SPEED DEMONS
Minutemen
Blue Note, Boulder
July 9, 1984
***
Westword, July 25, 1984
***
When California’s Minutemen played Boulder’s Blue Note recently, the mixed Denver/Boulder audience provided the real entertainment.
When the tofu-and-earth-shoe crowd met the grittier urban Denver stock, an ‘80s identity crisis of epic proportions resulted. At first, the New Age punks couldn’t seem to face slamming; they finally settled on a style mid-way between aerobics and suicide. The dance-floor melee hovered between a sweaty, orgiastic love-in tangle and kinetic skank explosions: transcendental anarchy rules!
Like the minutemen of history, this hardcore band came not to stay, but to warn.
Minutemen songs are brief (mostly less than a minute long), cryptic signals that encode the dislocations of comfort and disaster common to our experience. Boiling down elements drawn from hardcore, rock, jazz, even country swing, the band has developed a set of shorthand notes to the Terror: a gaunt, haywire hieroglyphics of noise and speed.
Long associated with the California hardcore scene, the band has adopted more of the attitude than the sound of that movement: The common denominator is speed.
The last great disruption of form in popular music was the late ‘60s expansion of the song structure: the decompression of the three-minute radio hit. Improvisation and ‘expanding’ consciousness egged each other on until drugs and ego bloated what was initially an exciting and innovative mutation into the fat, shapeless grotesqueries best exemplified by the Grateful Dead at their longest – and worst.
When punk came along in the late ‘70s, it immediately began to hack away at this carcass, tearing away at the immense façade of false sensitivity to reveal the rickety, attenuated skeleton hiding beneath. In their rush to judgment, though, punks sacrificed a great deal of complexity in order to render sound and lyric down into their own statement. What remained was a freeze-dried nihilism: concentrated, certainly nourishing, but nonetheless a stew in which all elements began to taste the same.
If punk tried to defoliate the over-grown jungle of pop and disco in the late ‘70s, leaving a naked landscape of scorched and narrow forms, the Minutemen are gardeners of a different sort, compressing the music into brief bonsai songs packed with complex sound and lyrics. Any given Minutemen song is bursting at the seams with riffs and words all arranged in tight, precise patterns. There is a rigid, implosive order, as though the Minutemen are trying to develop a microchip music in which each song is freighted with more and more information in an ever diminishing space.
Live, the sense of urgency that radiates (at times oppressively so) from the recordings is mitigated by the band’s seemingly effortless control of the material. D.Boon should be declared a national monument; he’s certainly big enough. With his shaved head, bull-neck and 250-pound bulk, Boon looms over the stage like a mobile Mt.St.Helens. And amazingly, the Minutemen never miss a beat as they flawlessly piece together the intricate Chinese-puzzle of parts that make up their songs.
For the Minutemen, ‘speed’ becomes a testing ground for control and independence, a miniature model for life lived at the edge of a social speed of light. Their most recent lp was not called The Politics of Time for nothing. Marshall McLuhan stated that the ever-increasing speed of communication had turned our world into a global village; Paul Virilo in his book on pure war writes that ‘the field of freedom shrinks with speed.’ The Minutemen race against themselves and a world always a step away from destruction here along the furthest borders of such ideas.
Boulder’s own Kaustic Kids opened for the Minutemen and acquitted themselves reasonably well during a brief set covering punk and neo-punk standards. While they have enthusiasm in abundance, their execution of the material was thin and distant, pleasant but inconsequential: Adam Ant at the Soda Straw.
Westword
July 25, 1984
