Hollow Earth

Shamefully, even though I was a Fugazi fan and had records by Black Flag, The Minutemen and Bad Brains (I mean it's hardly an exhaustive selection of that era's American Hardcore but...) I had never heard any Minor Threat. However I always suspected they were going to be worth checking out. This Christmas I sneaked into Glasgow's Mono Records and found that Dischord, Ian MacKaye's label, had remastered the original vinyl and reissued them.

Minor Threat is a very different proposition from the music which I've been collecting recently. Mainly I've been buying peripheral No Wave things and have been heavily revisiting Neue Deutsche Welle*. My plan was to try and build a better picture of the scene as it existed, quite a task for someone who doesn't speak German. This involved pressing acquaintances for the full extent of their knowledge, downloading humungous quantities of old deleted stuff (over 300 releases now clocked - more than it sounds), combing through what I had amassed and finally using the continental network of dealers to track down particular items second-hand.

In the past I would have been sceptical of the moral value of downloading like this. However, although operations like Vinyl On Demand, Was Soll Das Schallplatten, Kernkrach and NLW Backagain put out great authorised NDW reissues, their remit is constrained by the same foxtrot with the past that characterises UK reissues - you can't put out something which you assume 95% of your audience is au fait with. In the UK we are clearly neophytes and consequently the picture these (fantastic) reissue companies unwittingly paint of the past is distorted. Furthermore the reissue of a great number of the most important releases would be made impossible by the constraints of publishing and licensing even if the artist were happy. The true market for these discs must be in the double digits, and therefore financially pointless. I ask myself, in 30 years would I be happy for my own recordings to be traded for free, and the answer would be yes. I'm sure I'd be amazed if anyone gave a enough of a fuck to bother looking for them! No doubt you are sick to death of these worn-weary arguments.

While No Wave and NDW are like vegetable sorbet, the Minor Threat is actually the gastronomic equivalent of a shot of wheatgrass, or maybe more accurately macrobiotic sweet-corn, that's to say bracing but also comforting. It embarrasses me to reflect though that it is this almost conventional "Mom's Apple Pie" quality to the music which must have edged Minor Threat ever so slightly off the hipster's agenda. Minor Threat is not a "sick" band. They are not celebrating alienation, they are rallying feverishly against it. Straight edge is/was the marvelously improbable movement ever. It's sweet isn't it, and that's a good thing. Have a peek at this great video on it and the band's role in it. I have a lot of truck with it actually. As much as I'm glad for all the great things drugs have given culture, Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)", I don't buy my generation's awkwardness at people criticising drug culture. Drugs are certainly worth experiencing but very quickly they're boring. Minor Threat implicitly criticised the key aspect of drugs that their proponents could advance in their favour - that they create intensity - by being vein-poppingly intense.

Fugazi are certainly the lesser of the two units. I had actually sold all my old Fugazi records, but following my MT epiphany I picked them up again. I remember seeing the band supporting Sonic Youth on the Daydream Nation tour and at that time I was pretty keen on them, I suppose their chest-pounding teen-appeal is easy to understand (patronises younger self). "Margin Walker" and "Repeater" I bought when they came out. I dunno, I suppose their recordings are somehow less obtuse and bugged-out that Minor Threat's, a bit portentous even.

Still there are moments of superb rhythmic tension here, noting especially the taut-as-a-drum-skin bridge between "Turnover" and "Repeater", maybe this was the last "funky" rock group? And actually if you cross-read them as lumpen, as heirs of The Amboy Dukes (MacKaye a big Ted Nugent fan) then.....yeah. I was also extremely impressed to see MacKaye here testifying against an all ages ban at venues in Washington, f'sure motivated by his own financial interests but nevertheless still sticking it to the man.

*Minor Detour