Black Flag vs. Minor Threat

In My Eyes was comparable to Rise Above for me.

Nervous Breakdown was my favorite Black Flag song though. Or TV Party.

Minor Threat, for philosophical reasons.

Was never a Hank Garfield fan, but yes DAMAGED is ace. Then all that proto-metal...

Saw the 5 piece MT on the Out of Step tour. That was like a 500lb giant sat on my chest.

-- max (maxrea...), July 30th, 2006.

how has Ian become an asshole? i've never seen any evidence for that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVBgj0vqjC8&search=minor%20threat

I gotta go with the Flag for THAT guitar sound. And for Dez. But that choice was far less easy than my answer implies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6vOiyMi8l0&mode=related&search=minor%20threat

12XU and Small Man Big Mouth

and minor threat beats black flag because their music is better

psyched to see it. most of the major historical-overview-of-punk docs made so far have been skewed towards NYC/London in the late 70's, versus the aftermath.

i hate the way that hardcore is always passed over when people talk about punk rock. it's like 77 punk, then post-punk and no wave and new wave, then shit just skips over hardcore. hardcore is actually what i would call true post-punk. i mean i love gang of four and joy division and all that stuff, but hardcore deserves some credit.

punk rock didn't die in 77, it morphed into hardcore. 88 youth crew, 97 youth crew revival and all the different hardcore styles in between have played an incredibly important role in music.

plus growing up a hardcore kid in jersey that shit saved my life.

end rant.

Nah. The reason critics bypass hardcore is simple: NYC punk circa 1977 was an art-students' circle jerk pretending to be some kind of street-level revolution. By the time punk reached middle America and transformed into hardcore, it had become a genuinely proletarian thing, with suburban knuckle-draggers starting bands. And no critics wanted those people at their parties. So they declared punk over, and moved on to rap and world music.

Minor threat never had the elegant simplicity of black flag.

and "Straight-Edge" is just so fucking self-righteous.. so "american" it ruins Minor threat for me.

but that later almost metal stuf is bad.
no way!

Minor threat never had the elegant simplicity of black flag.
really? to me, minor threat sounds like pretty basic r'n'r sped up really really really fast, but black flag always has something sorta complex going on - robo's drumming especially (on the early stuff) - he accents the beats sort of strangely, or at least it seems that way. minor threat's best stuff is just as good as bf but bf's just got more of it.

and "Straight-Edge" is just so fucking self-righteous.. so "american" it ruins Minor threat for me.

it's self-righeous and stupid, but it's not particularly stupider than most other idealistic teenagers' ideas. but i've got no problem ignoring dumb lyrics most of the time.

people hating on MacKaye's so-called "self-righteousness" always sound really insecure to me, and I say this as a dude who is certainly not "straight-edge"

otm!

He's not preachy even though he comes off like that. all of those songs are very personal even though they come off as preaching. He was really only talking about his friends and all. he never thought that people all over the world would be analyzing them or taking them to heart. they were songs for his friends. that's my take on it and what i've read about it.

i never stopped listening. i've been listening to hardcore since 1981 until, um, yesterday. cuz, you know, i might be an adult...

i heart minor threat so much. and i still listen to them a bunch. black flag not so much. but i do loooooooooove pre-rollins black flag a ton. as any person should. and some rollins-era stuff as well. i would play loose nut if i still had a copy.

i have always had an almost infinite capacity for hard rock/punk/metal/hardcore though. even bad hard rock/punk/metal/hardcore. from any era. most people probably do "grow out of it" or something.

minor threat SKATES DC.

Black Flag covers can work, but the few attempts I've ever heard at Minor Threat covers were sorely lacking. Minor Threat was of a moment, a moment I actually missed by about a year. Black Flag was definately the better band. Minor Threat was the better punk band. They knew when to quit. Something that will forever be out of my reach.

http://www.riaa.com/gp/database/default.asp

...I've never seen any SST or Dischord records- I don't know if that means they haven't sold, or just aren't counted. Other, non-RIAA stuff does show up there. My sense is that they've never been distributed to enough mainstream shops to get those sort of sales figures. Several Epitaph and Lookout bands are platinium, but they've also had the mainstream airplay and distibution that second-wave punk never did.

