Subscribe
Along with At the Drive In, the most talked about band reunion of the 2012 music festival season has got to be Refused, the Swedish hardcore band that dissolved in 1998. In 2006, I spent a week with Jonas Lyxzén, brother of Refused’s lead singer Dennis Lyxzén, while on tour in China with Jonas’s punk band Insurgent Kid. “When Metallica plays in Stockholm, they call up my brother and say they want to hang out. When Anthrax comes, they call Dennis. It’s always like this,” he said. This was perhaps an early inkling that Refused’s legacy was growing. This year it finally attained critical mass in the form of a phone call from Coachella that re-launched the band onto rock stages around the world, including close to a dozen top-tier festivals, which of course includes Fuji Rock.
But long before Refused was getting shout outs from the Foo Fighters, this band was a much different story. In 1998, Refused had just released their third album The Shape of Punk to Come, a nod to Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come that was a manifesto for social justice from a group of self-affirmed “socialist, fag-loving, PC scumbags.” It was also as experimental as a hardcore album could be. Extensive samples of techno, jazz, classical violin and cello music, and spoken-word poetry and political speeches create, like on any great concept album, an continuous and etherial sonic space that leaves room for thought between the interruptions of the songs. The songs are hardcore bursts, that leap out of the silences with an intensity comparable to that of their American revolutionary contemporaries, Rage Against the Machine. Lyxzén’s vocals are meanwhile the dry-throat screaming of extreme metal. Unlike most Swedish punk bands up to that point, the production was spit-polish perfect.
The Shape of Punk to Come didn’t get mainstream attention at the time but is now being regarded by some as a masterpiece. Pitchfork called it the “Best New Reissue” of 2010, and one UK magazine, Big Cheese, even went so far as to list it as the #2 greatest punk album of all time, after Never Mind the Bollocks and before London Calling. But the Swedish hardcore band clearly didn’t see that coming in the early autumn of 1998, when a typical punk-rock-band-in-a-van tour of the US drove them to pieces and ended in total failure. After a show in Atlanta, Georgia, the band imploded and called off the rest of their tour. But to this whimper, there was also a bang, a screeching manifesto they later released online, “Refused Are Fucking Dead,” that pointed fingers at the capitalist music industry, the class structure and other typical stuff, but it also dwelled equally on their own sense of helpless complicity in the process. This is how they put it:
“When people are being praised as geniuses and idols just because they play music or write books or something equally boring and “cultural”, when the widespread belief that their creation is more important than that people take part in everyday life…What does that say about the rest of us and what does it say about the system that we have? When we continue to uphold the bourgeoisie myth of self realization by saying that anyone can make it, just as long as they work hard, or pick up a guitar, we uphold the dream of good vs. bad jobs (rockstar = good, factory worker = bad) thus we also uphold the class system and the justification of it.”
The same statement later went on to say, “When we become just another subculture with all the right attributes instead of a real counter-culture, then it is time to die.” As for their post-breakup vision, they stated, “We will continue to, at every attempt, overthrow the class system, burn museums and to strangle the great lie that we call culture.” In subsequent years, Lyxzén and drummer David Sandström stayed in the underground, forming other hardcore bands, while guitarist Kristofer Steen went back to school at the Swedish Opera Acadmy and guitarist Jon Brännström studied medicine.
The group’s stern ethical sense probably has a big connection to where they’re from. Refused is from the smallish city of Umeå (pronounced You-me-oh) in the north of Sweden. In Sweden, everything north of Stockholm is considered “the north,” and this university town of under 80,000 people is about 400km north of Stockholm and 400km south of the Arctic Circle. I visited Umeå a few years ago during the month of January, when the days were five hours long, and instead of some frozen waste, like “the North” in Game of Thrones, it was more like a very snowy Portland – full of vegan delis, government-subsidized collectivist punk rock club houses, college apartments, skinny jeans and straight-edge idealism. It’s a place where a band could be awesome without being famous. Perhaps a band of twenty-somethings from this place with its cherished notions of how the world should be just couldn’t take the stress of being injected into the gigantic, complex market societies of continental Europe and the US.
But now they are older and wiser and thankfully not afraid to share some music with they love with an audience that’s more than ever dying to hear it, even if that means a little backsliding on the politics of their youth. In a recent statement explaining their new tour, they declared:
We haven’t been a rocknroll band for 14 years so not all of us are as compatible with the culture of the music business as some other band in a similar situation probably would be. We never were, but in 1996 we could work our way around it by playing all of your hometowns, 150 shows in a year, no sweat. This is no longer the case. In summation: we want to play to everybody but we’re not the Rolling Stones. We convey this with all due respect.
And now:
…suddenly there’s this possibility to do it like it was intended. We wanna do it over, do it right. For the people who’ve kept the music alive through the years, but also for our own sakes. We feel that you deserve it and we hope the feeling is mutual.
See you in the pit.
Refused official website: www.officialrefused.com
