[!@#$%!]

(cont.)

Soulside, for instance, was a perfectly fine band, but during its three years of existence in the late '80s, it did nothing but walk the Minor Threat/Fugazi stick-up-your-ass walk. Indeed, the chorus of "Bass" ("I'm calling for action/So rise people rise/Rise and revolt/Burn the eyes of rulers/Burn it down") could stand as a D.C. agit-rock template. And Soulside was far from alone. Ignition, 96, Jawbox, Fidelity Jones—why, there have been enough socially conscious rock bands here to fill a Quaker meetinghouse. Even the excellent Holy Rollers, whose membership fell closer to Jerry Lee Lewis than Ian MacKaye in the lifestyles department, couldn't resist the urge to superglue political messages onto their songs.

Never, ever, have so many people—and music people, no less—taken themselves and their problems and the problems of the world so seriously. It was ingrained in them by the likes of Fugazi. So seriously, in fact, that they succeeded in draining every last drop of joy right out of their music. There was no joy, but you couldn't have tossed a dead cat in this town without hitting a vegan rocker committed to social justice. To this day, nobody dances, even at the Black Cat, where booze is duly served.

OK, I exaggerate. Washington has always had its fair share of music people who wanted nothing to do with consciousness-raising. And today, no one's going to confuse a night at the Black Cat with a PETA meeting. But the rock-social activism nexus here is without parallel, and its pernicious effects are still evident everywhere.

Back in the '80s, this town couldn't even dredge up a decent hair-metal band. Why? Everybody was too busy banging drums outside the South African embassy. During my days in Philadelphia in that decade, the closest thing we had to a protest song was the Dead Milkmen's "Beach Party Vietnam." And I don't remember ever attending a benefit anywhere for anything whatsoever. That's not to say that nobody in Philadelphia gave a shit. We just didn't like to mix politics and music. You might as well listen to the Indigo Girls.

While there's no denying that their elders damn near abandoned the youth of D.C. to its terrible fate, the latter still had a choice to make. They could have turned away from Fugazi's dour brand of scold-rock. Instead, many of them have done their darnedest to out-MacKaye MacKaye.

Take the straightedge thing, which is a moralistic offshoot of hardcore that stresses abstinence from alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and sex. It sounds like a creation of the Moral Majority, but in truth, it was MacKaye's brainchild. MacKaye christened this phenomenon with the songs "Straightedge" and "Out of Step," which he wrote during his days with Minor Threat. In the latter song, MacKaye sings, "I don't smoke/Don't drink/Don't fuck/At least I can fucking think." Jeff Nelson once said, "If it was [MacKaye's] way, the whole scene wouldn't drink or smoke." And Nelson had to fight tooth and nail to get MacKaye to add the pronoun "I" to the lyrics.

MacKaye used to brag about how he and Henry Garfield (later Rollins) liked to run around clubs slapping beers out of people's hands. Finally, if you play any Minor Threat song backward, what you'll hear is MacKaye saying, "Put out that cigarette, now!"

That said, no one can accuse MacKaye of having forced thousands of intolerant little snots into becoming lockstep puritans with Xs on their hands. He never put a gun to anybody's head. Nobody can make you be an asshole. It's strictly a do-it-yourself job.

The problem with Fugazi—and hence with D.C.—is that it has always proceeded from a faulty premise. Rock isn't a Positive Force—rock is pure sleaze. It's the Devil's music; he gave it to us to just the same as he gave us dope, shotguns, fast cars, M80s, high-octane booze, pornography, Big Macs, big colored pills, cigarettes, and all the other good things in life.

Hell, Frank Sinatra knew this: A wise man, he dismissed rock 'n' roll as the "most brutal, ugly, vicious form of expression—sly, lewd, dirty—a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac—martial music of every delinquent on the face of the earth." That's telling 'em, Old Blue Eyes. Now get back to eating those scrambled eggs off the bosom of that prostitute!

