Attention
“Sunday section gave us a mention / Grandma’s freaking out over the attention,” drummer Grant Hart sang on Hüsker Dü’s “Flip Your Wig”. That was in 1985. To listeners who’d been following this indie-rock trio, these lines had a clear autobiographical reference. In 1984, the music critic Robert Palmer published a momentous article in the Sunday New York Times’s Arts & Leisure section focused on three releases from the independent label SST Records: Black Flag’s Slip It In, the Minutemen’s two-LP Double Nickels on the Dime, and Hüsker Dü’s two-LP Zen Arcade.
If you cared about those bands, indie rock generally, and the New York Times, that article might have had you freaking out like Grandma, flipping your wig, or flipping Grandma’s wig. This music and the subculture it sprang from had been recognized and deemed significant by the mainstream media. Given the artistic ambition on display, especially from those friendly rivals, the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü, attention needed to be paid. Forty years ago, that attention, serious interest at the intersection of indie and mainstream, was a big deal.
It’s hard to convey to digital natives how different the world was in those days, before the internet—even before, for most people, cellular phones—when collectivity amounted to either local scenes or the big picture represented by what caught the mainstream media’s attention. I’ve covered some of this ground for PopMatters by looking back at the Violent Femmes’ debut in 1983. Back in the mid-1980s, some of us thought about such indie artists—the SST bands, groups on Slash Records such as the Femmes, and many others on lesser-known labels—as part of a very exciting alternative, or perhaps a complement to the mainstream.
Ultimately, the mainstream swallowed all those bands it deemed edible, digested them, and excreted the results. Thus, alternative rock became a genre and a marketing scheme whose artistic, economic, and existential products we’re still sorting through.
For example, we can sort by genre and subgenre. In the late 1970s, punk came springing up out of twisted roots from the previous decades. Punk led to new wave and post-punk, plus goth, electronic, and other subgenres. By the early 1980s, hardcore punk arose as a deliberately noncommercial reaction to the softness of some of those subgenres. Hardcore was folded into a burgeoning collection of indie-rock scenes. By the early 1990s, indie rock had been branded as “alternative”, including the subgenre grunge.
Sometimes, for someone who cared deeply about—felt directly addressed by—the pioneering indie bands, “alternative” boils down to a simple question. Namely: In the 21st century, what percentage of people wearing Nirvana T-shirts are actually Nirvana fans? Lots of people love all manner of alternarock, its roots, and its offshoots, of course, but Nirvana’s Nevermind, from 1991, retains its symbolic importance because its commercial and artistic success changed the game for indie/alternative.
Nirvana’s roots extended beyond Hüsker Dü et al., but Nirvana might not have had the chance to change the game had it not been for the indie pioneers. It’s safe to say, though, that a large percentage of the people wearing Nirvana T-shirts today aren’t huge fans of, say, Zen Arcade. That’s a shame, but it’s understandable. Even if you like the alternative artists that followed in Hüsker Dü’s wake, the indie artists that swam choppy waters alongside them, and the punk rockers, new wavers, classic rockers, oddballs, and misfits that preceded them, you might not like Hüsker Dü.
Perception
What’s not to like? Listen to Zen Arcade’s first track, “Something I Learned Today”, all two minutes and three seconds, and you’ll get a sense of what to like and dislike about Hüsker Dü, especially at this point in their development. Their music shares aspects of other styles but is a unique combination of three men’s abilities and sensibilities.
During the opening few seconds of “Something I Learned Today”, Grant Hart taps on his drums in an almost military style that’s not very rock and roll. Greg Norton adds a thumping bass line with equal parts in synch and counterpoint. Bob Mould hits an electric guitar chord, adding a metallic buzz. From there, the jet takes off as the guitar attacks and the drums get louder, building from that opening tap into an all-over-the-kit approach that might or might not be rhythm. Bass holds those frenzied displays together. The closest rock analogue is the Who with all their original members, as in 1970’s Live at Leeds, where the three instrumentalists essentially solo all the time while contributing to a cohesive forward momentum. However, Hüsker Dü’s roar would never be mistaken for the Who’s maximum R&B because as complicated as the later trio’s playing might be, the noisiness draws from proto-punk, punk, and hardcore punk.
