Let's face it: I've always had a problem with the entire punk set of genres. Even after I learned to accept and eventually seek out A) angry screaming, B) loud noises, and C) instrumental dissonance in music, I still took exception to what I felt to be a lack of musical accomplishment in most of what I heard of the punk aesthetic. I considered it an affront that anyone would go into the studio and make a record using only attitude and anger power, not having bothered with learning to play their instruments or the writing of compelling songs, and I found it irksome in the extreme that so many people apparently enjoyed listening to the resulting boring, bothersome, and structurally retarded music.

Let's continue being honest and sharing our feelings: I still feel this way about a lot of these bands. In addition to the problems with form I described above, the tone put forth by this music was incompatible with my personality and lifestyle; I simply wasn't the Fuck You type of guy that these records were aimed at. Such fundamental clashes would probably have kept me away from the hard stuff forever, if Fugazi hadn't come into my life and my stereo.

I can't recall how it happened, but in a crimson flash, I was listening to Red Medicine over and over again. Suddenly there was a bridge between what I wanted to listen to and what the enemy was playing: a band with roots in hardcore but with tremendous musical integrity. To be honest, I didn't have much use for their earlier records, but things only got better as the band drifted over time toward my side, first with End Hits [the Instrument demos were better], and eventually peaking with The Argument: a record that I considered to be perfection from end to end, put out by some old punkers from D.C.

Once these albums had been played, memorized, and exhausted, I went soft for a long, long time. There were a few visitors: a little Iggy Pop, The Clash, Television, At The Drive-In, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Green Day, Rival Schools; but nothing stuck around for long.

Now, here comes The Chemistry of Common Life from Fucked Up. O, how I love this record; how I love it. I want this record playing at my funeral. I want it to abuse me and then comfort me tenderly as though nothing happened. I want it to have like ten-thousand of my babies. The songs are fantastic, the brutal vocals make me feel like the Fuck You guy that I'm not, and the layered guitar sounds - executed by a man calling himself 10,000 Marbles - reach for a new level of sonic shit-yer-pants: in addition to being lovingly and meticulously crafted and perfectly suited to their context, they just
SOUND.
SO.
COOL.

Maybe these are terrible examples of how I've supposedly embraced the punk sound: Fugazi is universally loved by fans of all genres, and most of the Fucked Up record is rock and roll that happens to have hardcore vocals. But like beloved Fugazi's records, Chemistry affords me a tenuous connection with all the thousands of other recordings that are ultimately unattainable, even if they are, by me, unwanted.