Actually, most days I’d take Negative Approach over either Black Flag or Minor Threat.

Have to admit that, as much as I loved both bands in my teen years (early-mid 80s), they don't offer me much beyond the occasional blast of nostalgia at this point. And I kinda hate nostalgia... I'm sure the records are still capable of impressing folks who've never such stuff, but I rarely feel the need to spin 'em.

Well, I guess it's not explicitly (maybe just more immature and paranoid than anything) but what was he saying with that? It's a strong reaction to something, so to what? What was the racist crime Ian was being convicted for? "You blame me" suggests that he didn't feel sincerely guilty.

(Don't have an answer to the main question. I like Fugazi. I put on Red Medicine the other day and loved it like I never have before. Part of it have almost a Bill Laswell feel to them.)

I'm sorry
For something I didn't do
Lynched somebody
But I don't know who
You blame me for slavery
A hundred years before I was born

GUILTY OF BEING WHITE

I'm a convict
(guilty)Of a racist crime
(guilty)I've only served
(guilty)19 years of my time

GUILTY OF BEING WHITE

being white!!!

Sounds like punk rock via Rush Limbaugh. And it played VERY well with the racist/thug/skinhead element that early hardcore tended to attract.

xpost Yes, ffff is explicitly stating what I was hinting at.

he would also probably point out that he was (as the song says) 19 at the time, and trying to work out his thoughts & the struggle to arrive at morally/ethically tenable positions & doing so in public - a struggle which I guess many find insufferable to hear, "preachy," etc

But I'm not bashing. I (think I) totally understand where McKaye was coming from with that song. It must suck to go around feeling guilty all the time on behalf of history and the continuing actions of "your people." And the self-righteousness of many well-intentioned young white folks often leads right into that kind of liberal guilt.

But I still think bitching about it is lame. Take your fucking lumps. Guilty of being white is a hell of a lot easier to deal with than guilty of being black. Especially when the cops show up...

"You have to understand the context. Anybody who didn't grow up in Washington D.C. might have a little bit of a hard time understanding what "Guilty Of Being White" is all about."

Your third point is rather obviously true, but are you really saying "don't discuss the dynamic at work"? progress comes from working out issues doesn't it - I think it's much lamer to have a thought and go "oh, that's what I get then" than it is to wonder aloud about what it means - "Guilty" is an inelegant & immature stab at the process, but a stab's better than just mulling about it

But, even trying to ignore this, I still think Black Flag were better anyway. They still make it for me b/c of that fasterfasterfaster way then played, like there's a dividing line between being ludicrously propulsive & rocking, and being plain sloppy, and at their best the band sit right on it. I can't think of another band who sound/ed like that, it's a fundamentally exciting/thrilling sound.

Good point. My stance reflects a respect for a kind of stiff-upper-lip nobility that I think is both socially valuable and increasingly unfashionable in my (American popular) culture.

Sure, it's important to get our feelings out and to be as honest as possible about what's really going on. On a personal level, repression can be emotionally damaging, and in a larger sense, it distorts the discourse.

But I'll stick up for a measure of restraint, too, even at risk of seeming hopelessly old-fashioned. You ever see Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers?" Sometimes unburdening ourselves of our feelings can be terribly irresponsible, no matter how cathartic or "honest" it may seem in the moment.

While I don't feel at all guilty for having been born a middle-class white male, I do feel profoundly priveliged. I feel lucky as hell, and I recognize the infinite inequity that is life-on-earth frequently runs to my benefit.

And being shot at (once) and beaten down (once) pretty much just for being white has done nothing to diminish that.

In light of all that, I find the kind poor-me-I'm-white bitching exemplified by "Guilty of Being White" distasteful.

there's a dividing line between being ludicrously propulsive & rocking, and being plain sloppy, and at their best the band sit right on it. I can't think of another band who sound/ed like that, it's a fundamentally exciting/thrilling sound.