The brash tumult of hardcore is where the group started, when the members met in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1979. Naming themselves Hüsker Dü after a memory board game named after the Swedish and Norwegian phrase “Do you remember?”, Hart, Norton, and Mould played, thrashed, as loud and fast as possible. That inclination yielded Hüsker Dü’s unlistenable live debut album, 1982’s Land Speed Record—more a physical feat than a musical achievement. By their second album, 1983’s Everything Falls Apart, they’d grown past their pupa stage and started becoming melodic. That album included standard-issue hardcore (with more thoughtful lyrics than the subgenre generally offered). However, Hüsker Dü’s beautiful, counterintuitive cover of Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” signaled both their interests beyond punk and the 1960s turns they’d soon be taking—turns that can be seen as indie punk branching into (ta da!) what came to be called alternative.
On Zen Arcade, Hüsker Dü’s 1960s influences flowered in embraces of garage rock, neopsychedelia (backward tapes and all), intermittent group harmonies (!), and jammy interplay (especially on the 14-minute instrumental, “Reoccurring Dreams”). The title nodded at Buddhism, and one song referenced Hare Krishna, but the album’s lyrics didn’t philosophize as much as embrace a DIY existentialism. If the songs in the sequence represent, as is claimed, a young man’s journey from leaving home to finding his way in a disordered world, then this conceptualism could be dipped into, traced imaginatively, or ignored. There’s no named character. If the “I” speaking in so many of the songs, and the “you” or “he” discussed in others, is the same person, that could be true on many records that aren’t seen as narratives. If there’s a story, it’s a sketch: less the Who’s Tommy (though someone should adapt Zen Arcade into a movie or Broadway musical) than their Quadrophenia but even less unified than that—a bunch of songs that fit together because they reflected the writers’ mindsets and were perhaps retrofitted to represent a progression of images: “Hey, what if all these songs referred to one person….” Surely, during the instrumentals, you can forget about the concept.
Whatever else Zen Arcade was, it wasn’t standard-issue hardcore. It was informed by an understanding of pop-rock to that point and a determination to draw freely from whatever aspects of that history spoke to the members. It offered the power and headbangingness of hardcore but without the less appealing qualities, such as intellectual limitations. We call it hardcore or indie rock because we don’t know what else to call it. We could also call it thoroughly postmodern rock.
The music’s stylistic diversity eventually got Hüsker Dü in trouble. Specifically, their final album, the 1987 two-LP set Warehouse: Songs and Stories, ranged so far from their initial appeal to earn that unwieldy title and horrify some long-term fans. If you were looking for punk, you had to wade through a lot of other stuff. If you wanted updated classic rock, you could find more immediately recognizable versions. In short, a mere, mind-bogglingly three years after Zen Arcade, Hüsker Dü had pushed their boundaries to the breaking point.
On much of Zen Arcade, however—as on the band’s preceding release, the 1983 EP Metal Circus—the punk attack is intact, as Mould makes clear when he shouts this song’s opening lines: “Something I learned today / Black and white is always gray / Looking through the window pane” and the… something. Inside the original record’s gatefold cover are handwritten lyrics—white scrawl on a blue background—that tell me the next line is “I’m not inside, oh, your brain.” Even with those words in mind, I still can’t make them out. No matter how many times I’ve listened to this song (and I listened to it a lot in 1984) or many others sung by Mould with Hüsker Dü, with his subsequent alternative-rock band Sugar, or as a solo artist, I can seldom discern all the words. There comes a point where Mould gives himself over to a sound that’s part moan and part scream, the rendering and rending of supreme unhappiness. Even when Mould’s vocals are obscured by fuzz (while his guitar remains bitingly sharp), I happily enter the sound, physically or mentally writhing around in it. I’ve been there and felt that, and I’m grateful to Mould for delivering pain, frustration, and rage. In “Beyond the Threshold”, he risks ripping his vocal cords in making the title phrase believable. Same with “Pride”. Same with “I’ll Never Forget You”. And so on.
