Minutemen: This Band Was My Life

My first coming to anything approaching "critical consciousness" was as a young man reading philosophy at U.C. Berkeley and listening to Minutemen repeatedly, every day, to the point where my identity was indistinguishable from the band.

This, for me, is a large issue -- Minutemen and their music, their weltanschuuang -- and cannot be addressed in one fell swoop. Yesterday, toiling at my desk in usual Bartleby fashion, I happened upon the video above of an acoustic performance of the band recorded for public access television. The year is 1985. The band's zenith. The year of the SST Tour where I was lucky enough to see them.

This morning I downloaded Post-Mersh Vol. 2 and Post-Mersh Vol. 3. I never owned the albums in digital form, only vinyl and cassette. Listening to "The Product" this morning I was in awe. Again. My old heroes were truly heroic:

Product the product the product the product the product the product the product the product -- I'M THE PRODUCT OF CAPITALISM!

That cannot be improved upon. It says it all.

There are many gems in the video of the acoustic performance, not least of which is Watt's performance of "Tour Spiel." Lyrics to that song taught me plenty about the writing process:

are you going to write the song I demand?
and with the guitar turned off
and the gas tank empty
and the typewriter on
but my head is empty
and to really find me
i've got to look inside me

Minutemen were enormously influential. Frontman D. Boon died at the end of 1985. There hasn't been a working class radical consciousness musically gifted and inventive rock'n'roll band of equal stature since.