Fact is, rock 'n' roll—and before you start throwing some hoo-hah my way about how Fugazi ain't rock but an American variation of English art-punk, may I simply remind you that you're full of shit—should practically ooze lust, wickedness, decadence, and depravity. Indeed, depravity is the very lifeblood, the essence, of rock, and that's as true of your English art-punker as it of John Bonham.

During his wonderfully fin de siècle Ziggy Stardust phase, which he spent hanging for dear life onto Lou Reed (or was it vice versa?), David Bowie said a very rock thing. He said, "Any society that allows people like Lou and me to become rampant is pretty well lost." Has there ever been a more magnificently direct statement of rock's degenerative nature?

David and Lou (and Iggy too) understood that the decline of the West could be fun. But not the guys in Fugazi. They would put us on a mirth-free, high-moral-fiber diet, and let us enjoy none of the wonderful bad things in life. Rock is one of the most childish, stupid, and, yes, fun things around—and it's for these very reasons that it's one of the most important forces on the face of the Earth.

Fugazi has made the terrible mistake of using its position as a bully pulpit. It preaches and preaches and preaches. Take the famous "ice-cream-eating motherfucker" incident, which is captured in Jem Cohen's documentary about Fugazi, Instrument. In it, MacKaye berates two punks for hurting people in the audience. "It sucks to have to tell people how to behave themselves," he says, sounding less like a punker than a hall monitor at Our Lady of Fugazi Middle School. Then Picciotto says, "I saw you two guys earlier at the Good Humor truck, and you were eating your ice cream like little boys....Oh, I saw you eating ice cream, pal....You were eating an ice-cream cone, and I saw you....You're an ice-cream-eating motherfucker, that's what you are."

If this were an isolated incident, you could write it off as an understandable case of pique directed at a couple of assholes. But Fugazi's shows have long had the annoying tendency of morphing into civics classics where an ever-watchful Mr. MacKaye, who unlike Mr. Kotter doesn't suffer from a sense of humor, condescendingly encourages people to be nice and keep their hands to themselves. Let's face it: Ian missed his calling. He should have been a preacher.

But good rock doesn't preach. Shit, telling the preacher to go to hell is what rock 'n' roll is all about. If I want a lecture on personal responsibility, I can always talk to my wife. No, I look to rock for the same reasons people have always looked to rock—for a hedonistic, degenerate, and lewd message. As the great Waylon Jennings, who knew a thing or two about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, once said, "Rock 'n' roll meant fucking, originally—which I don't think is a bad idea. Let's bring it back again."

MacKaye has gone on record as saying he's opposed to sex only of the casual-Friday variety. But that's just the point. Rock 'n' roll is about casual sex, deviant sex, Mars-bar sex—a fact that seems to have registered with everyone on the planet except Fugazi. Little Richard—who went on, unfortunately, to do a little preaching himself—never had any doubts about the nexus between rock and fucking. He said, and I quote, "If there was anything I loved more than a big penis, it was a bigger penis."

Ah, and then there are drugs. Drugs and rock music go together like, well, drugs and sex. The reasons are myriad, but the simple truth is that rock music, no matter how "corporate," retains the ability to frighten parents, and so do drugs. Ergo, kids who want to shock their elders are going to want to do both, and preferably in tandem. It was MacKaye's ridiculous idea to try to sunder the connection between the two. This led to a nice bit of irony. While the rest of the punk world was gleefully excoriaking the Reagan administration, MacKaye was an unofficial spear-carrier for Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign.

In an interview conducted during his days with Minor Threat, MacKaye bragged that he once "fuckin' hit a kid with a hammer because he blew pot smoke in my face." John Ashcroft would be proud of him.

Look, I'm going to tell you the truth here: Rock music is dumb. So dumb it's funny. What's more, it's supposed to be, even though MacKaye would like to think otherwise: "I made a mistake thinking that rock 'n' roll had something to do with being intelligent and not accepting society as it was being given to us," he once lamented.

Don't despair, rock fans, because dumb is good. Hell, dumb just could be your salvation. I mean, take a gander at your great rock 'n' rollers. Elvis Presley? Dumb as a stump. And he knew it. Hell, Elvis is the man who said, "I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to."