Fugazi's The Argument

I believe I first listened to "The Argument" when I was 20. I had disliked it. "This is not punk," I thought. This is not The Clash, this is not Wire, this is not Gang of Four or the Buzzcocks, it's not the Minutemen nor Jesus Lizard nor Pixies nor Nirvana, nor Sleater-Kinney or Ted Leo and the Pharmacists or The Strokes or Jay Reatard. It was so boring, it went everywhere musically and was so obviously political. Punk should be simple and neat - catchy, violent, weird, and short. You could not rock out to this.

My only answer to that now is, "Yeah". It's none of those things; it's not simple, it's not neat, it's not weird or violent, but you can kinda rock out to it, when you're not thinking about it - it's Kafkaesque certainly, it's a journey through a bureacratic nightmare, and it's more melodic than catchy because it's a state of madness only achieved by very, very mad people.

Most intros in albums are a thematic intro only i.e. a way to inflate the artist's ego by making a mission statement for the music before the audience concludes there is none. Fugazi's "Intro" actually works: it introduces the sonic theme of the album, that of distortion and fuzz. It begins with radio chatter, eventually broken up by (I think) violin strings and further chatter. In that same sense, so the soul, the protagonist of the album, begins, an inherently lost and confused thing, cut into pieces by the violent strings and the murmur of crowds.

"Cashout" is not about one system, it's about all systems. "Everybody wants somewhere" certainly. On its own it's a simple statement, but MacKaye's emotion, as well as the playing of the band, transform it into something else: said with such indignation, with such moral conviction, yet with such simplicity (repeating it over and over at the end), it stops being about politics and instead about animal instinct. Everybody needs somewhere, even the dumbest lowest meanest saddest person to ever walk the earth, to the point where it's not about right and wrong, but a human being's basic drive to survive. If it were divorced from the music, it wouldn't be visceral; if phrased any other way, it wouldn't be primitive; presented as it is, it's an "argument", and feel however you want about it, its existence cannot be ignored.

The rest of the album is unlike "Cashout" - they are largely first-person stories, except for "Argument" itself. Guy Picciotto rages "I WANT OUT I WANT OUT I WANT OUT I WANT OUT" before concluding "[I] want a mutually assured destructive life-seizing separate culture!" He screams of a personal madness for the world to destroy himself as an individual. As a human being, he is beyond Descartes' mind-body dualism and wants his brain literally ejected. In "Full Disclosure", Mackaye cries "Accessory! Accessory! Accessory!" after fumbling in making a connection with another human being; he then, hollowed out, mumbles that he himself is a problem and spiralling out of control.

"Life and Limb" quiets the album down and, for that, is one of the best songs on the album (which is composed only of best songs, really). Picciotto sets the scene:

When the bit pulls tight, the grip is sewn into the reins
Can't breathe it out, you just breathe it back again
Come mental back your chambers full for no reason you can name
Boil in bad blood supply you know it's murder on the veins

It's surreal poetry if you look past its simmering fury. He proceeds to mumble, "Viva viva viva life and limb / viva viva viva threatening", before he and Cross elevate their voices above the wave of mutilation, crying "Hey, we want our violence doubled". The verses describe a torture victim, a slave, and the chorus is the degeneration of that slave believing in the violence around him and perpetuated upon him.

"The Kill" acts somewhat as the centerpiece for the album. It begins by describing simply a human being - someone "born into race and nation / accept family and obligation", and yet that same human being breaks down into the chant, "I'm not a citizen, I'm not a citizen." This one line has a shockingly powerful dual meaning. It means at once that the person is not recognized as part of society, someone fit to be ignored, and it means further that that person is an individual, someone apart from society, apart from ideals, someone who fundamentally has a right to be distinct. The song title refers to the killing of the concept of a person as an idea, and not necessarily in physical fact. When we descend into this person's eyes, he narrates his cold duty: "Laying in this cold field / Waiting for the call / Feeling right here in this uniform / I think I got them all", all sung to a groovy bass line, before returning back to echos, the impersonal, once more. It is a true sea in which the person's sense of self is submerged, at the risk of drowning.

