Friday, Sep 5, 2008
If you think today's co-opted rockers are clever with the tempo card, shifting from tough to tender, check out "Standing by the Sea," with Hart's cathartic bellows set against Norton's eerie thrum and the soothe of a crashing surf. The song, like so much of "Zen," is at once gorgeous and terrifying. And the transition from "Standing," which ends Side 2 in a kind of post-orgasmic calm, to the ramshackle fury of Side 3's "Somewhere," is arguably the record's finest moment.
Hüsker Dü could make you cry, but just for good measure they would rupture your eardrums in the process. Depressive? Angry? Delirious with angst? Conventional gauges of intensity are, at last, irrelevant. Hüsker Dü were all of those things, but they didn't brood. "In time I came to think of H|sker music as the shadowy underside of REM's child-eye vision of love and loss," says Terri Sutton in the liner notes to "Dü Hüskers," a 1993 tribute disc to "Zen Arcade," on which 23 Minneapolis bands replay the entire album, start-to-finish (one of two full-length tributes paid to the Dü, by the way). "Their games of hide and seek took place not in some lilac-scented Eden, but under the opaque ice of six-month Minnesotan winter."
This is the album Nirvana and Pearl Jam only wish they could have made: intelligent, clamorous, and hashing out more torment and passion in four sides than all the grungers and headbangers since -- all without a hint of heavy-metal pretension. It's amazing to think anyone could concoct a 14-minute bombast of guitar leads and layered feedback -- "Reocurring Dreams," Side 4 -- and have it not come out self-consciously. And when the 40-second whine at the end of "Dreams" is at last pinched off, the album trembling to a close in a congealed, numbing squeal, the silence that follows is palpable, painful and disconcerting. Not until you've stopped to catch your breath is it apparent that your notions of punk are forever changed.
"A strenuous refutation of hardcore orthodoxy," Michael Azerrad calls it in his book, "Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991." "'Zen Arcade' was the final word on the genre, a scorching of musical earth. The album wasn't only about Hüsker Dü coming of age -- it was about an entire musical movement coming of age."
"Zen Arcade" was not the only Hüsker jewel, though its scope and expanse hold it forever above the others. Six months after "Zen" sold more than 20,000 copies - an unbelievable number for a record with no corporate endorsement - came "New Day Rising," which woke the country from its winter freeze in January 1985. Along with "Metal Circus," a seven-song EP precursor to "Zen," these three records represent, possibly, the most potent 1-2-3 punch in the annals of indie music.
Warner Bros. would sign the band for its last two projects, a move that had critics either nodding proudly -- "I told you so" -- or sucking their teeth nervously. Major label signings are commonplace today, even for upstart acts piped to the masses via the feeding tubes of MTV, but in the 1980s underground it was not only rare but controversial. Fans waited anxiously to see if the new contract would nurture Hüsker Dü's enduring genius, or seal its fate as the first alt-rock dinosaur band.
As it happened, Hüsker Dü never sold its soul to the cigar chompers at Warner Bros., but nonetheless its final two albums were enormously anticlimactic. Most disappointing was "Candy Apple Grey," annoyingly titled and ruined by a handful of garish acoustic novelties. It tried so hard to be the corporate "Zen Arcade" that it nearly became a parody of it, which only serves to solidify the strength and dignity of the original.
Two decades later, "Zen Arcade" still sounds fresh -- the promises of punk rock fulfilled, and, in the same breath, left far, far behind. In the end, the legacy of "Zen Arcade" probably meant less to punk in 1984 than it does to rock as a whole in 2004 -- a glimpse of all the things it could have been.
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