You are describing what it is that I love about the Bikini Kill singles. All politics aside, you might want to give those a listen if you don't know them.

ROFL @ Minor Threat apologists

Steve Shasta

It's my favorite Bergman movie!

There is a middle ground between "whining a lot" and "repressing" - I think writing one song (whose length is, what, two minutes? less?) about a feeling one has is hardly omg-too-much-information spilling. I'm a big defender ("apologist" in Steve Shasta's phrase, whatever it would mean in this context) of that HC get-it-out moment in history, I think it was awesome - more at a personal level (for the people who were involved in it, for the effects it had on them as people) than in terms of musical history; I certainly wouldn't want to hear the version of hardcore punk that featured singers who didn't really think it appropriate to talk about what was on their minds, and I don't think that version would have inspired anybody except really extreme aestheticians.

also back on the TS: Rollins's lyrics are way lamer than MacKaye's, like, 100% of the time, except I guess to those way insecure people who're like "dude doesn't even drink a beer? OMG LIGHTEN UP WTF THE WORLD IS GOING TO END THE DUDE DOESN'T DRINK A BEER" (Rollins was way straight-edge too and WAY more macho about it than MacKaye)

And Guilty of Being White is a very interesting song that I think deserves to be taken in context. Ian always talks about DC being a city of politicians, but the true culture of DC was in the black people that lived there and I think he embraced that. He just wrote a song about being beat up because he was white and didn't get why he had to pay for the shit his ancestors did. He was young and full of rage.

Like I said before, he was more profilic and forward thinking than anyone I knew as a teenager.

I'm of the opinion that Black Flag are in the same career pattern as the Flying Burrito Brothers or Can (or the Mountain Goats, haha!!?!?!???*) where the legacy was forged and sealed in the beginning and after key members' departures, the band just auto-piloted on for many albums later. Black Flag could have ended prior to Damaged and even still (and perhaps even more lopsidedly) were vastly superior to Minor Threat.

*this is just a silly remark, I don't know enough about tMG's more recent work to justify/draw comparisons.

I agree that MacKaye's lyrics are way better than Rollins' Rollins' lyrics are pretty terrible for the most part that I can think of.

p.s. I am being serious and not funny or ironic. Steve you are a clown.

And sorry to link it endlessly, but Pop Ryan, you'd probably appreciate this:

http://citypages.com/databank/22/1083/article9800.asp

I hear that. Who's the other Toiling Midgets fan on here...

But I'm not dissing you Pete, it was a very cool article, just a bit more tilted to the critics faves of the indie scene. Though you do say that hardcore made Husker Du, et al. possible (and I agree).

I still think there is a large chunk of hardcore missing from almost any article about hardcore. It used to be that everyone forgot everything between 77 and Nirvana. But now Black Flag and Minor Threat are getting their due and everyone is forgetting the great true hardcore bands between 84 and 90.

But like I said not dissing you Pete, it surely is one of the better article's I've read about hardcore. Thanks for the link.

lol some would say for good reason...but OTM, it is pretty crucial to any understanding of hardcore. especially any of the stuff that splintered off from it in the 90's.

Thanks for the support on that latebloomer.

Two totally different bands musically, lyrically and in terms of culture. Flag were more loner, psycho, don't fit and hated more whereas Minor Threat had more of a gang mentality and attended PMA classes.
Early Black Flag looked like shit and less 'punk' so therefore win, until little tight shorts got involved and then they looked like Spinal Tap

I loved them both although all of Minor Threat as opposed to Damaged and My War (the latter was totally out on a limb when it was first released)

Comments about growing out of this are way off the mark.Aswell as all the other music I love, I still listen to Hardcore or whatever you want to call it , amongst all the other genres. I like it as least as much now (39)as i did when i was 19.

Let's face it you have to be at least 40 and probably nearer 45 to have really 'been there' anyhow. There are still Teds doing the rounds here in England 70 plus, so.

Also there were better bands than these two.

