Although Burma lacked real organized support, the band was blessed by its association with label owner Richard Harte. Besides his unfailing belief in Burma, he produced and engineered their records; he's largely the reason why 1983's "Vs.," recorded mostly live in the studio, is one of the most sonically powerful punk documents ever produced. And if Burma had made the major-label leap (Warner Bros. was briefly interested but was really only impressed by "Revolver"), what would that have gotten them? Throughout the 1980s, scores of indie heroes, including Hüsker Dü, the Replacements and X, all signed to major labels, a move that failed to prop up careers that were already stumbling. To put it another way, Azerrad's theory explains why so many of the farewell shows documented on "Horrible Truth" were poorly attended, and why Burma's recent audiences have been the band's largest ever. What the theory does not explain is why, as with Dylan's infamous crowd-enraging electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the number of people who now claim to have been at those Burma farewell shows is clearly greater than the number of people who actually were.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The punk explosion of 1976 still resonates because of what it allowed -- and still allows -- musicians with only the most rudimentary of tools. As true punk believers, Mission of Burma achieved an astoundingly expressive array of sounds and textures from an essentially limited sonic palette. The lovely, haunting "Trem Two," for example, is based almost entirely around one five-note descending chromatic scale on Miller's guitar, meticulously played (with the aid of an effects pedal) to resonate rhythmically like a metronome. Growing up in Ann Arbor, Miller was profoundly affected by the Stooges, hometown heroes fronted by Iggy Pop, whose first two albums, "The Stooges" and "Fun House," released in '69 and '70, are some of the earliest articulations of what would eventually become punk. Miller adapted the brilliantly lumpen style of Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, forging a unique combination of bite and jangle that bands continue to experiment with today.
Mission of Burma's most obvious innovation was the band's ability to operate in this gray area, combining rock 'n' roll's traditional fetish for pure, unmediated feeling, with a more modern sort of artistic calculation. Burma's music could evoke everything from the Beatles' ecstatic run of Hamburg rock clubs in the early '60s ("That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate") to the lightning-speed hardcore punk -- so fast it often seemed more like avant-garde art music than rock 'n' roll -- that was developing in the U.S. during Burma's tenure ("Go Fun Burn Man"). In this sense, Burma can be said to have blithely encapsulated punk's overarching mission: to draw a line connecting rock rebels past and present, and, in doing so, re-imagine and re-establish the music's anarchic condition.
Despite the punk pedigree, however, critics almost universally refer to Mission of Burma as "post-punk," and this term serves as a clue to why Burma was on the forefront of something whose importance is only fully understood in hindsight. With its implications of the resumption of real life after a revolution, the term "post-punk" poses the interesting aesthetic conundrum of what to do with an art form after all barriers have supposedly come down. For, as much as punk shattered hardened rock conventions, it also marked the first time in rock's history that a truly progressive change had been predicated on somewhat retrograde impulses -- a determined return to the past. Punk was rock 'n' roll's most self-conscious moment to date, and this self-consciousness came to be post-punk's most recognizable marker.
Rock's self-conscious turn, as embodied by post-punk music, was part of a larger process of evolution that at least two critics, Joe Carducci and Robert Christgau, have described in linguistic terms, noting how "rock 'n' roll" gradually became known as simply "rock." As part of a broader attempt to explain the American post-punk and indie rock explosion of the '80s, Carducci notes in his 1991 book, "Rock and the Pop Narcotic," that many of the earliest rock 'n' roll records were made by temporary groups of musicians; by contrast, "rock music is rock and roll music made conscious of itself as a small band music." (Carducci also worked for SST, the pioneering record label run by members of Black Flag.) Three years later, Christgau expanded Carducci's terminology to describe the first uses, in the late '60s, of the word "rock, [which] is rock and roll made conscious of itself, burdened with every vague association and meaning that the era's ad hoc self-analysis could pile on." In other words, rock 'n' roll becomes "art," and its practitioners and fans begin to assert the music's overarching meaning and significance.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
However much punk rejected the ideology of '60s rock, the music still had to grapple with rock's growing self-consciousness. The year 1979 was the perfect moment for Mission of Burma, four geeky guys who loved punk and basked in its aftermath, but weren't afraid to dirty their hands with rock 'n' roll. Their timing was great; their "sin" was that they were in the wrong place. As a recognizable genre, post-punk really took hold in Great Britain, where the most important punk rock band, the Sex Pistols, was conceived as much as an art project and marketing ploy as a rock band. The Ramones, the Pistols' American counterparts, and the band whose 1976 self-titled debut was the punk shot heard round the world, saw themselves as much more of a celebration of postwar consumer culture, rather than an ironic critique of it. Until Nirvana's massive success caused people to adopt the term "alternative" -- a vague appellation that simultaneously suggested an outsider art without the obligation of having to define just what exactly the art was outside of -- "post-punk" meant to Americans just about any music that could be said to owe its existence, in some way, to punk.
Next page: Burma's contribution to rock history