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Fugazi

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The lowdown on Fugazi

Fugazi are a Washington DC band, formed in 1987 and officially still extant, although they have been ‘on hiatus’ since 2002. The four members are Ian MacKaye (vocals and guitar), previously of hardcore legends Minor Threat, Joe Lally (bass), Brendan Canty (drums) and Guy Picciotto (initially only backing vocals in a hype man role, the Flavor Flav to MacKaye’s Chuck D, but subsequently second guitarist and co-lead vocalist). Their music is rooted in punk, but moves outwards to encompass much more. There’s a strong dub reggae influence from their earliest recordings, not least in their use of space – they took a traditionally dense and claustrophobic sound and found the space that was hiding in it all along. The guitar style is unusual. There’s no real differentiation between lead and rhythm, rather both guitarists occupy different parts of the sound spectrum, with Picciotto’s needling treble interlocking with MacKaye’s chunkier riffs. The real musical stars of Fugazi are the rhythm section. Lally and Canty are just superb, with sensational interplay, drive and groove. They deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as Entwistle and Moon or Jones and Bonham. As their career progressed, the records became more experimental, embracing elements of funk, jazz and post-rock.

If they had only left us their records, Fugazi would still be a band for the ages, but their business practices were also highly influential on underground rock in the 90s and beyond. They were fiercely DIY, recording and releasing all their records themselves on MacKaye’s own Dischord label. They chose not to sell any merchandise – if you’ve ever seen a Fugazi T-shirt, it’s a bootleg – and kept concert ticket prices as low as possible. None of this seems to have hurt them. Repeater has sold more than two million copies across the world, and their final tour saw them selling out three nights at the Forum in London. They were a very political band (I’m going to find the YouTube clip of them performing outside the White House for the comments), but not particularly preachy or sanctimonious. Their lyrics are often elliptical and allusive, and when the politics are clear, it’s often on a personal level, as in ‘Suggestion’ from the first EP, where MacKaye sings from the point of view of a woman suffering everyday sexual harassment.

It’s the music that’s key, though. Crass were similarly radical in approach, for instance, but I’m not going to seriously suggest we should be listening to them in 2017. Fugazi were thrilling and visceral. They made you think and they made you dance, and they made some of the very best rock music ever recorded.

The best place to start:

I’d have to pick Repeater, from 1990. It’s their first full length LP, and all the elements I’ve raved about above are present and correct. The opening four tracks are presented as one piece of music with no gaps, and it’s as good a twelve minutes of rock n roll as you will ever hear.

The absolutely essential masterpiece(s):

The compilation ’13 Songs’ combines the self titled and Margin Walker EPs, from 1988 and 1989 respectively. It’s notable for including ‘Waiting Room’, which has an absolute monster of a bassline. If you’ve only heard one Fugazi song, I’d bet good money it was this one. 1993’s ‘In On The Killtaker’ hits the sweet spot between early aggression and later experimentation. It’s probably my own favourite of all their records. Their last (to date!) album, ‘The Argument’ from 2002 was a fine and noble way to go out, a restaking of claims after a muted reaction to it’s predecessor ‘End Hits’.

Recommended if you like….

I suppose their antecedents would be people like Gang Of Four, but their real legacy is in their influence. If you’ve ever enjoyed any vaguely alternative American rock music from the last twenty years, chances are those musicians listened to Fugazi

Advanced listening/watching/reading etc.

‘Steady Diet Of Nothing’ from 1991 was the follow up to ‘Repeater’. It’s in the same vein as that record, a bit denser and darker perhaps, but still excellent. ‘Red Medicine’ (1996) and ‘End Hits’ (1997) are the later, more experimental records, where Fugazi incorporated psychedelia, musique concrete and other forms into their work.

There’s also a band sanctioned documentary, directed by Jem Cohen, called ‘Instrument’ that is well worth a watch, if only for the incredible footage of Guy and the basketball hoop.

In addition, Dischord now maintain a site (the Fugazi Live Series) where you can download recordings of almost every show the band ever played, for a suggested cost of $5 per show. I have the first and last shows I attended (Nottingham 1992 and Exeter 2002) and they are excellent.

Where others fear to tread….for completists only:

The soundtrack to Instrument was released as a standalone album. It’s scraps from the cutting room floor, jams and noodles. It sounds more like Slint than it does Fugazi. It’s a curiosity, but it should be at the back of the queue when you’re lining up albums to listen to.

There are a couple of 7″ releases that are worth finding. The ‘3 Songs’ EP was out a few months before ‘Repeater’, and is bundled onto the CD release of that record. ‘Furniture’ is an old song that was dug up and released on vinyl alongside the final album in 2002. In 2014, Dischord put out an archival release of the first Fugazi demo cassette to mark the completion of the Live Series.

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Comments

  3. Agree with absolutely everything you say above – thank you so much for writing this, and the Public Enemy comparison is so apt.

    I came to Fugazi in my mid-teens, and from there found the awesome Minor Threat. I love the music, but I also love the integrity and the politics. As a teen teetotaler with no real role models for the path I was walking, “Straight Edge” was like a 47 second thunderbolt – here was someone wielding a guitar, angrily decrying drink and drugs, and not giving a flying fuck what anyone thought about it. I never considered myself Straight Edge, but I loved that it was out there, and that Ian Mackaye had launched that movement in less than a minute.

