Up & down pop

Yoyo A Go Go is an indie-rock fest

by Matt Ashare

Just a few months before the world got its first whiff of Nirvana's teen spirit, in late August 1991, the International Pop Underground convened in Olympia, Washington. Borrowing from the anti-capitalist language of social critic Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, and from the rebellious tone of the Situationist International movement that Debord's words had helped catalyze in '60s Paris, the IPU proclaimed: "As the corporate ogre expands its creeping influence on the minds of industrialized youth, the time has come for the International Rockers of the World to convene in celebration of our grand independence." And so indie rock, or the music formerly known as punk, was reborn as a loosely organized entity, set apart from the cultural mainstream and from the punks of a decade before, by a professed lack of commercial aspirations. If the Sex Pistols screamed of smashing the system, IPU affiliates were simply happy to remain apart from it -- "No lackeys to the corporate ogre allowed."

Of course, by the time the live International Pop Underground Convention CD (K records) had reached record-store shelves a year later, everything had changed. The innocence of the summer of '91 had been clouded by the fallout from the Nirvana explosion. The doors at MTV, radio, and the culture at large had been blown open to new- and even old-guard punks. And four of the 20 bands with tracks on the IPU CD were in line for major-label deals: L7 with Reprise, the Melvins with Atlantic, Seaweed with Hollywood, and Scrawl with Elektra. So much for keeping the faith. But a person's got to make a living.

Undeterred by dissension in the ranks, the indie-rock troops gathered once again in Olympia, as they almost certainly will in the future, from July 12 through 17 in 1994, just three months after Kurt Cobain's suicide. Dubbed "Yoyo A Go Go" for Yoyo, the sister label of K and Kill Rock Stars, the festival attracted artists from around the region, the country, and the world: Portland's Team Dresch, Denver's Neutral Milk Hotel, Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan from New York's Yo La Tengo, Lois Maffeo from Olympia and DC, Canada's Cub, Beck from Southern California, Japan's Copass Grinderz, and Boston's Mary Lou Lord, to name a few. And now, more than two years later, we have Yoyo A Go Go (Yoyo), a double-CD document of the event featuring 36 tracks by 35 performers recorded live at Olympia's Capitol Theater.

It's hard to resist the temptation to pick apart Yoyo A Go Go like an anthropologist looking for clues about an ancient subculture. On International Pop Underground, Rebecca Gates of the great Spinanes serenaded an indie-rock icon with the song "Jad Fair Drives Women Wild" and Bratmobile kicked off a tune by screaming "Mecca Normal, you're my punk-rock dream come true," two outward displays of insular unity. Yoyo A Go Go opens on a more defensive note: "This is a song against fucking racist, Nazi, homophobic, shithead, fuck, bastard, Nazi, prickhead shits," explains the singer from a band called the Rickets, before they offer a blast of vintage '80s hardcore punk, "Three Reichs You're Out."

Disc two of the Yoyo comp starts with the members of the lesbian punk outfit Team Dresch recounting the origin of one of their favorite terms, "Lesbionic." It's a story that begins with two members of the band being assaulted in the parking lot after a gig and ends with a grand juror asking whether a particular club caters to a "Lesbionic" crowd. And this time, instead of Gates singing Jad Fair's praises, we have Fair's teenage son fronting the Stinky Puffs, introducing his "I Love You Anyway" by saying, "This is a song I did about when Kurt died."

But the defiant spirit of the 1991 International Pop Underground remains strong on Yoyo A Go Go, in the rough-hewn folk of Mary Lou Lord's "Helsinki" and the Softies' bittersweet "Empty Patches"; in the bass-heavy noise storm of godheadSilo's "Another Schizoid Embolism" and the slow-churn of Codeine's "D"; in the childhood innocence of "I Love You Anyway" and the seasoned strum of Ira Kaplan's guitar on "F-Train." It was there before Nirvana came along, and it survived the subsequent "creeping influence of the corporate ogre" because there's no easy way to classify or commodify a scene that celebrates equally Corin Tucker's lacerating scream (from Heavens to Betsy's "Ax Men"), the cuddly punk pop of Cub's "Your Bed," and the free-form skronk of Unwound's "Valentine Card." It's a sensibility that Unwound distill into the one intelligible line of "Valentine Card" on Yoyo A Go Go: "I like this music."