When I was an adolescent here in freedom’s land and bravery’s home, musicians all dispensed the same wisdom when they spoke to teenagers, more or less. Don’t do drugs, stay in school, practice safe sex, register to vote, reuse and recycle, and support our troops. (Of course I’m aware that not all of these items were on, say, Jello Biafra’s agenda, but I don’t remember him being asked to address a lot of tenth graders.) How much better to have attended the German gymnasium that was Blixa Bargeld’s alma mater, which he loved so much as a student that he firebombed it. As Blixa recalled in Neubauten’s oral history, No Beauty without Danger: One of the reasons I got kicked out of school was because I had started a fire. My expulsion had already been decided upon anyway, so I didn’t have anything to lose. But I was still the student body president, and tried to enforce my pseudo-democratic rights by decorating a “Schülermitverwaltungsversammlung”, a kind of student council assembly, with a fire bombing - in which no one was hurt - because I was no longer...