Blag Dahlia is the singer for legendary punk band the Dwarves and co-hosts the podcast We Got Issues. Since forming in the mid-1980s the band has ruffled feathers and pushed limits musically and otherwise. As they prep for a pair of new releases in 2017-2018, vocalist Blag Dahlia returns to Scene Point Blank to share some of his favorite (real or fake?) hate mail he’s received along the way.
Blag Dahlia’s Hate Mail
As the singer for the Dwarves, hate mail is the least of my worries. I’ve been threatened with death and dismemberment, lost record deals because of boycott pressures and been subjected to physical attack, robbery and vandalism of gear and automobiles. But nothing hurt my feelings more than this letter I got in 1991 from Annamarie, age 5, of Kankakee, IL:
Dear the Dwarves,
My daddy got drunk and hit my mommy when he saw her on the cover of your record with her boobies out. Now he has to live in the county jail and grandma cries every time she comes over to babysit me. I think you guys are poopy heads and I hope you fall off a big building and die and Jesus doesn’t even let you into heaven after.
Annamarie
Kankakey (sic), IL
Kind of breaks your heart, doesn’t it? But there is a happy ending here. By 2005 she was a cocktail waitress in St. Louis and I wound up sleeping with her after a particularly good show in the Gateway City. But not all of our hate mail ends so climactically.
In 1993, I received this correspondence from a statistics professor at MIT through the comparatively new medium of "email":
Dear The Dwarves:
The title to your song “Everybodies Girl” exhibits a shocking lack of basic grammar, but that isn’t why I’m writing. I teach statistics at MIT and your song is very popular with my students. After listening to it I take exception to the assertion that you are “in love with everybody’s girl.” There are currently over 3.5 billion females on the planet. How could you possibly be in love with all of them? Moreover, if you are in love with them all how could you possibly satisfy them emotionally or sexually?
On behalf of scholars everywhere I urge you to change the name of your song to “Several Girls” or “A Plethora of Girls,” etc. This will not only improve the veracity and clarity of your song craft, but it will also expel the earworm you’ve placed into my student’s brains with your surprisingly catchy pop-punk number. I thought you guys were limited to the hardcore of Blood, Guts & Pussy or the garage psychedelia of Horror Stories.
Statistically Yours,
Dr. Ezra Ezmonium
While I felt that the professor did raise some salient points here, I also felt impelled to travel to Cambridge, give him a wedgie and hang him from the lockers by his labcoat. Frustrated intellectuals aren’t the only ones who have objected to the Dwarves music, though. Recently, a Muslim cleric from Afghanistan sent me this missive:
Dear Apostates:
I heard your music and not only did it anger me, it offended Allah. First of all, it’s music and He really hates that. Even when birds sing it makes Him cry. Secondly, you endorse pre-,post-, and non-marital sex. Sex also makes Allah cry unless it’s between a man and one of his properly veiled wives who is demonstrably unhappy about it. Finally, you advocate cocaine use which directly competes with the sale of sacred poppies that help to finance our jihad against all unbelievers. Why can’t you punk rockers be more inclusive and understanding of alternative value systems? May you rot in Hell for all eternity.
Imam Malik Ibn al-Bathsheba
This one had national security implications, so I turned it over to some friends at the NSA for perusal. Turned out the guy was actually a student in the ethnic studies program at New York University named Jerry Greenberg. He now runs a day camp for depressed children in the Catskills and listens to Ani DiFranco records while crying softly to himself.
Hearing from Dwarves fans is one of the great joys of my life. If you keep writing, I’ll keep reading. If you’d like to contact the Dwarves reach out through our website.
BLAG DAHLIA
