Title
Performance: Fugazi
Subject
Live perfomance review
Description
This article talks about Fugazi’s music and live performance and how that tied in with the socially conscious themes that the band promoted in DC and in their community. The article also talks about their relationship with their fan.
Creator
Michael Azerrad
Source
Rolling Stone
Publisher
Rolling Stone LLC
Date
June 25, 1992
Contributor
[no text]
Rights
Copyright Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. Jun 25, 1992
Relation
[no text]
Format
[no text]
Language
[no text]
Type
Performance Review and Analysis
Identifier
[no text]
Coverage
[no text]
Original Format
[no text]
Text
One of this country's few truly underground bands, Fugazi refuses to join a major label and adamantly avoids any promotion. The band members won't even flog T-shirts, yet their self-released records sell over 100,000 copies apiece. Fugazi sold out the 2600-capacity Ritz, and not just because the band charged its usual five-dollar admission to the all-ages crowd--for a measly fin, ticket buyers get intense, impassioned performances that make Fugazi perhaps America's best live band.
The Washington, D.C., quartet's visceral but brainy music hails from hardcore punk (singer-guitarist Ian MacKaye was a member of the legendary Minor Threat) but resuscitates that now staid genre by daringly injecting funk, dub and metal for a much artier but even more compelling beast.
The band's squalling, dissonant guitars and angry, mutant dance beats recall the early Eighties neo-Marxist post-punkers Gang of Four; so does its didactic hectoring. Between MacKaye's drill-sergeant vocals and guitarist Guy Picciotto's more emotive bark, the group's rant-anthems relentlessly stump for social justice--everything from consumer activism to abortion rights.
In concert as well as in theory, Fugazi exists to demolish complacency by confounding expectations, so its unpredictable, stop-and-go arrangements are a musical metaphor--even drummer Brendan Canty occasionally wound up a lick with a clanging bell instead of the usual cymbal crash. MacKaye is icono-clastic enough to decry slum-dancing, a commonplace of thrash concerts. "I really hate to see people's heads getting crushed," he admonished at one point. "So just act like human beings, okay?"
But Fugazi's confrontational show is a two-way street, and the Ritz audience gave as good as it got. "Maybe for the five bucks we should give a megaphone," MacKaye said from the stage to roars of approval. "But that's not cost-effective."
So from both sides of the stage, the Ritz show was a volcanic outpouring of righteous indignation, every bit as cathartic as it was inflammatory. From the explosive opening salvo of "Reclamation," a barn-burning prochoice song from Fugazi's fraught 1991 album Steady Diet of Nothing, Picciotto was twisting his scarecrow frame into tortured arcs and angles, stutter stepping across the stage in a desperate attempt to emulate the band's disjointed structures and whiplash dynamic shifts, which went from screaming, all-out noise to cavernous silence at the drop of a backward baseball hat (proving, as MacKaye sings, that "silence is a dangerous sound"). MacKaye would answer with split-kick jumps and bent-leg twirls or pogo like a roebuck while the nimbly pounding rhythm section was content to hang back, the subsonic rumble of Joe Lally's bass virtually rearranging the audience's innards.
Whipped to a froth by the band's urgency (and whomping grooves), the audience was a swarming mass of arms and legs. If the crowd resembled the swirling contents of a blender, it went into puree mode from the opening chords of a war horse from the band's trailblazing 1988 EP Fugazi--"Suggestion," a livid screed about a woman trying to walk down the street "free of suggestion." Midway through, MacKaye took a mind-warping feedback solo, then turned his guitar into an air-raid siren as Ganty's snare drum exploded like rifle shots into the song's galvanic main riff.
