Subsol #3/2022

Peter Bagge
The nightmare of the American dream
OK, so we weren’t in Seattle in the early 90s, but thanks to Peter Bagge (Peekskill, 1957) we learned that the hate there was very similar to the hate here. Few artists have managed to chronicle the disaffection, acne-covered-alienation, misanthropy, and indignation of youth like Bagge. The creator of independent comic classics including Hate, Neat Stuff and The Bradleys, biographies mashed through the sieve of the ninth art like Fire!! or Rebel Woman, or hyperventilated columns in comic strip format such as Everyone Is Stupid Except for Me, is part of an alternative pantheon that goes far beyond graphic storytelling in the strictest sense: Bagge has also illustrated record covers for bands like Girl Trouble, The Hellacopters and The Action Suits, the outfit in which the cartoonist lives a parallel life as a drummer. Long live Bagge, forever.

Bobby Gillespie
A kid from the tenements
Bobby Gillespie (Glasgow, 1961) is the lead singer, songwriter and founding member of Primal Scream, and one of the few sixty-one-year-old men who can wear leather pants with enviable poise and dignity. He has released eleven albums with his band, including Screamadelica (1991), which included some of the most enduring anthems of British rave-rock, such as “Loaded” or “Higher Than the Sun”. Gillespie also played drums with The Jesus and Mary Chain in their legendary Psychocandy (1985) era. Gillespie, the “Oliver Twist of rock” (as Courtney Love called him) and bearer of the most perfect fringe of the 80s, visits Subsol to present his celebrated biography Tenement Kid (published in Spain by Contra this year): a “punk fairytale” full of class struggle, blinding garments, raucous records and rock and roll mayhem, from his proletarian childhood in Glasgow to the orgiastic summer of 1991.

Gillespie will be interviewed by Mónica Escudero, journalist in El País Semanal, Grijalbo, Primera Línea and El comidista.

Baya Baye
Catalan thug life
Víctor Ballesteros (Montgat, 1998) works in a vineyard and has a “toasted neck”. He is, in the most literal way, a redneck from the Maresme. When he gets on the mic, he unleashes a rapper called Baya Baye, whose imaginary includes barretinas (traditional Catalan hats) styled into balaclavas, gulping from porrones full of beer, and Dobermanns with the Catalan flag wrapped around their necks as collars. Baye’s bars, full of class hatred and suburban fury, make it palpable that everything about Catalonia’s political and national degradation is taken advantage of, just like butchers do. Tracks like “Macarrisme català”, “La mare kem va parí” or “Cor bandarra” are gobs of phlegm spat hard into the face of political parties, the establishment and cool people, shouts of rage rolled in risky humour amidst calls to reclaim the ruckus“liada”, that we at Subsol feel are f***ing hymns.