'Rather Be Forgotten Than Remembered For Giving In': The Necessity Of The Refused Reunion
Wednesday, 06 May 2015
Written by Ben Bland
Umeå is the largest city in northern Sweden. It has a subarctic climate and has grown rapidly since the foundation of Umeå University in 1965. Last year, it served as one of two European Capitals of Culture. It is the home of the Norrland Opera, hosts a significant annual jazz festival and is a centre for visual art. Most notably, though, Umeå has been an extraordinarily fertile city for heavy music over the last 25 years. Meshuggah are from Umeå. So are Cult of Luna.
Umeå’s most important cultural export, though, is Refused, the band who rewrote the hardcore punk rulebook with 1998’s devastatingly brilliant ‘The Shape of Punk to Come’. It depends on who you talk to, but the record is widely seen as the greatest hardcore album of all time.
While the influence of Fugazi and The Nation of Ulysses is writ large across Refused’s catalogue, ‘The Shape of Punk to Come’ to this day provides a perfect synchronisation of hardcore’s increasingly disparate strands. There’s a metallic edge to the guitar work, a focus on varied dynamics as per the post-hardcore movement, obvious influences from the world of jazz and electronica and, most crucially of all, a radical political message at the record’s heart.
Refused were always strangers to conformity. Both their 1994 debut, ‘This Might Just Be the Truth’, and their 1996 sophomore effort, ‘Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent’, had their foundations in the group’s radical leftist political profile. The former was the sound of a band struggling to find a suitable voice for their views, while the latter was a vicious, albeit slightly one-dimensional, denouncement of modern capitalist society.
It was only on ‘The Shape of Punk to Come’ that Refused successfully managed to articulate their political beliefs through musical means. By taking the work of earlier hardcore provocateurs and refracting it through their own tangled web of musical influences, Refused gave their political messages a whole new dimension. As New Noise, the band’s most famous song, states: "How can we expect anyone to listen, if we are using the same old voice? We need new noise, new art for real people!"
Despite the fact that their new, more radical sonic aesthetic came twinned with a more accessible songwriting style, ‘The Shape of Punk to Come’ made few waves upon its release. The band, increasingly frustrated at both their musical brilliance and political philosophy being greeted predominantly with ignorance by the punk community, split up in October 1998. To mark their demise the band published a fiery letter called Refused are Fucking Dead, which outlined theirs disgust at the commercial landscape against which they had resolutely struggled: "When every expression, no matter how radical it is, can be transformed into a commodity and be bought or sold like cheap soda, how is it then possible that you are going to be able to take “art” seriously?"
The communiqué strongly implied that Refused would never return, but did also promise that the five members of the band would “continue to demand revolution here and now”, rather than abandon their politics in the wake of the group’s demise. None of the projects that formed out of the band’s ashes – including AC4 and The (International) Noise Conspiracy – ever made an album as good as ‘The Shape of Punk to Come’, nor did they gain the audience that Refused struggled to capture in the late ‘90s.
The legacy of ‘The Shape of Punk to Come’, however, grew and grew. Despite being almost completely ignored on its release, within a decade it had come to be acknowledged as a true classic, and not just by a small community of hardcore punk fans. In 2012 Refused reformed to tour the album in a manner never previously afforded them. The shows were huge successes and, at the end of the year, the band went their separate ways again…or so we thought.
Last week, Refused announced the impending release of their fourth studio album, ‘Freedom’. Predictably, the reaction to the news has been mixed. The punk world has always had a problem with success and, while it could just about stomach the fact that Refused went on tour in 2012, the idea of them being a fully active band again is – in the eyes of many – a treacherous betrayal of the band’s politics: a band disowning their supposed beliefs in pursuit of financial gain.
A large part of the substance for this position comes from the Refused are Fucking Dead manifesto. Of course, punk provides one of the few environments in which statements made in one’s 20s are considered binding for life by necessity. When Refused wrote that statement they had spent seven years trying to make their views heard, suffering the depressing ignominy of life on the road for little reward.
Their last show had been shut down by the Virginia Police, concluding a US tour that had emphasised more starkly than ever that the world wasn’t prepared to listen to the group’s uncompromising anti-capitalist truths. Is it any wonder, given these circumstances, that the manifesto did not include provisions for how the band, older and wiser, might feel if given the opportunity to resurrect Refused at a later date? Were they supposed to predict that ‘The Shape of Punk to Come’ would gain a reputation almost unprecedented among albums of its genre?
Refused have been handed, by virtue of that album’s extraordinary increase in public prominence since its release, a rare second chance to achieve what circumstance denied them in 1998. They have an opportunity that radical leftist artists are rarely given to expound to the masses their despair over the state of the contemporary world. It matters little whether ‘Freedom’ lives up to its illustrious predecessor, which is an impossible task. It matters little whether the members of Refused gain financial reward for the band’s return. Given the lack of riches in the music industry today it hardly seems likely that they will get any more than a reasonable income, which we can hardly begrudge them.
Only one thing about the Refused reunion genuinely matters: the potential for the band to inspire others to follow their path and actively voice repugnance over the hyper-capitalist landscape that the band are returning to. It’s easy to moan about how the band are going back on their word, just as it easy to put up with the morally bankrupt state of contemporary international politics or – and this is particularly true for fans of underground music – to feel annoyed that a favourite band might actually gain a larger degree of mainstream recognition. Punk, despite the aspirations of many practitioners over the decades, has too often suffered from small-mindedness, from a communal approach that has favoured insularity over effective political action.
The world needs change now as much as it ever has. Decades of complacency since the end of the second world war has led to a world dominated by inequality, both in developed nations and between the developed and the developing world. Bands like Refused don’t have much chance of changing all that on their own, but by coming back from the abyss they might just help would-be young radicals find their voice.
Yes, ‘Freedom’ could dent the band’s incredible legacy – particularly in the way it is interpreted by those more concerned with rhetoric than results – but the world needs Refused. This is a band that promised never to give in, and we should be enormously grateful that they’ve taken this chance to fulfil that promise.
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