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Flipper were, without a doubt, one of the best eighties punk bands. You've never heard of them? Thats quite surprising considering Kurt Cobain freqeuntly mentioned them in interviews, REM covered sex bomb and Jello Biafra once stated that Flipper were one of the best bands in the punk scene.

It is a shame this band gets almost no recognition, because they really do stand out from the generic thrash hardcore that the punk scene almost entirely consisted of at the time. Instead of playing speed punk, Flipper took the hardcore sound of bands like black flag, minor threat and the germs and slowed it down. The music may take awhile to get into as it sounds so different from anything else. I didnt like Flipper when I first heard them, but I gave them a few more listens and now I love them.

What you hear once you play this album is loud basslines against Ted Falconi's quiet, distorted guitar, with Steve DePace hammering away at the drums. Over all this you hear either Bruce or Will ranting about the meaningless of existence in a cruel and uncaring universe. Just take a look at some of the lyrics to Way of the World: "There are eyes that cannot see and fingers that cannot touch. Thats the way of the world. There are dreams left empty and blank and legs that have ceased to walk. Thats the way of the world." The mood of every song on this album is the same, apart from sex bomb, where Bruce Loose Tries to shake listeners out of the depression that listening to the other songs are likely to have caused by playing a happy song.

This is, qutie simply, one of the best albums ever recorded. Pity its out of print. But then again, not many people are aware of Flipper's existence. If you want to hear generic hardcore, go and buy a CD of some band called Negative Youth or something like that. If you want to hear a band who dared tobe different, then check out Flipper. Every song on this album is great.

I saw the band on tour for this album. I also had the pleasure of seeing them several other times. A Flipper show was always an experience. Always a party atmosphere. I remember Bruce standing up and announcing that the show would start once someone bought the band a round of pitchers of beer. After about five minutes of ranting at the audience someone gave in a bought the round. Bruce proceeded to chug his down before going into a brilliant rendition of "I Don't Want to Live If I Can't Get Drunk". The whole band had obviously been partying prior to the show and before the end of the set the only member of the band on stage was Will. The rest of the band had either passed out or fallen off the stage only to be replaced by a member of the audience. One of the best rock shows ever!

This album captures the true spirit of the band better than any other material they released- except maybe the "There was an Old Lady" single. "Sex Bomb" is one of the greatest rock songs ever recorded and the rest of the album is just as good. The musicianship is minimal and incompetent, the lyrics are insightful and the album should only be played at maximum volume. It is even better if you are drunk.

This band was one of the most important in all of hardcore. When this music first came out the hardcore scene was quite diverse and the music had not yet developed into a "formula". Bands took different paths to reach the intensity and chaos that this whole movement represented. Flipper took the route past the keg of beer at your backyard barbeque.

Generic Flipper is not a hardcore/teen punk record, the genre it was lumped in when it first came out. The music captures the dark side of the counterculture--it plays like a bad acid trip. Flipper creates a very disturbing, paranoid drone that really gets under your skin as it forces you take a look at the futility of life. If you aren't ready to make this journey, I wouldn't recommend Generic Flipper. If you are, brace yourself because it's a bumpy ride. I saw Flipper live once and the crowd quickly assumed Rolling Stones at Altamont mode--dazed, drunken, stoned and violent. It was one of the greatest rock shows I've ever attended--Sonic Youth are the Monkees by comparison.

A landmark of post-punk music from Flipper. They never made anything this good again, but then again they didn't need to. I hadn't listened in ages, this weekend got a copy and rediscovered what passionate music came out of the whole post-punk movement.

Just read the reviews here and you can see the impact this had and still has on some of us.

I'm forty-two years old and an attorney in DC. Hearing Flipper again after twenty years made me remember what I once felt about music and about life.

The band "too punk for punk," as guitarist Rikk Agnew described them to me, Flipper did with rhythm what abstract expressionism did with line/form, and declared war on middle class, all-American morals and manners, as well as those they found stupid and pretentious within the growing punk movement (1980-83). Ted Falconi is the Jimi Hendrix of rhythm guitar, slashing scales, cobbling them into sometime-chords, then blasting them apart again just for laughs and a true anarchy in the song: for those who want anarchy to live up to content AND form, this is your band; Falconi's neuron-warping excursions get so vast and chaotic, that the bass actually holds the melody while the guitar churns a mass of fierce antonality, and somehow drummer Steve Depace centers the hurricane and keeps it together.

Flipper was fronted by two fierce geniuses, one of the head, Will Shatter, and one of the heart, Bruce Loose; they shared their mutual singing, bass-playing, & songwriting duties with an ego-lessness (in every sense) that is rarely found in rock n roll or any other art. They sang separately, and also together, as in a duet of doom on masterpieces like "We Don't Understand," on Public Flipper (so named for Mr. Rotten's theiving of Generic years later, based upon this album), which
is now released as is their second album Gone Fishing on CD via "Water Records."

