Discharge- Why? mini LP (1981)
The last time I wrote about Discharge, I had this to say:
“The whole point of Discharge was not to “rock.” Discharge were a very abstract, cool-looking, almost inconceivably arty, monotone, and minimalist outfit. They weren’t into tattoos or brass knuckles or sad/tough fonts. Discharge invented a timeless form of hardcore at a single stroke, by detaching melody, narrative, musicality, emotion, attitude, etc. FROM punk, reducing it to Stooges-levels of dumbed-down-high-concept. Discharge are an anthem, a protest—anything but a haphazard assemblage of rock cliches. In truth, Discharge are much more in the tradition of the Stooges, the Ramones, and Motorhead, than most any of the bands subsequent to them (although it remains a task to interpret this essence correctly).”
The real challenge is to hear this stuff as though for the first time. This, however, is entirely a mental process.
1) Discharge have more in common with Poison Idea’s Pick Your King 7” than with today’s “crust.” The shifting micro-verses, the cyclical riffing, the bouncy rap, the daring lack of melody or posture in the vocals, the absence of any apparatus—spooky intros—that would hold your hand and show you how to approach this music: how different were the early 80s! Nowadays, every band has to bore us into tears *first* in order to convey their deeply-disturbed upbringings/dependency on hard drugs, as if this were a vital condition of my enjoying the music. Discharge follow (anachronistically) the immortal advice of The Fix: “Go ahead.” And it is also true that the burly, rumbling, “anthemic” (in a very un-emo and un-national-anthem sense), and uni-directional discharges of The Fix bear the Discharge imprint as deeply as anything from Scandinavia.
2) To file Discharge’s differences from other early 80s hardcore acts as stylistic—“d-beat” versus “US hardcore”—turns their genius into a mere sorting error or categorical result. It is so easy to see the uniqueness of Discharge as belonging to the strange coincidence that they play in the Discharge-style! As though, at the dawn of time, when Adam was handing out punk sub-genres in the Garden of Eden, Minor Threat and Discharge each received their destiny and thus became sonically incomparable. Tout au contraire, the genius of Discharge does not sit *on top of* their style—so that, e.g. Disclose can be judged FROM this boundary, how they “take over” a pre-given sound—but rather Discharge’s style is inseparable from (to paraphrase SSD) “how they rock.” In other words, it is anything but a given.
3) Discharge are not a “lo-fi” rock band. This is another case of a retrospective calcification of our thought. But it does Discharge no favors! What is incredible about Discharge is the amount of cacophony they were able to throw up, the recklessness they were able to suggest, the noise they made—-*without* this being a technological by-product of poor recording. This is why, to this day, if a band is extremely static-y, “noisy” (from the point of view of what levels and lights were on in the studio BOOTH), such a band never takes Discharge as their reference for this production aesthetic! For, in fact, Discharge no more rely on “lo-fi”-ness than John Coltrane depended on it when he threw up the most holy noise the world had yet heard. Or than a classical composer, when he wants to suggest “heaviness” or the destruction of the world, relies upon tampering with the microphones!
4) The relation of Discharge to Motorhead is not the relation of Metallica to Motorhead. Here we have the whole question of Discharge and metal. Yes, there is something pushing Discharge into metal. But you will not find that thing on this album (Why?). It is a cliché to say that Discharge are vital to the history of metal—“cool” death metal and black metal bands openly acknowledge that Discharge are hugely important for them—but this is as un-self-evident in practice as is Discharge’s influence in punk. Here’s a thought experiment: compare a song like “No Feeble Bastard” to Deep Purple (oh, I dunno… “Highway Star”), and see how the little bouncy consonances in the chorus riff bear this resemblance. Same for the guitar solos all over the album. Just pretend you are listening to a Deep Purple raw demo… see what happens. And it is Discharge’s virtue to have turned this “metal” logic on its head, so that it completely disappears as a sound. When metal bands recognize in Discharge a forebear, they are recognizing the presence of this absence.
5) Discharge’s songs are among the great songs of punk. It is too easy to see Discharge as a formula, an algorithm, just spinning out these repetitions of itself. This is totally false. And this is witnessed by the entire history of bands like Meanwhile (whom I like a great deal) or Disclose (who are one of my favorites). They just aren’t as good as Discharge, song by song. When I was young, I had other explanations for this: Discharge’s lyrics are clearer; they came first; I simply knew these songs better; this was all an effect of canonization, etc… This is all true, but these are not explanations. Just try covering a Discharge song. “No Feeble Bastard,” “Does This System Work?” “A Look at Tomorrow”: these are as incredible feats as The Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen In Love…?” or The Misfits’ “Astrozombies.” The reasons that Meanwhile—who have a number of definite “hit songs”—are not able to match Discharge song-for-song is proof of exactly this. It may not be a question of empirically “who got their first,” but has rather to do with the explosion of creativity and the reinterpretation of all prior music that *got* Discharge their first. How could this not burst out in a set of great songs? (as opposed to just the condensation of a rigid style?!).
[Recommended.]
