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Nas: Illmatic

2013-02-09 20:30:00 (читать в оригинале)

You hear the arthritic rumble of the train. The 100-ton iron horse clacking at 55 miles per hour through the tunnel to nowhere. Stainless steel cars bombed with balloon letters in bubble gum paint. The F Line, pre-Giuliani, packed with rats and villains, foreigners and flummoxed out-of-towners, beggars, bandits, and sweating working stiffs. Third rails everywhere. It stops at 21st street. Queensbridge exit.

The doors crumple open and the passengers vanish up half-lit stairwells into the Bridge. There is no Illmatic without the Bridge. Illmatic is the bridge. Queensbridge Houses, the largest projects in America, brick buildings dun as dead leaves, a six-block maze clotted with 7,000-plus trying to survive. The pissy elevators only stop on every other floor. The neighbors are the rotting East River and the "e;Big Alice"e; power plant, its smokestacks hacking up black clouds.

The Bridge is where Nas was raised. He explained the mentality to The Source in April 1994, the same month Illmatic was instantly canonized with a perfect 5-Mic score: "e;When I was a kid I just stayed in the projects… that shit is like a city. Everybody's mentality revolves around the projects. Everybody's gotta eat. It's just the attitude out there, it's just life. You can't be no sucker."e;

Illmatic starts with that rumbling of the train. A VHS snippet from Wild Style immediately snarls, "e;Stop fucking around and be a man!"e; You hear a cassette tape hissing the verse from teenaged Nasty Nas on Main Source's "e;Live at the BBQ,"e; 1991: "e;When I was 12, I went to Hell for snuffing Jesus."e; He anointed himself the "e;street's disciple."e; Everyone blessed him as the Golden Child.

The track shifts to "e;The Subway Theme"e; from Wild Style, hip-hop's first creation myth, the 1983 film that exposed the routines of the South Bronx to the rest of the world. Nas calls his version "e;The Genesis"e;, fusing his own story of origin with the culture. 

His brother Jungle snaps, "e;yo, Nas, what the fuck is this bullshit?"e; Nas tells him to chill. He's carrying on tradition, defined as: "e;When it's real, you do it even without a recording contract."e; It's an oath of purity amidst poisons-- something that seems sanctimonious in a post-Puffy world, but it assured the older gods that they would have a stake in the next generation. He was the spawn of the Wild Style, the first great to grow up with Park Jams as his earliest memories.

I lay puzzled as I backtrack to earlier times.

Hip-hop was a teenager when Illmatic dropped. Old enough for biblical foundation, but young enough to be embroiled in an early identity crisis. The Columbia press sheet that accompanies it opens: "e;While it's sad that there's so much frontin' in the rap world today, this should only make us sit up and pay attention when a rapper comes along who's not about milking the latest trend and running off with the loot."e;

New York street culture was losing its birthright to hip-hop's evolution. Death Row and West Coast gangsta rap dominated the charts and mass media oxygen. Rap-A-Lot was carving up its empire in the South. It was after Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, and leather-suited rappers wanted that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze money. Big Daddy Kane was firmly in the silken post-Madonna Sex book era. LL Cool J was mugging with a red beret in Toys. Even a young RZA and GZA got bamboozled into goofy New Jack Swing jams by clueless executives. And Nas couldn't get a record deal.

This sounds insane in hindsight. When people start making greatest rapper lists you can't count to five before Nas' name is mentioned. The kid who went to hell for snuffing Jesus has become a sacred cow. Twenty years deep, he's nominated for a Grammy and is in Gap ads with his dad. There was the album with Damian Marley, the feud with Jay-Z, there was Belly. Nas is firmly entrenched in VH1 Special territory. He has crossed over enough without ever making radio hits, save for "e;Oochie Wally"e;, in which he is out-rapped by his bodyguard-- all for oochie.

But Def Jam's Russell Simmons passed on the demo, famously claiming that Nas sounded too much like Queensbridge machine gun, Kool G Rap. Translation: great but unsalable. He signed Warren G instead, who went triple platinum in the summer and fall of 1994. Illmatic only sold 330,000 copies in its first year. It has no "e;Regulate"e; that can inspire drunken Nate Dogg sing-a-longs, but it is widely regarded as the greatest East Coast rap album ever made. Illmatic is the gold standard that boom-bap connoisseurs refer to in the same way that Baby Boomers talk about Highway 61 Revisited. The evidence they point to when they want to say: this is how good it can be.

