Precocious punks

Teenage rebellion and Bob of Tribes’s ‘Death of Bambi’s Mother’

If you were a Northeastern Oklahoman teenager in 1995 you may have found access to the Tulsa punk rock scene complicated and forbidding. The absence of the internet meant you needed to know people to get your foot in the door. And even if you got that far, what if you weren’t cool? What if you had lousy social skills? There’s a real problem when you feel out of place in a group of people whose one point of commonality is feeling out of place.

If you were such a teen and found your way into a Bob of Tribes show, you may have found in their music a cultural Rosetta Stone. On the one hand, they served up loud, aggressive, adrenaline-saturated pop-punk. On the other, the melodies were roaming and unconventional; their lyrics were silly yet left room for interpretation. The musicians looked like guys you knew from AP Chemistry class—smart dudes who you suspected had a secret life after dark. Like playing inspirational punk shows for berserk ne’er-do-wells in dilapidated downtown venues.

“Death of Bambi’s Mother” from Bob of Tribes’ spectacular Does Anyone Have a Gun? 7” EP starts with a jammy, mid-tempo intro. The guitar lead, played in two separate octaves, evokes The Pixies’ Joey Santiago’s brand of controlled haphazardness. Around the 30 second mark, there’s a key change and short transitional fanfare, and the song erupts into a buzzing, breakneck frenzy.

The burning, crunchy guitars hammer out a Spanish-ish melody of galloping and cascading barre chords. Imagine a wiry teenage boy, his left fist flying along his guitar’s neck so fast his hand is a blur, his right arm banging out the notes. The drums are ambitious. So fast you can almost sense a Doppler effect, with beats piling up on top of each other in space-time. The rhythm warps ever so slightly as the song’s momentum keeps the players teetering on the edge of control, like tumbling down a grass hill on a skateboard. Having launched themselves into this maelstrom of inadvisable speed, Bob of Tribes were in the right place to tackle their decidedly juvenile topic at hand.

The lyrics are not political and they’re not cool. They merely express that the scene where Bambi’s mother gets killed in the Disney movie was so traumatic to the narrator that it only gets more painful with repeat viewings. It’s almost like an English Lit group project that the students were too cool to take seriously. But whatever the reason behind the song—sincere or snotty—it expresses the kernel essence of the teenage Oklahoma punker: acutely self-aware in a state full of perceived ignorant normies, grinding against the grain, complicating (as a form of sport) things that should be easy, all the while leaving room for speculation and mystery.

Smart, heavy, nerdy, bratty, and fun, “Death of Bambi’s Mother” was a song for the rest of us.