I was pretty into NOFX in high school, and Heavy Petting Zoo was my favorite album by them at the time. I hadn’t listened to it in at least a year or two but when I was going through my CDs trying to find my copy of Pet Sounds, I ran into it and decided it would be fun to have a little blast from the past.
Listening to it, I’m amazed to discover how good an album it really is. Which makes me wonder: why did I ever let it drift to the bottom of my stacks of old CDs? No real answer, but I won’t let it happen again.
Heavy Petting Zoo has pretty much everything that makes NOFX good. A few knock-down drag-out punk songs, a few more melodious pop-punk hybrids, a surprising amount of tenderness, a decent amount of humor (both in the silly sense, but also in the wry “we have to laugh at the world because the alternative is to get depressed” sense), a little over-the-top social commentary, and a lot of songs about sex, fetishes, domestic violence, and prejudice.
Two short examples:What’s the Matter With Kids Today?
It starts out “There’s something wrong with the kids in my neighborhood” and then goes on to catalogue the problems:
They’re always going to church
They dress well and they’re speaking articulate
They show each other respect
They’re never late, don’t joke, or break rules
They eat right, study hard, they like school
It lasts only a little more than a minute, just long enough to get the point across, but before it starts to sound trite. And it’s got a great punk feel – this is the kind of song you’d love to get kicked in the face to.
August 8th
The opposite side of the spectrum. This is just a pretty little song about one of those days when you realize that things are going to be okay. The hurt isn’t specified, and it really doesn’t matter. Everybody has bad times, and everybody also knows what it feels like when you step outside, the sun is shining, and you just know that you’re going to make it. While the sound is totally different to “What’s the Matter with Kids Today?” there are some similarities in theme: both are songs about the importance of spontaneity. The former is an indict of those who follow rules and patterns without question, who don’t allow themselves to live their life in the moment, with danger. The latter is about moments of spontaneous joy. I think that being able to understand the critique in the first song is important to make possible the happiness of the second.
There’s a lot of other great songs on this album that deal with some of the same ideas. “Freedom Like a Shopping Cart” deals with people who keep fighting for more, more money, more prestige, more power, but never seem to get any happier. It suggests that maybe the best thing we could do is give up on freedom when it’s nothing more than freedom to self-police, and instead embrace the freedom of no responsibilities. While this runs the risk of romanticizing the life of the homeless, I think it’s an important message: happiness is a state of mind, and there really is something to Thoreau and Emerson when they tell us to simplify our lives.
Another song, “Black and White” condemns the moralistic society which forces a man to deny his feelings for other men and stay in a loveless marriage. And it takes a detour to poke fun at Catharine Mckinnon and other feminists, who, they claim, let their feminism become a vehicle for condemnation of sex in general. It’s a little bit simplistic, admittedly, but come on, it’s just a punk song, and it is fun.
There are some missteps – I thought “Hotdog in the Hallway” (about how he likes to have sex with his fat girlfriend) was kind of funny back in high school, but it’s really just in bad taste. And a couple songs get a bit repetitive. But apart from that, it’s really a great little album.