What Makes a Man Start Fires?

Also for the first time on a Minutemen record, the band had a guest musician, Saccharine Trust guitarist Joe Baiza, who added improvised guitar leads to "Beacon Sighted Through Fog" and "East Wind/Faith". Drummer George Hurley introduces his first non drum percussion work on a Minutemen album, playing a collection of empty oil drums on "East Wind/Faith". For what would be the only time on a Minutemen release, all of the lead vocals were sung exclusively by D. Boon, although Watt does contribute backing vocals.

The opening track, "Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs", is actually meant as a tribute to Dylan (a hero of Watt's since his childhood) as well as a tongue in cheek parody of Dylan's classic early lyrical style. Further showing off their sense of humor, Watt introduces "Mutiny In Jonestown" by slating the take during the basic track recording as "Pavarotti, take one". "Split Red" is remade from the band's previous release, the 1982 EP Bean Spill, with some different lyrics.

What Makes A Man Start Fires? also appears on the My First Bells cassette and the Post Mersh Vol. 1 CD. It would be released as its own separate CD by SST in 1991.

In a 1983 Trouser Press review of the album, Charles McCardell said "the approach is fast and furious, the results dazzling." Noting, "[p]ervasive beat poetry influences," McCardell called the band "the rockin' beat poets of the 80's [who] slash through the pretense of their bohemian antecedents." Noting that "[i]nstrumentally, the Minutemen are far superior to many of their hardcore competitors," McCardell concluded, "[t]he Minutemen's music is seldom pretty, but always challenging." Writing for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau similarly praised the band's lyricism but wrote that he "prefer[s] their music." "The more you listen", he continues, "the less fragmentary these eighteen tense little guess you have to call them tunes sound each transforms its own riff into an identity that meshes with the album's guess you have to call it gestalt." In a 2015 retrospective piece on the album written for The A. V. Club, Noel Murray wrote:What’s particularly radical about What Makes A Man Start Fires? though is the way that it documents Boon and Watt’s dawning understanding that maybe music for and about “the workers” should be something that blue collar types might actually enjoy. It’s not that Paranoid Time and The Punch Line aren’t entertaining, but there’s very little in the Minutemen’s first two years of songs as hooky as “’99” or “Life As A Rehearsal,” or that feels as fully fleshed out as “Sell Or Be Sold” or “Fake Contest.” The simple addition of the occasional overdub, extended break, or guitar solo was all it took to make even a minute long Minutemen song seem “finished.”

Joe Baiza additional guitar on "Beacon Sighted Through Fog" and "East Wind/Faith".