Bad Brains and early Huskers of course, but what about the following?:
Big Boys
Nip Drivers
Jerrys Kids
Die Kreuzen
DRI
Negative Approach
7 Seconds
Dicks
The Freeze etc etc etc I'm guaranteed to have missed loads

A question to my fellow Limeys. Why are all the great bands American? Where's our stuff? Discharge I can just about handle but surely not The Exploited and their ilk?

The UK did have a bunch of good hardcore bands in the 80s; Heresy, the Stupids, Electro Hippies, Doctor and the Crippens etc, which were all fun but did seem a bit 2nd division compared to the americans.

However what we did do, which grew out of the UK HC scene but was a radical break sonically from it, was come up with grindcore! Napalm Death/Carcass etc were great and massively influential (if more on metal than on punk).

I love all that stuff though, even though it's not really in the same league as those bands Jessie mentioned (apart from possibly DRI and 7 Seconds - I like both bands, but I wouldn't say they're better than Discharge).

Also, Bidfurd forgot Ripcord, who IMO were probably the best of the later 80s UKHC scene.

But yeah the early 80s UK hardcore is pretty much all of the crusty variety - Disorder, Chaos UK, Varukers, Rudimentary Peni, etc.

One thing I loved about US hardcore were the accents. It’d be daft to say you hadn’t heard american accents in music before but HC really showcased the voice, possibly because no attempt was made to sing, it was all spoken word really, at various volume levels. “Thanks to modern chemistry sleep is now optional” “ I stayed at home today and I’m not going back to work” the whole of TV party etc sounded to these UK ears really exotic and cool whereas the accents in UK crusty punk were redolent of Oi, yobbishness and the far right, even where their politics were far from that. (There was an obvious snobbery going on here on my part)

Maybe in the US the situation is reversed, explaining the love GBH and the Exploited get and lack of acclaim for Hardcore, still noticeable to this day in the way Pitchfork reviews bands with roots in the HC scene. and the lack of interest in it on this board.
(Also pdf probably OTM above).

I honestly cut my teeth on 97 youth crew revival stuff as in 97 i was 15 and just the right age for that. So my first exposure to hardcore was may have been minor threat, BF, Gorilla Biscuits and all that, but the first real time hardcore that had an impact on me was that of Ten Yard Fight, Bane, American Nightmare, Converge, In My Eyes, Reach The Sky, and a bit later The Suicide File, The Dedication, Horror Show, Ink and Dagger. And being from Philly, Kid Dynamite and Lifetime ruled the school.

i probably like SSD as much as Minor Threat and Black Flag. i figure i'm in the minority there.

and the brit stuff means as much to me as the american stuff. the crusty stuff. i fell head over heels in love with it all in 1984. the year crass broke up! (i think) i seriously heart rudimentary peni, crass, subhumans, flux of pink indians, discharge, and conflict as much as any american hardcore. i can understand why some people just get a headache out of it though. and it is a different vibe altogether.

you would like das oath.

Crass did break up in '84, yeah. I didn't get into that whole scene until relatively recently, I got into USHC first, then worked my way round to the British stuff later. A bit backwards since I am British!

xxpost

ditto, that stuff was awesome! some of those bands were truly out there. hell, crass was practically a noise-rock band.

I still haven't come up with an answer to the thread question after a couple of days, for the record.

Nah, you should get their first one if anything

"I think the best way we're going to have to deal with it is that if I am able to say 'nigger' without everyone gasping, and if I'm able to say that word, because I don't have any problems with that word. I say 'bitch', and that means a girl asshole. I might say 'jock', which means an athletic asshole. But you say 'nigger', which means black asshole, everyone flies off the handle. That's where the racism thing is kind of fucked. That's where the whole thing gets out of hand. I think it'd be great if people could come down from that."

the whole interview is here:
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cch223/usa/info/mrr_rapsession.html

You're right that some of the bands it covers are a bit crappy, but that just shows how comprehensive it is, I can't think of many bands from that time other than some of the skinhead Oi! bands that it leaves out.

xpost

see, i was never really part of a "scene". i was too weird and had too many other interests for that. i always felt like an oddball at hardcore shows. i grew up with the whole danbury connecticut straightedge scene and i had friends who were a part of that, but i mostly made fun of them when i was drunk. they tolerated me anyway for some reason. i did dig their noise. and all that noise from that time. but those guys could be all kinds of drippy. i just wanted to go crazy. they were trying to bottle it all up.