On “Something I Learned Today”, Mould goes in and out of his trademark sound. Some of the song’s few lyrics come through clearly, while others get enveloped until the point becomes Hüsker Dü’s roar and a big group hug through repetitions of the title, right up until the rhythm section stops playing and Mould treats us to a sweet few seconds of ringing guitar that could come from a Byrds record.
Mould employs his screaming moan on a seven-inch single that Hüsker Dü released right before Zen Arcade, a transcendently brutal cover of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”. The original is a model of crystalline construction, up until their John Coltrane influence leads the guitarists into a bit of a tangle meant to evoke the “sheets of sound” Coltrane created on the saxophone. While Mould loves “Eight Miles High”, he doesn’t perform the song as much as honor its exploratory spirit by blowing the thing to smithereens. “Eight miles high!” he roars, and from there, he’s all sound, and the band makes like a cement mixer churning as it accelerates up an incline.
If you were a classic rock traditionalist in 1984, Hüsker Dü’s “Eight Miles High” might have struck you as blasphemous and criminal, further proof that punk rockers were noise-making nose-thumbers worthy of contempt. If you were in pain, angry, feeling outside society or wanting to be, incredulous at the pieties people were embracing or accepting—or horrified at big business’s and government’s brutality and disdain for any social safety net—then this music could be exactly what you needed to hear.
“Something I Learned Today” encapsulates the Mould side of Hüsker Dü. For contrast, turn to Grant Hart’s “Pink Turns to Blue”, with its lovely little singsong melody and sweet, high vocals delivering the chorus. Every word rings out, so you know Hart is willing to go places your average punk rocker wouldn’t, as when a woman has overdosed and “Angels [are] pacing / Gently placing / Roses ’round her head.” In an oversimplified nutshell, Mould represents the John Lennon side, Hart the Paul McCartney side.
Lennon and McCartney meet here and there on Zen Arcade, such as on Mould and Hart’s few co-writes, on Hart’s “Never Talking to You Again”, where (for the first but not last time on a Hüsker Dü album) the music consists entirely of acoustic guitar but the sentiments are acidic, and on “What’s Going On”, where the musical dissonance and combined voices come candy-coated. I mean the Lennon-McCartney comparison symbolically, but one of Hüsker Dü’s secret ingredients (like Nirvana’s) was the Beatles. If you’re intrigued by the Rubber Soul spirit of “Never Talking to You Again” and the White Album vibe of “What’s Going On”, go straight to the Help! bounce of “Hate Paper Doll” on Flip Your Wig.
The Mould/Hart divide ran like a river through Hüsker Dü’s records after Zen Arcade, two of them on SST and the final two on the major label Warner Bros. There are different ways to parse this body of work: Mould or Hart, this track versus that one, the densely and cheaply produced indie sound (courtesy of the band and/or SST’s house producer, the late Glenn Michael Lockett, always credited as SPOT) as opposed to the more expansive and “expensive” but still kind of crappy-sounding major-label productions (by Mould and Hart). If you like any strain of the Hüsker Dü stream, you can pursue it through either man’s subsequent work. For a steady stream of Mould at his most ferocious vocally and instrumentally, complemented by a few lovely Hart interludes, check out Zen Arcade.
