AR: Zen Arcade

Hüsker Dü - Zen Arcade (1984)

Jodi Spoor, my beloved high school Spanish teacher, introduced me to Hüsker Dü in roughly the fall of 1995. Hüsker Dü in the halls of Ache-y Break-y Hearts and Boot Scootin' Boogies is even more rebellious than it already is, and it's a minor miracle that she wasn't branded a pinko commie or re-Neducated or something for instilling such a lust for punk anarchy in her honors student. She started me off with the classic New Day Rising, the later Dü Warehouse: Songs & Stories, and the classic EP Metal Circus. I was hooked - the stellar combination of raw punk energy and bright, crisp melodies on Warehouse in particular would grab almost anyone with my tastes instantly, methinks - but somehow got distracted from looking further into the underground pop-punk godfathers' catalog. It wasn't until a near decade later in 2004, when I was exploring the used racks of a Natick CD store, when I stumbled across this $7.95 double album. In retrospect, I would have gone with this one first - the punk side is even dirtier, rawer, more out-of-control here, but the sparkling melodic moments are among the best in pop, let alone pop punk, while still exhibiting that dirt. I'll forever thank Sra. Spoor for a multitude of things, but well in the middle in the pack was her effort to steer me down the road that led me to Zen Arcade - it's a beast and a monument of the 1980s alternative-before-there-was-alternative scene.

I think I've already indicated this, but just to reiterate, the power of the Dü lies in their outrageous, rough energy and unwillingness to compromise in combination with a ridiculous knack for memorable hooks. They take that skill-set and steer it all over the place - the same band can deliver a crisp acoustic ditty and noise-rock freakouts that drone on *interestingly* for ten minutes. They definitely Venn-overlap in good ways with bands with which you might be more familiar - R.E.M. and Sonic Youth invariably pop to mind - but they are inarguably way harder than the first and more immediately melodic than the second. They never did hit the crossover success of either of those bands, surprisingly, so they've also got a bit of underground mystique that sits well despite their routine inclusion on Top N Albums EVAH lists.

Zen Arcade was reportedly recorded - that is to say, recorded, mixed, produced, sent out the door - in a scant 85 hours. The disc contains every bit of immediacy and first-take passion that you'd expect from such a strategy, and it embraces that aesthetic without concern. This also means that this is not really what I would describe as the best sounding recording I've ever heard - it's frankly a little mushy, which is I suppose par for the course with ragged punk albums and underground records from the era. That's the top complaint about the disc, and it's a fairly minor one; you're better off carping about the fuzzy sounds of DIY bands like Guided By Voices if you'd like to make the legitimate complaints department. This album is about dark, ears pinned back aggression and energy, and a little bit of bystander casualty - the drums getting picked up by the amp mics or whatever - is fine. That said, it's not like this is only a three chords punk guitar fest - bright acoustics show up, piano bangings happen, even a bit of ambient found sound scratches its way on. The term "sprawling" gets tossed about a bit with double albums, but this is one of the one that deserves it - it's a big, 23 tracks of all kinds of mayhem, all over the place and all in your face.

Not every track warrants extended description, but I'll run through them quickly here, stopping to point out highlights. The album opener "Something I Learned Today" opens up with a snare bang out, a rumbling bass riff, and the wall-of-sound splash of the signature Hüsker Dü reverb-drenched distortion. The lead vocal is snarl-shouted; this is what those in the biz call "an unsubtle opener." More high quality rage as well as some lead guitar shredding follows in "Broken Home, Broken Heart" - four minutes in, and it seems quite clear what they're up to.

Of course, toss that out the window, as the bitter twelve-string-strummer gem "Never Talking to You Again" follows and creates the term "punk jangle" for all of our vocabs. Great, memorably acrid tune where tones clash with sentiment just enough. "Chatered Trips" and "Indecision Time" are two more loud, blow-out rockers (the latter featuring an out of control, shake-the-guitar solo) that bracket the screaming noise-fest instrumental "Dreams Reoccurring." "DR" is but a snippet of the tape-effect marred experimental mayhem of which the band is capable. "Hare Krsna" sets that cults familiar chants over a guitar drone that's half terrifying noise out, half long lost fuzzed out Bo-Diddley beat. Take that, George Harrison.

