Darren J Beaney

The Fall Of The Repetitive Mixtape is a love letter to an era dead on its feet. Beaney encapsulates the very feeling of punk within the chapbook, both lamenting a world no longer interested in old school punk and giving a decisive call to action for us to dance, or, ‘be honest for a day in [our] life’.

Music Scene is punk’s swansong, Beaney conducting as he laments the change he’s observed. The speaker is borderline sisyphean, pushing against a world no longer welcoming punk. The “sour sounds” are emblematic of fresh things gone bad, and it becomes hard not to mourn them.

Music Scene gets followed by my favourite of the chap, Rebellious Jukebox. It begs people to live, to experience life within punk’s image. Utilising short, rhythmic phrasing, Beaney begs for an immobile generation to dance.

If Music Scene and Rebellious Jukebox were praising punk, Crap Rap 2 is punk’s failure to prevail. Punk’s death is one that strikes hard in Beaney, and it is evident. Beaney acknowledges that Punk was born to lose, presenting it through the idea of a gangsta, a disenfranchised. The poem concludes with the repeated line, ‘overindulged ill rhymes’, that gets italicised and the font gets flattened, symbolising the minimisation of punk culture.

Overall, The Fall Of The Repetitive Mixtape is a cohesive collection of poems that praise the bygone world of punk, and does it in a way that steals breath and takes teeth.

Ozzy Welch

You can find Ozzy on twitter – @OzzyWelchPoetry and Insta – ozzywelchpoetry