Fugazi - In on the Kill Taker

Pitchfork 86

If 1991 was The Year Punk Broke, and 1993 was when the underground had fully bubbled to the surface, between that, the world got Cliff Poncier, the singer of the band Citizen Dick in Cameron Crowe's 1992 movie Singles. Cliff (played by Matt Dillon) is a musician in a band with Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, and Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam, and has an album out on an independent label. To a large swath of America that was still getting used to Kurt Cobain’s face and R.E.M. winning Grammys, Cliff was the fictional bridge into the world of indie artists. He’s “like a renaissance man” we’re told, but it’s obvious he wants to make it big. Everybody wanted that, right?

Alt was the new normal. Things had gone from “Our band could be your life” to stadium concerts opening up for rock legends and poisonous major label contracts. Nirvana followed up Nevermind with the Steve Albini-produced In Utero, former SST bands Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and the Meat Puppets enjoyed radio and MTV airtime, countless kids got copies of the No Alternative compilation, and grunge was officially a runway style thanks to Marc Jacobs. Fugazi’s independent scene had become a global phenomenon, funded, largely, by corporate money.

Fugazi—reluctantly—turned into one of the last bands standing from the old guard of American punks. They became a band that mainstream kids and college radio stations wanted to check out at the perfect time in their career. Fugazi’s nonstop touring made their music more accessible to a wider audience than ever before. They had an organic buzz that led to better distribution deals, which allowed them to remain fiercely independent. To kids straddling the Generation X and Millennial borders, Fugazi were a touchstone, an introduction into the DIY mindset. Their ability to get people excited without a team of advertisers, big hit song, or anything besides word of mouth is, at this point, the stuff of legend.

And while their hardcore contemporaries were chasing big contracts and slots on the Lollapalooza tour, Fugazi teamed with groups like Positive Force—a Washington D.C. youth activist collective that took on poverty and George H.W. Bush’s war in the Middle East. Fugazi wanted to let you know they stood for things, and that maybe you should, too. Punk was more than just not knowing how to play an instrument but having something to say—it was about starting a zine, doing distribution, or going to a protest to fight inequality in all its forms. They were champions of the utopian freedom of the 1960s filtered through the busted amps of punk. If there was any environment for Fugazi to put out the biggest record of their career, this was it.

Since the band considered live shows to be their most natural setting, Fugazi toured relentlessly between albums. One look at the band’s show archives finds them playing the Palladium in New York City to 3,000 people on a spring night in 1992, Father Hayes Gym Bar in Portland, ME to 750 people a few nights later, then wrapping up an East Coast tour at City Gardens in New Jersey to a hair under 1,000 before embarking on a tour of Europe two weeks later. At some point during 1992, even though none of the band’s 73 shows were played anywhere near the Midwest, they found time to go to Chicago to record with Steve Albini. Self-producing their second LP Steady Diet of Nothing left the band “pretty disappointed at the end of the day with that record,” as Ian MacKaye would later say. Bassist Joe Lally found the experience “weird,” and that going to Chicago to record new songs was less about getting a new album out of the sessions, “it was more about working with Steve.”

The resulting demos were not what the band or producer wanted. The song “Public Witness Program,” had the same buzzsaw guitar and sped-up tempo of what you’d expect from one of Albini’s own Shellac songs. “Great Cop,” sounded much more like a raging hardcore song than the band may have wanted. The sessions, which float around file sharing sites and YouTube, would end up being simply a footnote in American indie history; titans from the 1980s underground getting together to mess around. In the end, after they made it back home to D.C., the band received a fax from Albini saying, “I think we dropped the ball.”

The band just couldn’t beat the sound they created in their hometown, so they entered Inner Ear Studios with Don Zientara and Ted Niceley in the autumn of 1992. When they finally emerged playing their first show on February 4, 1993, at the Peppermint Beach Club in Virginia Beach, the 1,200-person crowd got a set filled with almost all new material, peppered with older songs like “Suggestion” and “Repeater.” The band went on an American tour that stretched over 60 shows. In on the Kill Taker was released on June 30, sold around 200,000 copies in its first week alone, and Fugazi cracked the Billboard Top 200. Later in August, they played a show in front of the Washington Monument to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. Five thousand people crowded the outdoor Sylvan Theater and this time, when they played their new songs, the crowd knew every word.

Like the albums that came before it, In on the Kill Taker begins small and grows into something larger. Maybe it’s a metaphor for how Fugazi sees the world, or at least the one they helped to build: “Facet Squared” opens with a few seconds of near-silence that builds into feedback, then some guitar mimicking a heartbeat checks in at the 15-second mark, joined in by the rest of the band who work together building up what sounds like it will be a slow jam with no real leader. The guitars, along with Joe Lally’s bass and Brendan Canty’s drums, all work together like a machine. MacKaye’s guitar takes over for a few seconds, signaling the next level the song is about to take. That buildup leads to one of MacKaye’s most furious deliveries as a singer, opening by claiming, “Pride no longer has definition,” with the kind of energy and anger he channeled in his younger days with Minor Threat. The song ends and cuts right into Canty pounding away to start the Guy Picciotto-fronted “Public Witness Program.” Complete with handclaps, a ringing chorus, and Picciotto yelling, “Can I get a witness,” like a punk preacher; it showcases the band at their most driving. This is the closest you get to a polished Fugazi record, but by no means is it slick.