"Beyond the Threshold" is another aggro-number that repeats that line over and over, getting more insane to the point of sounding, no joke, like a demonic cookie monster. "Pride" does not exactly deviate from that crazed muppet track, either. The next stand-out gem on the album is "I Will Never Forget You," a 2:20 blitz over another rumbler of a bassline rhythm that screams with defiance and unleashes dire wrath along with its power chords and amphetamine screamer guitar solo. "The Biggest Lie" echoes this form a bit, this time with a bit of a band-sung chorus.

Another standout track comes in "What's Going On," another powerful, LOUD rager with hooks galore. Its dissonant verses with chants of "I was talking when I should have been listening / I didn't hear a word that anyone said" and "What's going on x 3 / Inside my head?" over throbbing guitar scratches and eventual Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano banging may sound like utter mayhem, but it works. "Masochism World" follows with yet another memorable guitar thrash / shouted chorus combo, and "Standing By The Sea" throws the technique over a circular bass pattern in something that sounds downright jaunty. "Somewhere" is a less memorable number in a now familiar pattern; it's actually a little too calm to work relative to its predecessors, even if its backwards guitar solo brings a new interesting sound to the mix.

"One Step at a Time" is a brief, echoing piano interlude that sits in front of the album's decided highlight, "Pink Turns to Blue." A simple fuzzy guitar riff loops over a sparse piano part for the verses; the chorus repeats a plaintive "And I don't know what to do / Now pink has turned to blue" that just haunts. A punchy, clearer lead guitar punctuates the bridge before a few more run-throughs on the chorus. It's a rich hook, and the song walks a perfect line between guitar drone hypnosis and typical VCVCBVC structure. By the time it hits its half-time stumbling close, the dread evident in the chorus permeates your surroundings - fantastic tune.

"Newest Industry" and "Whatever" return to form with yet another sample of the Hüsker Dü pop-punk prototype; these sorts of simple, tight melody over guitar nuttiness pattern (with catchy chorus taboot) would persist throughout their career. They're separated by another tinny piano interlude in "Monday Will Never Be the Same" and followed by the tape effects and spoken word / voices in your head experiment "The Tooth Fairy and the Princess" which I highly recommend you not fall asleep to.

The final tracks on the album are two of its strongest. "Turn On the News" starts with ambient TV sounds and a banged single piano note, but quickly morphs into a 4:30 punk version, complete with alt-chic cynicism, of a friggin' Kiss tune. Loud, shouted call and respond anthemic chorus is certainly odd on this disc - the tune even features some sarcastic hand-claps underneath its Ace Frehley solo. Never fear - they thunder and out-Kiss Kiss, predictably, and bring a rousing close to the album. Or what feels like a close - Hüsker Dü instead assumes you have fifteen minutes on your hands for an all-out explosive guitar-splash spiraling jam, the reprise of the earlier track that is now called "Reoccurring Dreams." And if you do have those fifteen minutes, imho, the exercise is well worth it - the acid-headed noise rock with screaming guitars and banging drums interruptions actually holds interesting for the duration, and while a jam session freakout is maybe not the normal way to close an album, it works here - and it's one of my favorite, stand alone tracks of their work.

Zen Arcade is a far cry from a perfect album, and as is probably evident in my repetitive writeup, there is a little bit of filler here and there as well as some repeated ideas across different songs. It's certainly consistently solid throughout, but after repeated listens the not-quite-as-high-quality songs start to stick out a bit. That said, the peaks are quite high, and props to ambition, the extended experimentations and executions of melodic-rage are quite excellent. For late '80s and '90s and '00s alt and/or indie rock, this is a thoroughly influential album. If you can pick out which bands have taken some tricks from Michael Stipe and company, be sure to add this to your stack so you can figure out where some of those groups got that growlier, id-ier alt-rock sound, too.

Status: Recommended
Nyet's Faves: "Pink Turns to Blue" and "What's Going On"

ADDENDUM - Something that I utterly failed to mention is that Zen Arcade is a concept album about a frustrated teen who leaves home only to discover that things outside (notably the drugs of "From Pink to Blue") aren't any better. He then, uh, goes insane or something via the album closer. I'm not entirely buying it - you're welcome to check the lyrics on the web yourself, but between a general incomprehensibility and a lack of enunciation of the lyrics throughout, this isn't really in the Quadropheina vein of rock operas.