Until he started smoking pot and dropping acid when he moved to California.

Black Flag for me, richer + more varied discog.

Angelic Upstarts - Who Killed Liddle Towers
Peter and the Test Tube Babies - Banned from the Pubs
Ejected - Have You Got 10P
Attak – Murder in the Subway
Sham 69 - Hurry up Harry
The Partisans - 17 Years of Hell (actually bought this when it came out)
Abrasive Wheels - Burn 'Em Down

etc etc

I even scored a Skrewdriver - All Skrewed Up 7" @ a record fair which drew some weird looks from the guy who sold it to me 'cause my hair was pretty short.

Also that 2nd Rudi Peni album was pretty f*cking weird sounding. Very digital compressed sounding to my ears. I asked Loder (who preoduced it) about it and I don't remember what he said but I think it was at the time he was enamoured with those EMS DDLs.

Second, when I started the threat the question was BF v. MT because I think they were the first real hardcore bands from each coast. To mention The Stooges and the buttholes (much like mentioning Husker Du), i think, is a bit off the mark. Although The Stooges are one of my top 5 favorite bands of all time, they predated even punk, let alone hardcore.

And, though I value that it is your opinion and is in no way wrong, I am very opposed to the thought that Minor Threat had less of a role to play than Black Flag. You may or may not like their music as much, but MT is one of the most influencial bands in hardcore, much more influential than the bands you pile them in with (circle jerks, the damned, etc) and also, I think, more influencial than Bad Brains (though Bad Brains did, in many ways, influence Minor Threat, MT's influence on hardcore as a whole is much more expansive).

It's so tough to have a purely hardcore discussion these days. Everytime I try to talk to people about the hardcore movement, it always wanders off into indie or proto punk or post punk or post hardcore. What is the aversion to hardcore. Why do critics and general music snobs (because we all are) feel the need to push hardcore off to the side and only talk about it's artier progeny or progenators? It's just bizarre to me.

well, I think part of it is that people are really turned off by explicitly, not to say aggressively political music - there seems (to me) to be a general feeling that HC politics are "preachy," and "ineffective," and a whole host of other criticisms which seem pretty suspect to me - anyhow, I think the whole kit 'n' caboodle gets a big heave-ho from a lot of people because they feel talked-down-to by HC, and most people I know when they feel that way don't ask "is there something wrong with my behavior/thinking" but rather immediately say "well, fuck you, then, if you don't like what I'm about"

I would posit that most people who get in HC are people who enjoy the dialectic of having their behaviors & ideas directly, even insultingly, challenged

I think Ian would maybe disagree regarding Bad Brains. In fact, one of the reasons why hardcore on the East Coast took off was because Bad Brains showed all thess kids who were still messing around with '76-informed punk rock that the music could be taken to whole other level of intensity. In my opinion, Bad Brains really are one of the original seeds of HC.

i don't think any of the u.k. bands i mentioned were sloppy. at least on record. and they all had their rocking moments. subhumans rocked a bunch. great guitar solos too. and pash, if you have never heard *from the cradle to the grave* by subhumans it contains one of my all-time fave side-long concept pieces/songs ever! they were prog peace punks!

I grew outside SF and fall into the MT camp but always figured Bad Brains to be a kind of "musicians" band. I mean I saw 'em @ the Elite Club (45 Grave/Flipper/Bad Brains and, I think, someone else) and they were GREAT, but I never considered them to be particularly influencial. I thought they played way to good to be a "real" punk band. Loved watching people skank slowly through the dub parts and fall off stage... slowly.

First of all, the book Banned In Dc makes a pretty good case for the Bad Brains being ground zero in DC.

Nobody has given props to the Nip Drivers since Jesse first mentioned them, and this must be rectified. Also, if we are tossing out faves, I need to mention the Angry Samoans' first two.