Two more early numbers kicked both band and crowd far beyond overdrive: "Give Me the Cure," a somehow exhilarating meditation on death, and the call to arms "Waiting Room." By now, Picciotto had simply abandoned his guitar and was failing wildly about the stage. "Shut the Door," a harrowing antidrug tune from Repeater, featured an inspired dub-style break--complete with booming bass and echoing snare--that turned the soundman into a fifth member. The final encore, "KYEO," ended as MacKaye screamed, the veins popping from his neck: "The tools they will be swinging/But we will not be beaten down."
Brandishing slogans such as "You are not what you own" or "America is just a word, but I use it," Fugazi is far from nihilistic; the band members are committed and outspoken as only political rappers seem to be these days. And they sure know how to put the agit back in agitprop.
The Washington, D.C., quartet's visceral but brainy music hails from hardcore punk (singer-guitarist Ian MacKaye was a member of the legendary Minor Threat) but resuscitates that now staid genre by daringly injecting funk, dub and metal for a much artier but even more compelling beast.
The band's squalling, dissonant guitars and angry, mutant dance beats recall the early Eighties neo-Marxist post-punkers Gang of Four; so does its didactic hectoring. Between MacKaye's drill-sergeant vocals and guitarist Guy Picciotto's more emotive bark, the group's rant-anthems relentlessly stump for social justice--everything from consumer activism to abortion rights.
In concert as well as in theory, Fugazi exists to demolish complacency by confounding expectations, so its unpredictable, stop-and-go arrangements are a musical metaphor--even drummer Brendan Canty occasionally wound up a lick with a clanging bell instead of the usual cymbal crash. MacKaye is icono-clastic enough to decry slum-dancing, a commonplace of thrash concerts. "I really hate to see people's heads getting crushed," he admonished at one point. "So just act like human beings, okay?"
But Fugazi's confrontational show is a two-way street, and the Ritz audience gave as good as it got. "Maybe for the five bucks we should give a megaphone," MacKaye said from the stage to roars of approval. "But that's not cost-effective."
So from both sides of the stage, the Ritz show was a volcanic outpouring of righteous indignation, every bit as cathartic as it was inflammatory. From the explosive opening salvo of "Reclamation," a barn-burning prochoice song from Fugazi's fraught 1991 album Steady Diet of Nothing, Picciotto was twisting his scarecrow frame into tortured arcs and angles, stutter stepping across the stage in a desperate attempt to emulate the band's disjointed structures and whiplash dynamic shifts, which went from screaming, all-out noise to cavernous silence at the drop of a backward baseball hat (proving, as MacKaye sings, that "silence is a dangerous sound"). MacKaye would answer with split-kick jumps and bent-leg twirls or pogo like a roebuck while the nimbly pounding rhythm section was content to hang back, the subsonic rumble of Joe Lally's bass virtually rearranging the audience's innards.
Whipped to a froth by the band's urgency (and whomping grooves), the audience was a swarming mass of arms and legs. If the crowd resembled the swirling contents of a blender, it went into puree mode from the opening chords of a war horse from the band's trailblazing 1988 EP Fugazi--"Suggestion," a livid screed about a woman trying to walk down the street "free of suggestion." Midway through, MacKaye took a mind-warping feedback solo, then turned his guitar into an air-raid siren as Ganty's snare drum exploded like rifle shots into the song's galvanic main riff.
Two more early numbers kicked both band and crowd far beyond overdrive: "Give Me the Cure," a somehow exhilarating meditation on death, and the call to arms "Waiting Room." By now, Picciotto had simply abandoned his guitar and was failing wildly about the stage. "Shut the Door," a harrowing antidrug tune from Repeater, featured an inspired dub-style break--complete with booming bass and echoing snare--that turned the soundman into a fifth member. The final encore, "KYEO," ended as MacKaye screamed, the veins popping from his neck: "The tools they will be swinging/But we will not be beaten down."
Brandishing slogans such as "You are not what you own" or "America is just a word, but I use it," Fugazi is far from nihilistic; the band members are committed and outspoken as only political rappers seem to be these days. And they sure know how to put the agit back in agitprop.