POSTSCRIPT, THE ON AND ON...

It didn’t occur to me that this further note would have to be added to the Dischord history, but our work continues and the redesign of our website has prompted this extended postscript. As it happens, plenty has transpired in the last seven years and the label continues with the mission.

Shortly after finishing up the original history in 1999, there was another bloom of creativity in the DC music underground and Dischord released records by Faraquet, The Capitol City Dusters, Q and Not U, El Guapo, and Black Eyes. The idea of documenting a musical community generally manifested itself in the release of records by bands that featured members of previous Dischord bands (for instance, Faraquet and The Capitol City Dusters had members who had been in Smart Went Crazy and Severin respectively), but for the first time we encountered DC bands that were made up of people who had grown up listening to our records.

One aspect of our ‘mission statement’ that I had taken some solace in over the years was the idea that the Dischord’s attachment to a specific community would create a de-facto ‘term limit’. What I mean by this is that since communities are living things, they also eventually die, and I figured that the DC music scene that we were connected to would eventually close up shop, and then the label would as well. It was never our intention to run a record label for a quarter of a century (December 2005 marked our 25th anniversary). As the musicians from the early bands grew older and stopped playing in bands, it seemed certain that the day would come when we were finished, however we did not take into account the fact that DC-area kids would grow up listening to our music and form bands. Surely they should considered ‘community’, and so we continue.

Q and Not U, El Guapo, and Black Eyes all came to Dischord in this light. For a few years in the beginning of this century there was a thriving musical conversation brewing in town and it was extremely exciting to see these bands push and pull sounds into new areas.