    View post on imgur.com

    Fugazi are clearly the better band. As you say above, that rhythm section is one for the ages, and they made a series of tremendous records which remain dear to my heart, and which I play regularly (Fugazi Friday is a long held tradition of my office life). I’m amazed that the band remain as overlooked as they seem to be, but I think you maybe need a bit of a background in non-UK punk rock to really understand where they were coming from.

    As advertised elsewhere, my favourite Fugazi track is and will always be Merchandise. The lyric is so short, but so perfect – a defiant statement of personal integrity and authenticity, exactly the sort of thing that gets mocked as old hat in the 21st century, but exactly the sort of thing I love.

    That closing cry of “You are not what you own” is possibly my favourite lyric of all time: it’s so gloriously simple, and it’s a real manifesto that you can (and should) live by – although virtually no one does these days. It’s probably the only rock lyric that I’ve ever really incorporated into my own life philosophy, and it never fails to remind me what’s real and what’s bullshit.

    When we have nothing left to give
    There will be no reason for us to live
    But when we have nothing left to lose
    You will have nothing left to use
    We owe you nothing
    You have no control

    Merchandise keeps us in line
    Common sense says it’s 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

  4. Yes.

    Just yes to all of the above. A band I don’t listen to all that much any more but who sit behind a lot of what I think about life and music. And my god the rhythm section. Cheers for writing this Kid (and Bingo).

  6. Have downloaded the first three LP’s based on this and the “best of” chat earlier. For some reason (prolly based purely on their name) I think they are going to sound like the Mars Volta.

  7. Fugazi are the BALLS! This was the first song I heard by them; I was in a record shop on Dean Street about 20 years ago when they played this on the in-store system. I stood and listened to the whole thing, then immediately went up to the desk and said “whatever it is you just played, I want to buy it”

    Fugazi – Arpeggiator:

    • It’s the music. I love the idea of Crass, the Crass story, but, for me at least, the records don’t hold up at all. My idea was to contrast them with Fugazi, a band coming from a broadly similar political angle whose records are still some of my very favourites.

      • Oh right. I was wondering if it was their holier than the holiest politics that rendered them embarrassing.
        Laying my cards on the table… I’ve never knowingly heard Fugazi but have been aware of their pedigree for decades. I should give them a listen, though punk protest music is not really my thing these days.
        Crass released a lot of dreck, no question, but I will say I think Stations Of The Crass stands up really well. It’s a fantastic blending of sonic landscapes, rhythms, and (dare I say it) tight song writing. The different vocalists trading off and the image they paint with the lyrics, whether you take it seriously (or as dystopian sci-fi as I do) makes for an exhilarating experience.

  9. Great to see the Fugazi love, although in the interest of accuracy, this being the Afterwiki and all, I must admit that I got a couple of dates wrong. Red Medicine was released in 1995, and End Hits in 1998. Everything else is right, especially the stuff about them being brilliant.

    (I’ve listened to Steady Diet.. three times today)

  11. Dangerous Minds turned me onto this clip this morning – it’s a full length film of a Rome gig in 1999. Great sound, and filming a cut above the usual bloke stood in the crowd with a camera

    I want to be Guy Picciotto when I grow up.

  12. @bingo-little!


    So begins the latest opera by New York-based new music collective Object Collection. It’s All True is derived from more than 1,200 hours of archival live recordings by the American post-hardcore band Fugazi. In an exhaustive months-long process, composer Travis Just and writer Kara Feely meticulously transcribed all the incidental stage banter, random drum beating and tentative guitar noodling between tracks – everything, that is, except the group’s actual songs. What results is a 100 minute-long assault upon the ears, scored for four electric guitars, two drum kits, and four actor-singers. Cosi Fan Tutte it is not

  13. @Kid-Dynamite

    I’ve just finished reading “Against Everything”, a collection of essays by Mark Greif. A few of them were about music, including a very interesting account of how the Grateful Dead and Velvet Underground were basically the same band, coming from two different angles (and both starting with the same original name), as well as a pretty heavily revised version of this piece about Fugazi and Minor Threat.

    https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/what-youve-done-my-world/

    One of the better articles I’ve read on the band. Sadly, it doesn’t include the closing passage from the version in the book, which links back to an earlier thought about how, when you’re 15 years old, the opening minute of a Dinosaur Jr. record can make you feel like the universe actually makes sense, and there may yet be a place for you in it:

    “Someday, someday, I thought. I want to do something worthy of this. One thing worthy of all this beauty, before I die.”

    I would certainly give the book a thumbs up. The writing style is a little cold at time, but he’s very thoughtful and persuasive, on topics ranging from exercise to reality TV to food to modern warfare to hipsterism to learning to rap.

    • From Dischord’s Bandcamp page:

      The Messthetics are an instrumental trio featuring Brendan Canty (drums), Joe Lally (bass), and Anthony Pirog (guitar).

      Brendan Canty and Joe Lally were the rhythm section of the band Fugazi from its inception in 1987 to its period of hiatus in 2002. This is the first band they’ve had together since then. Anthony Pirog is a jazz and experimental guitarist based in Washington, D.C. One half of the duo Janel & Anthony, he has emerged as a primary figure in the city’s out-music community.

      The trio’s debut includes nine songs recorded at Canty’s practice space throughout 2017, live and mostly without overdubs. It’s a snapshot of a band dedicated to the live ideal, where structure gives birth to improvisation.

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