I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death. 

The enduring vision of Nas: a baby-faced Buddha monk in public housing, scribbling lotto dreams and grim reaper nightmares in dollar notebooks, words enjambed in the margins. The only light is the orange glow of a blunt, bodega liquor, and the adolescent rush of first creation. Sometimes his pen taps the paper and his brain blanks. In the next sentence, he remembers dark streets and the noose.

The phrases and images are so deeply rooted in rap consciousness to have become cliché. Over the last 19 years, a million secret handshakes and scratched hooks have been executed to lines from Illmatic: I woke up early on my born day; I sip the Dom P, watching Gandhi 'til I'm charged; you couldn't catch me in the streets without a ton of reefer, that's like Malcolm X catching jungle fever; I'm an addict for sneakers, twenties of Buddha, and bitches with beepers; vocabulary spills, I'm ill; life's a bitch and then you die.

Removed from context, they seem unremarkable. When spit with criminal smoothness over beat breaks, they became iconic. If Rakim was rap's Woody Guthrie, Nas was the Dylan figure expanding the possibilities and complexity of the form, twisting old fables to match contemporary failings, faithful to tradition but unwilling to submit to orthodoxy.

Illmatic was the bridge. Melle Mel and Kurtis Blow, to Run-DMC, to Rakim, the Juice Crew, and Big Daddy Kane. Now Nas. Everyone said he had next since Large Professor brought the chipped tooth kid sporting Gazelles into the studio. His arrival was a communal effort. After MC Serch discovered he was unsigned, he landed him a deal at Columbia Records. When Nas summoned beats, he was laced with jewels from the city's best producers: DJ Premier, Pete Rock, the Large Professor, and Q-Tip.

Regional demand was so high that Serch claimed he discovered a garage with 60,000 bootlegged copies. The brief length (10 tracks, 39:51) was due to this rush to get to market. It also left less room for error. There are many albums with higher highs than Illmatic, but none with fewer flaws. The sequencing is perfect down to "e;Halftime"e; ending as the cassette tape clicked. It's as dense and claustrophobic as Queensbridge, but blood simple. The verses sprint around blind corners and the hooks are hypnotic chants: New York State of Mind, One Love, It's Half Time, The World is Yours, Coming Out of Queensbridge, Represent.

A classic album is supposed to change or define its time. Illmatic did both. The Notorious B.I.G. borrowed everything from art ideas to album structure. It was so blatant that Ghostface and Raekwon dedicated an entire skit to mocking it. Jay-Z took a hot Nas line and made a hot song on Reasonable Doubt. If you listen to Sean Carter before Illmatic, the rat-a-tat is straight from Big Daddy Kane. After Nas dropped, Jay-Z suddenly got smooth. Those are just the two most famous appropriations.

No album better reflected the sound and style of New York, 94. The alembic of soul jazz samples, SP-1200s, broken nose breaks, and raw rap distilled the Henny, no chaser ideal of boom-bap. The loops rummage through their parent's collection: Donald Byrd, Joe Chambers, Ahmad Jamal, Parliament, Michael Jackson. Nas invites his rolling stone father, Olu Dara to blow the trumpet coda on "e;Life's A Bitch"e;. Jazz-rap fusion had been done well prior, but rarely with such subtlety. Nas didn't need to make the connection explicit-- he allowed you to understand what jazz was like the first time your parents and grandparents heard it.

I pour my Heineken brew to my deceased crew on memory lane. 

None of this context has to matter. Illmatic is imprisoned within itself. The power is targeted in the narrow scope of its worldview. There are six desperate and savage blocks and there is nowhere else. Nas captures the feeling of being young and trapped. You see his struggle and you see his ghosts.

The more I listen to Illmatic, the more haunted it feels. When you're younger, it clubs you with its hail of words and the skeletal beauty of its beats. But the older I get, the more it strikes me as a teenaged requiem for those still living. "e;Old Soul"e; is the sort of stock phrase used by yoga teachers and amateur psychics, but it always fit Nas. He's 20 and prematurely nostalgic, struck by memories of park jams and watching "e;CHiPS."e;, when Shante dissed the real Roxanne, and how much he misses Mr. Magic.

