Ian MacKaye on technology and the value of a good song

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When Jeff Nelson and Ian MacKaye of the seminal Washington D.C. hardcore band Minor Threat founded Dischord Records in 1980 the goal was to document their former band, the Teen Idles. Although they had no way of knowing it at the time, they were kicking off a legacy that brought underground music and D.I.Y. culture together and inspired generations of independent record labels to follow in their footsteps.

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After almost 30 years MacKaye still runs Dischord with the same fiercely independent and self-sustaining spirit that got the label started in the first place. And though he is by no means a luddite, MacKaye has utilized the technology boom of the last decade as an evolving means of documenting and disseminating Dischord’s releases while not letting the medium become the message.

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Chad Radford: The rise of the internet over the last 10 years has drastically altered the ways in which people find and make music available to the world. Could a label like Dischord be launched and run the way it has been, in the year 2009?

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Ian MacKaye: Of Course it could, but you have to transpose things. It couldn’t be started the exact same way. For instance, when Dischord was started there were no CDs and there were no digital downloads and there were no computers. So obviously if you started a label exactly the same way as Dischord the context would be entirely different. It would be hard… But also, Dischord was started to document a specific scene. It was a scene that already had momentum. The band had already been playing – it already had an audience. We were essentially fulfilling the desires of people who wanted to hear the music. They wanted to hear it and we wanted to document it. Pressing the Teen Idles single in 1980 just made sense. We were documenting it. We weren’t trying to promote anything because the band had already broken up.