Hüsker Dü,
Hate-Buddhas
By RJ Smith

Surely rock has reached some kind of crossing in the wilderness when Hüsker Dü can make the lyrics to their second single, "What Do I Want?" - "What do I want?/What would make me happy?/Nothing" - sound neither funny nor rhetorical. This is a condemnation that sheds light on nothing. "We want the world and we want it now" has been a catch-all you could paste over everything from Chuck Berry to punk. "What Do I Want?" calls for no realignment, heralds nothing new. It's 100 percent poor mental hygiene, a hole in the earth that won't be shoveled over.

Three guys from Mendota Heights, Minnesota, Hüsker Dü are hate -Buddhas - radiant of so much terror and revulsion that, live anyway, they aspire to a kind of implacability that approaches Zen. Punk gnawed at public institutions, aiming to make whatever social activities felt necessary not feel certain. But when one of the Hüsker's sings "I feel hate 'cause I move fast," he's announcing a whole new breed of dread. His mind's too clogged and pressured for him to ponder his standing at home, school, in society. All he can do is loathe or die (or so he feels). Stranded in an ion storm. The Hüsker's put Descartes in the slam pit: it's not even the self against the crowd, it's one's mind against one's body, peers, the world. This is a vision of society that would make Vance Packard (not to mention Ronald Reagan) shit in his pants.

The shiny domes of many hardcore partisans always seemed to me just an emblem of authenticity - few non-believing Bloomingdale punks were gonna do that just a look "now" at Second Avenue and St. Mark's. But Hüsker Dü (hair-heads all) make shaved heads seem like metaphors in disguise - the next best thing to exposing your gray stuff. Locked into their skulls, Hüsker Dü start out lashing at institutions - school, the m.-i. complex, hearth and home - and end up blasting away at consciousness itself. This is some serious aggression. Frequently in their songs they condemn the mixed up, the naive, and apathetic, only to crawl back into the space behind their

own eyes out of frustration and guilt. Alone, numbed, they lose track of themselves. All identity is linked with the intertwined yearnings to reach out and to lash out.

Another Pleasant Valley Sunday this is not. But in a country bent on turning everything into Roosevelt Island - all concrete and bad angles, and please don't bleed on the patio - it needs no justification. Hüsker Dü's 1981 Land Speed Record is a live performance that scalds throughout its 17 songs. The recent Everything Falls Apart EP is more studio-sedate, but still a thriller. Everyone's playing is improved. Guitarist Bob Mould is finding new ways to lard noise into the gaping holes hardcore opens up, and bassist Greg Norton easily moves from playing with the vocal line to accompanying the drums or guitar. Most improved, though, is drummer Grant Hart. Whitney Balliett once described a Max Roach solo as sounding like a drum kit falling down a stairway, and Hart comes off like that every time out. A little remorse creeps into the title cut, and a cover of "Sunshine Superman" comes out of left field and earns its place. Still, free-floating anger is at the center of this 12-song EP, and though Hüsker Dü are rooted in hardcore rock-steady, in the EP's most exciting moments their anger threatens to swallow either them or their conventions whole.

When Bob Mould threw his guitar down and pressed his fists to his temples at the end of their April 17 show at Gildersleeves, what might have been theatrical was truly frightening. It also seemed natural. Hüsker Dü had just finished a titanic show, one so fraught and locomotive even the band looked surprised. On vinyl a pumping bass-line or a throttling drum-fill may leap out of the thrash like a vein popping out of a hot dog, but details aren't really the thing. That's even more true live. At a couple of moments at Gildersleeves the very structure of hardcore was overpowered, so what came across was a molten, liquid blur that moved so fast it hardly seemed to move at all.

In this sufferer's time, people as young as the Hüskers can best express their disenfranchisement with a clear mind. Fresh out of school, they can survey the landscape and know that none of it is their fault. That attitude might be tempered with age, but after comparing the live performance on Land Speed Record to what I heard at Gildersleeves, it's obvious the Hüskers have just gotten more obsessed. "It's only getting darker," says the last song on "Everything Falls Apart." Yeah - but these three are getting brighter.

Hüsker Dü will appear at Folk City
tonight, April 27.