Will constructed songs from influences like Wilhelm Reich, Greco-Roman religions (mistakenly and rhetorically called "Myth"), Hindu morality plays, philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and, just plain "Life," which is one of Flipper's most hilarious songs, meant sarcastically and seriously depending on their moods; Bruce wrote songs of both his growing up in the treacheries and euphoria of San Francisco's Haight, and of the psychology underlying many of the "politics" trumpeted by revolutionaries, and also "Life." Bruce maybe be a nihilist by method yet hope and humor show on many of the songs he wrote, including the confessional EVER, which is on this album. "Ever look at a flower and hate it?!" While the joking SEX BOMB BABY is always touted as the band's hit, the yowls of despair and suicidal intensity of a love affair aborted in I SHINE YOU SHINE is truly the band's greatest work. It is simply one of sublimest, most dramatic expressions of sorrow in any form of music. Will Shatter's vocals are chilling, spasm'd, and ride atop Ted's sublimely
melancholic drone.

Flipper originated a new style which alternated between super-fast, typical punk, to a more often depression-sodden, opiated, lurching & listing, slowwww'd tempo. This tempo-method was copied by numerous bands, and was cited by Kurt Cobain as one of his most powerful influences. SHED NO TEARS is also one of the greatest songs ever written: it swings & hops to a happy-go-lucky nihilism that most people haven't the philosophic or psycho-dynamic stamina to endure. Its bass line & melody, invented by Bruce Loose in a moment of desperation, is a trademark FLIPPER fulmination. Ecce Homo: it's not easy living with sight into the depths of the human psyche but Flipper puts a gleeful floppery on "only pain, suffering, and death..." What a great song to DANCE to, truly. Only the Dionysians could get it.

This album pretty much saved my life as a teen. I discovered it four years after it was released. A friend passed a tape of it my way, and the lyrics to the first song, "Ever," really spoke to me. It described my life completely: "Ever think you're smart, and find out that you aren't? Ever play the fool, and find out that you're worse? Ever look at a flower and hate it? Ever see a couple kissing and get sickened by it? Ever wish the human race didn't exist? Then realize you're one too?" Then singer Bruce Loose hits it home: "Well? Have you? I have. So what?" I had discovered what I called "desperation punk," a band so disillusioned with the world and themselves that their music reflected it. Just like "Jackass" being born from being disenchanted suburban youth, so was this music. Forget trying to make a difference like hardcore punk was trying to do; this band was saying, "Screw it all!" I was inspired by it all, learning that reality isn't what it always seems from "Life is Cheap" and "Way of the World." The rest of the album is a descent into deperation and, at times, hope ("Life," "I Saw You Shine"). Then it ends with one of the truest epic punk songs ever, "Sex Bomb," a jam that will make even the staunchest of punk fans want to get up and dance. This album may not have changed the world, but it certainly changed this impressionable youth's life in 1986.

This is the ultimate middle finger to the generic, closed-minded hardcore that was rearing its ugly head at the time. Flipper were very clever at disguising the fact that they could write and play intelligent, clever music. On the surface it sounds like they are simpletons who can't play their instruments, but if you listen closer, you soon realize that the joke is on you, and everyone else. Ted Falconi's guitar playing, in particular, is inspired. You have to know what you are doing in order to sound that sloppy and atonal. If you want irony, this is it! Too bad Will Shatter took the "rock star" route to the afterlife by overdosing on Heroin. That's about the only cliche Flipper was ever guilty of.

This is a fantastic punk album. A classic. You must buy it now. One of the few punk albums that has a strong thread of compassion despite their guitar screechings and lyrical wailing. They paint such a convincing picture of a sad, bleak and hypocritical world that they betray their own sensitivity and hope... what more could you want from emotional and musical adolescents?

This is without a doubt one of the greatest punk records of all time. The sheer drunken incompetence combined with the anti-social malcontent rantings of Bruce and Will make this an essential alb for anyone who likes punk. Who cares if it's too slow for the hardcore yobs. Buy it now

Flipper's music is atonal, fuzzy, and droney - seemingly comprised only of guitar riffs that go in hypnotic circles, thudding drums, distortion, and the lead singer wailing out lyrics (at random apparently).
At first, it sounds completely WRONG. Everything about it is off. It's like anti-music. Like a group of guys that decided to do everything backwards. Everything feels shambley and out of tune and it has a disturbing, menacing quality. Like the soundtrack to a freak show played at half speed.

But something about it is so compelling. The music is strangely precise. These guys knew exactly what they were doing, and despite the messy overall feel, this stuff is sharp as a razor blade.

Keep listening to it and keep listening to it and eventually you kind of "get it" and the music makes total sense. Also, listen to the lyrics: unlike most punks these guys weren't about nihilism, this music is all about sadness and tragedy.

But then (incredibly) the album ends with the most absurdly, overflowingly joyous punk song you will ever hear: "Sex Bomb" and somehow (listening to the album from beginning to end) is like a cleansing experience.

Amazing stuff