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IVH: Jawbreaker / Unfun [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-08-31
Tonight’s selections from Jawbreaker’s 1990 debut album, Unfun.
The punk scene has always been a bit of a joke, if we’re all being honest with ourselves. What started off as young hoodlums picking up stolen instruments and making songs about anarchism, war, and racism has evolved to middle class white kids making sweet melodies to songs about love and parents. Not to say that the original scene is sacred or anything (just listen to how dated The Sex Pistols’ debut is), but it certainly is easy to see how many pop-punk bands end up being the butt of a moderately hip and somewhat funny joke on an elitist website such as this. Then again, how would I know. I wasn’t around in the 70s for The Ramones or The Clash or anything else. What made the band Jawbreaker special was that they knew this. They also knew chances are you weren’t around either. Jawbreaker took their shameless embrace of personal and emotional topics and spun it on it’s head, making sly stabs at the seriousness of punk rock and at the elitist nature of it all. They made songs about high school-esque crushes (Want) or not being all that tough (Incomplete) while the rest of the scene moaned on about political inconveniences and injustices while never actually voting or changing anything. Jawbreaker didn’t invent pop-punk or emotional music, but it changed the scene. It took the melodic Rites of Spring sound and fused it with Ramones-like song structures and thus created the mold for punk rock in the late 90s and the 00s (for better or worse). Yeah, that’s great and all, but what about the music? Well, remember that jab I made at the Sex Pistols expense? Yes, admittedly, this album does sound dated in comparison to other Jawbreaker albums, or a lot of other punk albums that came out afterwards, and in some ways that can work in it’s favor. Because of the grainy production and simple song structure, it’s quite easy to appreciate this album retrospectively. Songs such as Seethruskin, Busy, and Gutless are noisier and have more beauteous lyrics than their counterparts in the music scene, but it’s hard to ignore that the song structures are overtly simple. Granted, this can be considered a problem with all of Jawbreaker’s albums, but in later works the band made up for it with even noisier production (Bivouac) or with an epic scope and embrace of a simpler sound (24 Hour Revenge Therapy), only for the problem to come back on Dear You. This album, along with all the other records, is great, but really at this point did you need me to tell you that Jawbreaker can write a beautiful pop song with the hook only containing the droning yet harmonious hook of “I want you”? — Sputnik Music
Want / Boxcar
When Jawbreaker’s Unfun first appeared, in 1990, I was a freshman in college. One roommate of mine schooled me in the ways of modern R&B, while the other was into popular metal. My tastes varied, but I somehow missed out on Jawbreaker that first time around. As subsequent albums were released, I did indeed catch on, but it was probably a good thing. The raw complexities of Unfun would have probably been lost on a naïve 19-year-old. I liked my soul-baring artists more straightforward, like Morrissey or Dave Gahan. I think if I had heard Blake Schwarzenbach’s thoughtful lyrics paired with the powerhouse trio’s unpredictable and juggernaut song structures, my head would have exploded. Twenty years after the fact, Jawbreaker seems to have been well ahead of its time, a pioneering influence on that nebulous sphere of music now known as “emo”. Unfun has been remastered by drummer Adam Pfahler, and repackaged by his own Blackball Records, with rumors of the band reuniting in its wake. Unfun is an overwhelming whirlwind, a master class on percussion, a proto-grunge bass artifact that stuns with every low end pluck, and a display of the importance of being vocally earnest, while burning the place down at the same time. Songs such as “Want,” “Busy” and “Incomplete” still crackle with angsty energy, evolving from west coast ’80s punk, and one can easily see, further leading to the soon-to-be grunge era. — Treblezine
Fine Day
x YouTube Video
