the Effigies :: Security
sporting a look halfway between skinhead and steelworker, The Effigies were emblematic of Chicago’s rough and tumble origins and its culturally dominant working class and a harbinger of the look and attitude that would command the local punk and hardcore scene for years to come.* musically**, they cast the die as well, weaving muscular guitars with deftly crafted hooks and melodies that might even have you humming if you weren’t so busy ducking punches. their sound was big and brawny like the city that spawned them. this is the foundation, and a solid one at that; hefty enough in and of itself to have guaranteed the Effigies a prominent place in the local punk pantheon. but something else is going on here: just listen.
though not without precedent elsewhere in the world, the Effigies no less boldly grafted select phonemes of dub and disco onto a regionally distinct but unequivocally American punk syntax, producing a musical creole unseen before or since. British dub-punk hybrids (The Clash, The Ruts) were mostly a success, but on occasion toothless, and certainly more pop that our boys from Chicago could ever hope to be. PIL probably trod the more righteous path first, with a nod to (if not a warm embrace of) the galloping hi-hat and steady 4/4 of 70s Manhattan clubland. i won’t delude myself into thinking that the scores of post-Rapture dance-punk neophytes lay any claim to this ragged, midwestern troupe or that their novel experiment had much significance to Music at large; but it was honest and—dare I say—a little bit courageous, and that means the world to me. architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh once wrote “there is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.” yeah, I like that.
* to contrast, the dominant punk scenes in the US in 1981 were the decidedly middle class, straight edge Washington DC scene (‘Georgetown punks’), the blue collar jock-punks of the militantly straight edge Boston scene and all of those misfits out in LA. the beer-swilling sons of Polish laborers were unmistakably odd men out.
** the Haunted Town five-track EP was released on Autumn Records in 1981. it was later re-released in 1984 in Ruthless Records with Security as an added track. the Bodybag / Security 7” single was originally released on Ruthless Records in 1982.
Security (6.3MB MP3)
the Effigies (homepage, more info)