How to Clean Everything

Or, the Importance of Being Earnest

Just over thirty years ago, Fat Wreck Chords released How to Clean Everything, the debut album by Winnipeg-based punk band Propagandhi. Growing up in Canada in the nineties, this record was ubiquitous; growing up in punk more generally, it was divisive. Today, it is that funny, formative thing for so many fellow travellers—a cringeworthy classic, and a shaky start to one of the truly progressive arcs in punk.

“I have come believe that there is value in having something that haunts you until you are dead,” wrote singer and guitarist Chris Hannah on the 20th anniversary of How to Clean Everything. Ten years later, he’s no more kindly disposed to the album. “That’s fucking terrible, what kind of a fucking idiot would like that?” Hannah proclaimed in a video posted to the band’s Instagram account on May 31st, its official birthday.

Elsewhere, in a more generous mood, Hannah addresses the record’s posterity:

I dig it. We still play songs from that record. When I hear them and I play them, the message still resonates with me and I can see the 20 year old Chris writing those songs …I just don’t like when I hear that record, like when I hear that actual record, that recording. That moment in time. I’m just like, "Jesus Christ, turn that fucking thing off."