MY ACADEMY

812. MISSION OF BURMA, "Academy Fight Song"
Produced by Richard Harte; written by Clint Conley
1981 Did not make pop charts

If you weren't alive (or paying attention) in the 1980s, you may not understand how important local scenes were back then--not just in their own right, but as slow feeders to a regionally pluralistic national music scene. Michael Azzerad deals with this obliquely in Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, Gina Arnold much much better in Route 666: The Road to Nirvana, but both of them focus mostly on the local clubs. Far more interesting to me was local FM radio. In retrospect, the early 80s seems like a golden age (all golden ages exist in retrospect, of course), a highly fortunate moment in time that came after punk led to an explosion of small DIY bands but before FM radio became totally corporatized. Even after many FM stations were absorbed by corporate media conglomerates like Clear Channel and Infinity, there was still, for a little while, a commitment to local music: sponsoring local battles of the bands; doing long in-studio interviews with local artists; even playing nightly countdowns of the top 5 local singles. In our own era, when playlists are not only tightly controlled but set nationally rather than locally, such freedom and regional divergence seems unthinkable.

As you can tell from earlier entries, I spent the 80s in the Boston area. By the end of the decade the cool station was supposed to be WFNX, but the pioneer FM station in Boston was and would always be WBCN. They broadcast live from the Rat in Kenmore Square and promoted local bands so heavily that some touring rockers playing the Garden, Great Woods, or Foxboro would wonder why their opening acts were getting more applause than they were. The program director at BCN for most of these years was a guy who went by the name of Oedipus. He was one of the first djs outside of New York to realize how important the Ramones were going to be to the history of popular music--and if that doesn't establish his aesthetic cred, then there clearly is no hope for you.

My point is that, in the early 1980s, FM radio cultivated a kind of rock "provincialism." I'm using the word in the sense that the novelist Hamlin Garland used it in Crumbling Idols, a book of essays published almost a century before I ever set foot in the Rat. Very near the end of the nineteenth century, Garland saw the future of literature in the cultivation of local literary cultures that would in turn feed a national and even global redefinition of art. He saw Dostoyevsky as a Provincial artist, but he didn't think that meant that younger novelists like Stephen Crane should write like a Russian. They should write like themselves, about where they were. In seeing the larger world freshly through avowedly localized eyes, they would expand the vision of artists everywhere.

If I had to pick one band that exemplified the Boston scene in the early 1980s, it would be Mission of Burma. They played other cities, they've reformed and actually played Brooklyn earlier this year, but they never really broke anywhere except in Boston. "Academy Fight Song" was their first single, and it seemed primed to be embraced by soi-disant high school misfits everywhere, or maybe just people who never really outgrew the attitudes of high school. The sound of the single is sludgy and choppy, but even with the subject matter you'd never mistake it for a Dead Boys opus.

Which is my point actually. Maybe you had to be there, but to me this song sounds like Kenmore Square, even though the Rat's been torn down and there's a hotel there now, and even though I never actually saw MoB live. (I did see Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, one of the band's eventual splinters.) This single sounds like Boston in the early 80s, and you could never mistake Mission of Burma for a New York band, an Orange County band, a Minneapolis band, or a Cleveland band from that period, anymore than a jazz fan could confuse the sound of a purely Kansas City band from the 1930s with the Red Bank inflections that Count Basie added to the K.C. sound.

But then there's the two-way genius of provincialism: the local becomes the national, which feeds back into the local again, albeit in another locality. Bands from other scenes listened to MoB, even if their fans didn't in significant numbers, and they were in turn influenced what I may be alone in calling "the Boston sound." Most prominent among these was R.E.M., who of course eventually hit the big time. I'm willing to bet that at one point more people knew "Academy Fight Song" as a song R.E.M. played than as a song that Mission of Burma originated. Many may not have known it was a cover.

And I swear, sometimes when I listen to R.E.M., particularly when they're rocking rather than whining, I can hear Mission of Burma. I wonder if that makes Athens' favorite sons a Boston band.