Talk back (just not to your dad)

PENNYWISE singer Jim Lindberg has had pointed words for authority figures over the years. Check out the fourth (and unprintable) track on his band’s 2001 album “Land Of the Free?” or pretty much any cut from the group’s lengthy catalog of thrashy skate-punk.

That attitude is an asset when you’re headlining the Warped Tour and riling teenagers into a mosh pit. But it’s not so useful, say, when prodding your 2-year-old to stop introducing herself as “Butt-crack” to the grocery store clerk near their home in Manhattan Beach.

“I tell my kids that some kinds of authority figures are not worthy of respect,” Lindberg said, “but that your dad is not one of them.”

Such is the existential dilemma of “Punk Rock Dad,” Lindberg’s entry to the recent spate of alt-fatherhood memoirs. Most of these writers (cough -- Neal “Alternadad” Pollack) treat children as NPR-core accessories on par with John Varvatos Chuck Taylor sneakers. Mercifully, Lindberg is self-aware about the silliness of name-dropping his band to get his kid into the employee restroom at a mall and of his acquiescence to soccer tournaments after a youth spent pounding brews between sound checks.

The anarchist in him wants to impart punk’s free-thinking spirit on his daughters and flip off the soccer mom in an SUV sporting a “Re-Elect Bush” sticker. But Lindberg admits that some rebellions have to be age-appropriate.

“We have a song with the F-word in the chorus,” he said. “I don’t let my kids sing it. It’s a situation for gross hypocrisy, but I find it strangely humorous.”

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Living up to their punk potential

MORE good news from the punk-rock front: Hopeless Records has collected more than $1 million on the Take Action tour, from which a portion of ticket sales and sales of albums on its Sub City subsidiary label are benefiting the Youth America Hotline, a suicide-prevention program. The Van Nuys-based company has long paired an independent, do-it-yourself ethos in its music with tangible social activism.

Gainesville, Fla.-based rabble-rousing band Against Me! is likewise tackling the issue of music’s ability to inspire political change, if a bit less optimistically.

“White People for Peace,” the forthcoming single off the group’s major-label debut, “New Wave,” shoehorns frontman Tom Gabel’s laments about protest music’s anemia into a mammoth chorus hook that suggests he’s selling himself short.

Gabel’s asking big questions: Many critics complain that pop music needs to have more of a political consciousness, but what if it doesn’t matter? Can protest songs really compete with military might today? The video might be cribbed straight from Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” and a bloodier version of the video game Tecmo Bowl, but it’s a bold move from a great band on the cusp of very big things.

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Lojero introduces L.A. techno-soul

WHILE L.A.’s various rock enclaves face the ongoing challenge of coming up with something fresh, a low-key techno-soul scene has been quietly building.

“ArtDontSleep Presents From L.A. With Love” is a new CD compilation curated by alt-art party promoter Andrew Lojero, and it culls new material from L.A.’s jazz-inflected glitch-pop producers.

The tear-in-your-martini lounge of A Race of Angels’ “Just Begin” is a highlight, and Coleman’s “No Strings Attached” is begging to score some movie scene where a heartbroken DJ picks his 12-inches off the lawn after his girlfriend kicks him out of the house.

Even though the album occasionally treads close to shoe-store-soundtrack land, it’s a thorough document of a scene that needed one. Extra points to Lojero for enlisting local artists to design liner notes for each track and for proving that thoughtful record packaging still has a place in a business so often found in full-on retrenchment mode.

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august.brown@latimes.com