Related cover story: On the haunt: Double Phantom Records breathes new life into Atlanta's DIY scene

When Jeff Nelson and Ian MacKaye of the seminal Washington D.C. hardcore band Minor Threat founded Dischord Records in 1980 the goal was to document their former band, the Teen Idles. Although they had no way of knowing it at the time, they were kicking off a legacy that brought underground music and D.I.Y. culture together and inspired generations of independent record labels to follow in their footsteps.

After almost 30 years MacKaye still runs Dischord with the same fiercely independent and self-sustaining spirit that got the label started in the first place. And though he is by no means a luddite, MacKaye has utilized the technology boom of the last decade as an evolving means of documenting and disseminating Dischord's releases while not letting the medium become the message.

Chad Radford: The rise of the internet over the last 10 years has drastically altered the ways in which people find and make music available to the world. Could a label like Dischord be launched and run the way it has been, in the year 2009?

Ian MacKaye: Of Course it could, but you have to transpose things. It couldn’t be started the exact same way. For instance, when Dischord was started there were no CDs and there were no digital downloads and there were no computers. So obviously if you started a label exactly the same way as Dischord the context would be entirely different. It would be hard… But also, Dischord was started to document a specific scene. It was a scene that already had momentum. The band had already been playing – it already had an audience. We were essentially fulfilling the desires of people who wanted to hear the music. They wanted to hear it and we wanted to document it. Pressing the Teen Idles single in 1980 just made sense. We were documenting it. We weren’t trying to promote anything because the band had already broken up.

So if you’re in Atlanta or wherever and there is a local band that’s really popular and people come to see them regularly and are passionate about the band, even if the band were to break up, people would still want to have some sort of documentation. If a label were to start to start today and say ‘okay, we’re going to create a way for you to listen to this music,’ they could still succeed.

But also there are musical movements. Dischord was involved with a significant cultural movement in America. There was a matter of timing. I was born when I was born and got into music when I started playing music and put out a record because my band broke up. But there was a cultural movement afoot and they will continue to come, so to answer your question, could a label like Dischord start today, of course. It just wouldn’t look like, sound like or be like Dischord. The general impetus is to document something that’s important to you and if someone was going to be thoughtful, reasonable and fair minded about music then it will always be a possibility.

Were there other labels or businesses that you looked at as an influence in the way that you ran the label?

Not in terms of business because we were totally clueless about how record labels work. We were from Washington D.C. and there was no music industry to speak of in this city so we had no idea as to how record labels worked. We approached it very simple mindedly. We thought ‘okay we’re going to make the record and sell it for however much we thought would be fair, and thought about how much we would want to spend on a record and made it a little bit cheaper. Of course we took into account how much we were spending on it. If we spent $1 or $1.25 we thought ‘well, we can’t sell it for that much, so let’s make it $2.50,’ which seemed like a fair price for a 7-inch. It was very pragmatic and we definitely thought about what would work.

The necessary ingredient, or course, and this brings it back to the root of everything, is that you can put out a record that you like, but someone is going to have to want to buy it. People ask me about starting labels all the time and the truth is that you have to write a good song. If you want people to remark upon your work than you have to do something remarkable.

In recent years -- I think it’s still the case -- but there is an enormous amount of structural sophistication with labels and any number of computer generated templates and finding stuff on the internet, but ultimately without a good song everything is hallow and it’s not going to go anywhere.

One of the benefits of the Internet is that you can find anything there, but the problem with the Internet is that you can find anything there. It’s like walking into the most insanely massive box store in the world and trying to find a pair of tweezers.

Maintaining a strong identity on the internet does seem to be a big obstacle for younger bands.

