was fucked up when they went to see a show — taking tons of speed, tons of Valium. It was about gettin' your hair cut real short and going out and bumping into all these guys you didn't know. There was violence in that scene, but it was friendly aggression, male bonding. It was misinterpreted by adults, but, then, everything is: I'll probably do the same thing in five years to the next thing that comes along. [Mould is 30.]
"The amount of outrageousness in the late Seventies ans early Eighties and the violent nature of it — there was nothing like it before, not even in the beginning of rock and roll," he continues. "It was just out of control. Around '82, '83, it started to dissipate and became diluted. Everyone became so individual, but at the same time everything became more stratified: This image means this, this image means that; it wasn't all just crazy-mixed up. Suddenly you were just hard-core, just death rock, just glam rock, just goth rock. Stars and trends emerged. Somebody got big and had a paisley shirt, and the music was going there. Somebody had the big hair and was part of a coven, and that became that thing. Everyone had uniforms, and it became part of mainstream culture again. There wasn't anybody being extreme any more, they were just copyng things that had been done. And I don't know that it'll get exciting again, because a lot of the kinds of places this music came from are just gone. And alternative America just isn't that alternative any more. Most of the people I know from the business when I started out are now in major A&R positions at record labels."
At the moment, Mould is focusing mainly on his music, but he thinks that eventually he might want to write a book. "I have so much stuff around," he says, "short stories and such. I've had a few things published in art papers, but someday I'd like to put it all together. I've got a friend who's a European-history professor in Boston who used to play in a hard-core band and offered to help me edit the stuff. It's, like, hundreds of pages, and I carry it around with me: some handwritten, some typed, just years and years of it. A lot of it's really weird, but a part of me wants to get it out of my house."
GQ music columnist Stephen Fried received the 1990 best-magazine-story award from the Philadelphia chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
