Government Issue - Style and Influence

Style and Influence

Government Issue was one of the best bands in the history of American Hardcore. For one reason or another, they were jinxed. Their van'd break down; they'd do tours and have ten people at the show because of no publicity — everything bad that could happen to a band happened to them. But they were amazing.

–Dave Smalley, singer for DYS, Dag Nasty, All, and Down by Law

Though Government Issue began as a hardcore punk act, over time their music evolved to incorporate other styles. Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore: A Tribal History, writes that they "vied with Minor Threat as the top band in 1981–1982" and that Legless Bull "best exemplified smartass suburban HC." But by 1982, with Brian Baker and Tom Lyle in the lineup, the band began to develop a sound more akin to heavy rock than pure hardcore. Steve Huey of Allmusic notes that the band "carried the torch for traditional hardcore punk on their early records, but evolved into something more adventurous by adding bits of metal, new wave pop, and psychedelia".

By 1986's Government Issue Stabb was moving in a more melodic direction influenced by the gothic rock of The Damned, and by 1988's Crash the group was at its most musically diverse. Stabb himself later remarked that Government Issue "proved that we were more than just a hardcore band. We'd graduated from the school of 'bang and howl' and we really bummed out a small portion of our punk audience", and that "we'd moved on from the hardcore world into melodic, well-crafted punk with a decidedly pop edge." Aaron Burgess of Alternative Press notes that the continual evolution in sound over the band's nine-year lifespan made their music more influential to later generations of punk rock groups:

Though they started out playing solid, standard-issue melodic hardcore, Government Issue weren't afraid to let their outside influences, no matter how incongruous, infect their music—or, in Stabb's case, their look, as well So, while Stabb's hairdos and stage clothes got increasingly kookier, so did the band's music draw ideas from pop, goth, psychedelia, Middle Eastern music and beyond. And while changes like these could seem like sellout moves for a group that once wrote a song called "Rock 'N' Roll Bullshit", they were a vital next step in the evolution of .

However, though they did have a following in the straight edge community, Government Issue's stylistic expansion from one album to the next alienated much of their early hardcore audience. Blush writes that "Unfortunately, most who went to see G.I. through the 80s still expected to hear hardcore reminiscent of the first EP. The group was moving into a softer, R.E.M. direction, and none of their fans gave a shit about such profound maturity." Huey remarks that the band "has remained somewhat overlooked in relation to the rest of the D.C. hardcore bands of their time, in part because their music never really fit the proto-emo bent of much of the local Dischord stable", while Burgess notes that they nonetheless "made history in their own way by never fitting into the scene most people naturally associated with their city."