Portions for Foxes: Be Your Own Pet

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

I can never trust someone who doesn't like punk. You don't have to like all of it, or even much of it - but there has to be that love for something loud and pushy and semi-uncontrolled, all amateur energy and swagger and attitude. Maybe for you it's hardcore, or garage rock, or a dozen other names - but you know the feeling, you know the drive.

Be Your Own Pet has all of that, and more. (Another song of theirs opens with the great line I'm an independent motherfucker, for example.)

My very favorite song of theirs is the glorious, snarky Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle, the anthem for a generation of nihilists on fixies.

No gears, no brakes
All real, no fakes
No gears, no brakes
We'll break your face

It's at least partially self-parody, as the video shows. That's the glory of punk: the attitude can turn from real to a pose to a joke and back to real, all in the course of the same song. Because it's the attitude that matters.

The sound of this song is also awesome - there's an instrumental break in the middle where you can hear the rhythm of bicycles in the music - struggling, fighting the gravity of a hill, and then getting over the crest and accelerating down, faster and faster.

Have fun, and be safe with it
Just kidding, FUCK SHIT UP!
We ride bikes, cars are for idiots

Punk, to me, is happy nihilism - the sense that the world sucks, and things are bad, but who the hell cares? It works best when you're young and full of fervor - and Be Your Own Pet were pretty young when they made this song. It shows. This is the best kind of rollicking, mad, punky energy, a song that grabs you, shakes you for two magnificent minutes, and then runs away laughing.