My advice is to maintain a strong sense of identity to themselves and the people they’re playing music to and that will translate. Again, you will hear people in the music business talking about touring a record, or touring behind a record. That is a total inversion in my mind. Why would a band go out and play shows to promote a record? It suggests that somehow the record is the goal, where in fact the music is the goal and the record should support the tour. It’s the other way around, and this is the way that we have allowed ourselves to be shuffled around by the industry. Music was here before the industry, but there is so much of an emphasis placed on selling stuff that music becomes sort of like the byproduct of the sale. So often you hear people say I want to form a band and put together a record to promote the band. My position is that you should form a band because you want to make music and then when you’ve played music long enough, and you’re agile and your music is compelling enough for people to come see your band and take an interest in it, that’s when you need to document it. That’s the trap that people fall into, and they say to themselves what’s the best way to promote music. Well, the best way is to write good music.

Even as a journalist I fall into that trap. I receive 50-100 promo CDs, downloads and 7-inches each week and I pick what to write about based on timeliness. Is the band coming through town with a new record?

I know, it’s overwhelming! Imagine if you had a really deep, abiding love for fruit, and you really liked to eat a piece of fruit and contemplate it, and get your head around just what it is that you like about that piece of fruit so much. And then everyday you get 15 fruit baskets in the mail and you have to eat it all. You’re fucked.

That’s the story of my life… And then people get angry with me when I don’t tell them how delicious their fruit baskets are.

I can dig it. I always feel bad because people who are music writers and review records obviously have a deep love for music but then they find themselves in a position where they’re being force fed the music and they can’t keep up; they can’t really put their heart into it. Not that these people don’t have a heart, but there’s just not enough heart to go around. So writers often end up writing about music in a different manner in terms of references and comparisons and most diabolically the kind of ephemeral details that have been supplied by the press sheet.

You know like, ‘this guy’s brother lost a leg in Iraq and wanted to make a record, and this other guy’s mom died, but everyone in the band loves sex. They’re all clearly under duress but they love to fuck and it comes through in their music…’ So sayeth the press release.

I tend to think of Dischord as the grandfather of the DIY or independent label.

What’s notable about Dischord is that we really had no idea how to do it and we approached it just with thinking it through. We didn’t accept anyone else’s template and did it our way. As years went by we started selling more records and then we were in a position where we knew how we were doing it and one band would say ‘we want press photos.’ So we said okay, let’s think about how we should do this in a way that wouldn’t be wasteful and figure out different ways to approach what bands were asking for and create a response. Essentially that’s how I try to live period; think about a situation and try to come up with a creative way to navigate it.

I don’t know most labels, but the one thing that I hope people walk away from Dischord with is that you don’t have to do things the way people tell you to do them. That’s the quickest way to bitterness and surrender.

I think the way that resonates now is that no one has really completely figured out how to use the internet.

People are still high on the internet and they are high on technology. At some point it will settle down and people will realize that computers, and their phones are just tools, and that’s all they ever have been. You should write a story about how phones have crippled the gig audiences. I really suspect that people get hooked into this other network and they can’t be bothered to go back outside of it. They get plugged-in to these things and it’s like crack. I’m 47 and the only other time that I can think of in America, where there was such a consummate fetishism, or the only thing that comes to mind is the mid-‘70s head shop scene when there was a real emphasis on drug paraphernalia. People were so interested in the various ways to smoke pot, but really all these things were just tools. That’s the only other time that I can think of that connects with the way that people fetishize technology right now and it’s a distraction, which is all it’s ever really been. At some point no one is really going to give a fuck about your app. It’s absurd, and at that time is when people will get back to work at making things real.

That’s interesting because both drugs and iPhones shorten your attention span make you dumber.

Exactly, of course noting that I didn’t use that word that you just used. They get enough advertising already without help from me. I’m really pushing for the use of PLD’s which are personal listening devices, like the little players that use mp3s….

You mean like an iPod?

I didn’t say it, you did. [laughs]

Noted.

I’m doing battle. PLDs man! Spread the word!

(Related cover story: On the haunt: Double Phantom Records breathes new life into Atlanta's DIY scene)

(Photo by Amy Farina)