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Personal
While Hüsker Dü was on their last legs by the time I got to them, they were one of those bands that the people I looked to as cool kids liked. I never owned any album besides New Day Rising, but a week of listening to them demonstrates the retentive power of a half decade of hearing an album played at a party, or when a roommate falls a little too much in love with a band. If you can sing snippets 10, 20 years after the fact – and from the verses – you heard that album on heavy rotation at some point.
A Little History
Hüsker Dü hailed from St. Paul, Minnesota, during the boom years that saw them, The Replacements…and Prince gain national attention. (Yeah, yeah, Prince was on a different level.) They met at area record stores – first Grant Hart (drums/vox) and Greg Norton (bass/future restauranteur), and later Bob Mould (guitar/vox) – and they came up in the Minneapolis/St. Paul punk scene, with their personal emphasis on St. Paul. (A 2017 interview with a Minneapolis member-supported radio station, before Hart’s death at 56, is the best, if one-sided, origin story I found.) They showed off their hardcore roots on 1980’s Land Speed Record and that heightened aggression carried all the way up to their first full length album, 1983’s Everything Falls Apart. Like flowers in a field, however, some melodic inflections started coming through as early as the Metal Circus EP from the same year (hear the guitar on “First of the Last Calls”).
They swung for the fences almost immediately after that with the release of 1984’s double album, Zen Arcade. More musically eclectic than anything that came before (as measured by the distance between “Never Talking to You Again” and the explosive “I’ll Never Forget You”), it’s a loosely-held together concept album, a narrative about an anonymous protagonist leaving home from a barely-more accepting world. Before that album went out into the world, Mould spoke to the band’s ambition:
While Hüsker Dü was on their last legs by the time I got to them, they were one of those bands that the people I looked to as cool kids liked. I never owned any album besides New Day Rising, but a week of listening to them demonstrates the retentive power of a half decade of hearing an album played at a party, or when a roommate falls a little too much in love with a band. If you can sing snippets 10, 20 years after the fact – and from the verses – you heard that album on heavy rotation at some point.
A Little History
Hüsker Dü hailed from St. Paul, Minnesota, during the boom years that saw them, The Replacements…and Prince gain national attention. (Yeah, yeah, Prince was on a different level.) They met at area record stores – first Grant Hart (drums/vox) and Greg Norton (bass/future restauranteur), and later Bob Mould (guitar/vox) – and they came up in the Minneapolis/St. Paul punk scene, with their personal emphasis on St. Paul. (A 2017 interview with a Minneapolis member-supported radio station, before Hart’s death at 56, is the best, if one-sided, origin story I found.) They showed off their hardcore roots on 1980’s Land Speed Record and that heightened aggression carried all the way up to their first full length album, 1983’s Everything Falls Apart. Like flowers in a field, however, some melodic inflections started coming through as early as the Metal Circus EP from the same year (hear the guitar on “First of the Last Calls”).
They swung for the fences almost immediately after that with the release of 1984’s double album, Zen Arcade. More musically eclectic than anything that came before (as measured by the distance between “Never Talking to You Again” and the explosive “I’ll Never Forget You”), it’s a loosely-held together concept album, a narrative about an anonymous protagonist leaving home from a barely-more accepting world. Before that album went out into the world, Mould spoke to the band’s ambition:
