“There are no more races to be run, there are not numbers left to be won. Everybody’s down, we pulled each other down. There never was a truth to be found. We are all bigots, so full of hatred, we release our poisons…Like Styrofoam!”
F.U.G.A.Z.I.: “Vietnam War slang for a messed up situation. Fucked Up, Got Ambushed, Zipped In.”
What’s up with Fugazi? What does the four-piece rock band mean to say, and why do they approach “their say” the way they do? Literally even: what are they saying when they sing? Their vocal delivery is so obscure, it’s nearly impossible to tell. Let’s turn to the lyric sheet (a nice, big, roughly 15×15 piece of hard-stock paper chalk-full of words with little distinction between song and absolutely none between verses and choruses—except for the deep red coloring, the Repeater album sleeve looks nearly identical to Tortoise’s Standards even though its clearly based on those of the Minutemen and their SST label-mates).
“Merchandise keeps in line, common sense its by design. What could a businessman ever want more? Than to have us sucking in his store. We owe you nothing, you have no control. You are not what you own.”
Oh, that’s what they’re saying. I’ve listened to this record hundreds of times—always loving it, always smiling at a few words here and there—but I’ve never known all the words to a single Fugazi song.
Fugazi’s music has always seemed to be about so much more than “the words.” The electric energy, the driving rhythm, the overall body assault. Sure the words and the screaming, yelling, whining voices that deliver them are part of the whole, but I’ve never thought they defined the band. I think I’m in the minority of Fugazi fans on this. Fugazi fans, quite righteously perhaps, love what Fugazi says, how they say it, what they stand for. Famously, singer Ian MacKaye strikes many of his admirers as the absolute litmus test in integrity, cultural critique, “straight edge” asceticism, and punk rock principle. For teenagers in the late 1980s, as the Reagan Revolution contrived its second decade, MacKaye spoke truth to power and made social justice seem cool. His band held regular benefits for domestic abuse centers in his local D.C., played in high school gymnasiums, and never charged more than $5 when they charged at all. But everyone knows this; this is the legacy of Fugazi. What’s 1990’s Repeater saying?
The album begins with octave electric guitar swells, quietly. Bass and drums come in: mellow, medium tempo and groovy. When the second guitar comes in—loud, big, and sharp—it’s surprising. It’s surprising because of its volume and the way it causes the whole band to play much louder all of sudden. But it’s not really “punk rock”; it’s surprisingly “metal,” in a late-80s kinda way. Who but the guy in Def Leppard or Poison slides their pick up and down the guitar neck before playing a power chord? Within 4 bars though, before anyone might think they’re listening to radio rock, Guy Picciotto screams, “Languor rises reaching” and abruptly pauses. “To turn off the alarm…and there’s never so much seething that it can’t be disarmed.” The band—two guitars, bass, and drums—all begin to rise together: “You just stop it up, pass it on, shove to shelf it, to leave it off and…turnover!” What’s the alarm? What are we shoving to shelf? I have no idea what Guy (pronounced “ghee,” like clarified butter) is talking about, but I don’t really care. The energy the four-piece conveys is all I need. Desperate desires exposed by musical momentum. Fugazi’s album opener (“Turnover”) delivers. And then smacks right into the next song, the title track, which starts faster. The guitars are now screaming together, dive-bombing with feedback and grinding against one another. But the bass and drums, again. They’re just grooving. The bass is playing a line over and over again, calling and responding to itself nearly as subtlely and sophisticatedly as a reggae bass line, just faster. The snare drum is loud in the mix.
This is the thing about Fugazi. They are a killin’ rock band. Rarely since the 1970s do we get to hear a rock band stretch, play, and groove like Fugazi does. I’m hard pressed to name a punk band that composes more danceable music. The syncopations stutter, the backbeats hit. The band grooves like Funkadelic, or at least Talking Heads. But it’s harder, louder, more aggressive. Fugazi plays disarmingly, creatively, and with a certain mastery that belies their D.I.Y. aesthetic. It’s gotta be part of their charm. Everyone who’s ever heard them knows the bass and drums are basically peerless. Joe Lally repeats and ornaments deceptively simple bass lines for entire albums; Brendan Canty’s drumming combines prog-rock dexterity with the groove of the funk masters, influencing an entire generation of rock drummers (note how ubiquitous the high-pitched and up-front-mixed snare drum became in Seattle bands right about…the year after this record came out). The rhythm section leaves drops, drops breaks, extends silence, plays in half-time, comes back in double-time. They’re a reggae band for skinheads, a dance band for punks.
