Pre-Poem Spiel
In this post, I’m sharing the first selection of pieces from “A Poem at the Going Rate,” which was inspired by (and in some ways “about”) Minutemen, one of the most significant underground bands of the 20th century. I’d also like to provide a bit of context for the poem, especially for anyone who is less familiar with the band. So after the poem, you can find a brief thing I wrote about the band that have been important to me.
Post-Poem Spiel
Structurally, the poem is all about writing according to speech rhythms, and it’s all about end-stopping lines but continuing to push the poem forward. This energy of contradiction/tension and improvisational thinking crystallized for me while listening to Minutemen intensively this summer (though I’ve been a fan for decades). I found myself drawn to D. Boon’s way of speaking and stringing thoughts together (w/lyrics from Mike Watt) in “History Lesson, no. 2,” and I became fascinated by Mike Watt’s own way of speaking in interviews (as in We Jam Econo and elsewhere on YouTube and in print). The poem takes some of those speech and thought patterns as a basis, but then goes its own way with it, looping back throughout with quotations of lyrics and references to the band’s historical context. The poem also gets lost along the way, and then finds a way back.
Just as influential is the band’s insistence on musical freedom. During the period Minutemen were active, the first wave of punk had passed and bands alternately described as punk, post-punk, and hardcore were all mingling together. The music was in flux stylistically, and where some pushed toward a codification of punk into a static genre, others like Minutemen redefined punk as stylistic freedom. You can do anything, draw from anywhere, and pull it off on strength of conviction, passion, and commitment to the sound. To some extent, this is a mentality that comes from free jazz and free improvisation, where the receptive ability to listen musically to the nearly uncontrolled sounds one makes is crucial to establishing a sonic continuum that another listener can then enter into. While no one would mistake Minutemen for free jazz (except for a few tracks maybe) and their songs do have structure, they nevertheless share in this freedom of hearing forward: as Mike Watt said of the band, “We didn’t write songs, we wrote rivers.” The Minutemen songs are famously short, but that also means no individual song has time to calcify, and it all unfolds into the next one: it keeps going, answering itself, interrupting, changing. It’s all in motion. So the poem tried to do this in is own way too.
The other thing I take from them speaks more broadly to how I came to self-publish and start a press, and the kinds of values that inform those choice. The Minutemen understood that how you did things on a material level was the real basis of any ethos or politics. For Minutemen and likeminded bands, your art was political because it was how you moved and acted in the world: you did it yourself and didn’t wait around for acceptance or somebody else’s plan or approval. It was a way of organizing one’s life toward autonomy and freedom, and it was for everyone: “our band could be your life.” Eventually, they named this attitude with one of their many slang terms, econo, and the phrase “We Jam Econo” became a mission statement. In the simplest terms, it meant basic thrift: a scarcity mentality learned from struggling to make ends meet and watching their parents do the same. Beyond this, jamming econo meant that you considered yourself a producer of culture—you saw the economic context your art lived within—and you paid attention to things on a material level: you did the math and ruled out bullshit. In an industry where the absolute norm was for bands to be fleeced by record labels who sold them illusions of stardom, this economic consciousness was at once a defensive posture and a radically freeing approach to music-making.
Econo was economics, but it was also an attitude of enhancing what you already have, and allowing each component part to have its own rightful place. As bassist Mike Watt puts it, “That’s the whole idea of the band, not just economy in the material sense, but makin’ it like conversation. Making this an interesting conversation. We’re going to have [our drummer] Georgie in here, man. We’re going to make space for him, he’s going to come in here and speak, spell his name with his fuckin’ fills” (qtd. in Fournier 18). This extended also to the sonic frequencies the band existed on: Boon intentionally turned the bass on his amp all the way down and played one of the most treble-focused guitars, a Fender Telecaster, so that it did not compete on the same frequencies as Watt’s bass. This became a signature sound for the band, and it emerged from thinking about the way their parts worked together, going beyond style and surface to consider what their acoustic properties were and how to organize themselves on that level. “Our band is scientist rock,” as Boon sang.
*
This poem is going to keep growing, and I hope to put it out eventually as a chapbook. Who knows what the final sequence will look like, but I’ll keep sharing stuff here as it develops. Right now, there are 12-15 sections done, and I would like to write some more. And if you want to read more about the band, you can also find plenty of basic info at AllMusic and Wikipedia. And here is a bibliography of stuff I’ve been consulting:
Michael Azerrad’s chapter on the band in Our Band Could Be Your Life is definitive (and available on the Internet Archive) and difficult to improve upon (without going into exhaustive detail). From Little, Brown and Company, 2001.
Fournier, Michael T. The Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime (33 1/3). Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2007.
Ruland, Jim. Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records. Hachette, 2022.
We Jam Econo: the Story of the Minutemen. Directed by Tim Irwin. Rocket Fuel Films, 2005. It’s free on YouTube as well.