Our occasional series “Secret History” features profiles of classic D.C. albums as a way of looking back at the District’s contributions to music over time. In this installment, we take a look at the Nation of Ulysses’s 13-Point Program to Destroy America (Dischord, 1991).

D.C. post-hardcore of the late ’80s and early ’90s, while undeniably awesome, could be a bit dire. Mapping out an exciting new musical territory informed by the energy of punk, the dedication of hardcore, and the tunefulness of pop, but doing it with furrowed brows and studious frowns, many D.C. bands of the era came perilously close to overdosing on earnestness. Which is why the Nation of Ulysses were so welcome. Fronted by the insistently sartorial, perfectly-coiffed, and unnervingly charismatic Ian Svenonius (Sassy Magazine’s Sassiest Boy In America, 1991), the Nation of Ulysses were a five-man army spouting a revolutionary youth manifesto founded on sleep deprivation, parent destruction and insurrectionary separatism. It sounded cracked and brilliant, the product of over-caffeinated punks down with Situationalism, Futurists, Constructivists, classic soul, and raw garage power.

According to Svenonius, who has since fronted Cupid Car Club, The Make-Up, the Scene Creamers, Weird War, and most recently Chain and the Gang, and who graciously sat down with DCist recently to discuss the Nation of Ulysses, “The Nation of Ulysses really started as an ideological program before we ever struck a note of music…. We were really different…. We had a gang sensibility. We all lived together. It was more of a cult than a band. It was explicitly a political party. We were explicitly modeling ourselves on something like the Vice Lords, a gang from Chicago that became a political party.”