Brave Captain. fIREHOSE. 1986. SST.

 Questions of the efficacy of leadership come to light on this debut album opener from fIREHOSE. A rhetorical critique of military hierarchy, Brave Captain assaults the air around you with Gang Of Four inspired guitar and rhythmic intensity. Co-founded by the surviving members of San Pedro stalwarts Minutemen, George Hurley and Mike Watt, along with guitarist/vocalist Ed Crawford, fIREHOSE continues the duo’s American complacency resistance, specifically its inevitable, lamentable hold on popular music. Disinformation among the top tiers of national leadership made it possible for the Lt. Colonel to illegally sell arms to the Islamic paramilitary group with Israel acting as intermediary while the Commander in Chief, high on post surgical recovery drugs, dozed consciously in a hospital bed as the National Security Advisor fed him meaningless details concerning the operation. Urgency was a hallmark of Minutemen’s deliberately messy, signature sound, propelled forward by a trio whose aesthetic was predicated on the unsettling awareness that the working class’ greatest artistic freedom was to detail the enormity of the boot at its neck. Like Minutemen, fIREHOSE was a democratically minded provocative organ that rarely distinguished between what the brain has to say from how the fist chooses to say it when communicating dispatches from its ongoing assault upon the status quo. The illegal sale of arms to Hezbollah and the subsequent funding of Nicaraguan Contras—also illegal—by members of the Reagan administration revealed not a starting point of an autonomous, functioning body of deep state players accountable to no one but additional evidence of its vigorous continuum. Recently, the lies and relentless volleys of unforgivable violence between Hamas and Israel can serve as a reminder why bands like Minutemen and fIREHOSE are vital to not only a music audience but to culture itself, which thrives on the voice of people. According to Carl Sagan, "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." It’s an insight worthy of the memory of the late, great D. Boon.

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