Barely Human

Password recovered for the podcast feed five years on from the last BARELY HUMAN episode. An updated on what you might have missed! Keep up to date with: Brainrot/Instagram: @barelyhuman__ Merch/music: barelyhuman.bandcamp.com New writing: mebarelyhuman.substack.com Email: max@barelyhuman.info Thanks to everyone who supported/supports this project - Max

In October of 2021, an email arrived in the Barely Human inbox titled 'Error Filled Podcast.' Normally we might have looked past it, mistakes being mistakes, except that it came from Clarke Blacker of Stick Men With Ray Guns: the band profiled as the Butthole Surfers' significantly more underground parallel in BH008. Clarke outlined a number of mistakes we had made, from incorrectly naming band me...

The final episode of Barely Human brings us into the present day with two punk bands who briefly caught the eye of the broader culture...for better or worse. First we find Low Life in Sydney, Australia: a satirical punk band who released an LP in 2014 that somehow got swept up in the #pizzagate scandal (kinda). Then we go back to New York City to find hardcore band Haram who played a fierce brand...

In Episode 11 of Barely Human, we arrive in the contemporary to look at a thriving subcultural community from Melbourne, Australia. With Dick Diver we find a band who related to the contemporary condition by singing about items littered on the kitchen table...before unwittingly creating a non-genre that was cruelly nicknamed 'dolewave.' Then we cross to the post-punk mania of Total Control, who tu...

The tenth episode of Barely Human looks at boundary pushing obscenity through the lens of two vastly disconnected artists. In English garage satirists Country Teasers, we look at the slippery slope of satire and 21st Century obscenity: to find the endpoint of a long history of free speech arguments. From that "evil country outfit," we then find a blues singer from Alabama named Lucille Bogan, who...

After stepping into the '90s last episode, Episode 9 highlights the backward looking glance of that decade: via its garage punk revival, and notions of 'discovery.' We look at R.L. Burnside, a unique Hill Country blues player who performed for decades in small-town Mississippi, becoming a household name after collaborating with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion 50 years after his first gig. Then we...

From the English post-punk response discussed last episode we move to Texas in Episode 8, to find two anti-punk agitators of the 1980s. In Butthole Surfers, we find an unhinged band who took the absurdism and hallucinogens of the '60s counter-culture, and painted the punk and hardcore underground with it. When they then hit the '90s, signed to a major label, scored a hit with 'Pepper,' and sued th...

The second half of the Barely Human series begins! After covering '60s counter-culture, proto-punk and the punk explosion over the first six episodes, we reach 1978, to enter the world of London post-punk. Episode 7 finds an unofficial marker for the beginning of the elusive genre, when two kids from Chelsea called Television Personalities released 'Part-Time Punks,' a mockery of the movement that...

In the sixth episode of Barely Human, we look back at punk and hardcore through the lens of two artists who have been footnoted by mainstream histories. First we look at the London punk explosion through the eyes of Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex, who went from selling kitsch anti-fashion accessories on Kings Road in 1976, to playing punk on Top of the Pops two years later. Then we turn to '...

Episode 5 of Barely Human looks at two characters who pushed and crossed boundaries in the name of antagonism. We start at the birth of L.A. punk to find Black Randy: a mysterious and eccentric musician who spent as much time pranking and tormenting his peers as he did appropriating soul music. Then we turn to GG Allin: someone whose artistic mission as a punk frontperson was not just depraved, bu...

In Episode 4, Barely Human turns to the space between the hippies and the punks to find the bands who didn't fit in with the bands who didn't fit in. From the US midwest in the early 1970s, we find Cleveland proto-punk act the electric eels, who were toying with the tropes of punk years before the movement started. Then we look a band from Detroit comprised of three brothers who turned down a twen...

The third episode of Barely Human is about two underground artists who are often placed in the uncomfortable category of the 'outsider musician.' We look at The Shaggs, a band from the '60s that comprised three sisters from small-town New Hampshire. They created their own unconventional sound and musical language as a result of their near-total isolation from the world around them. Then we turn to...

Barely Human continues with two cult musicians who flavoured their careers with cynicism, self-sabotage and corrosive irony...only to be left misunderstood and misremembered by the broader culture. In Randy Newman we find the glossed over career of the now-famed film composer, who once had the chance to write a hit for Frank Sinatra, but chose to mock him in the song lyrics. Then we turn to Frank...

In this first episode of Barely Human, we investigate two underground bands who managed to attract the eye of Presidents, Prime Ministers, the FBI and MI6. We look at '60s counter-cultural actors The Fugs, who were present at the famed Flower Power protests of 1967 and were described by J. Edgar Hoover as "repulsive to right-thinking people." Then we turn to '80s anarcho-punk agitators Crass, who...