“Do you know what I call an un-played record?” asks Ian MacKaye. “A piece of fucking trash. It’s paper and plastic. So if I make something, I want to make sure it adds value.”
Thankfully, as the co-founder and co-owner of Dischord Records, MacKaye has made the very opposite of landfill indie. The Washington DC label turns 40 next month, having created one of the world’s great punk discographies by staying fiercely egalitarian. They do not sell merch, only music, and at low prices, too: a socialist and ascetic stance in a corporate US. MacKaye once told malcontent slamdancers, regarding the lack of security at a gig by his band Fugazi: “It’s more fun to look out for each other than to pay people to look out for us,” summing up his entire socioeconomic ethos. “We started and continue to exist on the fringe,” he says now.
Dischord was founded in 1980 by a teenage MacKaye plus Nathan Strejcek, Geordie Grindle and Jeff Nelson to release their punk band the Teen Idles. “Nobody else was going to put it out,” says MacKaye, now a droll 58-year-old. His parents’ address was on the sleeve; 1,000 copies were pressed, with the covers cut and glued by hand. “That’s the real record industry,” says MacKaye. “We sat together and made records.”
Guy Picciotto, who played in Fugazi with MacKaye, remembers its impact. “It was electric,” he recalls. “Kids releasing music demystified the process, but, because it was such a statement, the object was heightened. It felt different to hold that record. I had this weird pride, even though I had nothing to do with it.” However, there was some resistance in the ideologically pure punk scene. “Releasing a record, and monetising music, some people looked at a little askance,” says MacKaye. “So we declared any money made would go to documenting other bands.”
Inspired by local hardcore punk heroes Bad Brains, MacKaye and Nelson’s next band, Minor Threat, arrived in a whirl of screeching, sweating and slamdancing. MacKaye loathed the cliche of the debauched rock star and his refusal to participate in boozing, drug-taking and promiscuous sex also – inadvertently, he suggests – gave birth to an abstinence-based cultural movement known as straight edge. “Music is sacred,” he has said. “It’s a put-on that you have to be drunk, a fuck-up or use drugs. I don’t buy it.”
“I didn’t drink or do drugs and it was hard to find people like that,” says Amy Pickering , who worked at Dischord for 22 years. “At 16, I found a subculture that felt like family.”
Dischord began releasing records from a burgeoning local scene bristling with breakneck guitar rhythms, guttural howls and rapid-fire drums. It was uniquely positioned in Washington. “The whole town operates in the shade of government money and in that cover you don’t get a lot of sunlight,” MacKaye says. “So the things that grow here are really stubborn.”
The label was volunteer-run for years, operating in a shared home known as Dischord House. Pickering ended the teenage boys’ era on her first day by swiftly taking down the “no skirts allowed” sign. Bands rehearsed sitting down in a low-ceilinged basement, while all-nighters were pulled to assemble records. “At night, we’d get cardboard from people’s trash to make sleeves,” recalls Pickering. They even won a recycling award from the county. MacKaye had three jobs to keep things afloat. “It was three years before we withdrew money from the label,” he says. “We didn’t start paying ourselves until after eight.”
By 1983, the city’s punk shows had become violent and skinhead-infested. “We were tired of the super-aggressive people,” remembers Nelson. Many key bands, including Minor Threat, broke up, but a new batch soon emerged, ditching hardcore punk and embracing melody. Picciotto’s band Rites of Spring were pivotal, as were Beefeater and Embrace. The term emotional hardcore, or emo, was put upon them, eventually creating an entire teenage subculture – although the bands rejected it.
This period of musical evolution, shutting down violence at shows while escalating political engagement, was entirely thought-out. Pickering mailed anonymous notes in the post stating: “Get ready, it’s Revolution Summer.” Some viewed the scene as overly earnest or preachy; the noise-rock outfit Pussy Galore had a song called Fuck You, Ian MacKaye. “People accused us of being clique-ish,” says Nelson. “I suppose that’s true, but we wanted to work with people who were making great music and were nice.”