San Francisco's Jawbreaker straddled a pivotal moment when emo was a "core": halfway between insult and genre, hardcore and pop, underground and mainstream. Their lyrics stressed both punk principles and emotional outpourings. Their music was furious but catchy, with a set of mannerisms that flowed smoothly into indie-rock, pop-punk, and alt-rock: palm-muted power chords laced with bright octaves and harmonics; guitar leads rounding off into whistling feedback; counter-melodic bass lines; and epic breakdowns with arty sampled monologues. They had lofty ideals, but their songs walked around on the streets, sullen and pissed, with fresh scabs and dog-eared volumes of Bukowski in their back pockets. The phrase "emo-core" itself is a problematic compromise between hardcore and pop-- an angst-inducing identity for a young band. Blake Schwarzenbach was 22 when Jawbreaker's 1990 debut, Unfun, came out, and this was but one of the pressures that drove him. Recriminating tunefully through a shredded throat, he calibrated himself against a punk scene and adult world of coequal injustice. Unfun was Jawbreaker's punkest record, but he feared it wasn't punk enough: "Sorry we ain't hard enough to piss your parents off," he snipped on "Incomplete". His fretful intelligence often led him to dispense free psychological evaluations and strawman parables. There are many issues-based songs: "Softcore" is anti-porn, and "Seethruskin" is anti-racism. It gets almost Orwellian: "Don't think that I ain't counting all the things you do," Schwarzenbach bristles in scene-cop mode. (He always loved those sassy "ain'ts.") To that extent, the record earns its title. Yet the music itself is irrepressibly fun. Drummer Adam Pfahler was a fucking behemoth, a whiz with galloping toms and breathtakingly long fills. He sounds great on this low-end boosted reissue, which, on CD and download, also includes the formative Whack & Blite EP. And Schwarzenbach's prickliness was ultimately sympathetic, because it stemmed from a vulnerability he laid bare in songs like "Want", where dark secrets are exorcised in the name of love. "So now you know where I come from," he sings, underlining it twice for emphasis: "My secret's come undone/ My heart reveals my cause." The world is fallen, but he's not dancing on the wreckage. He's looking for survivors, imploring on "Busy", "We're all close to the end; don't you need a friend?/ Honor your allegiances!" — Pitchfork
Busy
"Unfun sounds pretty much the same right now as it did then." So why am I wasting finger movements and stomach acid trying to write about this record? Well, this is where the elusiveness begins: it was my introduction to the punk rock/d.i.y. music community. This community was one of which I was utterly ignorant; only later, when I became submerged in it, did I realize that it existed outside of the confines of the mainstream that I did know. A friend in college (a real flesh-and-blood friend, not an aluminum disc friend) who was in a punk band introduced me to the record, telling me it was one of his favorites. In order to find a CD copy for myself, since I wore out the cassette copy I made of his, I scoured the copies of Maximum Rock N Roll that he loaned me and went with him when he went to independent record stores and punk rock shows. After I found the record, things just seemed to blossom. Now, I could go on and on about the bands I started listening to, the shows I started seeing, the people I started meeting, the friends I started making. This would clearly demonstrate my total Jawbreaker-sparked engulfment by this outsider community (and thus make for good writing). But the point I want to make is one that’s more difficult to argue (and thus make for not-so-good writing): this record is doubly symbolic for me. It’s representative both of my gateway into the musical community of punk rock/d.i.y. and into the ideological community of punk rock/d.i.y. culture. So at what point did listening to punk rock music lead to a change in my cultural world-view or ideology? How does consuming a product of a certain public culture lead to a personal ideological change? What were the specific steps by which this happened to me? I know that it wasn’t Jawbreaker’s music or lyrics alone on the record that did it. Nor was it the hundred or so bands that I discovered as a result of the record. Nor was it any one of the friends I made, the books I read, the movies I saw, the papers I wrote, the thoughts I thought, or the things I said since those months in 1992 when my mind and world opened up for the better. — Pop Matters
Incomplete
Eye-5 (Get it? I-5, Interstate 5) from the Whack & Blite EP. This song closes out the CD version of Unfun so it seems fitting to close out this diary with it. An excellent melodic bass line carries this one.
Eye-5
WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
All repeats.
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