Fishbone Changed My Life

This Fishbone performance on Saturday Night Live meant so much to 16-year-old me. It was a total revelation that you could pack so many emotions into a 4-minute song - face-melting rage, abject fear, transcendent joy, and whatall un-name-able else. I’d been playing drums for a year or two at that point, so Fishbone was also a revelation that expressing all those emotions musically came from disciplined practice. What I saw on screen, and on stage when I saw them live, was controlled chaos, a performance where expressive looseness met musical tightness. These guys were NUTS. But LORD could they play.

And they had a point of view, a moral code. Other bands I listened to had these things also, but with Fishbone I started to grasp that the medium was the message - that the music itself wasn’t just something to lay socially conscious lyrics on top of. If you were good enough at making music - the chaos of it, the structure, the sounds, the sense of play and control and lack of control - all of it was part of the code. They taught me that having something to say and having your shit together are deeply intertwined. That if you want to be listened to you’d better give people a reason to listen, and that you can - should - expect that from other people.

Fishbone also taught me about irrational fear and how it can make your life smaller and less rich. I hadn’t known it, but I was afraid of a certain level of aggression, not just in music but also in people, that can actually be helpful, enriching, even healthy. Why I was afraid of this probably relates to things like growing up religious and male and skinny and suburban that I can’t flesh out here. But their aggression was part of their virtuosity - I don’t think you can separate these things - and their music had that combo in a way other bands didn’t. Plenty of punk had the rage without the virtuosity; plenty of jazz had the opposite. But for me, Fishbone put all these things together in a way no other band did. This all probably sounds a little gushy at this point, and music hits us especially hard when we’re around 16, arguably more because of us than the music itself. But it’s only now that I’m able to put into words exactly why this particular band blew me apart in a way I needed to be blown apart.