Space Age Filler

I heard about punk rock before I actually heard any of it. (Aside from the scatalogically inclined Quincy Punx who were dominating radio during my mid teens, but that doesn't really count any more so than Orange Fanta counts as fruit.) Initially, it sounded like the kind of deliberately bad, cheaply nihilistic crap that I would hate. The fact that so many moronic skater bullies in my Jr. High and High school loved it's more skull-shirted permutations only added to the turnoff. This was clearly music for people who believed that "No Future" meant you didn't have to try instead of that you had the opportunity to make something better. That most of these aforementioned morons are now either going nowhere or going nowhere with kids in tow only props up this idea.

ASIDE: If there's no future, why the fuck are you assholes breeding?

So yes, Sex Pistols didn't do much for me when I got their lone LP from a CD club. Besides that, it didn't really even sound like the punk rock I had envisioned when I saw it described in an encyclopedia (even worse than looking up money laundering in a dictionary) so why even bother? It wasn't until I was at a summer camp in the summer of 03' that one of the instructors gave me a Minor Threat CD that I knew how wrongheaded my lazy dismissal of the genre had really been.

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When I first heard "Filler" it was, as with a lot of great art, a blur. The song opens with a rumble like bullfrogs shedding their legs and sprouting teeth. Drums bubble up like a fuse. Then shit gets real...

I couldn't discern lyrics, but it didn't really matter. This was the punk rock I'd imagined and it scared me more than a CD that was 20+ years old at the time should have been able to. It was singular in it's commitment to a physical imperative. Power chords like bricks laid in an overcaffeinated silent movie. Ian McKaye's accusatory bellow, as much at you as for you. Particularly in the early work (which might be all that matters in punk rock) the band had two modes: On and Off. Melody was incidental, like a canoe being kicked through a merciless river. However, the brilliant aspect of Minor Threat is that they chose such perfect DNA to build that river from. One story (perhaps apocryphal, but in that case truthful in a way no true story could be) has guitarist Lyle Preslar taking the riffs from old Rolling Stones songs and simply speeding them up to the point where the only choice is to let everything bleed. By using innateley solid progressions, the band was able to focus on tightness and energy. There is no fat. There is no wanking. The closest thing you get to a solo is a noise burst at the end of the chorus, ghost notes biting stepped on squeals... Fuck, it might not even have been intentional

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Once I started to figure out the lyrics, it all made sense; this was a band focused on stripping everything away until only the ineffable self remains. The person addressed in the song is all of us and none of us. There's an individualist politics, or at least a philosiphy at work and, while it's undeniably simplistic and judgemental, it has a clarity to it that only a very rational person who happens to be very young, very stupid, or an excellent actor can execute with such conviction

What happened to you?
You're not the same

There's something in your head

Made a violent change

It's in your head

Filler

You call it religion
You're full of shit

Filler

Was she really worth it?

She cost you your life

You'll never leave her side

She's gonna be your wife

You call it romance

You're full of shit

Filler

Your brain is clay

What's going on?

You picked up a bible

And now you're gone

You call it religion

You're full of shit

Filler

This was, at 17, the punk rock I'd been waiting to hear. It wasn't nihilistic so much as it was negationist. If everything else was filler, then that meant there was a lot more room to manuever than songs running under 1:30 would suggest. It wasn't until another two years of exploration of underground hardcore/emo that I'd find the band that fulfilled that potential.

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Antioch Arrow had a far shorter and less prominent existence than Minor Threat but made songs with a little less force and a much greater breadth of impact. The first song of theirs that really knocked me on my ass was "Space Age." It opens with a keyboard/organ line (some combination of my ignorance, bad hearing, and the recording quality has rendered it indescernible at this point) that sounds like it's heralding a DIY version of the monolith from 2001. The vocals drop in, threatening to swoon or explode.

Dipped in chocolate with a cobra design/My sign is a sign which is a sign.

Then things really do explode, the drums ricochet off of themselves. A guitar riff slides and pounds like a distant jet engine, further abstracting the fury that Minor Threat distilled for me so perfectly. I could dissect the lyrics ('Hmm, what archetypes does the chocolate, evoke? Is he talking about the Zodiac?') but that's missing the point of the song. When playing live, Antioch Arrow supposedly had to completeley retune after every song. Every bit of this song is about exhausting yourself while drilling into the spirit world and coming back with synaesthetic force. The surging riff is question is not quite atonal, but it's a concrete element much more than a melodic or harmonic one. The hook that it provides, such as it is, is like the predestined pounding of a piledriver. It feels automatic, like the riff has been brewing and has now escaped into the song like a firefly with a binary brain set loose in a black box.

We've gotta have time to stay, "WAH!"/ And if we soften, I drip all over the floor.

Notice what evocative nonsense the lyrics are (I mean that as a compliment.) Is meaning even relevant? The ineffable self Minor Threat seemed to be clearing the way for is totally on display here. When I listen to this song, I feel the words and the vocal delivery like an arthritic feels a descending storm. It's pure sensation, nerves unsheathed of any agenda. Where the accidental squeals of "Filler" implied the solos of an era that had already been written off, "Space Age" packs every indulgence into such a short span that, even when a note feels like a flubb or a misstep, it recovers into a cartwheel or a somersault so quickly that you would be a fool to try to tell what is or isn't intentional or, really; to even hold the misstep against them. Maybe it's all nervous spasms like stoned philosiphy riding the rails of an Attention Defeciet or maybe it's the keys to the kingdom. Either way, Minor Threat used hardcore as a way to boil their own concerns down to adolescent ammunition, Antioch Arrow treated the form as a chance to fill in the gaps with their own cosmology.

"While Pacific Time Zone says that litte girl's on time."

The organ bleats like a siren trying to scorch glue from painted mountains under the previous line, tracing the chasis of the vocal melody before throwing it all over the hill again.

Pacific Specific!

The singer lingers on the last line, repeating it four times with exhasustive intensity, jamming in a mini-monologue like a one-note solo, rasping out a post-verbal moan before sucking in a breath and flipping the phrase as the drums rev up:

Specific Pacific! Thirty-three feet below, the fish have a funny thing at thirty three below.This red cement I walk on, this broken glass song/ I wish us alligators would be so so very gone.

Then the organ comes back, same melodic chunk as before. Tag, you're it.

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Two weeks ago, my ipod broke. This past weekend, I took an old tapedeck (rescued during a chaotic move-out) and set up a playlist that alternated between Antioch Arrow and Minor Threat. The tape I've been listening to is, then, a tape of that playlist. It feels nice to get back to synthetic warmth and spinning squeals, especially since both of these records came out before I even owned a CD player. Each presents an epic but equally galvanizing visions of what punk rock can be, volleying back and forth from tack to track. I decided to focus on these songs, mainly because they're the ones that probably embody what I love most about these bands, but both records ("In Love With Jets/The Lady is a Cat" and Minor Threat's "Complete Discography") are essential for anyone who got sick of punk when they realized how simple it was and wants to see that simplicity either rendered as a platonic ideal or blasted open like a Kinder Egg full of rust and ecstatic intent. Links coming up tonight.