I once read an interview with the Minutemen in which they addressed the concepts of consonance and dissonance. In music, most people prefer consonance, something familiar, something comforting to the ear. Others notice, even prefer, something new, something different - sounds they haven't heard before. While these sounds might not feel right to them at first (e.g. the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring), open minds and ears are often rewarded later. People with open minds and ears often prefer dissonance. Applied to a social context, these same preferences hold true. The dissonant ones are the free thinkers of the world - its innovators. Free thinkers and innovators understand that cacophony, too, holds the promise of song. And their actions are demonstrations that freedom has no bounds.


No one captured the spirit of free thought, open-mindedness and innovation more than Philadelphia's own Ruin. Ruin flew in the face of convention both in the music world and in reality itself. By the early eighties, punk had become codified into an artificial "lifestyle," just like many movements had been both before and after it. Punk had its own dress code, finite rules, and modes of being. It expressed itself in haircuts, loogies, the odd middle finger, mono-dimensional-up-tempo-thrash and leather coats with spiky adornments. Ruin, while lumped into the punk genre, adhered to none of its codes. They were spiritual, they wore all white, rarely felt the need to curse, and never spit on anyone. They were punk in terms of how it originated philosophically; namely, as a way of living life - with passion, commitment, and concern -- and as a new way of expression, one's own individual way of expression. Punk had first encouraged the idea that if you're not happy with the current system, you can simply form your own, and then encourage others to do the same. This is exactly what Ruin did.


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