Fugazi is the real Radiohead.
 

Everyone (by everyone I mean music critics and bloggers) talks about how Radiohead made this massive transition in the '90s, vastly evolving their sound and their genre with an album (OK Computer) that broke boundaries and broadened scopes. Radiohead is praised for how much they changed, how drastic their change was, and how successful the result turned out to be.
All this is true and Radiohead is great, but lately I've been having some issues with the notion that they're the closest thing we late-90's kids (if you were in high school when OKC came out- this means ou) will ever have to a Beatles. So i've been mulling it over a lot, and...

Red Medicine is just as drastic a shift in musical scope, and just as inventive and fresh a record as OK Computer was for Radiohead.

Fugazi *really did* break rules and stretch genres. I mean, I couldn't even really tell you what the fuck Red Medicine IS to this day! But I know it's fucking incredible, and that it + End Hits + Argument make Fugazi just as successful an act as Radiohead.... Better, if you wanna start comparing albums directly.

that's my thought for the moment. Basically just that Fugazi's awesome. Wish they were still together. One of the only truly unpredictable, and definitely one of the most consistently awesome (awesome without pause, actually) bands of my lifetime.

haha... funny, because I am from DC and red medicine is where Fugazi lost me. and you are calling it their ok computer??? wtf.

I enjoy both bands, but it's definitely no contest that Fugazi is easily the much better band.

I never got why everyone gushes over OK Computer so much. It's good, but come on.

Steady Diet of Nothing was always my favorite Fugazi record, most people I know their favorite is In On The Kill Taker. Red Medicine always seemed to be the divider of fans (also seems evident in the Instrument documentary).

Fugazi however never had a chance in hell of being as heralded as Radiohead, mostly due to the self imposed lack of marketability Fugazi put on themselves. Radiohead always seemed interested in wasting your time convincing you that they were highly mindful artists with their at times grandiose albums and I guess a great many people fell for it. Wheras Fugazi always made it pretty clear that they were just a rock band that was interested in politics and activism. Bed For The Scraping rocks by the way.

I was a little bit interested about Radiohead when I heard Creep from them. But their directions change wasn´t very interesting to me. Thom Yorke is still a great singer.

When I heard Fugazi´s repeater on the radio, it really blowed my mind! But when I got the whole album, I was a little disappointed about that. I listened it not long ago and it sounded quite good. But somehow after Repeater I didn´t got any information about the band and I lost it. I have thought to listen the albums after Repeater someday...

I saw Fugazi on the gig many years ago and they were just great!

what the? lmao

anyway, Fugazi's fan base is miles away from being half as big as Radiohead's..
and that's to me what's so special about Radiohead - they experiment with their sound so much, yet they're as mainstream as it gets!

Fugazi's discography is great tho.
they were one of those bands that develop with every album, thus i appreciate them.
surprised you guys haven't even mentioned The Argument - it's truly amazing how they broke up with their best album!

They lost a lot of people with that album. I remember pissed off hipsters in Instrument complaining that it's "just not Fugazi".

In fact, it was the real Fugazi finally coming out. A monstrous, eperimental, harsh, geometric, angular and funky album, weird as hell and full of color.

I love old Fugazi, but their last three albums are their best. No question.

great post.

Instrument is my favorite Fugazi album.

BTW, I have no idea what this thread is supposed to mean.

End Hits is actually my least preferred of their records. But whatever.

I don't know Radiohead, but Red Medicine is definitely one of the best Fugazi albums. With that LP, they took a big step in Sonic Youth's direction: more noise, more experiment, and all that.

I would like to add two things.

What radiohead was starkly original only in the context of the diametric shift in 1990s music it represented. Radiohead had managed, (somehow I don't know since their guitar work aside from a few tracks was softer than edgy), to be some kind of mainstream college rock/alternative/borderline grunge and when they shifted towards this organic synergy of college rock, distorted guitar work blended with harmonic, ambient, and electronic music that was a radical shift in direction which honestly, no one in the mainstream predicted. Just as Nevermind just blew away hairbands and Michael Jackson, so do did OK Computer and I think more so Kid A later push away the alternative/grunge era and bring in both the resurgence of art rock bands (all these "The ..." bands) and also electronic music out of the rave closet and into the top 40.

This is comparable would say more so to when Bob Dylan went electric than to when the Beatles went psychedelic, because in all honesty, I would say that the psychedelic Beatles was an insincere corporate experiment that further was not very good or very innovative more so just popular. If your talking about the British Invasion and the Beatles initial successes, I also think that isn't applicable to Radiohead, as the Beatles didn't invent a sound so much as a marketing strategy.

fugazi are one of those bands i KNOW are fantastic, but i just dont listen to.

You've possibly got a point Stateside, but this was a pretty minor song in '97. It's not good (at all - possibly the worst thing you could listen to) but it does show that there were plenty of people trying to find a way to incorporate the rave influences into a pop framework. Over here, the view was very different - this was a massive hit, and by the time Ok Computer came out, Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Orbital and a few others were household names and festival headliners.

And from another perspective, the thing with indie/ guitar music is that it's been stuck in the 80s since the 80s. Plenty of non-indie, non-guitar bands were experimenting with new technology - but it took a while (probably until Kid A) to take a proper hold within guitar music. Though a note on that - there was a few bands in the Baggy scene (Stone Roses, Happy Mondays) who were on the cusp of indie and the more (technologically) experimental acid house scene - but John Squire thought he was Malmsteen and Ryder was a waster, so what should've been a creative meeting of worlds quickly became staid nostalgia on one side (Oasis, Britpop) and headed away from the charts and back to the raves on the other (Jungle > dnb).

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying that the above just isn't true in the UK.

I have never liked Fugazi and I probably never will.

(And of course, there's a massive irony in that America is overwhelmingly responsible for creating a lot of the best early dance music, whether you say it started in the 70s or with Detroit/ UR).

Instrument is awesome, but I don't count it as an album.

And I'm not sure I know what this thread means either.

Just basically that Fugazi had a better self-renovation in the 90's than Radiohead, who's considered the best-of-the-best (not just by mainstream, but by underground standards as well) while Fugazi is unknown to at least 70% of American now-grown alt-rock kids who think OKC was the most dynamic shift of the decade.

Red Medicine threw everyone off, and challenged absolutely everything. It was a complete distortion, and it was fucking awesome.

All Radiohead did with OK was get better at what they started on the Bends... they learned to conceptualize better. Kid A isn't a 90's album, so it's another story. But Red Medicine changed Fugazi front-to-back, and reanimated their music completely.

Nobody else took bigger risks and saw less reward in the 90's than Fugazi.

^^James brown. Son.

Yeah, I kinda feel the same way. I dig 13 Songs and Repeater and everything, but when they started drastically pushing the boundaries of their sound with Red Medicine, that's where I start to really love the band. Songs like 'Do You Like Me', 'By You', and 'Long Distance Runner' are just fucking perfect. In fact, when I think about it, this is probably my favorite Fugazi album. They were such a vital, interesting, and inspired band. I really regret never getting to see them live.

u must spread rep fer suchfriendz.

Long Distance Runner... oh god yes. Who would have expected a song like that from a fucking hardcore band?

Argument is my favorite by far. And unfuckingbelieveable album from start to finish.

"Life and Limb" is so "what-the-FUCK?" that it's almost criminal. Very few songs build and progress as perfectly as that song.

The first five songs are all just brilliant. And the album ends with ragga-psychedelic awesomeness that makes me want to join an army on an alien planet.

Yeah, I love Argument. It was my favorite album of that year, and remains a top 10 favorite of all time.