This is the question Fugazi has been answering since 1988. The music on The Argument can’t really be called punk; it is too formal, its dynamics too fluid, and is is a shade too pretty. Yet it has everything great punk has: not just passion but buckets full of it, running so high at times that it makes a listener feel as though some great change must surely be imminent; not just energy but energy channeled into the service of a deeply felt message. So here we have the album’s second song, “Cashout,” which is really its first, since the first track is forty-five seconds’ worth of untitled sound collage (which does, one should say, have some really lovely ancient-sounding violin on it). The instrumental parts of “Cashout” complement one another like the workings of a fine watch: the bass plays one figure, the guitar another, the two endlessly apposite as though discussing something about which they are fundamentally agreed but on which they will never see exactly eye-to-eye, and the drums play a rhythm that was born in a house where the ghost of Hugo Burnham rattled chains all night long downstairs in a damp basement. The song advances without strummed chords and without a standard backbeat; it moves, but seems also to stand still. It sounds like a person nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other, active but motionlessly so, all potential energy ready to go unstable and get loud at any moment. And then, in a very pretty voice, Ian MacKaye sings this lyric -- I have taken the liberty of inserting line-breaks: |
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