Nuclear Crayons "Teenage Suicide"

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Nuclear Crayons
Nameless E.P.
7" EP
(Outside Records, 1982)

I want to make it absolutely clear that today's post is not making light of suicide. This is an ugly song for a heartbreaking situation.

Brandon Bitner is the latest in the horrible rash of teen suicides in the last several months. He threw himself in front of a tractor-trailer around 3 a.m. the morning of November 5, after deciding he could no longer endure the relentless bullying at school for his perceived sexual orientation. He was only 14 years old.

There have been over a dozen teen suicides that have made the national news recently. All were cases of young people driven to take their own lives after undergoing relentless bullying, either for being openly gay, bisexual or transgendered, or simply for being perceived to be.

Two boys were even younger than Brandon: Asher Brown and Seth Walsh were both only 13. Asher shot himself in the head; Seth never regained conciousness after trying to hang himself.

SadCat started a blog, The Price of Hate (now in my blog links), at the end of September to remember these poor children, who either took their own lives or were killed. There are already fourteen entries dating back to this past July. There are also entries for two boys who were not yet even in their teens when they killed themselves in 2009; Jaheem Harerra and Carl Joseph Walker were each just eleven years old when they took their own lives. The other two entries are a suicide from 2007 and a murder from 2005.

The two children who were murdered were not even school-aged. Ronnie Parris died in 2005, five days after his third birthday, at the hands of his own father, who slap boxed with him to, toughen him up, so he wouldn't become a sissy. Roy A. Jones was beaten to death this past August by his mother's boyfriend for acting too girly. He was seventeen months old.

Unlike other posts with long write-ups, this time I will not shut up. I'm one of the lucky ones; the other kids at school apparently didn't figure me out, even though I knew by the time I was eleven. Then again, I lived in extreme denial for nearly two decades after that realization.

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Nuclear Crayons were outsiders in the Washington, D.C. punk rock scene, hence the label name of Outside Records. Vocalist Lynch Lavoison started the label to document both her own band and others that fell outside the box that was harDCore. In addition to this EP, she also released a compilation of area bands, mixed nuts Don't Crack, and a full-length Nuclear Crayons LP. I'm sorry for not writing more about the band, but there are other blogs out there with excellent info, as I discovered after starting this post. I highly recommend investigating further. By the way, the discoloration on the sleeve is from whatever they used to glue the sleeve shut. The brush strokes suggest to me rubber cement, but I could be wrong . . . or the voices could be lying.

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I should explain Flipper damage, I guess. It was a term coined in the early 1980s to genrefy punk bands who played on the slower end, with bass driven melodies and harsh, noisy guitar, like the band Flipper, naturally.