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Cro-Mags’ performance inThe Beat(1986)After the show, as the teens roam the streets, Rex gives his review. “I could see the black head of death the whole concert. Everybody was feeling and breathing and praying to death, the skull. There’s so little beauty left since it was destroyed that we’re attracted to anything that generates power. Anything with some feeling in it seems good to us, even evil. It’s good to be violent and pray to death gods like the Skulls, because that’s better than nothingness, and sometimes that’s all we’re left with.”This is the liberal fallacy The Beat is based on: Beat poetry is life-affirming, hardcore nihilistic. At the very least, writer/director Mones chose the wrong band to make this point, since the “death god” on bass was himself a published beat, and the Cro-Mags were strict vegetarians and devout believers in God. Like some other devout believers in God you could name, they were violent men, but so were William S. Burroughs, who shot his wife in the head, and Lucien Carr, who stabbed a man and dumped his body in the Hudson. “Lemi-leki-sama,” Rex’s healing spell that frees spirits, sounds like nothing so much as the Hare Krishna Mahâmantra of which Ginsberg was so fond, and which the Cro-Mags used to chant backstage before shows. Nihilism is not the problem here. Harley Flanagan loves God. Harley Flanagan loves life.
MTV interview with Cro-Mags on stagediving, Hare Krishna and GodPreviously - Welcome to the Bunghole