Flip Your Wig/Keep Hanging On

First things first: I was very wrong about Hüsker Dü. Not in the way that I was wrong about Blur or Pavement, who are good bands but ones that I would have justifiably hated when I was younger. No, Hüsker Dü is right up my alley: melodic punk music with lots of awesome guitar solos. From as soon as I had opinions on music, I liked that stylistic combination: the MC5, the Stooges, Sonic's Rendezvous Band, Television, and Manic Street Preachers. All I can muster in my defense is that neither Grant Hart nor Bob Mould is a good singer. But that has hardly stopped me elsewhere.

What I find particularly interesting about them is how they get to the place of 'melodic punk': lots of fuzz combined with open chords. It's a rare combination, because it requires violating the basic physics of electric guitar playing. Fuzz, distortion or overdrive happen naturally when the amp overloads the speaker, and the result of that process is a degraded sound quality. There are a few easy fixes for this problem: if the distortion is caused by circuits and not from overloading the speaker (and this is where almost all distortion comes from these days), then increasing the volume will increase the fidelity of the guitar sound. One can also play in a more precise fashion, i.e. no reverb, more muting, staccato rhythms; these are all hallmarks of metal, which aspires to be both distorted and fast. And one can also mess with the EQ to boost the treble and remove mid-range sounds, which will raise the guitar out of the mix. This technique is also frequently used in metal. Metallica's decision to bring back mid-range guitar sounds was the signature betrayal of Metallica, even more than a reduction in tempo and the introduction of ballads.

So far as I can tell, Hüsker Dü solved this problem on their early records through a combination of volume and the EQ trick. The usual result of this is a very tinny sounding record--no bass, no audible drums besides the snare and the hi-hat (hint: if the kick drum sounds like the snare, something has gone wrong), and this mars the early records, including the otherwise excellent Zen Arcade. But somehow they managed to solve this problem by Flip Your Wig. The result is a string of fast-moving punk-pop songs, but of a particular kind: they're all acoustic guitar songs played on electric. That is, unlike traditional punk or metal songs where the chords are relatively static and the melody is played on top of them, Hüsker Dü's songs move from chord to chord by changing one note at a time. That frees up the band to create melodic, rather than strictly rhythmic, basslines, and the songs improve a lot for this. It also allows you to do more with less. "Keep Hanging On" is two chords with two slight variations, but it doesn't actually need anything more than that: