The grunge band Pearl Jam were once commended by a Guardian interviewer for their right-minded, if unsuccessful, attempts to challenge corporate price gougers Ticketmaster. But they brushed off the idea. "Bands like Fugazi,” they commented, “make us look like Mariah Carey."
Fugazi’s credo of punk as self-responsibility is effectively summed up on ‘Bad Mouth’: “Time is now, it's running out… /So you better start living the life that you're talking about.” The band formed in ‘87, after the first wave of hardcore punk, when many scene-setting bands had come and gone, and soon became the figureheads for DIY culture. (Own-label releases, no-overheads self-booked tours, lowest prices possible and so on.)
Yet what may have been exemplary also become an encumbrance. Too many responded either with shoulder-shrugging devotion-as-evasion (“if only we could all be like Fugazi”) or nit-pickingly, trying to catch them out over some trivial detail. Which misses the point twice over. First, isn’t that lyric addressed to us? Isn’t the question how we live our lives? Second, and more importantly, none of this would matter… in fact, most likely we wouldn’t even know of it… if Fugazi hadn’t been a great band.
As Andy Kellman of All Music Guide says: “if history is kind to Fugazi, their records won't be overshadowed by their reputation and methods of operation... they will instead be known for their intelligent songwriting and undeniably proficient musicianship.”
In ye olde days there was an endless slew of badly photocopied punk fanzines, full of interviews in five-point type where no-hope bands of interchangeable names. Each one would insist by rote they wouldn’t sell out for a million dollars. To which you always thought “of course you won’t, your band’s shit, mate.” Whereas Fugazi really were offered million-dollar deals by majors. Offers they turned down flat.
Fugazi were formed by Ian MacKaye, already a pioneer of the Washington DC hardcore scene. His previous outfits had been short-lived and beset by differences, with Minor Threat breaking up after band members wanted to - yes, really - sound more like U2. So he resolved to not launch into his next groupuntil everything, musically and ethically, seemed solid. (‘Waiting Room’, the opening track of the first album, is thought to concern this: “I won't make the same mistakes/ Because I know how much time that wastes/ Function is the key”.) Yet if it led to a band with a solid line-up for its sixteen-year history, perhaps it’s most important element came more by chance. Which was Gui Picciotto becoming second frontman.
Picciotto’s original outfit Rites of Spring released a total of one album and one EP, and performed a mere fifteen shows, all bar two in their native DC area. But they were the classic case of the small stone who produced huge ripples.
Simultaneously widening and personalising the subject matter of punk songs, they soon gained the tag ‘emo’. (Not at that point associated with tweeny angst-pop, though Picciotto was even then disdainful of the term. And MacKaye didn’t like it much either.) Introspective while fulsomely expressive, they seemed to recognise no distinction between personal transformation and social change. As their Stravinski-derived name might suggest, they reunited punk energy with the Romantic spirit, perhaps best captured in the lyric “the world is my fuse”
Picciotto later remembered: “The shows were always ‘events’ for us. Back then, a bad show was really crippling. Every show had to be momentous. We put everything into them. We treated them almost like religious occasions. The reaction we got was incredible.”
Whereas before Fugazi MacKaye’s main band,Minor Threat, were not just an originating but perhaps the default hardcore band. Notably theirs is the photo adorning Wikipedia’s entry on hardcore punk. Yet he became a keen fan of Rites of Spring,attending all their gigs and producing both their releases. And his next band, the short-lived Embrace, demonstrated their influence.To be frank, I suspect it was Rites of Spring who pushed MacKaye from a decent punk artist to a great one.
Yet Picciotto was not just the last member to join, the band were originally planned as a trio. His involvement slowly grew, from roadying to on-stage dancing, to backing vocals, finally to full member. (He’s later cheerfully admitted that had been his plan all along.)
Significantly, the original plan was for him to be MacKaye’s “foil”. (As Flava Flav had been for Chuck D, or Hanin Elias for Alec Empire.) Beginning with Lennon and McCartney, bands have often thrived off having two distinct but complementary songwriters to spark off one another. MacKaye’s songs were typically driving and relentless, developing an argument, pressing home a point. He retained from his Minor Threat days a love of punchy choruses, and the audience singalongs theyoften promoted. His key ability was to combine measuredness with frenzy.
While Picciotto’s songs were torrentially emotive and allusive, romantic in the Rousseauian sense of the word. (A typical lyric of his: “He's alone/ His mind is his own town/ Where his thoughts run aground/ They fall all over and down”.)
As Michael Azarrad put it: “MacKaye’s sober athleticism found its polar opposite in Picciotto’s almost hammy sensuality, a formidable yin and yang that powered the band’s galvanic performances.”MacKaye jocularly compared their approaches to the drill sergeant and the mealy mouthed guy.
