All Edges

You'll be relieved to hear that I am renouncing violence and letting my hair grow out. A scary-clean skinhead straightedge motherfucker from upper NW, my hobby was cruising bars and parties in combat boots, knocking drinks out of people's hands or making them eat their lit cigarettes. It was my own personal DARE program: just say NO, bitch.

But I hardly put a dent in the drug problem, and my mom kept telling me that violence was no solution. In fact, even Ian MacKaye and like the Bad Brains were telling me that violence was no solution. Plus kicking druggies' asses gets boring.

So I have mellowed from a mere savage into a mature artiste. I sip European non-alcoholic beer and listen to Fugazi. I raise children. I'm still flexing my head, but now I'm a "writer."

Before I start reviewing CDs, you may well be wondering whether I'm a "neo-Nazi" or "anti-fascist" skinhead. Am I fighting the capitalist machine, the IMF and World Bank, or rather dignified Negroes or people who have sex with individuals whose pudenda are relevantly similar to their own? Do I listen to Anti-Flag or Fear?

Well, hate crimes may be fun, but they are just plain wrong That's why I'm a Marxist-Leninist-Sandanista rebel. I am pissed, really fuckin pissed, about SUV emissions and the Third World and shit.

Whatever. This is the second, or maybe third or fourth, golden age of punk music (depending on who's counting), and we're here to tell you all about it. So let's say 1976-78: the original explosion led by Pistols/Ramones. 1981-85: the hardcore years: Black Flag, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys. 1992-96: grunge.

The dominant radio rock bands of the moment - Blink 182, Weezer, and Sum 41, for example - are punk-based. And there are more real punk bands now - and more good punk bands now - than at any time since 1984. That's according to recent studies by the School of Advanced Punk Studies (SAPS). The think tank points to six factors in the ever-growing phenomenon known as vicious thrash, the sequel:

First, to have good punk music, you have to have a Republican administration. Clinton just didn't create the desirable exquisite degree of alienation. Second, Jewel sucks. Remember that neo-folk craze? Third: demographics. The children of the original punks are reaching their teen years, and all they really have is soccer and confusion, stuff that is deeply unAmerican. They're reaching for something, and in their crazed desperation they're calling it "punk." Fourth: the Backstreet Boys are in rehab. Predictably, their next album will make Black Flag sound like the Archies. Fifth (really) major labels have cut back in some draconian way, so that dozens of tiny, impossibly excellent little record companies are putting out what "the kids" want to hear. And sixth, the Mohawk still says "art student" in any language.

The Methadones, "Ill At Ease" (A-F)
I am so all about the Methadones. One might think of this album as, first of all, a kind of anthology of non-hardcore punk from the Ramones to Green Day: not in the sense of covering the songs or something, but in the sense of having mastered and re-presented the vernacular. The Meths are an all-almost-star almost-supergroup including members of the Queers and Screeching Weasel. Every song is built around a rock-solid melodic hook, and I already hear some of this stuff as classic, in particular "Bottom Out," and "Take a Look."

Boy Sets Fire, "After the Eulogy" (Victory)

Punk bands have a habit of naming themselves after newspaper headlines. Sometimes these are real headlines, sometimes inventions. My personal favorites in this genre are Hornets Attack Victor Mature and Toys That Kill. But you gotta admit, "Boy Sets Fire" is pretty damn good too. It's simple and to the point. Not only that, but my 11-year-old boy actually did set fire to a hayfield and burn fifteen acres this summer. So now he wants a Boy Sets Fire hoodie and baseball cap. We're resisting, cause you shouldn't be proud of arson. Plus he loves the band, especially the first song on this cd, which goes "where's your anger; where's your fucking rage?" Well I wish I could share his enthusiasm. I like my punk cleaner and simpler. Late in this thing BSF threatens to mutate into U2, with ringing anthems in a pretentious bellow. That's a terrible temptation for young punk bands who will not get it through their skulls that U2 SUCKS. Vincie says I'm totally wrong, that "they don't sound anything like those pussies." And they have kickass, ferocious moments, no doubt, like "Pariah Under Glass." And we agree that they play well. They bellow well. And when they're through, they lapse into silence well.