There is no narrative about Ill Will, but you hear the name over and over. Will was his best friend and first music partner who lived on the 6th floor with turntables and a mic. He was shot to death in Queensbridge over a drunken argument. You don't hear how Nas and his wounded brother Jungle rushed Will to the hospital, got static from emergency room officials, and watched him die. But the sense of grievous loss shadows almost every bar, especially "e;Memory Lane"e; and "e;One Love"e;.

If you listen to it enough names start to pop out: Fatcat, Alpo, Grand Wizard, Mayo, the foul cop who shot Garcia, Jerome's niece, Little Rob, Herb, Ice, and Bullet. The entirety of "e;Represent"e;. You start to wonder where they are now, or if they are. The album's lone guest AZ, lays it down flat: he's destined to live the dream for all the peeps who never made it. 

But Nas uses Illmatic as more than a vehicle to escape. The styles and stories that formed him fuse into something that withstands outdated slang and popular taste: it is a story of a gifted writer born into squalor, trying to claw his way out of the trap. It's somewhere between The Basketball Diaries and Native Son, but Jim Carroll and Richard Wright couldn't rap like Nas.

That's why 19 years later, Get On Down is re-issuing a box set with a vinyl, gold CD, and an ersatz cherry wood case featuring a 48-page book with The Source article that originally crowned him-- even if Illmatic was the archetypal cassette album (along with the purple tape). It's best heard by ignoring the dogma, culture wars, Nas clones, and would-be saviors that have accreted since April of 1994. Who cares whether it's the greatest rap album of all-time or not? It's an example of how great rap can be, but not necessarily the way it should be.

There was no real follow-up to Illmatic because Nas understood that he'd tapped into a moment that could only come once and in one place. This is what things had been building towards. A little over a decade later, Nas claimed that hip-hop was dead, but this world that was his was already starting to vanish on Illmatic. But you can still summon it from the first rumble of the train. This is what happened when the doors opened.

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J Dilla: Donuts (45 Box Set)

2013-02-09 20:30:00 (читать в оригинале)

If the six years since Donuts was released has taught us anything, it's that a great album can be a sort of open-ended puzzle that can be solved from multiple angles. It's become James Yancey's signature production opus, even though the path that led him to it was laid down by a lifetime of collaboration, workshopping, and constant production in the service of other people's voices. It's the last work he created in his lifetime, released the week of his death, and yet it still feels like his music hasn't run out of time yet, whether that's down to periodic dives back into his vaults, or via the artists that've picked up inspiration and run with it to new places. It's a widely praised favorite for so many people, and yet there's something about Donuts that feels like such an intensely personal statement. Even attempting to engage with it objectively, setting aside the direct experience of the man who made it, doesn't entirely break through its mystique.

But as music, the role Donuts occupies is something more than the weight of its rep or impact-- or even the circumstances in which it was created, as hard as it is to separate the idea of the album's sound from the motivation of a prolific creator knowingly constructing his final work. As an album, it just gets deeper the longer you live with it, front-to-back listens revealing emotions and moods that get pulled in every direction: mournful nostalgia, absurd comedy, raucous joy, sinister intensity. There's all kinds of neat little tics and idiosyncrasies, pushing Dilla's early 00s beat-tape experiments and exchanges into compositions that tinker with Thelonious Monk's off-kilter timing and Lee Perry's warped fidelity. The songs on Donuts are like miniature lessons in how to take sample-based music and use it to build elaborate suites out of all those nagging little pieces of songs that stick with you long after you've last listened to them. There's little else in Dilla's catalog quite like it; at points, it sounds like he was busy quickly unlearning everything he'd taught himself just so he could have the experience of relearning it all again one last time.

While Donuts is best experienced as a self-contained album, Stones Throw has gone to the unusual step of reissuing it as a box set of 7"e; singles, a format that initially comes across like a boutique novelty at the expense of practicality. If anybody owns a scuffed-up old jukebox and wants to stock it with records that recreate the feeling of recalling jumbled-up memories and mulling over them for a while, then sure, this would work great. And it's hard not to appreciate the symbolism of issuing this album on 7"e; records, considering that the hospital bedside setup Yancey used to create a significant portion of Donuts consisted of a SP-303 hooked up to a portable 45 turntable. But is there a reason to chop one of the last 10 years' purest can't-listen-to-just-one-track experiences into pieces, especially when the target audience for this reissue likely already has a version they don't have to keep flipping over?