Proceeding from "The Kill" are more vignettes. "Strangelight" continues more of Picciotto's poetry:

The sun's a strange light
Nothing grows right anymore
Scars on every stalk
Whose mouth should I use to talk?

unveiling more of the unnatural dystopian society the protagonist is forced to endure. Like a true rock star, Picciotto lustfully shouts at the end, "Get your shoes on / Get your feet on, baby / Come on over" urging an unseen lover to join him in the sludge.

"Oh" is another one of the album's best songs (I confess, there's something about the Picciotto songs in this album I'm inclined to), and it has the characteristics of a real rock song: it's loud, it's hedonistic, it's got lots of twang in it, but it's sung from the perspective of an embezzler, gleefully making away with millions of dollars, in the process selling his soul to the dollar: we're not sure who asks at the end, "Thank you sir, may I have another?", his fellow human being or his own soul.

Continuing onward from the energy of "Oh" comes "Ex-Spectator", where MacKaye sneers "Looking out for cars and modality / Trying to find some sort of geometry" and "Here's some questions that the writer sent: / Can an observer be a participant?", skewering others and himself for their indecision and inability to change anything.

The hallucinatory penultimate, "Nightshop" is seemingly the narrative of a Beckett-like protagonist, mumbling non-sequiters "God I want a new invective", "I'll take something real / The fight to feel", "Inside your mouth / All comet cleaned and scrubbed down / Landscaping for a ghost town", his voice being applied through a filter disguising his singing. He finally breaks out from the fog shouting exultantly "Find something else!", Mackaye crooning "Time to make or break." Returning back to the song with "I've got no patience / I'm nowhere stationed / I'm hanging at the nightshop eating shit", it's almost as if Picciotto's narrative arc through the album is having this one revelation, that he's nowhere, his life is crap, and he's got to break out of it, fast. Given the scenes he painted previously in the album, it's certainly a moment of triumph.

The last song, "Argument", follows this triumphant release; appropriately, all the song really is is Mackaye presenting a simple argument to his audience. It's an appeal not to the audience's conscience, nor to their empathy or sense of right and wrong, but to their intellect, their sense that people are individuals and by necessity have the same needs as everyone else. If we had lived in the early 2000s, we knew he was singing about the War in Iraq; in our modern times, we can only think the song is about the eternal bloodiness of the human mind.

So it starts:

When they start falling, executions will commence
Sides will not matter now, matter makes no sense
How did a difference become a disease?

And he even concedes the opposing side must "have reasons, a rational defense." He is not angry, he is not pleading, he is not even trying to "win" a debate, he is simply stating: once human life is sufficiently disvalued, such that the conclusion is to exterminate life, what will stop the wave of violence? What will ensure life is respected thereafter? What can only follow is a disease of death, and nothing, not even being on the side of "good" and "evil", will stop the red tide.

It's all about strikes now
So here's what's striking me:
That some punk could argue
Some moral ABCs

he sings, decrying the idea that someone's mere feeling could overcome psychological, historical human processes, before continuing,

When people are catching
What bombers release.

asserting the fact that all of our opinions, all of our decisions, all of our equivocating solidifies into people-destroying bombs at the end, which will be the only lasting thing remaining of the arguing. For this reason, Mackaye worships the bomb, and human folly, the only real things at the end:

Here comes the argument
Here comes the argument
Folderol.

For the conflict has finally degenerated him as a human being.

While I can attempt to describe the album's intellect, I can't describe the album's sheer aesthetic beauty. In fact, the intellect comes almot primarily from its sense of beauty and musicality. I can confidently say these things because the album makes you feel these ideas before you understand them.

For that reason people should listen to the album itself. For rock as protest music, this is one of the greatest rock albums ever created. It's probably the greatest punk album. And if honesty and bluntness, over cleverness and brilliance, as well as immediacy and emotion are American ideals, this is easily one of the greatest pieces of American music ever made, and I stand by that. 20 years into the future, an argument needs to be made for "The Argument".