Fugazi, The Argument (Dischord)

Well. Fugazi is back. It's still possible to think of them in terms of a relation to the hardcore they invented. A parallel is bop in relation to swing. Miles and co. took the tropes of swing and played with them: took them apart and reassembled them in various ways: bop was interesting in relation to swing, and as a negotiation between melody and dissonance. Fugazi is in the same negotiation. This album displays a mastery of rock styles (up to and including the Beatlesque) but then sends them spinning or allows them to dissolve. Each song suggests and then resists resolution, and so keeps you paying attention. The result is masterful and unpredictable and wonderful. I really think this is an album one needs to live with for awhile, and I am only entering into that process. You can hear traces of Minor Threat in Fugazi, and you can hear traces of Fugazi everywhere: famously in Nirvana, for example, and hence in almost everybody that is at all serious about rock music. Few of the original hardcore and straightedge generation managed to mature in a worthwhile or responsible way, but Ian MacKaye and company could have been predicted to; they were always serious and always devoted to a kind of truth that could stand up over the long haul. They still are and it still does. Really, when you think of DC, you think of two styles: GoGo and straightedge. But Fugazi is a world and a style and a truth to itself, an affirmation of the real.

Agnostic Front, Dead Yuppies (Epitaph)

"Agnostic Front" is about the best name I ever heard for a band. The idea that agnostics would form a violent revolutionary cell and kick ass for the cause of indecision itself a manifesto for the attitude of early-eighties hardcore, which is where these boys come from. They're aging, but Lord they still sound pissed, as vocalist Roger Miret yells in a Lee Ving baritone. Now Dead Yuppies was in the pipeline on 9.11, when thousands of yuppies went down with the shit. So AF put the following disclaimer on their album: "Agnostic Front is an American working class band that does not support or condone any type of extreme terrorism or mindless acts of terrorism." This of course leaves it open that AF supports moderate, mindful terrorism, a point on which we're all agreed.

The Eyeliners, Sealed With a Kiss (Panic Button)

I think it's fair to say that punk is a masculine art form. But did you know that Belinda Carlisle of the Go Go's was briefly the drummer for the Germs, arguably the first hardcore band? But the Go Go's themselves were of course antibacterial: they looked and sounded like a Pepsodent ad. Now one would think that female punkers had gotten beyond the chirpy, happy, gee-whiz-aren't-I-so-cute phase, considering such 90s phenoms as Hole and Sleater-Keeney. But the Go Go's are back, and we're also forced to deal with the Eyeliners, a trie of punkette cuties. This album is fun in a pretty unimaginative way: so light and fluffy yet with just enough in the way of references to the Ramones to count as punk. I enjoyed it first time through. Not sure I'll ever play it again, though.

Bigwig, "An Invitation to Tragedy" (Fearless)

These guys rock like a mother. Bigwig is what we call "melodicore": fast and vicious but coherent. It's rarely been done this well. This is definitely not pop music; it's not Weezer. But it's got as little pop thing going that it doesn't want to admit to; these guys aren't as pissed off as they want to be. Underneath there's bubblecore yearning to breathe free. That's okay, because I'm rarely in a sufficiently testosterone-laden mood to listen to pure howling hardcore for more than a few minutes. "An Invitation to Tragedy" explores the idea that hardcore punk music can be listenable. Now you could consider that a betrayal of the style as defined by acts like Agnostic Front. But purists have a certain sad ideological bent, don't they?, as though they should have been Maoists during the cultural revolution, denouncing their neighbors as petit-bourgeois counter-revolutionaries. We're over all that now, right? We can just spin a good album and enjoy it, right? Right?