Assumption
Despite Hüsker Dü’s having been influential in at least the role model sense, I’m hard-pressed to think of any artist who sounds like Mould, Hart, or the trio. If you like Hüsker Dü, you might like Naked Raygun, the Big Boys, Throwing Muses, Dinosaur Jr., Built to Spill, or Modest Mouse, but not necessarily. Still, the role model sense of Hüsker Dü’s importance suffices. That sense applies to the fact that Mould is gay and Hart was bisexual. Their sexuality didn’t inform their songs in any obvious way, but it put the lie to any easy assumptions about music made by men who happen to love other men.
In 2024, don’t bother looking for queerness in Hüsker Dü’s music except in some outsidery way that adds up to nothing. Lots of straight people are outsiders, too. But also, don’t bother looking for other music that sounds like Hüsker Dü’s. The old records—at least on the original vinyl (I’ve never heard the CDs)—sound as good as they ever did. If you liked Hüsker Dü back then, you were right. The music can rocket you back to those years, but it can also leave you feeling outside time because that music isn’t, never was, what most people think of as “1980s music”.
Over the decades, alternative rock fans have gone back and explored the Hüsker Dü catalog and sometimes raised objections to the production or lack thereof. Any of the indie-rock records of that time might prompt the same complaints about flatness, a lack of “sonic interestingness”, messiness, or worse. Consider 1985’s Tim, the major-label debut by Hüsker Dü’s fellow Minneapolis hardcore-punk-pop-rockers the Replacements. Since the day of its release, listeners have been puzzled over the odd production, which reportedly resulted from producer Tommy Erdelyi—formerly Tommy Ramone, the Ramones’ first drummer—having, unsurprisingly, hearing trouble. The 2023 remix of the album “corrected” the sound, making this off-kilter masterpiece sound like regular music. Iggy Pop tried the same trick with the brutally bizarre original mix of the Stooges’ Raw Power (1973). About all such efforts, I say: Do what you like, remixers, but please keep the originals in print for the record (pun intended).
Objecting to how the original records sound, like criticizing classic rock albums for being too short, reflects a lack of historical understanding. The indie-rock records sounded the way they did because of economics but also because the artists were consciously presenting an alternative to the mainstream. Punk rock was the presiding spirit, no matter how widely the artists ranged stylistically. DIY authenticity translated to a horror of glossiness and multiple layers. All but two songs on Zen Arcade were recorded in one take, as the band announced in the album’s credits. One take: take it or leave it. “The whole thing took about 85 hours, the last 40 hours straight for mixing”, according to the liner notes.
Expression
In 1998 or so, by chance, I had a brief but rich conversation with Bob Mould. Hüsker Dü had broken up, and he was anticipating a solo career. In fact, he’d literally just walked out of the Warner Bros. headquarters at Rockefeller Center and was standing on Fifth Avenue, adjusting to the afternoon sun. I walked up, said hello, and told him how much his music meant to me and my friends, and while he was obviously pleased, he also seemed humble, almost embarrassed, as though Hüsker Dü’s powerful undertow was news to him. “I’ve always encouraged people to take the music seriously,” he said, sounding just like Bob Mould, but as though trying out the statement to see how it sounded, but also as though he’d really had to work at getting people to take the music seriously and was surprised that his efforts had worked.
That emotionally complicated response made total sense, especially given my experience when seeing Hüsker Dü live. This was probably between the band’s follow-up to Zen Arcade, 1985’s New Day Rising, and its follow-up to that one, Flip Your Wig—together a bounty that left some of us feeling like this band was at least one reason to like the mid-1980s. The show I saw is mostly a blur to me now, but it probably presented a mix of the old and the forthcoming. On those records, as on Zen Arcade, Mould delivered just what I needed to hear at the time. At the show, I got right up to the stage, wanting to watch Mould and know if he really felt the force of what he was expressing.
The audience kept pushing forward, and I was pressed between overheated bodies and the low wooden structure the band was playing on. Bob Mould seemed to be for real. At one point, he looked down at me, and his expression seemed to say, “What are you doing there? Do you really want to suffer like that?” Well, do you, punk?