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ok, i found it... article my michael little, october 17, 2003, washington city paper.

IN ON THE KILLJOY

Thanks to Fugazi, D.C.'s rock scene is a steady diet of boring.

In 2002, Fugazi guitarist/vocalist Ian MacKaye explained how he feels when he makes music. "People use the word 'fun' when they talk about music all the time, and I just happen to be a person that doesn't necessarily think that music is 'fun' or that I have 'fun' with music," said MacKaye.

MacKaye wasn't just having a bad day. In that Magnet interview, in fact, he effectively summed up the ethos of Fugazi, the band that put D.C. on the post-punk map. Formed in late 1987 by MacKaye, bassist Joe Lally, drummer Brendan Canty, and guitarist/vocalist Guy Picciotto, Fugazi quickly developed a devoted following. And the fans had something more than the music to hang on to: Far from the typical post-punk band, Fugazi built a reputation that relies on uncompromising morality.

Just how seriously do MacKaye and Fugazi take this mandate? Consider that MacKaye has been known to lecture Fugazi's audiences on the evils of pushing in the mosh pit.

Ethics—in the mosh pit as well as the CD rack—may seem like a strange foundation to build a rock empire on, but Fugazi has outlasted most of its contemporaries. Indeed, of the 13 bands chronicled in Michael Azerrad's 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground, only Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, and Fugazi are still around. Fugazi may or may not be selling quite as many records as it did during its early days, but who's counting? What matters is that Fugazi has ardently upheld a set of values that seem, well—let's just say that "idealistic" doesn't quite do it. Against all odds, the four-piece band from Washington has survived some 15 years in the rough-and-tumble music biz without ever coming close to selling out to a major label, all the while holding firm to the quaint notion that it's actually possible to give one's fans more than their money's worth.

Now I ask you: What could possibly be wrong with that?

As it turns out, plenty. With its message of moral probity, Fugazi—and its direct predecessor in preachiness, Minor Threat—cast a long pall over the Washington, D.C., music scene and in so doing seduced an entire generation of unsuspecting young people into believing a monstrous falsehood: namely, that rock 'n' roll both could and should be ethically redeeming—that it could, in fact, help them become better human beings.

The truth is that rock 'n' roll doesn't want you to become a better human being. It wants you to damage your hearing. It wants you to drink heavily, gobble illicit little pills without knowing what they are, and drive your car at insane speeds smack into a K-hole.

No wonder Washington is a lousy rock 'n' roll town. We got hoodwinked. Fugazi sold us a bill of goods. The band somehow managed to convince an entire rock community that doing good was more important than sounding evil. I can only think that the entire rock community must have been stoned out of its gourd at the time. But enough is enough. Somebody has to grab goodness by the halo and give it a good shaking, if only for rock's sake. And seeing as how I'm the only person who ever seems to think Fugazi's a problem, I might as well be that somebody.

Thanks to Fugazi, Washington can pride itself on having the most earnest music scene in the world. How earnest? Well, suffice it to say that emo was born here. Emo is an ill-defined but always harrowing subgenre, pioneered by the likes of Rites of Spring but now best represented by such intolerables as Dashboard Confessional and Rainer Maria. It sets diary-entry-emotionalism above all else. 'Nuff said?

And on the do-gooder front, no one can outdo Fugazi. From the get-go, the post-punk band threw itself into charity like a remorseful Salvation Army soldier working off a hangover. It affiliated itself with Positive Force DC, a punk activist group, and played plenty of benefits to help the homeless, the Peace Center, the Washington Free Clinic, the Whitman-Walker Clinic, and various and sundry women's and human-rights groups—Fugazi even played a show for the inmates at Virginia's (now defunct) Lorton Prison. MacKaye insisted that the band never charge more than five bucks a show, and that Dischord Records—the label he founded with Teen Idles bandmates Jeff Nelson and Nathan Strejcek in December 1980—never charge more than $10 a record.

Let's face it: If Cotton Mather had ever gotten around to forming a post-punk band, that band would have been a lot like Fugazi: moralistic, uptight, and inordinately fond of delivering hectoring sermons from the pulpit—er, stage. Which is cool, really—Þock believes in a big tent, and if it can find a place under there for a Christian hair-metal band dressed in bee stripes, it can certainly find a smoke- and alcohol-free corner for the Roundhead post-punkers in Fugazi.

