Daniel recommends “New Day Rising” by Hüsker Dü
The lunch bell was about to ring. In a lanky jumble of overstuffed backpacks and understated teenage affection, my best friend passed me a mixtape in the hallway. He had dubbed Hüsker Dü’s live album The Living End on one side and Sugar’s Copper Blue on the other. Up to that point, I paid attention to music in only the most cursory ways, and to the degree that I did—think Huey Lewis and the News, think “Weird Al” Yankovic—it belonged to a more juvenile world I was eager to leave behind.
That evening, I popped the cassette into my boombox and pushed play. The live show opens with two hundred voices jostling to be heard over one another. Bob Mould checks his guitar levels, and Grant Hart lets out a long formless sound that dissolves into feedback and the feverish, expectant clamor of the audience. “Check, one two, hey.” A few restless cheers and whistles scatter against the gathering force at the edge of the stage. “Check, one, two. Two, two, two.” Mould’s guitar shudders briefly and then begins to squeal and shimmer with more feedback.
The crowd disappears into itself, and Mould draws out the moment, letting it hang in the air, iridescent and portentous, until finally, irrevocably, Hart’s drums come barreling through. Greg Norton is there with him on bass, furiously accenting every wild-eyed snare hit, every amphetamine slam of the kick drum. Mould is still riding his feedback, but as it begins to crest, he surges into the song, and it swells with distortion. “New day rising!” Mould shouts it over his guitar, over the drums, over the bass, over the swirling mass of elbows and shoulders down front. He shouts it again and again. The ninth and tenth times he almost sings it. On and on he repeats the phrase, never once surrendering its potential.
The first Ramones LP set three-chord songs to a revved-up backbeat, changing Mould’s life forever, but it’s those three simple words that constitute the entirety of “New Day Rising” that changed mine. Drifting up out of the reticence of youth, each change in intonation was gravid with its own sense of wonder and ardent possibility. The fierceness of Mould’s delivery made it feel tantalizingly adult, but it was the audacity that someone could write a whole song out of so little that emboldened me to finally step into the world it promised.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but it was a decidedly post-punk world I was entering. Whereas punk famously declared there’s “no future, no future for you,” Hüsker Dü and their peers had fostered a more optimistic community of their own making. Like-minded outcasts had found one another, and though I arrived a generation late, I could still glimpse the model of interconnectedness and self-empowerment they built together out of the wreckage of punk’s insurrection.
I began listening to the music of my generation, first with Sugar on the cassette’s b-side and then to the scores of contemporary bands that claimed Mould as an influence. I got a job at a record store after high school and met people who pushed me to listen more broadly still. Eventually, I decided to take up a pair of drumsticks and start a band. Making mix tapes, playing in bands, going to shows: All these things became the way I connected with others, all different ways I looked for the same thing.
I chased this elusive sense of belonging the entirety of my young adulthood, and from behind my kit, I found the intimacy and connection of the best sex and the physical transcendence of drugs. For me, as for Jon Fine, guitarist for the band Bitch Magnet and author of Your Band Sucks, “the music was the sex and drugs.” Until it couldn’t be anymore.
Mould has been candid that alcohol and drug use contributed to the dissolution of Hüsker Dü. He had to find a way to carry on without the only band he’d ever known, and on his debut solo album, Workbook, he sketched out the beginning of his own new day rising, pushing the limits of his expression, almost to the point of madness. After I began to bump up against my own limitations as a drummer, I, too, went in search of a new means of expression. Sex, drugs, and shitty first drafts doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but at the front of the classroom I have found where I most belong.
I consider it my goal to teach my students to participate in the conversations that shape their lives and wrest away the agency from those who would gladly write their story for them. It’s a pedagogy informed by both sides of the post-punk hyphen, and I find their anxious, eager writing at the beginning of the term as exhilarating as listening to “New Day Rising” that first time. A whole future of what they might accomplish spools out across the academic calendar, and with each passing year, the experience of teaching accumulates new meaning and new urgency. I’m practically singing to them now. I intend to continue on as long as I can, again and again, repeat to the end.
Daniel Couch is a professor of English literature and composition at Chemeketa Community College. He is the editor of Your Guide to College Writing and co-author of a book on Bob Mould’s 1989 solo debut, Workbook, for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series. He currently plays drums in the socially conscious punk rock band, Scontro.
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