Well, think of it this way: What's your favorite song on Donuts? Breaking an album like this into its component tracks puts a new viewpoint on a record that's always been easy to see as a whole, and the limitations of three minutes or so per side gives individual moments more weight on their own. The rhythms of the isolated tracks can feel truncated and abrupt in this new context-- without anything to segue into, side-enders like "e;Workinonit"e; and "e;One Eleven"e; flip off like a light switch-- but it still fits the suddenness and in medias res editing of the album's handmade, conversational feel. And it only serves to elucidate how much Dilla could do in such a limited amount of space. He could fit a lot of off-beat meter-shifting, loop-upending false starts and jump cuts, subtle slow-build dynamics, and double-back surprises into the little 50-to-80-second vignettes. That's plenty of time to set up expectations, only to twist them around a thousand degrees.

There's also some clever sequencing to the sides that lets new thematic possibilities appear. Of course "e;Airworks"e; and "e;Lightworks"e; share a side to themselves, and as consecutive tracks they felt like weird companion pieces in the middle of the original album. On record, that odd pairing-- a hiccupy series of tics drawn from L.V. Johnson's classic Chicago soul, transitioning into a cheerfully odd rework of Raymond Scott's late 50s musique concrete corporate jingles-- forces those two cuts into closer quarters and highlights their shared tendency to loop vocal phrases and backbeats into knots you can't untie. Same goes for "e;Two Can Win"e; and "e;Don't Cry"e;, which consecutively showcase Yancey's knack for building classic hip-hop beats out of solitary 70s R&B nuggets. The choppy yet lush elegance of "e;Dilla Says Go"e;/"e;Walkinonit"e; and the heartbroken please-stay pleas of "e;Hi."e;/"e;Bye."e; stand out in isolation, too.

But even without that benefit of new juxtapositions, it's still eye-opening to take each little set of songs as it comes and not sweat getting to the next one, pinpointing the inimitable technique and sample-sourcing scope of Donuts through certain distinct moments. Just pull out "e;Geek Down"e; and note how Dilla took one of the most recognizable samples in hip-hop, ESG's "e;UFO"e;, and found something surprising and obscure to lay it over: a 2002 7"e; retro-funk b-side called "e;Charlie's Theme"e; released in limited numbers by an incognito Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley from Portishead. That's in keeping with the other moments where he's clearly working with some well-used building block that every sample-based producer should know their way around-- Mountain's "e;Long Red"e; ("e;Stepson of the Clapper"e;); Malcolm McLaren's "e;Buffalo Gals"e; ("e;Workinonit"e; and "e;The Twister"e;); the Beastie Boys' "e;The New Style"e; ("e;The New"e;)-- and still finds a way to fit that piece into something uniquely his by drawing from an encyclopedic catalog of under-utilized funk and soul deep cuts. Even the ubiquitous siren he lifted from Mantronix feels like Dilla's sole property now-- maybe because Kurtis never thought to lay it over a mobius-strip revamp of Kool and the Gang album track "e;Fruitman"e; ("e;The Diff'rence"e;) or a tense, staggered piano loop cut from Martha Reeves' mid 70s post-Motown solo debut ("e;Thunder"e;).

If you need any extra incentive, the box set packs in some bonus material. There's a medley of tracks that share sources with Donuts instrumentals "e;Anti-American Graffiti"e; and "e;Geek Down"e;, which were originally slated for MF DOOM and Ghostface showcase "e;Sniper Elite & Murder Goons"e;. The track shows both MCs still in post-Madvillainy/Pretty Toney form, DOOM twisting internal rhymes at a ridiculous clip, Ghost still verbally sprinting like he's coming off "e;Run"e;. And "e;Signs"e;, originally a Fan Club release, tacks on a stand-alone postscript that hints at some of Donuts' brilliance, but mostly just provides a pretty straightforward (if appealing) instrumental break based off a needly organ riff and that old Syl Johnson "e;Different Strokes"e; grunt. The rarities are enticing, the packaging is immaculate, and the format is intriguing. But above all else, this reissue provides a good excuse to revisit an old favorite in a new light, and in the end it's still a classic no matter how you hear it-- on 45, CD, MP3, or just running through your head.