Azerrad’s also described Picciotto’s performance as “scenery-chewing”, and there is a sense in which he’s a Method actor’s idea of what a punk singer would do. Check out this version of ’Burning’,with his Marlon-Brando-as-dockworker vest and intensity, almost completely disregarding the audience. (The song also gives us our header, “I wanted a language of my own”.)
...now compare to Ian MacKaye on the afore-mentioned ’Bad Mouth’
The band commonly played all-ages shows at non-conventional venues, here the Sacred Heart Church in their native DC. The gig feels like a communalising experience, not just with the absence of a still figure in the house (well at least not anyone not wearing a yellow cap) but the lack of rigid dividing line between band and audience.
MacKaye’s Minor Threat songs had been quite narrow in content as well as style, a magnifying glass held over himself or the hardcore scene he inhabited. A scene that was male dominated, if not actively testosterone laden. So ’Suggestion’, (from the same gig) marked quite a major broadening of his interests. Written (controversially for some) from a women’s perspective, live it was often sung by a female guest vocalist. Here the duties are picked up by DC scene stalwart Amy Pickering.
As Michael Azarrad put it: “MacKaye’s sober athleticism found its polar opposite in Picciotto’s almost hammy sensuality, a formidable yin and yang that powered the band’s galvanic performances.”MacKaye jocularly compared their approaches to the drill sergeant and the mealy mouthed guy.
Azerrad’s also described Picciotto’s performance as “scenery-chewing”, and there is a sense in which he’s a Method actor’s idea of what a punk singer would do. Check out this version of ’Burning’,with his Marlon-Brando-as-dockworker vest and intensity, almost completely disregarding the audience. (The song also gives us our header, “I wanted a language of my own”.)
...now compare to Ian MacKaye on the afore-mentioned ’Bad Mouth’
The band commonly played all-ages shows at non-conventional venues, here the Sacred Heart Church in their native DC. The gig feels like a communalising experience, not just with the absence of a still figure in the house (well at least not anyone not wearing a yellow cap) but the lack of rigid dividing line between band and audience.
MacKaye’s Minor Threat songs had been quite narrow in content as well as style, a magnifying glass held over himself or the hardcore scene he inhabited. A scene that was male dominated, if not actively testosterone laden. So ’Suggestion’, (from the same gig) marked quite a major broadening of his interests. Written (controversially for some) from a women’s perspective, live it was often sung by a female guest vocalist. Here the duties are picked up by DC scene stalwart Amy Pickering.
For their part drummer Brendan Canty (who’d also been in Rites of Spring) and bassist Joe Lally made for an impressive and powerful rhythm section. But, unarguable as that is, it fails to capture their contribution. At the very start, it does seem MacKaye was writing songs then bringing them to the band to learn. But fairly soon compositions went through a group process, often assembled fromkit-partelements all four band members had come up with. (Tracks were always credited to the whole band.)
Which leads onto something else, associated but still more important. In rock music playing well is of marginal importance compared to playing together. Robert Fripp once said “It has nothing to do with self-expression, it has to do with a group mind.” A great band, who achieves that, will move and act as one. Fugazi, as anyone who caught them live could confirm, were a perfect case in point. You’d watch them thinking “I swear these guys must be telepathic or something”.
The art (not just music) that’s most impactful is often the art which achieves seamless integration of form and content, until it’s almost impossible to see the two as separate things. And Fugazi’s style perfectly blended with their stance, self-motivation combined with collective action.
And if any of that sounds like hyperbole, check out the band workout in this version of ’Glue Man’. The final track of the original EP was often used as a set closer as… well, this clip probably gives that away. Someone once sent me this link with the Andre Breton quote “beauty must be convulsive or not at all”. He wasn’t wrong.
The band’s first album ’13 Songs’, (officially a compilation of two earlier EPs), came out in 1989. All the songs linked or referred to above stem from it. Over seven albums the band’s style stretched, with an overall shift away from hardcore towards more of an ‘art rock’ sound. I read a review of one later album (in small type in some badly photocopied fanzine) which wouldn’t even give its title, so outraged were they by it not sounding “punk” any more. As should be needless to say, the most punk thing about Fugazi was that they never bothered about sounding ‘punk’. More importantly, the roots of their developments can already be heard in their first album. They took up a genre already thought standardised if not moribund, and breathed life into it.
MacKaye once said “How about at the end of Fugazi it said, 'they fucking did it their way'? And let's let that be the end.” And by the end the band had played over a thousand gigs around the world, normally all ages, normally for low door prices, always challenging crowd violence when it arose. “Better start living just like you’re talking about”? Pretty damn close.
Quotes and much of the info above from Michael Azerrad’s history of the Eighties American underground ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’(which has chapters on both Fugazi and Minor Threat) and ‘The Dance of Days’ by Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins (a history of the Washington DC punk scene, through which the various members of Fugazi thread). Both books recommended. While for essential viewing - ‘Instrument’ is a documentary portrait by Jem Cohen, who used his close relations with the band, to assemble five years’ worth of footage. (‘Glue Man’ above is from the film.)
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