Mark Greif is one of the smartest men I have ever met. He has been my teacher and life-coach at the New School for the last year. In that short time he has introduced new ideas, confirmed old ones, and dismantled and obliterated others. He is the editor or a personal favorite magazine of mine, n+1, and a writer who consistently weaves philosophy, literary criticism, pop-references, and sociology throughout his work, and in his daily lectures/discussions. He recently published an essay titled "What You"ve Done To My World" in an anthology titled Heavy Rotation. the Anthology consists of writers articulating something about a particular album that changed their life. Mark chose Fugazi.

Last fall we came to class to find that Mark had cued up the projector and had several YouTube videos of Fugazi, Bikini Kill, etc. ready for us to watch. We sat and intellectualized Punk for the rest of class, mark becoming flush when he found himself "falling into the 'nostalgia trap'" when discussing his younger years.

"What You've Done To My World"
By Mark Greif
Minor Threat didn't last long as a band. It was, though, as the music writers say, "influential." Meanwhile, its young singer, Ian MacKaye, moved through several short-lived bands until he formed another stable group, which added a second, lesser known but highly emotional young singer, Guy Picciotto, from the even shorter-lived (but "influential") band Rites of Spring. This was, as it turned out, a piling together of two geniuses on the Lennon/McCartney model—with a new rhythm section of comparable genius. They called their band Fugazi.

It chagrins me to be writing about Fugazi, since no one is less qualified than I am to do it. I wasn't there in D.C. when they started, I didn't see them on their first tour or their second, and I always had the profound and pleasurable sense that their music at least partly excluded me, because it was so tightly bound up with the post-hardcore and straight-edge world, a subculture I had nothing to do with. They were not commercial, they didn't offer themselves to the world through radio or TV, they didn't connect to anything else I knew or that felt natural to me. In fact, in addition to being a band, Fugazi was a kind of phenomenon known to many people who didn't care for them musically: an anticommercial, ultramoral, somewhat puritanical outfit that toured constantly, often playing in such unconventional places as church basements and college rec halls; that insisted on an all-ages admissions to shows so that fans under eighteen or twenty-one could attend; that held down ticket charges as low as five dollars, rather than raking in the money.

read the rest here:

http://nplusonemag.com/what-youve-done-my-world