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Oneohtrix Point Never: Rifts

2013-02-09 20:30:00 (читать в оригинале)

"e;Timbral fascism sucks,"e; said Daniel Lopatin in a 2009 interview with The Wire. His point was it's wrong to reject specific sounds-- in this case, the synth tones used in 1980s new age-- simply out of disdain for the genre they're associated with. In one sense, Lopatin's solo project Oneohtrix Point Never is an ongoing battle against timbral fascism. He's tried to liberate synth sounds from their conventional trappings, placing them in less familiar contexts and coaxing you to hear them in new ways.

This laid-back battle began with Lopatin's first album, 2007's Betrayed in the Octagon, which he called "e;a stoned space epic about one really bad day in the life of an astronaut."e; His astronaut landed on a strange planet in 2009's Russian Mind and wrote the score to his own death in 2009's Zones Without People. But more interesting than that inscrutable tale was the way that, throughout this trilogy, Lopatin re-imagined synth music for the current era, injecting tension into something normally soft and cheesy. New age got a bad rep because it became too light to resonate, simplifying emotion instead of creating it. But even Lopatin's most beatific arpeggios and most soothing drones avoid sentimentality and easy-listening ambience. 

That became clearer when New York noise label No Fun packaged those first three albums together-- along with tracks from smaller-run releases-- into the 2009 double CD Rifts. Listen to one track here or there and it can be tough to hear how lighter moments differ from the saccharine cloud of incidental mood music. But immerse yourself for long stretches, and Rifts sounds more like the hypnotic marathons of Terry Riley than something playing in a store that sells candles and crystals. In that sense, the set was greater than the sum of its original albums. Absorbing all two and a half hours revealed commonalities between Lopatin's disparate constructions-- the kind that aren't apparent when you take OPN in small doses.

The immersion opportunities are even greater on Lopatin's new version of Rifts, issued on his own label Software. This lavish 5xLP/ 3xCD set includes six more tracks from previous releases, stretching it past the three-hour mark. Revisiting Rifts in this expanded (and reordered) form, I've found its stoic sadness even more impressive. Lopatin finds poignancy in wavering tones and rippling notes, conveying a sense of loss mixed with stiff-lipped acceptance. Even the set's one curveball-- an acoustic guitar song called "e;I Know It's Taking Pictures From Another Plane (Inside Your Sun)"e;-- carries this tone, and sounds logical squeezed in between synth-scapes.

The rich moods of Rifts persist in the tracks Lopatin adds to this version. Take the hymn-like despondency in the trebly voices of "e;Memory Vague."e; Or the slow lurch of "e;The Trouble With Being Born"e;, which sounds like a defeated army returning home, dejected enough to hang their heads but prideful enough to march in step. Such complex sentiments have marked Lopatin's work even as he's moved to the noisier drones of 2010's Returnal and the glitchier loops of 2011's Replica.

So in retrospect, the path OPN has traveled makes sense. But when I first got Betrayed in the Octagon from No Fun in 2007, it was a bit of a shock. At that point the noise underground was still in an upswing, and the harsher sounds of Carlos Giffoni's label (and festival) led the charge. There was diversity inside the No Fun umbrella, but nothing there sounded like Betrayed in the Octagon. It turns out that Giffoni and Lopatin were prescient, or at least observant, because soon many other underground artists began mining new age styles.

That trend may be less in vogue a couple of years later, but it survives. Just in the past two months, excellent forays into new age-tinted synth have come from noise-leaning types such as Joseph Raglani, Robert Beatty, and M. Geddes Gengras. All of which makes Rifts look like an important touchstone, and it should. The way Lopatin discovered fresh ideas inside of a worn-out genre is an inspiring story for the present age.

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Stars of the Lid: The Ballasted Orchestra

2013-02-09 20:30:00 (читать в оригинале)

In the 1990s there were a few artists tucked into out-of-the-way corners of the United States making music defined by its vastness. In Richmond, Va., were Labradford, whose slow-moving and cinematic pieces showed how much could be wrung from simplicity and repetition. Up in Dearborn, Mich., Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren were making sensual drone music inspired both by the endless held tones of Lamonte Young and the textural romanticism of 4AD. And down in East Austin, Tex., there were Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride, who made druggy and internally-focused drone music as Stars of the Lid.  

