’s librarian who was just slightly guarded, and slightly better groomed, than the others. During introductions, Alex pointed to Nathan, who shared his exact features, and said, deadpan, “We’re twins.”

I sat opposite Anthony, who’d flown out with me from Los Angeles. When I'd originally told him about this story, he’d informed me, “You know, I think Fm going to come along to Cleveland.’’ I’d been disturbed that he hadn’t asked, but upon further thought realized that I could use a chauffeur. I told him he could come along on the condition I would mock him in print. Soon, he was talking sports with the guys in that preposterous deep voice of his.

Earlier in the day, we’d made the mistake of visiting the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, finding it vast, demoralizing, and existentially stupid. Afterward, it was hard to ignore this city’s devotion to the ghost of rock ’n’ roll. The thought felt connected to the thing that had always animated my approach to playing live music, the simple truth that bands that take themselves too seriously are excruciating. The five kids (late 20s to early 80s) at this table seemed to have learned that truth long ago. They’ve been in pretty much the same band since they were 12. That band was now called Cruelster. Some of them have been at it since sixth grade.

A year earlier, I’d stumbled onto the Enjoy Cleveland video series from 2015. In the videos, a dozen Cleveland punk groups play songs in front of a greenscreen. Many of the bands shared members. It was clearly a tight-knit scene hidden in the underbrush of a city I’d long dismissed. A caption read that the videos were “made as a direct response to [hardcore documentary] Destroy Cleveland which sucked ass.” The sentiment felt familiar from my time in the early ABC No Rio scene in NYC, a scene that also defined itself partly by what it was not (the larger and world-famous meathead wonderland of NYHC). I’d known of Cleveland as home to Clevo Hardcore, a slight variation on the New York template of tough-guy chugga-chugga stuff. Although I liked that scene’s crown jewel, Integrity, everything that followed felt hackneyed, fungible, carbon copy to the point of self-parody.

There was nothing carbon copy about the Enjoy Cleveland bands. Some (Shit Blimp, Yam Bag, and Real Regular, who sounded like a Flippery San Francisco art band from the last days of the Carter administration) were distinct takes on hardcore punk. Others were vaguely recognizable takes on music (Bulsch, who grunted their own made-up language, or the hectic performance art of Bad Noids). Each band utilized the greenscreen differently: sports footage, nature documentaries, endoscopic video, Windows 95 maze screensaver. Then there was the video for Perverts Again, who sounded unlike anything I’d ever heard. The singer (Alex, I later learned) marched in place like a cat mashing a blanket, narrating songs apparently written by a sixth grader. While I hesitate to call their video good, the band was that rare thing so much better than good; they were interesting.

Perverts Again led me to Cruelster; I didn’t yet know that both bands were made up of the same members in a different configuration. Cruelster were good in ways that seemed shockingly familiar. They offered the hostility of the Mad, and the Contortions, and Danse Asshole [sic]; the novelty of Battle Unicron [also sic], and Melt Banana, and Pink Section; and the profundity of the Cravats, and Kleenex/LiLiPUT, and Tracy and the Plastics. That they did this all while sounding like an early-1980s hardcore band made them thrillingly unpredictable. In the video, the singer wore a Trump shirt, and although I quickly figured out the most likely explanation (the video was shot in 2015, back when his candidacy was still a punchline), for a magical moment I thought the Trumpers had actually made a good hardcore band.

Cruelster knew how to ridicule. They seemed to have distilled that thing I’ve always known as “mockingness.” Examples are rare: Art, the band, taunting yippies at their own venue in 1979; the derisive guitar solos of Fear and the Feederz and the Crucifucks and the Dicks; Kurt Cobain’s sly, hostile smile in Nirvana’s 1992 “In Bloom” video; the time, in 2006, when Desperation Squad played America’s Got Talent and jeered Piers Morgan and Brandy and David Hasselhoff to their faces. I'd assumed that type of derision was gone forever, lost in a new world where everyone has a brand to protect and every band has to squabble over shrinking shares of the public’s time and attention.

