But for the British, post-punk was also a sound and a sensibility, and the leading lights of the movement took rock's self-consciousness to new extremes. Every musical impulse seemed be an attempt to second-guess assumptions about rock's pleasure principle. In 1979, the Gang of Four, four earnest Marxists from Leeds University, released their debut, "Entertainment," possibly the most self-conscious title in rock history: Here we are now. What are the material conditions that allow us to entertain you? In interviews, the band would explain that terms like "rock," "funk" and "punk" were merely building blocks to be fit together and disassembled at will -- a vision of music as pure structure. Wire and the Fall each made a virtue out of an almost comically rigid approach, turning on its head rock's traditional rhythmic "swing." And Public Image Ltd. combined thudding grooves and lugubrious bass lines -- nicknamed "death disco" at the time -- with John Lydon's lyrics about the burden of memories, producing a music that almost dared you to move your body to it.

Until post-punk hardened into "new wave" in the early '80s (the British version of "alternative"), the music thrived during a period that corresponded almost exactly to Mission of Burma's life span. More than any other American band, Burma was clearly paying attention and perhaps even inspiring the post-punk movement. Burma was supposedly the only band that Mark E. Smith, the Fall's legendarily cantankerous singer, could tolerate. And, in a literal interpretation of the Gang of Four's building-block beliefs, Burma's "Signals, Calls and Marches" even included, in lieu of a lyric sheet, an alphabetical list of every word sung on the album. Depending on your perspective, Burma either Americanized British post-punk or Anglicized American post-punk. (Cleveland's Pere Ubu, whose "Heart of Darkness" was a staple of Burma's live show, had already managed to do something similar a year or so before punk became codified -- a true sin of bad timing.) At times, Burma shared Joy Division's murk ("Dead Pool"), Gang of Four's harsh angularity ("Outlaw"), Wire's arch abrasiveness ("New Nails"), the Fall's linguistic obtuseness ("This Is Not a Photograph"), and Public Image's dry rhythm ("Fun World"). Like the Gang of Four, they played with Cold War imagery ("Peking Spring"); like the Sex Pistols' "Holidays in the Sun" (albeit without that band's dark comedy), Conley's "Progress" dealt with the ironies of the postwar world.

From Prescott's scattershot rhythms to Miller's tightly coiled chords, from Swope's blur of sound to Conley's thudding bass, the thrilling tension of Burma's music is the way it always sounds as though it's about to sabotage itself. Crucially, however, Mission of Burma was an American band; it was as uniquely redolent of its surroundings and intoxicated by rock's manic rush as the Ramones or the Stooges. Either by accident or design, Burma's songs never had the polish of British post-punk. The slew of great American bands now part of the "post-punk revival," including the Rapture and Radio 4, sounds a lot like British post-punk and almost nothing like Burma. For that matter, Silkworm and Versus, the two American bands that opened for Burma at a London club in April, and who constantly elicit comparisons to Burma, ultimately sound nothing like the boys from Boston. The fact that people still speak of Burma and the Gang of Four in the same breath two decades later is a testament to how subtle Burma's synthesis was, and how original the music ended up sounding.

The secret weapon of Burma's music is that while it embodies the self-conscious tension pioneered by the band's British peers, it simultaneously fights its downward drag -- "the pulling of the undertow," as Miller sings on "Secrets." In a way that must have sounded positively foreign to British post-punks, Burma's music dramatized a battle between mind and body that became its own musical tension. One of the pleasures of Burma's records is hearing Prescott occasionally yelling what sounds like gibberish at the top of his lungs, seemingly lost in the music. For all the angst and self-examination of "That's When I Reach for My Revolver" and "Academy Fight Song" (which climaxes with "I'm not judging you/ I'm judging me!"), these songs carry an anthemic spirit that few of the band's peers -- British or American -- ever achieved.

This, then, is Burma's lasting contribution to rock history. They came of age at the exact moment rock was collapsing into itself, and they made music that somehow embodied this self-conscious turn inward while surging with the momentum of more innocent earlier times. By embodying the interplay between structure and freedom, Mission of Burma's music crystallized the post-punk moment and shined a light forward. It's fitting that this aesthetic leap is apparent only with the luxury of hindsight, because it's become clear that whatever has passed for "alternative rock" over the past 20 years has wrestled with this same dialectical tension. It forms an unbroken chain from Mission of Burma through the Pixies through Nirvana through Shellac and any other band on the radio or MTV that attempts to make opposition part of its pose. Punk forever changed rock 'n' roll, and the music has spent two decades grappling with the self-consciousness that was punk's fallout. As the fallout remains, the legacy of Burma's 21 songs plus ephemera only grows. Whatever the members of Mission of Burma decide to do from here, the world shows no signs of allowing them to stop.

Recent Stories