The problem here in D.C. is that nobody has stepped up to make the Devil's case. People can talk all they want about the ubiquity of evil, but here in Washington the evil people seem to skip rock and head straight for the Republican Party. If only D.C. had been able to produce a band of total deviant fuckups to give its children some alternative role models. The folks in Pussy Galore, who let it be known what side of the fence they stood on with their song "Fuck Ian MacKaye," might have served, had they not—the chickenshits!—up and split for New York. As it was, the unfortunate young things of this fair city were left with nobody to emulate but Fugazi.

With his outrageous outfits and teetering-on-the-edge self-parody schtick, D.C.'s other Ian—Ian Svenonius of Nation of Ulysses and the Make*Up fame—might have bailed us out, had anybody been able to figure out what he was up to. As it was, the kids found it easier to bark along with Drill Sergeant MacKaye. Svenonius' "Sassiest Boy in America" tag didn't help matters, either. It's a well-known fact that sassy and evil don't mix.

The fact is, D.C. is a one-horse town, and the nag's name is Fugazi. Bring up our nation's capitol in rock circles nationwide and the band that comes to mind—the only band that comes to mind, usually—is Fugazi. Throw in the fact that Dischord remains the city's premier record label and you're dealing with some major influence. If first Minor Threat, then Fugazi, has set D.C. music's moral tone, Dischord has been there to nurture and document those bands that have fitted the taste.

Dischord's motto is "Putting DC on the Map," and it has. The folks who run Dischord will tell you that they're not in the business of manufacturing Fugazi clones, and they're telling the truth. Dischord has released records by dozens of groups that could in no way, shape, or form be likened to Fugazi. A few of these bands have even demonstrated a sense of humor. But in a company town run in large part by Fugazi, it can't hurt to do what Fugazi does. And bands know this. Play benefits. Sing socially conscious songs, and sing them from the heart. Whatever you do, don't advocate dope, guns, and fucking in the streets. Or fun. And for God's sake, check your sense of humor at the door.

Take a stroll through Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins' excellent Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capitol if you have any doubts about the ravages MacKaye and his ilk have inflicted on D.C.'s rock community. (Jenkins is a Washington City Paper contributing writer.) I find it to be depressing reading because, well, from the days of Minor Threat on down, nobody in the '80s or '90s ever seemed to be having any fun. The book's 400-plus pages depict a rather dour circle of people dedicated to the proposition that punk rock can, and should, change the world. If nothing else, it's definitive proof Oscar Wilde was right when he said that youth is wasted on the young. Where was the laughter? The fact is, when it comes to fun, the D.C. music scene in its formative years ranked right up there with rickets. You can argue about the musical merits of such bands as Faith, Scream, Three, Ignition, Rites of Spring, Beefeater, Bells Of, Hate From Ignorance, Embrace, and Insurrection, but they sure as shit weren't a rollicking good time. Indeed, they all seem to have proceeded from the exotic notion that the point of rock is to play intense and humorless music as intensely and humorlessly as possible.

I can tick off scads of bands that make me laugh just to think of their names, but only one of them—Tesco Vee's Meatmen—made D.C. its home. Black Flag, Flipper, the Adolescents, the Meat Puppets, Cows, the Circle Jerks, Killdozer, the Dead Kennedys, Butthole Surfers, the Angry Samoans, Camper Van Beethoven, Fear, the Dead Milkmen—the list goes on and on, but the point is that in the '80s, while the rest of the punk world was busting a gut and rolling in the fucking aisles, D.C. was at a Minor Threat show listening to a sermon.

The worst part of it is that the only thing that Minor Threat and Fugazi's hometown imitators seem to have picked up on is that irksome tone of angry moral righteousness. If you're going to emulate Fugazi, then for God's sake emulate the band's laudable aversion to big record companies, steep ticket prices, and ripping off the people with every CD you sell. But no, I guess it's easier to sing whiny songs about society or about how your friends are sellouts who have lost their punk-rock cred.