It's hard to imagine any project of Ian MacKaye's going underrated, but there it is. Growing up as a punk kid in Baltimore, in the D.C. scene's shadow, in the '90s, that guy exerted a crazy amount of power over my imagination and the imaginations of just about everyone I knew. Entire networks of kids viewed him with some combination of awe, scorn, grudging respect, curiosity, and, more than anything else, utter starry-eyed adoration. It wasn't just the music, though that was almost uniformly great, and it wasn't just the public persona, though that stood in stark contrast to just about everything else happening in music at the moment. It was some combination of art, backstory, and demonstrable success; Fugazi, after all, sold a fuckton of records while openly disdaining and bypassing the record-selling machine. And then it was something else, too. I once watched Fugazi play an outdoor show in a raging thunderstorm, gasping as lightning ripped through the sky during all the climactic cathartic moments of "Waiting Room," almost like God had decided to sit in with the band for a song. MacKaye was also the first famous person I ever interviewed, and even though he was totally personable and approachable, my hands shook like a motherfucker the whole time. He was, and is, a person with gravity, with presence. And yet when Fugazi dissolved a decade ago, he went a different way, and that way was a quiet way.