In such a new world, addressing Trump artistically is pointless; outrage exhaustion has itself been weaponized by MAGA. Cruelster often operate, as Jo put it, “from the viewpoint of a schizophrenic Republican.” “Benghazi Mommy,” the last track from their 2018 LP, Riot Boys, does this. The song opens with a speedy, vicious riff straight from an unmade ’60s spy movie. Mike barks the verse(?): “Yes, I was there, yes I did nothin’. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, they had mommies.” One minute in, guitar and bass drop out. It could be Cruelster’s take on Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick,” as the glorious riff never kicks back in. It's just Mike, growling over the floor toms, now sounding very much like a man in crisis, desperate to make you, the stranger he has cornered in an Applebee’s men’s room, understand what he is saying. Yes. Yes. I did see they had mommies. Saw on the TV that they had mommies. Two minutes in, the drums peter out and the song is over. The first time I heard the track, I yelped.

When Mike told me that their starting point was Rancid—a band as musically distant from Cruelster as Led Zeppelin—I gave him a confused smile, thinking that was another joke that didn’t land. But of course: He graduated high school in 2010. Why wouldn’t Rancid have been their intro to punk? Later, when I mentioned the old Mondale shirt I wore in the 1990s, as the same kind of joke as “Benghazi,” one where the datedness of the reference is part of the joke itself— Hey! We’ve got the same weird humor! We’re not so different after a!!!—everyone asked, in near unison, who Mondale was. They’d all been born a decade after his crushing electoral defeat in 1984, the same year I found my own starting point for punk.

I sought to clarify. How did they get here from there? The American Hardcore movie was a further entry point, although everyone was explicit that they consider themselves a punk band, not a hardcore band (this was sometimes qualified by saying “not hardcore with a capital H”). “We hate the military,” Nathan said abruptly, to awkward laughs. I said I’d noticed they started selling Cruelster T-shirts reading I HATE THE MILITARY. We discussed the physical safety mechanics of wearing such a shirt in the staunchly purple state of Ohio, which led to a discussion of Cleveland’s status as the best-tipping city in the world, and of the salt mines that run for miles under Lake Erie. Over the course of the night, the gang drank somewhere between eight and 10 rounds each without showing any sign of being drunk.

We met up the following afternoon at Rock & Roll City Studios, in a small hot room with Cruelster’s master set list scrawled on chalkboard walls behind and above Jo at the drum kit. Over this, in different chalk, someone had written “Clevo Hardcore,” which seemed much like the way my ABC No Rio pals and I would draw “NYHC” on our knuckles as a goof. Anthony and I sat in lawn chairs in a cramped corner. I hadn’t audited another band’s practice in 36 years, longer than anyone in Cruelster had been alive. And yet that Multiple Man Smell instantly brought me back. I itemized my flashes of deja vu: the kick drum cinder block and the stack of cracked cymbals, the fast language of glances and smiles, and the way small objects like pens or bottles of water can instantly vanish, lost to the underfoot ecosystem of cans and shirts and trash that could linger indefinitely. When I noted I was the only one wearing earplugs, a band discussion followed on ear protection and tinnitus, which resulted in a quorum agreement that Alex had “tiny” ear canals. No one seemed to have a hangover.

A week earlier, I’d sneezed while on the phone with a former bandmate. “I forgot how awful your sneezes are,” he’d said, in earnest. I’ve always assumed that most band members don’t get along. Certainly that was my experience. Everyone gets on everyone’s nerves if confined together, physically and/or artistically. Cruelster doesn’t work like this. In early March 2020, the band “toured” Ireland. That is, all four original members vacationed together in Ireland and spent each night in a different town’s pub, drawing up elaborate flyers for each night's nonexistent show, fake bands included, then posting the flyer on Instagram with the news that the night’s show had been, sadly, postponed due to CO VID. The disease wouldn’t halt Western civilization for another two weeks. As with Mike’s Trump shirt, reality overtook the joke with a vengeance.

