As a guest of the band L7 at the Hollywood Rock Festival in So Paulo, Brazil, Ian MacKaye waited outside a hotel with

the rest of the bands, managers, handlers, and crew, herded together like so many sweating sheep. In defiance of So Paulo's ninety degree, Kurt Cobain, outfitted in a winter hat, sweater, and jeans, pointed to MacKayes shorts, Hey, where can I get a pair of those? Incredulous, MacKaye replied that he could make him a pair right then. They headed to a restroom where MacKaye helped rip the jeans of the most recognizable, but perhaps physically feeble rock star of the 1990s. His two pairs of long johns now exposed, Cobains complexion turned sickly. Convulsing and shivering, he excused himself. As the door of a stall slammed, the sounds of dry heaving echoed against the tile.

Cobains history of addiction to drugs, including heroin, which was found in his blood during an autopsy after his suicide, has been documented extensively. Yet, MacKaye had words mixed with compassion for the person, and frustration at the circumstances that brought a man so talented to self-destruction.

If you take a very sensitive person, and you pluck them out of their normal routine and you give them a million dollars. You just say, dont worry well do your laundry, well your accounting, well do everything, go and be the genius you are. Imagine what its like when that door shuts. When someone has invested that much money, and theres that much attention, and everyones just waiting for your next brilliant fucking pearl to drop

As the frontman for two of Washington D.C.s most famous and influential punk bands of all time, Minor Threat and Fugazi, and as the founder of Dischord Records, arguably the most successful independent record label in the country, Ian Mackayes personal and professional history seems unrelated to the fate of Cobain, Nirvana, or any mainstream music of the 1990s.

Yet, Nirvanas success plays no small part in why MacKaye's band Fugazi, and the D.C. Punk scene he

helped found, rose to national attention from record executives, Rolling Stone, Spin, and other major labels and music magazines at the start of the nineties. As David Markeys groundbreaking documentary of a Nirvana tour coined it, 1991 was the year that punk broke, when punk music broke through from the underground and reached millions of people through MTV, and the mass distribution of Nirvanas album Nevermind. With Neverminds sales in the tens of millions, punk music reached one on Billboard, and played to crowds in sold-out stadiums. It was a stark departure from its origins in Washington, D.C. as music for the marginalized, played in semi-condemned community houses. Punk now had become an avenue for the record industry to profit enormously. Marketable and commercialized, punk became an aggregated cultural movement that either embraced popularity and profitability, or struggled to maintain its self-sufficiency. Put more crudely, Nirvana's popularity began the infighting over who was selling-out or not in the now nation-wide punk scene.

In the wake of Nevermind, D.C. became an El Dorado for record executives questing to sign the 'next Nirvana' in the city of the band's influences. Yet, from punks beginnings, Ian Mackaye, his bands, and his record label spearheaded the resistance against complicity in record industrys profiteering, and maintained the strong community ties established during the late seventies when D.C. punk was a nascent music scene. Though not without its own inner conflicts, with MacKayes influence, D.C. punk has lasted for more than three decades, continuing a tradition as a politically and socially engaged counter-culture.

However, it is punks precarious status as a counter-culture that makes it so difficult to define. The fact that such disparate bands such as Ian Mackayes Fugazi and Kurt Cobains Nirvanadisparate in terms of their song structures, singles sold, and their conception of music as a tool of political engagement could both be labeled punk is just one indication of punks lack of definability. It also points towards the conflict inherent in the production and reception of punk music: the struggle over authenticity. Confrontational by nature, whether through amp-bursting distorted guitar, impossibly fast rhythms,

audiences stage-diving, or singing with performers when there lacks a stage, punk is a volatile cultural phenomena. As such, critics and commentators from inside and outside the scene tend to sensationalize and generalize. For MacKaye, punk has been fetishized and commodified from its inception, and his reaction to this has given him a particular take on what 'punk' actually means: When I say punk dont get me wrong, Im not necessarily talking about a look or soundfor me punk is a free spaceradical ideas presented in a venue that is not being controlled by profit motives. This conception of punk, divorced from the monetary incentive of the music industry, or the pissing-contest hierarchies of punk's cultural cache, illustrates the unique core MacKaye helped create in the D.C. punk scene: its DIY ethic.

Ever since the late seventies and early eighties, when punk music was first played in D.C., MacKaye has had this embattled perspective against punk's misappropriation; The American media picked up on punk as a sensationalist, ridiculous, nihilistic practice, he said, So there was a lot of media images showing what punks were. There were always these morons that would come to concerts hit themselves over the head with a bottle, start fightsbut what happened was people would start coming to shows informed by this At the same time though, MacKaye recognizes the original significance of appearance and the violence that then became stereotypes of punk music and culture. In a way that highlights mor There was actually a gang in Georgetown called the punk beaters, who would start fights with anyone wore short hair or stovepipe jeans. So violence really started to enter the pictureand standing up to people who were attacking you was an empowering thing.

However, violence at punk shows became something MacKaye would fight against. Representative of his resistance to misappropriation, he became known for his willingness to engage the crowd at Fugazi shows, stopping mid-song to tell violent dancers to stop, or even have them removed from the venue. Yet, those who did not meet Fugazis standard of safe conduct would leave with an envelope with five dollars, the full price refund of attending a Fugazi show. For their entire career, spanning sixteen years, Fugazi

negotiated with booking agents or only played venues that would price tickets at five dollars or less, and admit people of all ages. They took a percentage of the door receipts, instead of the common practice of demanding a guarantee, so as to assure the ticket price. It was part of an ethic of protest against the practices of the music industry that MacKaye and the band considered unjust. "How a band carries itself, where the band plays, where it won't play, how we handle our business is very important," MacKaye said. "We try to present a show that brings feelings of community to the crowd.