Hero Worship: Ian Mackaye

Being asked to write about Ian Mackaye for a feature called Hero Worship gave me conflicting feelings; Mackaye, more than any other musician I can think of, has created not only some of the most breathtaking music I've ever heard, from the searing punk attack of Minor Threat through to the thunderous sonic expanse of Embrace and the pioneering experimentation of Fugazi, but his ideological stance and his unwillingness to compromise how his music is represented has been a benchmark that I have very often measured my own musical endeavors against.

...And that's the rub. The last thing I would imagine Mackaye finding comfortable would be someone describing him as his 'hero' and 'worshipping' him. This is much more a case of me having just enormous respect for the man, his music and his methods.

Autonomy is surely the keyword with Ian Mackaye. He's kept control over his music by releasing all his work on his own label Dischord Records, always printing the sale price of the records on the sleeve to avoid over-pricing (don't think that he had a myopic view on selling records either, Fugazi's Red Medicine album sold 160,000 copies in its first week). He's always bucked whatever the predetermined template of the music a 'punk' should make, stretching the parameters and finding new sounds and styles.

My first exposure to his music was Fugazi's In On The Killtaker, an album as raw and aggressive as I had hoped but also so challenging, infusing fresh, left-field elements into the songs. My mind was blown, I became a fan and it was the best gamble I ever made on any band as each proceeding album Fugazi produced pushed these elements and challenged my preconceptions further and further. No band, be they a perceived as punk or otherwise, was able to simultaneously provoke me creatively as well as ideologically like Fugazi could.

It's not unusual if you're a musician to be given 'advice' by people, be they managers, labels or whoever, that you should talk to this certain magazine or play with that certain band, it will be a 'great opportunity' – it's just what you should do if you play in a band. It's got nothing to do with whether you are comfortable with it or not, there's a path there that cannot be deviated from. Ian Mackaye has proven conclusively that this is untrue.