Jawbreaker: Unfun

I feel like I’m betraying an old friend by writing this review. Before he condemns me for my transgression, however, let me begin to defend myself by saying that we really haven’t been in touch recently. He’s been hanging around with his brothers on my shelf and I’ve been hanging around with newer bands, people I now find infinitely more interesting than him.

Although, having just admitted that, I realize that this review might end up seeming like I’m betraying him twice over. Not only am I unearthing our long-ago, once-vital friendship for the lone purpose of writing about him, but I’m also baldly admitting that he’s become less of a friend to me. Sure, I still pull him out for a spin now and again, usually when I’m feeling like I haven’t heard from him in eons, and we always have a blast. But mostly, I seem to forget about him. (If you must know, his spine is fading a bit from over ten years sitting in the sun in whatever apartment in which I happened to be living. And it’s getting damn hard to read his name anymore. So perhaps it’s no wonder I don’t look him up more; he’s literally become invisible.)

But there’s also a third betrayal I’m making by committing these words to paper. I’m not going to be talking so much about my old friend’s musical qualities that once brought and still bring me so much happiness for this tribute to him. True, there are tons of these qualities, probably more than will fill this paragraph — the galloping percussive bass and sustained guitar chords that open “Want”, the first song on the record, the clever use of sampled dialogue in “Incomplete” and “Eye-5”, the impossibly-fast drums and breathless lyrics of “Gutless” — but, uncovering him once again for the purpose of writing about him, I’m more struck by how this record has become symbolic of two things for me, one of which is easy to discuss, the other being more elusive.

I want first of all to explain how this record hit me when I first heard it, shortly after it was released on CD in 1992. It sounded like a perfect sonic brew of the genres I obsessed over in high school — heavy metal and college rock when “college rock” meant what the radio station outcasts (not the fraternities) were listening to — and combined the driving musical aggression of the former with the melodic sensitivity of the latter. Like the rap music I was also listening to at the time, its lyrics were personal and intelligent. (For evidence of this, listen to “Busy”. Its eager awkwardness comes across as strangely coherent; it’s like having a wee-hours drunken conversation about the profundities of the world that lasts well into the rest of your life.)

That paragraph, though, is all musical evaluation; it would do well to be summarized in the following statement: Unfun sounds pretty much the same right now as it did then.

So why am I wasting finger movements and stomach acid trying to write about this record? Well, this is where the elusiveness begins: it was my introduction to the punk rock/d.i.y. music community. This community was one of which I was utterly ignorant; only later, when I became submerged in it, did I realize that it existed outside of the confines of the mainstream that I did know. A friend in college (a real flesh-and-blood friend, not an aluminum disc friend) who was in a punk band introduced me to the record, telling me it was one of his favorites. In order to find a CD copy for myself, since I wore out the cassette copy I made of his, I scoured the copies of Maximum Rock N Roll that he loaned me and went with him when he went to independent record stores and punk rock shows. After I found the record, things just seemed to blossom.

Now, I could go on and on about the bands I started listening to, the shows I started seeing, the people I started meeting, the friends I started making. This would clearly demonstrate my total Jawbreaker-sparked engulfment by this outsider community (and thus make for good writing). But the point I want to make is one that’s more difficult to argue (and thus make for not-so-good writing): this record is doubly symbolic for me. It’s representative both of my gateway into the musical community of punk rock/d.i.y. and into the ideological community of punk rock/d.i.y. culture.

So at what point did listening to punk rock music lead to a change in my cultural world-view or ideology? How does consuming a product of a certain public culture lead to a personal ideological change? What were the specific steps by which this happened to me? I know that it wasn’t Jawbreaker’s music or lyrics alone on the record that did it. Nor was it the hundred or so bands that I discovered as a result of the record. Nor was it any one of the friends I made, the books I read, the movies I saw, the papers I wrote, the thoughts I thought, or the things I said since those months in 1992 when my mind and world opened up for the better.

As close to an epiphanic moment in this tribute as I’m going to reach, those last few sentences are pretty cringe-worthy. But writing about Unfun as a specific cultural product of a specific place and time in my life that has had lasting effect just feels right fucking on. I’m sure my old friend would approve.