Stars of the Lid's 1995 debut was called Music for Nitrous Oxide and it had a track called "e;Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy"e;; those two phrases offer a serviceable definition of what SOTL's early music was all about. Working at home and recording on their Yamaha MT-120 and Tascam Portastudio 424, Wiltzie and McBride were patiently mapping a new terrain for experimental music. Along with groups like the previously mentioned Windy & Carl in the United States and UK groups like Flying Saucer Attack and Amp, they were taking the tools of D.I.Y. culture (recording at home, getting the word out through print zines, releasing music on smaller, specialized labels, demonstrating a fondness for cheap and easy cassettes) and using them to make abstract music for deeply immersive listening. Music For Nitrous Oxide mixed metallic drones and feedback with the sounds of strange voices; the effect was something like tuning into two radio stations at once, hearing strange disembodied phrases mixed with weird music that floated across the plains. For their third album, 1997's The Ballasted Orchestra, which has been out of print for some time and has now been reissued on vinyl by Kranky, they did away with the voices and followed their drones to a place where words have no meaning. 

The Ballasted Orchestra is four sides of shifting guitar-based drone, with textures that range from thick and menacing to thin and ethereal. For those more familiar with SOTL's work from the last decade (ambient music classics And Their Refinement of the Decline and The Tired Sounds of...) what's most striking about Ballasted is how raw and ragged it sounds, in the best possible way. As the the SOTL project matured, the music grew more pristine, incorporating strings and horns and drawing inspiration from carefully composed music by artists like Arvo Part. In 1997, when these tracks were recorded, Wiltzie and McBride were firmly committed to seeing how much feeling they could wring from guitars and effects pedals. 

Turns out it was quite a lot. Some psychedelic drone music seems like it's designed to soundtrack a trip through the cosmos; Stars of the Lid invites you to close your eyes and explore your own mind. And the range of sensations and moods is surprisingly wide. The disorienting "e;Sun Drugs"e; mixes thin tendrils of wavering drone with trebly guitar notes that feel random like wind chimes. "e;Taphead"e; is closer to the airy drift of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois' Apollo while "e;Fucked Up (3:57 AM)"e; is tensely cinematic, with overlapping chords that are finally interrupted with a cavernous bass that sounds like a tuba blast echoing through an empty gym.

But the highlight and centerpiece is the side-long "e;Music for Twin Peaks Episode #30"e;, which is split into two parts. David Lynch's television series ended its two-season run with episode #29, so the clever title (and Stars of the Lid have always had good ones) affirms that they're using their imaginations to soundtrack a fictional world. And while the work of frequent Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti's work has been an inspiration to Wiltzie and McBride (see "e;Mullholland"e; on The Tired Sounds of), at this point the connection was more thematic than sonic. If anything, the piece is more likely to bring to mind the industrial soundscaping of Lynch's sound design partner Alan Splet. But SOTL's speculative soundtrack is absolutely masterful, a drawn-out throb of drone that feels vividly alive. At high volume it taps into the oceanic quality of shoegaze, dissolving boundaries between the listener and the listened-to. 

The "e;Twin Peaks"e; nod helps explain why Stars of the Lid still feel so relevant and why this music, while deeply connected to the wide-open world of 90s tape-based psychedelia, still feels so current. We'll never stop soundtracking our space and creating virtual worlds. It might happen with a YouTube or an installation but in 1997 there were 4-track tapes recorded by friends in dark rooms that somehow found their way to other people who understood the transmission. 

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Jawbreaker: Bivouac

2013-02-09 20:30:00 (читать в оригинале)

They never became a household name and people still think Face to Face or some shitty "e;pop punk"e; band wrote "e;Chesterfield King"e;, but Jawbreaker were a huge deal for a lot of people. I remember driving from New Brunswick, N.J., to Philadelphia to bring my girlfriend a promo cassette copy of Dear You, the group's 1995 post-Green Day major label debut. It had arrived a day earlier at the record store where I worked, and I thought she'd want to hear it. I got out of the van, showed it to her; she tossed it on the ground, smashed it under her foot. Around that same time, a guy I knew from local basement shows, came into the record store, pointed to the tattoo of the Jawbreaker logo on his arm, and shook his head. He had tears in his eyes.

