Punk Rock Music: November 2004 Archives
It's hard to be an American punk band. Well, maybe not now, but it has been for a while. The British have just seemed sexier for all these years, especially among the music literati and its hard not to believe they were. The post-punk Brits were art college educated, schooled in fashion, philosophy, history, and design, and all under a Social Democratic government, if in decline, with liberal unemployment policies. They also had one important commodity: the fading flame of the Sex Pistols to warn and guide them. How did a band like Minor Threat ever have a chance to secure any kind of legacy with folks like Greil Marcus, Lester Banks, or Robert Christgau flying the anglophile punk flag?
It might be because the band won the peoples' hearts. The hearts of the angsty youth looking for a cause or an ethic to believe in. Maybe its because I first heard about this band on a homemade patch sewn on a friend's baseball hat, because this band inspires in people that devotion, long after their demise. But if you stopped listening to Minor Threat when you stopped buying new trucks for your skateboard, then listen up, or just listen again and flex your head.
Started out of the ashes of the shambolic Teen Idles, Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson continued to release records on their Dischord label, a DIY effort that started in 1980 after the demise of their old band. Culled into the ranks of the new effort was Lyle Preslar and young bass prodigy Brian Baker. After releasing an initial LP of 8 short songs and an EP to the excitement of early US punk pioneers, the band, augmented by a bassist that allowed Baker to play second guitar recorded their final full length record, Out of Step.
For anyone who would decry the band as the progenitors of meathead thrash, the LP is a confusing document. Production tricks like the dub-like drop out and drum delay on, "Look Back and Laugh" and a more sophisticated approach to songwriting and arranging is evidenced on songs like, "Little Friend," "Think Again," and the uncredited, "Cashing In." The jangle and angularity of British post-punk is all over this record, along with the subtle influence of dub reggae brought to the band no doubt by the ever potent Bad Brains. This influence can be attributed to the band's rabid fandom of punk and post-punk musics, along with the guidance of older allies like record store owner Skip Groff and engineer Don Zientara. Besides covering Wire's "12XU" early on in their career, Out of Step, despite being the ground zero for the increasingly watered down "Straight Edge" philosophy, shows debts to Gang of Four, the Buzzcocks, PiL, and Magazine, if you listen for it. And why not? If all it takes to be post-punk in Britain is attendance at an early Sex Pistols show and subsequent band formation, is it any less valuable that Minor Threat had to substitute the Pistols spectacle for that of the Cramps, or equally flooring Bad Brains?
So fuck what you've heard. If the fusing of British punk and post punk bands with the critical youth energy of the then burgeoning US DIY music movement is uninteresting to those who were there to write about it in weekly publications, great. If anyone is willing to dismiss the whole of Minor Threat's efforts as derivative based on their own copyists, then too bad. For those who really listen to this band there is a rich reward in seeing and hearing history as a interdependent rather than linear.
I'm just asking, even if you think this band belongs on the backpack of a 13 year old rather than in your understated and erudite record collection, just give it a listen, one listen and really hear how it works. Isn't that enough for the Greatest Band of All Time?
