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No, I did not see Dystopia when they played at MICA in 1998.
My awareness of the group begins with, of all things, a meme bumper sticker.
Based on the bumper sticker’s claim, clearly, “further reading” was in order. How did I miss this particular group, fellow travelers in my underground circles throughout the 1990s and beyond?
I think the first thing I got scrambled on is the group’s particular distinct aesthetic. Like hobos, underground folks use a series of signs and symbols to indicate where they claim allegiance. I can see myself flipping through the stacks, encountering the release “The Aftermath…” and not “reading” the album art right.
So far, in my research, I have seen the labels “crust”, “sludge”, “punk”, and “metal” applied to the band, all of which have an iconography in play I can “read”. The art and aesthetic of Dystopia releases is that of the coolest graph bomber hanging out with that kid no one else hangs out with in the back of the art room. They are furiously flipping through and cutting up magazines and other print media to find what they are looking for. The collages they make, which will get rejected from the year-end Art show, will be way ahead of their time but also perfectly of their time. All credit for this impressive artwork and lettering goes to Dino Sommese for being, somehow, a combination of both of these people I knew in high school.
The second thing I got scrambled is how I suspect this music was passed around and grew in awareness and influence. I came of age at a particular moment in underground time, and we traded cassette tapes as a way of passing on the music we thought should be shared. The wellspring of underground culture surrounding punk and other heavy music was only accessible back then through others involved in the scene. So… you got what you got. For example, no one passed on Crass’ music to me, although I am aware and appreciative of the group now, finally hearing them mostly through a reissue campaign that began in 2010.
The same “person to person” logic I still use to navigate happened here. Body Farm hit town on a bill with local must-sees Muscle. I became an instant fan of Body Farm, which led me to the label Tankcrimes, which has been reissuing Dystopia’s music.
Also, if Dystopia played MICA in 1998, my band The Unheard Ones played MICA in 1996 with Franklin and The Deadwood Divine. By 1998, I was burned out and busted up with the scene. Missing out on Dystopia could all just be bad timing related to me thinking I was going leave behind the “weird life” and become a normal person. I blinked, and I missed it. No tape was traded.
The final thing is simply not being ready for the group’s music. In my initial mid-2024 checking out of their recorded re-releases, I hit the first album’s first track “Stress Builds Character” and I wasn’t ready for what it was evoking emotionally, nor could I imagine wanting to dwell for too long in that place.
But then, after a winter 2025 nap I did not mean to take, waking up in pain, facing the tasks I still needed to do, reeling from more local and national bad news, the algorithm, my sworn enemy, began to play their 2008 self-titled release on my phone as I made the bed.
And I got it.
It is a reminder of something I always hold to be true: it does not matter when you get into a particular group or how. I got to add a group to a very small circle of artists who hit me in a very specific cathartic way 17 or so years after they broke up.
How many plus or minus “punk points” is that?
I’ve never cared about that, and I never will.
