Consumer Guide Album

Minutemen: The Punch Line [SST EP, 1981]
They're politniks who love punk, with a name that mocks hardcore's rightwing rep and their own aesthetic--these eighteen "songs" average under fifty seconds apiece. The lyrics don't rhyme or even scan, less poems than the jottings of young men given to cultural bullshit. "History Lesson"--"hundred thousand years ago homosapiens stood erect mind empty fresh created love and hate created god and antigod human slaughtered human for power"--gets the flavor: not Fredric Jameson, but better-informed than the skinheads they play for. And where last year's seven-inch Paranoid Time could pass for speed-rock, the funky dissonance here has no parallel in the genre or anywhere else: not Ornette Coleman, but better-informed than the Circle Jerks they play with. B