“Brendan #1,” the third track, is a short instrumental that features dozens of bars of drums and bass at a fast pace before the shrill, entwined guitars barrage in. The drums grow increasingly busy until a big fill resolves back into the repetitive, tom-tom half-prog, half-jungle kind of feel. Two different sections of the song would make great samples for other projects. “Brendan #1” is one of Fugazi’s “segue” compositions that they use intermittently on stage to move between songs rather than always pausing for breaks. Fugazi concerts were like albums, through-composed musical events with their own momentum, swerves, and surprises. The segue merges into “Merchandise,” which begins with a slow build recalling a band morphing into a medium-tempo reggae song. One guitar plays a one-note harmonic rhythm along with the hi-hat, hinting at the ‘2’ and ‘4.’ When the song kicks in, its full-on skank hits on the ‘2’ and ‘4,’ recalling the American iteration of punk-ska in the 1990s. It’s danceable and energetic. When the big chorus comes in—“We are your nothing. You have no control!”—it sounds anthematic and meaningful, the type of statement that would resonate with many teenagers, neither showy nor pretentious. “You are not what you own!” Hmmm, well that may have sounded impressive to youth in 1990, but this sentiment might be a tad out of fashion in the internet age of teenage consumption.
One of the things that strikes me about Repeater is how surprisingly “mainstream rock” this era of Fugazi is. Sure, they’re innovative, edgy, and acerbic. But the band rocks, rolls, skanks, and grooves so hard it seems weird to me now that they weren’t a “bigger” band (though Fugazi’s consistent and deliberate rejection of music industry standards certainly helped shield them from “breaking out”). They write beautiful and interwoven guitar lines, put them to terrific grooves and vamps, and build strong choruses with resonant messages—catchy fair for a bunch of vegan, anti-alcohol and drug skinheads. The guitars provide, usually together even when in contrasting roles, searing and sharp leads with low-end riffs and muffled power chords—sounds and approaches that sound not so different from MTV bands in the late-80s, nor the “grunge” of the early 90s. They seem nearly typical of their cultural moment, but much better musically.
And then I remember: it’s the voice, the singing voice that is such an essential part of so much pop music. Have I mentioned the voice? Ian and Guy do not sing conventionally. Their vocal melodies are disjointed and startling, interruptive and innovative. Moreover, they don’t enunciate for shit; their opaque but action-filled lyrics resound like outbursts and spiels. The words seem deliberately obscured by the singing screaming voice, shielded and guarded, but brazen and bold too, nearly daring you to follow (or demanding you to read the liner notes). Ian barks and yells, enunciating in the back of his throat in seeming disregard for the sounds of English syllables. Guy mis-pronounces and mis-leads with his phrasing; he extends vowels and maligns them into moans and cries. The duo’s is a distinctly alienating approach to singing and songwriting. Rarely do vocal melodies repeat (except in “Blueprint” which begins with Guy whining “I’m not playing with you” over and over again.) and when they do, they abscond in ornamentation and improvisation.
Fugazi singing is at once more melodic than most punk music and nearly as rhythmic as hip-hop. But Fugazi doesn’t rhyme much. Their overall delivery is not smooth, but abrasive and guttural, the kind easily mistaken for anger or malevolence. Well, Fugazi is angry, and probably—hopefully—they took just a little bit of pride in feeling malevolent as residents of the nation’s capital, watching it become one of the most segregated communities in America. Guy’s inclusion of the band early on (mid-first e.p. I believe) was a deliberate move to bring in a jester, a “response” to Ian’s “call.” The band imagines Guy a “foil.” He played Flavor Flav to Ian’s Chuck D. Fugazi rocked interracial crowds in D.C., raised social awareness and money for local causes, and I would guess that they were relatively known and admired among multi-racial Go-Go music and hip-hop fans in the area. Still, Fugazi wasn’t going to be getting on black radio nationwide.
