Anti-Climacus

This is an excellent explanation of why I like Hüsker Dü and find them difficult to listen to for more than a song or so at a time:*

Azerrad is describing a band — a musical entity that coheres as it becomes larger than itself. What his technical description elides is the anger Mould emphasizes in his subtitle. Mould takes care to mention that as a kid he loved the used pop 45s his dad bought from a jukebox jobber, and strongly implies that on his life’s path, melody gradually subsumed rage. That’s how it worked in Mould’s second band, the worthy early-’90s trio Sugar — only somehow Sugar’s foregrounded tunes never provided quite as much liftoff. Hart’s devotees would attribute this to the loss of their man’s supposedly more buoyant melodies. My take is that Hüsker Dü’s separate but different tunesmiths were both buoyed by Hart’s drumming, as Azerrad indicates, thus transmuting the rage most fans hear in Hüsker Dü into a propulsion that in the moment was provisionally liberating. In either analysis, the band worked the magic. And the band is gone.

The liberation was, to repeat, provisional. You’d be lucky if it lasted all the way home, or onto the other side of the LP. It was an enticing taste of something sweeter than the frustrations that enraged you too...

The last paragraph is excellent, too.


*The other explanation being that I never took to metal or hardcore. Tuneful, well-constructed hardcore is always going to be a song I might like in too abrasive a form.