Music Video from my high school Punk Band (Patreon)

Thought this might be fun to share: an animated flash music video I made for my punk band when I was in high school. This is a “punk” cover of a Gordon Lightfoot folk song, “Second Cup of Coffee.”

(It worked on my iPad but not my android phone, not sure what the deal is with that so if you're unable to view it, my apologies)

(IMPORTANT NOTE: for some very stupid reason I thought it would be funny to make the “play” button on this impossible to find. You have to click the tiny letter “C” in “Blackbelt”.)

Things were different back then. Punk was fast, Macromedia Flash ruled the internet, and it seemed basically OK that 50% of our all-white band had dreadlocks (myself included unfortunately).

Being in a punk band was incredibly fun for me. I got to hang out with some cool older kids, talk about music and leftist politics (at a pretty basic level... we talked about “Dude, Where’s my Country?” by Michael Moore like it was Das Kapital), and best of all perform punk shows at tiny venues like the Hockley Village Seniors and Community Hall (capacity: 50). As the drummer, I always LOVED the energy of watching a bunch of punk kids shoving each other around to the beat of our music.

Most of our songs were about George Bush and the wars in Afghanistan/Iraq, but we also had a song called “Fish Bus” which was about ????? I don’t actually know, I guess a bus for fishes or a bus that was a giant fish or something. I think t was a metaphor for society. Most things were back then.

One time he were doing a show at the Seniors and Community hall and on our way there we stopped at a convenience store. There was a bunch of expired homogenized milk and the owner gave it to us for free (still not sure why he did that). Being teenage shitheads, we of course poured the milk down a slide on a school playground and then left some in a random person’s mailbox. At the time we thought this was a really cool thing to do- in fact, I apparently was so proud of this random act of food waste that I immortalized it in this music video.

Also, to clear up some confusing moments in the video, our band was called “Black Belt Kelly” which was a reference to famous black Kung Fu movie actor Jim Kelly, who starred in “Black Belt Jones” and “Black Belt Jones 2/ The Tattoo Connection” (which is not at all related to the original Black Belt Jones) and, most notably, has a minor role in Bruce Lee’s final movie “Enter the Dragon.” There’s a quote from The Tattoo Connection at the beginning of the movie and Jim Kelly’s face appears a few times during the video.

Anyway, watching this now I’m mostly disappointed at how little I’ve improved at art and animation in 13 years! Hope you enjoy