"Repeater," Indeed

Or, Why Ian MacKaye is the Lost Del-Tone


Reading Mark Andersen's often insightful, often irritating, always passionate Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capitol, one gets the impression that DC Underground stalwarts Fugazi, fronted by Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and backed by other veterans of that cities early-to-mid 80's hardcore scene, has created a form of music altogether new in America, at once powerful and gentle, beautiful and raucous. Having listened to Fugazi's popular Repeater this evening, I can find little to dispute. I hear gentility, and power, and violence, and moments of beauty.

But that ain't new.

Gah, I've started with the most prevalent of current rock criticism cliches, that All New Rock Rips off Old Rock. Man, I'd hate to have to be a new rock band today, to have all your efforts reduced to your Influences, with snide commentary. As if this makes Mooney Suzuki somehow less than the MC5. As if Nirvana didn't steal from every 80's underground band from the Pixies to Big Black. As if the Ramones didn't arrive at their entire sound by throwing together the Stooges and the Beach Boys. As if the Beatles were anything other than a bunch of Buddy Holly wannabes singing show tunes. And if you're wondering about Elvis, ask a black dude.

Now, I'm not going to argue about Fugazi's influences. As far as I can tell, Fugazi is the logical progression, not to say departure, of Ian and company's respective musicalities from the fasterlouder sheets of thrashy hum that Minor Threat exemplified. I don't think a one of their songs was deliberately patterned after anyone else's, indeed they seem to have taken great efforts to avoid such. Nobody deliberately names a tune "Song #1," unless they're interested in working from a clean slate.

But wanna do something fun, something that would probably annoy Mark Anderson until he found a point from his back notes that would cover him?

Load Repeater into your stereo so that it plays after The King of Surf Guitar: The Best of Dick Dale and His Del-Tones. Then pick your jaw up after you discover how oddly alike they sound.

Now, this might upset some people who want to believe as Anderson does, and won't have the Holy Fugazi left on a plane similar to the Strokes, who hardly get mentioned without being alternately compared to the Velvet Underground and Television. But that's only because certain loud people in the underground possess a bizzarre, obsessive compulsion to reject any music they deem as "not relevant," to which we can add as a matter of course anything more than five years old. To such as they, Dick Dale is that guy who did that song from Pulp Fiction. Yeah, it's cool, but it's old, and we have a moral obligation to listen to the new Go-Kart release, because that's about today, man.

Whatever. Anyone who uses the word "relevant" and means it is either unable to see that hunting "relevance" leads to the same kind of empty ephemerality as the record industry's business cycle, or they see it and ignore it. In either case, the position renders them blind to the truth: that Dick Dale is Rock n'Roll.

Rock n'Roll is dated. It's yesterday. Your mom and dad used to dance to it. We've all smelled that desperation in the recent issues of Spin, trying to sell the Music That Rocks, succeeding in selling the Music That Rocks, only to have the Music That Rocks still swamped like a tiny boat in the sea of Music That Goes Platinum. Hip-Hop is what lights MTV's fire, and Hip-Hop is what all the kids are listening to no matter what their melanin level. Rock is still there, but it just ain't the big dog no more.

So Rock is yesterday. It just so happens that yesterday is almost endless, today is but 24 hours, and the future doesn't actually exist in our frame of reference. And since we can't go four years without examining in excruciating detail all the cool and uncool stuff that happened in the previous decade, I say we drop, for good, any pretense of interest regarding what's going on "today." If VH1 has taught us nothing, it's taught us that whatever we think is cool today stands a real good chance of being embarrassingly laughable tommorrow.

Honestly, who cares how old music is? The first time you hear Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll", be it on your shiny copy of their fourth album or those formerly ubiquitous Cadillac ads, you're transformed, overwhelmed, and if you have any life in you, air-guitaring like a chimp on six espressos. The same goes for the most ancient of Rn'R: Link Wray's "Rumble" still swaggers mightily, as does the yob hopping of his cycle that anyone who hears this song thinks of.

So does "Run, Run, Run," or "Blitzkrieg Bop," or "Bad Reputation," or "Sabotage," or "Seven Nation Army," or any of a thousand others that have claimed neural space in our collective noggins. So who cares if Hip-Hop rules the Billboard charts? Let the industry pukes worry about such; it's their job. Ours is to cherry-pick what we like. What's worth remembering, from any genre, will be remembered.

Besides, it won't be long before H-H too becomes mostly retro, mostly reworkings of old forms. It may even be so already. Is it any secret that the best Rap steals from the best black instrumental music? Same with R&B, the genre for gospel singers who don't want to sing gospel. Sound-wise, R&B has always bowed to whatever else was hip at the time. That's why it sounded like jazz and blues fifty years ago, like soul and funk in the 60's and 70's, like disco in Michael Jackson's heyday, and today bears the description foisted on it by Chris Rock: "a bunch of people singing over rap beats." It's the only genre where people really are just interested in the vocals.

Anyway, back to Fugazi, the band that served as an escape for many from both hardcore and emo, the undiplicated punk band for grown people. If R&B is multi-genre-friendly, then Ian and the Boyz are a perfect marriage of genres: as distorted as Johnny Ramone's Mosrite and as funky as James Brown's pelvic bone. They manage to be exciting to listen to, and breathable at the same time. You could probably find a way to dance in a non-slam sort of way to them (and you'd better, at a show, lest you face the scorn of St. Ian of the Church of the Reformed Mosher), but you don't have to. The groove is enjoyable either way.

Whatever you pick, Fugazi's a lot more Rock n'Roll than they realize, and that's a good thing. They prove what can be done with Rock n'Roll if it's approached deliberately, with a mind for variation, for using the framework rather than bowing to it. Miles Davis achieved something similar with modal jazz in the late 50's with Kind of Blue (current Amazon.com Sales Rank: #167. So much for the tyranny of the present).

So for the truly avant-garde, for those who grok Ecclesiastes' dictum that all rivers run back to the sea, I suggest doing the twist, or some robotic form of jitterbug, at the next Fugazi show you attend. You'll be stared at, but that's half the fun, and ol' Dick will be proud.