This was a band the underground didn't want to lose, at a time when commerce wasn't so closely intertwined with everyday listening experiences. Formed while they were students at NYU, the trio of vocalist/guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach, bassist Chris Bauermeister, and drummer Adam Pfahler relocated to Los Angeles and released their debut, Unfun, in 1990 (it was reissued by Blackball in 2010). Unfun was a good (very fun) record, a solid dose of early 90s emotional, literate punk that established the raw-voiced Schwarzenbach as an underground hero. The band went on the so-called "e;Fuck 90"e; tour with Econochrist that summer and broke up, but managed to get back together, relocate to San Francisco, and record 1992's Bivouac.

The record found them experimenting, and pushing into deeper, angrier, heavier (and headier) waters. People cite 1994's Steve Albini-helmed 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, which showed up after they played some shows in 1993 with Nirvana, as the group's pre-major label masterpiece. But Bivouac has always held a special place for me. It's their darkest collection, a sprawling, shaggy-dog set that found them transitioning from the cleaner, calmer Unfun to something grittier, wilder, and smarter. Bivouac was a ragged call to arms, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy an ambitious offering within that newer space they'd created.

Bivouac also includes one of their most beloved songs, "e;Chesterfield King"e;, a poppy anthem a lot of people saw themselves in. It was a perfect punk vignette. In just about four minutes Schwarzenbach sets a scene ("e;We stood in your room and laughed out loud/ Suddenly the laughter died and we were caught in an eye to eye/ We sat on the floor and did we sit close"e;) as vivid as good fiction. One of his gifts was finding a way to present specific, personal details ("e;Held your hand and watched TV and traced the little lines along your palms"e;) and make them feel universal. So, here, when the protagonist cuts out to catch his breath and ends up sharing smokes and thoughts with a toothless woman in a 7-11 parking lot, you sort of remember this happening to you, too.

But it's not all love and lovesickness. From opener "e;Shield Your Eyes"e; ("e;There was a sun once/ It lit the whole damn sky/ It kept everything alive"e;) onward this is an apocalyptic record filled with bigger kinds of searches, depression, and dirt. You get that soul sickness in "e;P.S. New York Is Burning"e;, "e;Parabola"e;'s "e;I saw myself in someone else and hated them,"e; and "e;Like a Secret"e;'s request: "e;Don't talk me down from here/ Let me fly this kite without a string."e; It shows up clearest, and more impressively, in the 10-minute closing title track's search for meaning: "e;I'm lonely/ I'm an only/ I learned to put on airs/ I needed them to breathe/ Today I wake up."e; Here, Schwarzenbach sets an earth clawing scene ("e;I dug my fingers in the earth/ I drew picture of my pain/ They were so pretty"e;) punctuated by feedback, noise, and the singer's howling of the album title, a shout that hurts and brings down the shelter he's place around himself. It's a call for help, though one that doesn't need to be answered. You get the sense that it's the act itself that mattered most.

Biouvac's 20th Anniversary CD reissue, remastered by John Golden from the original tapes, includes songs from the original studio sessions: "e;Ache"e;, which showd up on 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, and "e;Peel It the Fuck Down"e;, which appeared on the 2002 compilation Etc. Like the original 1992 CD, this version includes the four-songs that appeared on the 1992 Chesterfield King 12"e;: "e;Tour Song"e;, "e;Face Down"e;, "e;You Don't Know"e;, and "e;Pack It Up"e;. For those who followed the band at the time, those tracks have always felt as much a part of the tracklisting as the 9-song vinyl version. (Fittingly, Blackball has also reissued the 9-song Bivouac and Chesterfield King 12"e; on vinyl for the first time in years.)

One of those Chesterfield King tracks, "e;Tour Song"e;, ends with the line: "e;Every little thing must go wrong."e; But, the truth is, despite things not working out exactly as planned, everything did not go wrong. People were angry when Schwarzenbach had painful polyps removed from his vocal chords and were ready to riot when, later, he cleaned up his vocal sound for Dear You. That record didn't sell well enough according to DGC standards, Jawbreaker never became the next Nirvana or Green Day, and in 1996 the group called it quits. But, in retrospect, Dear You was the right record for the band to make. (It's a great album, just not the one you wanted to hear when you were 21 and navigating a close-knit underground that hadn't dealt with this sort of thing firsthand.) So, yeah, Jawbreaker may have grown up before we were ready for them to grow up, but their music has managed to age especially well. It feels as vital now as it did two decades ago.