Cool Kids

This song describes an all-too-common problem with childhood: the formation of cliques. In this case, some cool kids have formed an exclusive club where they meet to talk bad about other kids, even the subject of the song who's "ugly and an imbecile" according to them.

Screeching Weasel frontman Ben Weasel thought he'd escaped the realm of cool kids when he first joined the rebellious punk-rock movement in the mid-'80s. But he was wrong. "I chose punk because I thought it was the only place where I could just do whatever I wanted and there were no cool kids groups or whatever," he told Tempi magazine in 2015. "But very quickly I began to realize that I was totally wrong, it's just like everything else. I began to rebel against that from the very beginning, and that has always caused problems to me. In fact I have no idea how I have a career at all… The reason people say that I'm right wing, even though I'm not, is because the predominant voice in punk is left wing, and I have to criticize it. If the predominant voice was right wing I would be doing the exact opposite. Not just for the sake of doing it, but because I'm against any sort of unthinking allegiance to anything. I took seriously what they say in the hippy movement and in the punk one too: to question everything. I question everything, including your insistence that I question everything."

This features Teakettle Jones on keyboards, which is a pseudonym for Weasel and the album's co-producer Mass Giorgini.