Hüsker Dü’s taste already went beyond punk rock before they broke a land speed record on their fast-paced hardcore debut, and it didn’t take them long to start bringing those non-hardcore influences into the hardcore scene. They showed off their love of ’60s psychedelia with a Donovan cover on 1983’s “Everything Falls Apart“, and they prefaced the release of 1984’s “Zen Arcade” with a cover of The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.” On “Zen Arcade” proper, all bets were off.
Being a 70-minute double album alone made it go deeply against the grain of hardcore, and the music within ranges from hardcore ragers like the immortal opener “Something I Learned Today” to the acoustic “Never Talking To You Again” to the band’s own brand of psychedelia (“Hare Krsna,” “The Tooth Fairy and the Princess,” and the 14-minute jam “Reoccurring Dreams”) to the garagey proto-punk of “What’s Going On” to sweetly melodic, proto-alt-rock songs like “Chartered Trips,” “Standing by the Sea,” and “Pink Turns to Blue.”
Like so many great double albums, “Zen Arcade” goes in countless different directions, and it’s the kind of album that you can spend a lifetime listening to and hear something new every time. It’s very literally “post-hardcore” in the way that it bucks against almost every convention of the genre without abandoning it entirely, and those proto-alt-rock songs sound nearly a decade ahead of their time. Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic famously said “What Nirvana did was nothing new; Husker Du did it before us,” and with today’s hardcore scene embracing alt-rock, “Zen Arcade” is a still-relevant reminder that history repeats itself.
An ambitious record from punk’s Midwest coalition, Husker Du’s “Zen Arcade” takes the Minneapolis trio into both past (some psychedelic rock here) and future (noise-rock studio experiments there) territories. As with many double albums, “Zen Arcade” is a loose concept record, about a kid’s journey to adulthood; the story’s narrative is secondary to the songs: melodic, cutting slices of ’80s punk feeling its way forward.
The Fat Angel Sings 