Consumer Guide Album

Angry Samoans: Gimme Samoa: 31 Garbage-Pit Hits [PVC, 1987]
There's something heart-warmingly perverse about turning these proud piggos into yuppie fodder, and after all, how many other major '80s bands could fit their entire recorded output onto one pricy piece of plastic-coated aluminum five inches in diameter? Including even a few outtakes--the same ones that pad PVC's rerelease of Inside My Brain into something collectors might respring for, and I must admit they're growing on me. Some disparage the Samoans as incipient Dead Milkmen, which isn't such a terrible insult and also misses how disturbing they were--Rodney Bingenheimer wasn't their only enemy. In fact, maybe they still are disturbing--maybe that analysis is a pornography-is-boring move, an attempt to trivialize the threatening. Always a reluctant fan, I find that their bad attitudes reinforce each other played back to back in this format: hard, catchy, unashamed straight-teen-male hostility so funny that there's no denying the educational value of its self-knowledge, though maybe more for observers than participants. In very short, a punk touchstone. A