guy and dolomite

Fugazi
by Bartholomew Green
September 24, 1998

   Fugazi really don't need any introduction. For the past ten years they've been putting out records on their own Dischord label, creating a consistently powerful body of work. Though they may be one of the most considerate bands in the world, their music is anything but polite. Watching Fugazi play reminds one that rock music can be a transcendental force and more than just a commercial product.

   Fugazi singer/guitarist Guy Piccotto is no dummy, as his answers here will attest, and a nice guy to boot.

   Dolomite: Fugazi is the antithesis of the cliches that are associated with rock music (sexism, arrogance, etc.). Is it sometimes hard to love the music despite all of the negative things associated with it?

   Picciotto: I don't really have that hard a time divorcing myself from the crappy baggage rock carries with it. I mean to my mind underground music and punk rock was always a reaction against that kind of bullshit anyway so I think there has been a space cleared for music to work beyond the zone of the ill cliches and that is the space we choose to function in and devote our energy towards maintaining.

   Dolomite: Some Fugazi lyrics are oblique and almost like poetry. Are there specific writers or poets that inspire you?

   Picciotto: For my part lyric writing is kind of a struggle. I find writing them a lot like pulling teeth out of my jaw bone - it's a tough process and not a very "writerly" one. I read like crazy (literally anything I can get my hands on) but I'm not sure how much it influences the writing of the songs. It's a lot like the music - you ricochet shit around till things fall into place and once they lock in they are stuck hard and you leave them alone. As far as lyricists go to me no one is better than HR in the early Bad Brains or Darby Crash in the Germs.

   Dolomite: Can you mention a few of the performers who had a big effect on you?

   Picciotto: For the most part the stuff that really impacts us inspiration-wise is kind of local bands here in DC. I mean we check out bands here religiously and we really consider ourselves part of the lineage of bands that come from here. So over the years I would name check bands like the Faith, Nation of Ulysses, Slant 6 , Void, and the Cranium as just a random sampling of stuff that has killed us and kind of sparked us to work the music.

   Dolomite: In Fugazi songs like "Version", I detect a heavy dub reggae influence. Others ("Repeater") remind me of African music. Is this comparison totally innaccurate? It seems that you are expanding the vocabulary of punk-influenced music, especially rhythmically.

   Picciotto: Yeah - there's all kinds of stuff crammed in our blender; dub, go-go etc. The closest thing we have to a formula is just that a lot of the time the "melody" is really just a rhythm. That rhythmic foundation gets worked into a solid mass and it allows everything else the freedom to just kind of spiral around over it.

   Dolomite: One thing I find remarkable is that so many people focus on your refusal to deal with major labels. Why do you think people have such a hard time understanding the way you conduct yourselves?

   Picciotto: I think it is so ingrained in people's conciousness that the holy grail for all musicians is the major label contract that anyone looking for an alternative is seen as wilfully perverse and maybe even ungrateful in some kind of weird way. It's like spurning the great beneficent daddy love of the industry which itself is understood as the only zone where the "real" shit is happening. Money is seen as the great legitimizer & the rightness of an economic bottomline has almost become biological, resistance to which is seen as fruitless and naive. We just feel there needs to be a rival aesthetic, a zone predicated on something other than the maximization of cash. I mean, major labels function like any other mass market corporate entity and despite the fact that they peddle in what are obstensibly "artistic" statements they certainly don't disguise their motives or methods and we should recognize this transparency. It is really more up to musicians to decide where they best feel their energy is spent and what they are willing or not willing to do to create alternatives. Regardless, there will always be an underground because there will always be statements being made that couldn't possible appeal to a mass mindset and so they will have to forge their own avenues to be heard. We'd rather put our time into helping maintain those avenues.

   Dolomite: Do you fell any sense of nostalgia when you think about all of those eighties bands like the Minutemen, etc. who toured all the time? Is that work ethic gone altogether or is it back underground?

   Picciotto: I refuse to entertain nostalgia even though the bands back then were so killer and the model of their work ethic was so relentless and inspirational. I feel bands now are doing much the same thing but in much different circumstances - the atmosphere now is really diffused and unclear. The attentions of the overarching industry have done a lot to fuck up people's sense of the moment, their sense of a network and their sense of individuated scenes. But the impulse to play and to tour and to blow people's minds with sound remains and there are tons of bands out there who use the same compass as the Minutemen did.