In On The Kill Taker
Fugazi; "Public Witness Program"; from Amazon Warehouse
In on the Kill Taker was Fugazi’s breakout record—the one that charted, that the tastemakers of the era couldn’t stop talking about. But all of that was lost on me. I was in kindergarten when it was tearing up college radio, singing The Beach Boys by the time their sound was assimilated into the firmament of pop culture. I suspect it was similar to the way Nirvana would inspire a generation of young musicians, like the Velvet Underground before them, perhaps in a causal chain all the way back to when Lizstomania had taken Europe by storm and a young Edvard Grieg, sitting in the audience with his parents or an au pair, would be inspired to compose his own bombastic and grandiose pieces, only to have a French rock band write about the whole affair.
Initially, In on the Kill Taker was a relatively forgettable listen sourced from my favorite Scandinavian server. At that moment, I was still figuring out what I wanted music to do, exactly. I was, of course, coming off a long stretch of polished records—bands with tight session players; jazz artists trying to find a moment of transcendence; classic albums worn thin by years of radio play; loud-quiet-loud post-rock; guys with acoustic guitars. If you had asked me around the time I heard Fugazi’s third offering, I probably would have described it in the same way that named one of the most acclaimed French electronic bands: “a daft punky thrash”.
I remember feeling kind of embarrassed the first time I really listened to the record, headphones on in my bedroom. It was like I’d walked into a situation I shouldn’t have been in, caught some cool kids in flagrante delicto as they were pounding out some garage (or barn) jam session. The drums sounded like they were recorded in a concrete basement, the vocals like shouted arguments half-caught through a closed door. It was everything I wasn’t—aggressive, chaotic, direct—but in a way that wasn’t imminently relatable like other hardcore-adjacent bands I listened to at the time.
In my college years of finding myself musically, trying to grow my understanding of this fantastic and evanescent thing that I maybe wanted to study, I went to the library, just as I did in my youth. I picked up interviews with creators indiscriminately, looking for any kind of touchstone or reference to sound-based art—they could be architects or painters or graphic novelists; it didn’t matter. I was curious and there was a wild world to explore. Through some of this incredibly catholic reading and well-curated film selection at this particular branch, I found out about the process of scoring movies: a band I liked in high school scored an obscure undersea documentary; Miles Davis did a beautiful crime thriller that captured his coolness so precisely; and a gentleman John Cassavettes worked with my all-time favorite Charles Mingus on a movie, maybe two.
Cassavettes captured the most intense DIY approach I had heard of in cinema. He was a working actor that was also a director, put all his energy and money into his films, tried to capture the intimate, quotidian moments of life. I wanted to learn about his approach, his frame of working, and got the Criterion Collection Box set that had been recently released. I found myself lounging on my bed, sick with the flu at 22, watching The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, going in and out of consciousness until I woke up with the DVD menu stuck on chapters at 3am. It was dreamlike; I was riveted.
Back to Fugazi—I learned they had a documentary that captured the making of one of their albums, and that it was named for a song on this record. I was transfixed by this idea I had seen with Cassavettes, that it was possible for people to intentionally and intensely work on a small budget, to produce something that captured the spirit of the moment. I put on this record again after quite some time, and I learned they had a song called “Cassavettes”, with a refrain that goes “shut up, this is my last picture”.
In On The Kill Taker wasn’t Fugazi’s last picture—it was right in the middle. They still had a couple of albums in them before they went on indefinite hiatus. It was clear they were working something out here, that they had more to say. In that sense, the record is a bit uneven, a bit unpredictable in its sequencing and song structure. But surprise, happenstance, kismet: these are the things from which the most elemental aspects of a life ensue. We love things for their predictability but also their subtle inversion of expectations. So when a song like “23 Beats Off” transitions from a rock groove with a lyrical subtext about the AIDS crisis to squalls of feedback, it entices you to listen again, to rediscover.
In my case, it just took a few years. Maybe five.
Verdict: Keep
The specter of AIDS haunts Fugazi’s music in a way I hadn’t realized until writing this. Are there any other artists or musicians from that era who wrote lots of songs about the crisis? Please share if so!