Never liked most of the "Punk And Disorderly" comp style UK punk. But I love Crass and everything related in a way that is very different than my love of freaking out to USHC.

In the end, I think the answer to Jesse's question about UK/US scene/sound/quality differences could come down to something as simple as Reagan vs Thatcher and the reactions they inspired (plus social and cultural forces, no doubt). On a Crime reissue single Thurston Moore's liner notes talk about how none of his scene in NYC took the California sound seriously, thought they were ripping off the britishes, etc...

"And then Reagan was president. And then we understood. California screaming. Suburban wasteland. Middle class hippy. Fuck. Hardcore USA exploded and its direct roots were these records we balked at. So we bought 'em all and played the fuck out of them. Total energy spread. The Ramones were hippy Reaganites. We hated Reagan. Still do. Crime will always be relevant. Fuck Bush. Frankie Fix rules."

Also, ryan, there's at least a bit of discussion around current HC stuff on this board. I know Scott, M@tt H and I are all involved on some levels, there's probably more people.

I live with some folks who are like 15 years younger than me and we book shows at our house, so I have been (somewhat involuntarily) exposed to a LOT of newer bands from the HC underground. Some of them are pretty damn good... Ballast, Face Down In Shit, Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower, probably a ton more. I attempted to defend them as "legitimate punks" (whatever that might mean) on this thread (searches)

are there still punks?

Disclaimer: I was new then and, y'know, not really familiar with the place.

And the answer to the question is still Black Flag by a razor thin margin.

my blind spot is the 90's. i was, apparently, absent from class in the 90's. i mostly listened to metal in the 90's as far as heavy stuff goes with some exceptions like eyehategod and that kinda sludgey noize. someone on ilm was kind enough to send me a tape of 90's grind/powerviolence and i thank them again! if they send me their address i'll return the favor. i know botch and cave-in and converge and all that, but i know i missed a heap of good music. Decibel is actually good for tips on that kind of thing, cuz a lot of the writers grew up with it. meaning i am old.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikOvH6a6HIs&search=gauze

old G.B.H. > any xXyOuThCrEwXx band

i am heavy on the hybrids with new stuff. watching that gauze clip makes me remember how much i like straightup no fuss no muss hardcore. i should start spamming xhcx labels for review copies.

Also it seems that the Damned's 1977 US tour had a really big influence on USHC, as mentioned in We Got The Neutron Bomb etc.

scott: i see what you are saying about how a lot of hardcore bands today are going the metal route, but there is a big youth crew revival happening too. Bridge Nine has a bunch of third wave youth crew (1st: 88, 2nd: 97, 3rd: 06) follwing in the steps of In My Eyes, Ten Yard Fight and others of the 97 era. Have Heart, Casey Jones (on eulogy records) and there are a ton more. I am currently writing a piece for PopMatters on the third ressurgence of youth crew and it is really vibrant. Youth crew is back in high schools and really becoming an ethic. So I'm stoked on that because youth crew is really what i love about hardcore. 97 was the year that got me into hardcore, I was just a punk before that. haha.

Despite my bitching about indie (which I really do love) this thread has yielded a great discussion.

Ice Cream: in This Band Could Be Your Life, Ian MacKaye says that every DC hardcore band covered Wire songs, including 12XU. In fact, at one show, every band on the bill covered the same Wire song.

First Minor Threat ep 1981
First Bad Brains album 1982
First Black Flag ep 1978

was nervous breakdown the first true, pure hardcore record?

-- Ice Cream Electric (docido...), August 2nd, 2006.

i wouldn't quite say that, there's a lot of Germs in early Flag!

so youth crew revivals are happening in 9-year intervals, weird!