The last group I’d seen live was Funky Butt, a decent-enough brass band (when they weren’t rapping) I’d caught on a family trip to St. Louis. That was nine years ago. But I had stopped by a pal’s gig just a few months earlier, in Los Angeles, and hung out in the courtyard while bands played inside the club. It took maybe three minutes before that inane audience downtime banter made me want to hammer roofing nails into my skull. Here, in Cleveland, inside the spacious Prototype Collective on the fifth floor of a building that once housed machines and laborers, I knew no one. There was no banter, if I so chose. My own bands had vanished from living memory. I was blissfully anonymous.

Bands played. I had to quickly recalibrate my vigilance for show danger, from malignant assholes to benign moshers. For someone my age, with a faulty C5-C6 disc, the pit may as well have been a bonfire, something to be watched, not touched. But the slamming was mostly the kind where people bump and laugh. The audience looked like I’d always hoped they would at a show in the future—young women in weird face paint, weirdo punky dudes, lots of nonironic mustaches but only one pair of earlobe plugs. No one held phones aloft to document (ubiquitous digital cameras having debased the value of photography?), and the drugs seemed confined to booze and pot (fentanyl having mined hard drug use in this decade). Cruelster’s salty shirts hadn’t yet been printed, but it didn’t seem like the kind of place where anyone would’ve cared. Violence at shows, I’d been assured earlier, resulted in cancellation online. When I asked about all the bands sharing drums, amps, and cabinets, I was told that quarantine had altered behavior, making everyone far more open to cooperation (several people in different parts of the country later echoed this conclusion). The between-band transitions were more merciful than almost any show I’d ever been part of.

Cruelster headlined. Conner threw off the onstage symmetry of Alex and Nathan, and the band failed to sync up the little leaps they call “the hippityhops.’’ But the set was exactly what I needed it to be. Mike stomped around in an oversize shirt—Disney’s Moana—and obviously took the role of frontman quite seriously (“leaving reality,” was how he’d earlier described the act of performing, a feeling I still recall intimately from my own bands). The whole thing took 19 minutes.

In 1943, Woody Guthrie doodled THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS on the side of his guitar, inspiring generations of musicians to use their own guitars for bite-size mission statements. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame displayed several, from the quaint (George Harrison, GO CAT GO), to the icky (Jerry Garcia, GAS GRASS OR ASS NOBODY RIDES FREE), to the shitty (Tom Morello, ARM THE HOMELESS). The concept always seemed silly to me. And yet Nathan’s guitar—a hacked and papier-mached Danelectro U2 reading MAKE THEM WONDER WHY in capital acrylic letters—actually did feel like a statement of purpose, like someone trying to communicate a philosophy I’d already applied to my own life.

On Saturday, Mike and Nathan departed for family trips and the rest of the gang had work, leaving Anthony and I with a free afternoon to enjoy Cleveland. The salt mine tunnels were no longer open for tourists. We discussed exploring the hospital I was born in, St. Joseph, which had been abandoned with the power left on (online photos were as creepy as that sounds). But Lorain was a hike, a time commitment, and the last time I’d stopped by, a decade earlier, it felt like the type of town where a visitor might get beaten to death with a brick.

We decided to visit the USS Cod, a WWII-era diesel submarine now docked on the banks of Lake Erie, but once a fearsome death machine that sent 14 enemy warships to the bottom of the Pacific. The submarine’s logo is a human skull pierced by a torpedo. The skull grins stupidly through two rows of busted teeth, as if it just won a bar fight and got a missile in the noggin for its efforts. It looks like the cassette cover art for a bitchin’ thrash metal band from 1984. Meaning, it also looks like a detail from Cruelster art.

