1998: A Retrospective; Refused — The Shape Of Punk To Come

Ryan Nims
Ryan Nims
Sep 6, 2018 · 5 min read

It’s time to talk about my mystical powers.

There is a thing I would do in my teens and early 20s where if I liked the vibe of a band and I wanted to be closer to it, via society, or just emotionally or spiritually, I would gravitate towards it psychically. Through a series of meditations and positive thinking I would propel my completely worthless body and soul towards something I perceived as profound and life-altering, and eventually, hopefully, I’d end up closer to it. On further examination I can now tell you as an adult(source?) this is something people call “fandom” and not in fact a mystical brand of wizardry I myself invented or tapped into. In reality what I was doing was making a mental note “this is good, listen to this more often, try to hang out with people who like it because they’re your people.” But in a young brain capable of processing things solely through metaphors and self-invented mysticism these things took on huge weighted importance I could only think about in hushed tones. (I never TALKED about anything, ask anyone. HAH you can’t nobody knew me.)

I first encountered Refused like I did many bands at the time, absolutely terrified of going back to school on Monday, staying up late on Sunday night, watching 120 Minutes and muttering “fuck me up fam.” Thanks to the Internet I can now pinpoint the exact date of this, June 27 1999. (What is shocking about looking at 120 Minutes playlists now, at this late-in-the-game era of 1999, is seeing relatively vanilla entries like Goo Goo Dolls and Eve 6 peppering the playlists. I do not remember it like this. But I digress, as I will time and time again) It was right at the end of the show and the video left me shoooooooook. Nobody on TV was playing that fast or hard or loud (the fact Eve 6, Fuel, and Goo Goo Dolls were on 120 at this moment should illustrate this) nor doing it in such fetching sweaters. As a life-long Smashing Pumpkins stan it should be clear I’m a sucker for apocalyptic aggression dressed in gentle clothing.

gentle inferno

Learning about Refused via this video didn’t immediately change my life, get me into Epitaph shit, get me investigating other Swedish bands etc. It did signal to me that beyond the adult contemporary state MTV had been left in circa ’99 that there were still some employees left attempting to help the kids find inspiration. At this point in my life, as had been the case since 1995, I would ideally be watching MTV 18 hours of a 24 hour day. I needed those subtle nudges and I lived for them. It was like waiting for a sign for god and then somehow getting it. I wasn’t at this point needing MTV to tell me where to go, I had enough to go on at that point to survive as a musically literate guy, but I still appreciated these little bits of subversion. This was still the sliver of time where THE INTERNET hadn’t completely blown everything up, but had made its presence known.

Because of this I was very much able at this time, for the first time ever, to see a music video and then say to myself “I want a CD quality version of that song”, go online, then within a hour (56k only in Vermont bruh) have that song. I don’t think Napster had yet unveiled itself, but there were a lot of websites that just straight up posted direct links to MP3s. And let’s not forget BearShare, Kazaaa, newsgroups, and all manner of subtle variations which had become forces in their own right. Can’t remember the specifics but I had a nice version of New Noise in no time. Listened to that one song over and over again. As I did all the songs I had at that time.

I’m not gonna pretend that New Noise changed my life or anything but it was certainly an ideal I held up for a long time. Remarkably sincere loud thrashy math-rock adjacent jams I had hoped a future version of society would align themselves behind, party righteously ,and overthrow the bastards.

Gonna skip ahead a few years here. I’m in San Diego. At this point I think I had located a used copy of Shape Of Punk To Come. It’s 2002. I’m riding the bus everywhere and it’s part of my rotation of discs. I was introduced to a friends group via my main friend slash life compass. It was a bunch of young people who were into cool music, in bands themselves, culturally literate. This shouldn’t have been so inspirational, but I had no idea when I moved to San Diego it would be full of so many ready-to-die shitheads. Coming from afar, I thought all of California would be righteous. This was not the case. So locating cool young people my age was huge. Getting drunk at these parties I sussed out real quick a lot of these folks liked Refused. I had been referring to them internally for a while as “the Swedish guys in sweaters”. But these folks knew their backstory, appreciated I knew who they were, and therefore were giving me the time of day. I hadn’t experienced this before. I was used to playing it as dumb as possible to make friends and it just wasn’t working out for me. Suddenly my knowledge, no matter how transitory and surface-level was appreciated. At this moment I realized that surge of adrenaline I felt when seeing that video the first time, that there were people out there for me, that liked what I liked, wasn’t just a phantom pain. It was real. It paid off. Following your Id brought you to others like you. It was revelatory. I had basically washed up on shore after an emotional shipwreck, had no guidance, and was suddenly saved by the revelation there were young people around me who felt like I did.

Refused really didn’t loom large in my life at all after that period. I thought the album was cool, but I didn’t buy any of their others. I thought The International Noise Conspiracy was cool, but really boring. What did happen was this: Many many years later, I had washed up ashore somewhere else. Didn’t really know who were my people were anymore. I tried to be as open as possible, it was hard, but I stuck with it. Eventually after throwing myself out there I wound up washing ashore on dock. This fisherman I encountered nursed me back to health and I woke up one day on a boat with a big REFUSED sticker on the back.

It’s a fools errand to trust your opinions as a teen. But there’s a truth in there somewhere. If you refine it and stay true to it you’ll tune into a frequency. That frequency will save you. That frequency will liberate the dead. It happened to me.

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