Dischord’s workload grew as the endlessly touring Fugazi and their ferocious live shows of pulverising spring-and-release tension – where you may see Picciotto slam-dunk himself mid-set into a basketball hoop – gained a huge following. Hundreds of thousands of albums were being sold and the label bloomed. Chris Richards, the pop music critic at the Washington Post who played in the Dischord dance-punk band Q and Not U, recalls the 90s scene as “magnetic, a gravitational force”. Fugazi’s all-ages gigs policy ushered in a new generation. “At 15, the bar for entry was zero,” says Richards. “That blew me away. You just show up and you’re part of it. It cemented in my young mind that music and community are inextricably linked.”
By now, big money was being thrown around underground scenes in the wake of the global success of Nirvana. Fugazi were offered $10m from Atlantic but passed and stayed on Dischord, charging $5 for gigs. “If we signed there would have been no band,” says Picciotto. “We functioned because we were in the driver’s seat and if someone else was in the driver’s seat we would crash into a wall.”
Contracts and lawyers have never been used and MacKaye says he has “never had a band leave on bad terms”. Over 40 years, only two left for major labels: Shudder to Think and Jawbox. MacKaye remains friends with them, but Pickering recalls some friction. “It was unsettling, because the word ‘sellout’ was on the tip of everyone’s tongue the entire time,” she says. “It felt like they were abandoning ship.”
Craig Wedren of the pop-leaning Shudder to Think argues that his ambitions were always there. “We wanted to take our music into the mainstream,” he says. “There was a lot of backlash, but if you’re cutting ties because we signed with Sony, that means you’re not hearing the music. Those people were more interested in the philosophy.”
Despite the dedication to low prices – in 2020, digital $7, CDs $10, vinyl $15 – and high principles, it has not always been a united front at Dischord. “Me and Ian are like an old married couple,” Nelson says. “There’s no shortage of love and respect, but we could not be more different. I’m a graphic designer, so I love advertising and TV commercials, but Ian loathes all these things. We’ve butted heads a ridiculous amount.”
MacKaye nearly called it a day around 2007 – and one other job has been frequently suggested for him: “People say I should run for office,” he says, laughing. “But I’m just not a big enough asshole.” Anyway, he soon had a rethink. “I realised I’m bolstered by the trust of hundreds of people,” he says of the label’s bands. “They entrusted Dischord with the caretaking of this music and I have a custodial responsibility.”
He even hired a private investigator to track down band members of Void, who had split in 1984 but were not cashing their royalty cheques. When the investigator found one of them, it turned out he had been sticking to the original deal: that all money would go into releasing the next Dischord record, even though the band were not making one themselves. “For 30 years, he was living on that premise,” says MacKaye. “It was really touching.” He persuaded him to start cashing the cheques.
Dischord still puts out new albums – MacKaye’s band Coriky being one 2020 release – but largely focuses on archive, including the sprawling Fugazi live series of more than 750 recordings. The label has a tendency to rub off and stick. “Its legacy is incalculable,” says Richards. “I’m 41 and still learning how much Dischord and Fugazi have taught me. It’s a beautiful model for what music and community can be.”
Wedren feels the same: “There’s magic, genius and beauty there, along with a viral decency. I take it to my work in Hollywood as a composer, and what better place to apply Dischord principles?”
So is Dischord a template for contemporary labels to follow, or the product of a bygone era? “People should self-determine and figure out what’s right for them,” MacKaye says. “Everything is less now, in terms of sales, but music will never die. It will take new forms. Kids are developing secret languages through music and they’re going to figure out ways to disseminate that. Whether it’s on plastic or their devices; whatever form, there are ways of doing it that feel ethical, meaningful and righteous.”
Dischord will not be commemorating 40 years of the label, but, when reflecting on its legacy, MacKaye looks back to a box set released after 20. “When we started, we were told we were too idealistic and not a real business,” he says. “People were derisive and made fun. After 20 years, I wanted to ask: are we fucking real yet? So I would just double down on that. If you strike a bell and 40 years later people can still hear the ring, then that’s something.”
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