Fugazi vocals insure the band will always remain un-commercial; Fugazi’s approach to singing and songwriting re-contextualize the otherwise “rock” instruments in ways that reminds listeners of their thoroughly punk rock, anti-establishment intentions. Don’t be lulled by the great beats and heavy guitars—Fugazi sounds an alarm to America: Time is running out. They might ask “you” to come along with them for the ride, but they’re telling most Americans in the Reagan era to Fuck Off (or, maybe, charitably, Wake Up!).
I listen to Fugazi and I wonder about what they’re trying to do, about the meaning of their sounds. I do not know how to make sense of the method of their message; I don’t, therefore, really know what they mean or, more precisely what they mean to mean. The message, wrapped tightly in near-virtuosic skill sets and fully-realized aesthetic intentions aggregates into aggression, threat, and violence.
“Somewhere in these private minds,
The last one comes just in time
To clear out the chamber and sew up the lips,
‘Cause that’s the price you pay for hoping every slips not a slide.”
Yet Fugazi reminds me that music is not made to be written about, to be translated in others’ expressible ideas. Fugazi’s music basically screams this at me as I try to corral and explicate it. Close listening to Repeater reminds me of French linguist Roland Barthes on the “grain of the voice.” In an attempt to get beyond the dreaded tool of music criticism (“the poorest of linguistic categories”)—the adjective—Barthes calls for a new approach to music criticism. “It would be better,” Barthes writes, “to change the musical object itself, as it presents itself to discourse, better to alter its level of perceptions or intellection, to displace the fringe of contact between music and language.”
For Barthes, the “grain” of the voice is not expressivity—nor does it “signify”—but in a singer’s voice, “something is there, manifest, and stubborn…beyond (or before) the meaning of words.” The grain is not style, technique, timbre, or approach. It is physical, nearly biological. A singer’s grain is “something which is directly the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages…as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings.” I know exactly what Barthes is describing when it comes to certain instruments in certain peoples’ hands: saxophones, string basses, and guitars can touch my ear like a hand. The singing voice, less often. But I am hearing the grain in Fugazi’s singing, especially Ian; though that may be because I hear more throat and course-ness and so associate it with “grain.” But still, grain is not only sound and body.
The grain signifies artful discordance, disconnecting associations as surely as it conjures them. The grain does not “ ‘translate’ an emotion” or “represent a signified”; nor does it reflect a “known, coded emotion” or “reconcil[e] the subject to what in music can be said.” The grain suggests a constellation of meanings and significations that take their shape in the immediate experience of the relationships between words and music. It’s neither simply the lyric, nor the musical melody: it is the grain of the singer’s voice wherein words and music are combined with the body to express the singular, uniquely experienced iteration of the singer’s musical mind through performance. The grain of Fugazi’s voice amalgamates every aspect of the band’s music and channels it into a single stream of symbolism and meaning-making. In the case of this Washington, D.C. quartet, the grain of myriad voices congeals into a fist, both defiant and violent.
Listening to Repeater, I can hear the musicality and the groove, the love, the effort, and the poetical political expressions. Looking at the words, considering them, and recontextualizing them back into their musical settings allows me to appreciate better the pictures they paint. To some degree though, I think, there’s a bit of damage done to Fugazi lyrics when laid bare. It’s a bit demystifying now that I am actually picking up whole verses rather than tattered phrases with punctuating yelps. More than most singers’ words, they seem to lose just a bit of their resonance, their metaphor, and yes, their “grain.” Fugazi writes punk haikus—short, simple, direct, evocative and open-ended interpretive. And they deliver them with double punches: first, musically, the whole band forms an onslaught; second, in terms of their “grain,” the vocals berate and absolve you, attempt to gain your attention, wake you from your stupor, get out of bed, recognize the social ills that we are all a part of, and do something to make the world a better place. They plead with us not to turnover and go back to sleep, even though they know we will:
“Languor rises reaching
To turn off the alarm.
And there’s never so much seething that it can’t be disarmed.
You just stop it up, pass it on, shove to shelf it, to leave it off and…turnover!”