We stooped and stumbled through the maze of pipes and cabinets and steps and hatches, two able-bodied men never tasked to fight in any war, visitors from a world where able-bodied men tour in cargo vans, not submarines. I wouldn’t wear one of Cruelster’s new shirts, but I didn’t disagree with its message. And yet the setting gave me the unease of an atheist in a grand cathedral, forced to acknowledge that the world I inhabit was built from one in which such dissent would have been unthinkable. Life in the Topsy-Turvy Twenty-Twenties didn’t make things easier. In this decade, conservatives mock “woke” soldiers, and their president scorns “loser” POWs. MAGA Americans already wear “defund the FBI” shirts. It’s not so hard to picture them wearing I HATE THE MILITARY shirts by this time next year.

I clambered up a ladder and emerged back on the deck, blinking in the sunlight. Officially, the Cod’s kills are measured in tons, not humans (a rough estimate gave me north of 2,000 people, roughly the Pearl Harbor death toll). Kill marks painted on the periscope tower showed a collection of flags— Japanese Imperial, Japanese merchant, Thai fighters—and the cartoon outline of a merchant junk vessel over the number 26. Completing the mural, a huge martini glass commemorated an apparently epic party held in the crew’s honor by rescued Dutch sailors in 1945. So, another Cruelster joke.

The Cod sat docked a block from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The museum’s preposterous glass pyramid glinted across the shore triumphantly, an emblem of American individualism, the unspoken thing the Cod submariners felt they fought for, even before it had a name. Could they have imagined a genre of music so powerful it would infect every other country on earth, including the nations they’d just defeated?

And then this strange news from Tokyo: Sakevi Yokoyama, vocalist of Japanese punk band G.I.S.M., had died just three weeks earlier. Sakevi was one of the last of the infamous frontmen, known as much for his shock tactics and physical assaults as he was for his music. The night before, back at our Airbnb, we’d watched grainy videos of him taking a flamethrower to his audience. With him seemed to die a glorious little world of rumor, one more vanquished ghost of pre-internet punk. What would the crew of the Cod have made of G.I.S.M.?

At dusk, we met Alex at American Tattoo Studios, which reminded me of tattoo shops I’d visited in the 20th century, only cleaner, and nicer, and with better flash. Anthony decided a shin tat would be in order. While that was underway, Alex told us a guy from last night’s audience had berated him, ostensibly over Ukraine, first in person, then on Facebook. He seemed surprised if not slightly rattled, which may have been a clue. Cruelster’s era didn’t seem to offer that much pushback. They’d had the misfortune of living in a time when the world was far crazier than anything punk could offer.

Alex handed me a paperback of Friday Night Light, his self-published novelization of the Perverts Again album of the same name. Which—what? Anthony’s tattoo, infuriatingly, turned out glorious, the ANARCHY VIOLENCE of G.I.S.M. in a stencil circle, Crass Records-style, arched above and below the USS Cod skull logo, a beautiful commemoration of our three-day trip. It occurred to me how very much I disliked him.

When I’d originally told my father-in-law why I was going to Ohio, he said, “I didn’t know punk was still punkin’. ” Why has this genre persisted? Rap evolved into something that would’ve been unrecognizable 40 years ago. The Rock & Roll Museum consigned hip-hop’s pioneers (and most other black musicians) to the literal basement. No kid wears Spoonie Gee or Kurtis Blow shirts. Minor Threat and Misfits shirts sell in malls across America. When I was a teenager, I’d always assumed that hardcore punk would just keep evolving. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that it all could stay locked in the 20th century. Just as it hadn’t occurred to me that a band in 2023 could do things as weirdly innovative as bands in 1983. Cruelster changed that equation. They did what one musician friend of mine once called, in a far less enlightened century, “bringing the retard to those who don’t ask for it.”

There’d been a time in my life, almost exactly 30 years ago, when I’d made the switch from a smart band to a dumb band. Fans of the former registered this switch as a betrayal instead of a widening of the canvas. They’d wanted someone to validate how they felt about the world, which is a generous way of saying they wanted fan service. Powerful music—powerful art—can sometimes directly align with fan service. But that’s not the only function of art. Sometimes good art needs to baffle. We live in a world filled with profound mysteries. Why can’t music reflect this? Why does everything have to be so fucking literal all the time?