MacKaye, in an interview for Brandon Gentry’s book Capitol Contingency: Post-Punk, Indie Rock, and Noise Pop in Washington, D.C., 1991-1999, believed that little bit of shine was intentional, the result of producer Ted Niceley reacting to what he heard from the popular bands with the same DNA as Fugazi that were getting heavy airplay. “It’s that consciousness of radio,” MacKaye said, “that puts me off a little bit,” while also railing against the producer’s “total fixation on detail.” Yet it’s exactly that consciousness of radio and fixation to details that give In on the Kill Taker its real edge. It’s hard to imagine a song like “Cassavetes,” with Picciotto conjuring up the ghost of the dead director, screaming, “Shut up! This is my last picture,” being sandwiched between the Smashing Pumpkins and Candlebox on a radio station’s playlist. The extra lacquer on top only makes it more scathing and visceral.

There’s no single on In on the Kill Taker. Besides “Waiting Room” somehow becoming one of the defining Gen X anthems, Fugazi never set out to make any one song hold any more importance over the others to try and get radio program directors to pay attention. In fact, on their third album, they threw all curve balls, going from fast and hard to slow to mathy and instrumental. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Picciotto and MacKaye had helped lay the foundation for the hardcore and emo scenes in the ’80s with Rites of Spring and Minor Threat respectively. The roots of Fugazi were blooming out into hundreds of subgenres and taking hold in regional scenes across the country. Fugazi appealed to such a vast swath of people, something a lot of punk, hardcore or indie bands couldn’t claim in 1993, and In on the Kill Taker had something for everyone.

A song like “Smallpox Champion,” again with that slow start that builds, blows up into Picciotto delivering a sermon, railing against America being a country founded on genocide, “The end of the future and all that you own.” While “23 Beats Off” sounds like a song from Wire’s early years literally stretched and pulled out to nearly seven minutes, MacKaye goes from singing (as best he can) to screaming about a man who was once “at the center of some ticker tape parade,” who turns into “a household name with HIV.” You get a dose of the past, present, and future listening to these 12 tracks.

Lyrically, it’s also one of the more ambitious albums from the era. While burying any meaning beneath a pile of words like Cobain or bands like Pavement were so fond of doing was certainly du jour, Fugazi liked to mix things up. Picciotto flexed that English degree he got from Georgetown, while MacKaye’s muses were Marx and issues of The Nation. The band blends political with poetic, while sometimes erring on the side of the latter. If there’s any deeper meaning behind “Walken’s Syndrome,” besides being an ode to Christopher Walken’s character in Annie Hall, it’s difficult to tell what that is. “Facet Squared,” with MacKaye singing about how “flags are such ugly things,” could either be about nationalism or the facades people wear when they go out in public, you pick. Maybe that’s what they wanted the listener to do.

Fugazi were so unbelievably popular that it was more so the idea of Fugazi had caught on like it was just another adjective like goth or grunge. Even with their famous anti-merchandise stance, an entire small economy of bootleg shirts popped up, including the infamous “This Is Not A Fugazi T-Shirt” t-shirt. The press also took even more notice. Rolling Stone, in a positive review, said Fugazi had inherited the title of “The only band that matters” from the Clash, while Spin wasn’t so hot on it, calling the members “radical middle-class white boys” and the album “rigid, predictable.” The food critic Jonathan Gold, whose music writing tends to be overlooked when discussing his oeuvre, gave it three out of four stars in his LA Times review. In on the Kill Taker wasn’t hailed as a masterpiece or an album that was changing the game, but everybody needed to weigh in on Fugazi.

And as a profile that came out in the Washington Post a month after the album’s release showed, everybody wanted to be associated with them. The article mentions fans like Eddie Vedder, “rock’s couple of the moment” Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, and Michael Stipe, who shows up to one of the band’s shows in Los Angeles: “He dances the hokey-pokey in the street in front of the Capitol Theatre with Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty,” in a very 1990s moment. In on the Kill Taker isn’t brought up until somewhere near the bottom of the piece. It was almost like saying that you liked or knew them was like a badge of honor, it absolved you of your own sins. The music was eclipsed by the message.

Mainstream interest in Fugazi was never as strong as it was during the period surrounding their third album. Two years later, when they released Red Medicine, the spotlight had shifted to pop-punk bands like Green Day and the Offspring. Fugazi continued to put out albums and pack shows that usually cost around five dollars, but the press was less interested in figuring out this crazy band with their wild set of ideals.

Many of the people who did pay attention to Fugazi, however, reacted. Like Brian Eno said of the initial 10,000 or so people who heard the Velvet Underground when their first album came out, the hundreds of thousands of people who bought In on the Kill Taker or saw the band as they trekked across America, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, that year and beyond, were impacted in some way. Maybe it was one kid out of 1,200 in attendance on September 27, 1993 who saw them in Philly with the Spinanes and Rancid, or another of the 100 who saw them in Kyoto, Japan. Maybe a 15-year-old girl read about them in a magazine, this band that everybody was talking about, and decided to start her own band. Maybe it was a kid in El Paso, or a kid in Iowa City, or Greensboro. Maybe they inspired another kid to start a zine, which led them to realize they wanted to be a writer. Maybe 10,000 teens were so moved by Fugazi in 1993 that the ideas the band lived and worked by were ingrained into how those people have tried to go out and face the world.