WRITING ABOUT THE Mekons in 1986, Greil Marcus noted of the punk-gone-country rock band from Leeds, England, that "their very persistence across a decade marginalizes them." More than 15 years later the Mekons still persist in making records and touring, and they're still stumbling around the outskirts of the pop universe as we know it. And Fear and Whiskey, which Marcus used as a touchstone for his essay, saying it "may have been the best pop record of 1985," has just been reissued by Quarterstick Records.

Critics rallied around the Mekons, especially after they incorporated fiddle, accordion, and Hank Williams and Merle Haggard covers into a faux amateurish aesthetic that might have sounded postured if it wasn't so genuinely staggering. But the record-buying public couldn't have cared less. A 1989 Twin/Tone CD repackaging of Fear and Whiskey – as Original Sin, with additional tracks from The Edge of the World and the EPs English Dancing Master, Crime and Punishment, and Slightly South of the Border – didn't set the world on fire, either.

In strictly temporal terms Fear and Whiskey could qualify as "classic rock." After spending a week punching the dial in my mother-in-law's Cadillac, however, I can assure you that audiences in the stretch of southwest Florida between Tampa and Naples are not hearing "Flitcraft" and "Last Dance" on their one-corporation-over-all airwaves. Classic rock in that great commercial-radio wasteland is targeted to specialized audiences; one station builds its sound on the foundation of Led Zeppelin; another boogies to the Allman Brothers and ZZ Top; a third anchors its playlist with the Beatles and Stones. But no one is narrowcasting to a demographic hankering for the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Gang of Four, or early Talking Heads, let alone the Mekons.

Still, in 2002, the 10-song, 35-minute Fear and Whiskey holds up with such other underplayed '80s masterpieces as Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights and X's Wild Gift. I daresay, with the advent of the second Bush era, it sounds more relevant than ever. Over the years the Mekons (Jon Langford, Tom Greenhalgh, Susie Honeyman, Steve Goulding, Rico Bell, and Sally Timms, among others) have invited us to examine a morally hemorrhaging body politic through the bleary gaze of defeated and self-loathing outsiders. As Marcus so aptly wrote, "History is a nightmare from which the Mekons are trying to awake, and when they do they're still drunk." When they sang songs such as "Chivalry" ("Fear and whiskey kept me going") and "Hard to Be Human Again" during the reigns of Thatcher and Reagan, they sounded too beaten up and pounded down to imagine things getting much worse.

Village Voice critic Robert Christgau called Fear and Whiskey "a triumph in search of a war." In fact, the Mekons created their own in "Trouble Down South": voices sputter strategy over walkie-talkies; a commentator sings, "Trucks move out, the village burns, there's silence in the swamps"; and haunted, high female voices wordlessly mingle with eerie fiddle lines, like smoke swirling up from smoldering corpses. We don't get those messages coming out of Afghanistan now. We probably won't get them coming out of Iraq, or Iran, or North Korea, or wherever the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis strikes next. Their war – against "terror" two months ago, against "evil" today – is too big to be troubled by human details on the ground.

In a way, then, we got what the Mekons were looking for. But at least when they recorded Fear and Whiskey, the Mekons could sing about "darkness and doubt" following them around. Now, with politicians bidding to post "In God We Trust" and the Ten Commandments in schools, even doubt finds itself in the stranglehold of the corporate state. At least Fear and Whiskey hasn't been reduced by history, or classic rock radio, to the emotional one-dimensionality of nostalgia. We can still listen to the ghostly cross talk of singers choking on their own words and groping for connection while we read such prescient liner notes for "Trouble Down South" as "Oh President Oh CIA why must we be punished for crimes we did not commit?" and for "Country" as "These days you don't have to leave home to be in exile."