Because I can sum up the history of HC fairly succinctly: trailblazing artists invent new genre/subculture that subsequent adherents turn into a conformist shadow of its former self. It's the same reason critics will talk to you all day about The Sex Pistols and The Ramones but aren't too interested in talking about The Exploited or Rancid. If HC had continued to attract/produce bands like Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains, there would have been a chance. Instead we got Cro-Magnons, Dag Nasty, and Murphy's Law. HC was highly influential for good (no Black Flag = no Swans/Sonic Youth, at least in the way we know them) and for ill (all of emo). But it's also a reductive term - punk can apply to such diverse artists as Minutemen, Wire, Huggybear, Rocket From The Crypt. HC is a rather limited sub-branch of punk, and it's BECAUSE of the tunnelvision of its adherents. No one was able to expand the sound beyond what the forerunners did, so the scene was stuck hybridizing with metal to give an illusion of progress.

lot of hardcore bands today are going the metal route

That's been the case at least since '86, probably earlier - but when skaters started listening to Reign In Blood it was definitely all over. Crumbsuckers, Suicidal Tendencies 2nd album, I Against I, metal metal metal. Chuck made a good point here when the Rolling Metal thread was sidetracked into HC discussion: Rolling 2006 Metal Thread

Point being, the metal was there all along. Even the Bad Brains ROIR tape has some metallic moments - but I'll repeat myself from that thread: when people talk about hardcore merging with metal, it's the whammy bar / overtone divebomb / virtuoso hammer-on / post-Van Halen variety of metal rather than the earthier 70s stuff (Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Nuge) that influenced bands like Black Flag, Husker Du, Killdozer, et al. Even stuff like Kraut, Void, early Bad Brains, weren't metal in the way that Crumbsuckers, Suicidal Tendencies, or late 80s Bad Brains were. There was a distinct pursuit of a "cleaner" guitar sound.

One of the best things about Black Flag is that they thought their way out of the HC box, while others melted (Minor Threat) or died trying (Dead Kennedys - fuck you, listen to Frankenchrist, a terrible album but it doesn't really sound like anything else). You could say Black Flag "went metal" like everyone else, but they went metal in the weirdest way possible.

Thanks for the Middle Class' "Out of Vogue" reference.

I forgot. Godlike! Essential.

http://agonyshorthand.blogspot.com/2006/07/interview-with-mike-atta-from-middle.html

Something that pointed out the direction hardcore was headed for me was the Rat Music For Rat People comps:

Volume 1, 1982
1. DOA "America the Beautiful"
2. DOA "Fucked Up Ronnie"
3. FLIPPER "Life"
4. CIRCLE JERKS "Live Fast, Die Young"
5. BAD BRAINS "How Low Can a Punk Get?"
6. BAD BRAINS "Don't Bother Me"
7. CRUCIFIX "Steel Case Enclosure"
8. DEAD KENNEDYS "Forward to Death"
9. DEAD KENNEDYS "I Am the Owl"
10. BLACK FLAG "Scream"
11. TSOL "Weathered Statues"
12. TSOL "Sounds of Laughter"
13. AVENGERS "American Tragedys"
14. DILS "Blow Up"
(this is a great listen, most of these are live not studio versions, if you've never heard this I highly recommend you seek out a copy - and Dave Rat is still sitting on a ton of killer shows he taped at the Fillmore during the early 80s)

Volume 2, 1984
1. BUTTHOLE SURFERS "Butthole Surf Theme Song"
2. BIG BOYS "History"
3. BIG BOYS "The Seed"
4. PERSONALITY CRISIS "Case History"
5. MINUTEMEN "Fake Contest"
6. JFA "Middle America"
7. TALES OF TERROR "Skate or Bate"
8. FANG "They Send Me to Hell C.O.D."
9. MDC "Pay to Come Along"
10. MDC "(R)Evolution in Rock"
11. DICKS "Legacy of Man"
12. DRI "Madman"
13. DRI "Sad To Be"
14. THE WHITE LIE "Postcard from Dachau"
(starts off strong, but there's a higher ratio of dire stuff here... I like DRI as much as the next blockhead but comparing DRI, JFA, and MDC to Black Flag, Bad Brains, and The Minutemen is, as the song says, no contest...)

Volume 3, 1987
1. DI "Ballroom Blitz"
2. DI "Going to Lebanon"
3. CORROSION OF CONFORMITY "Bound"
4. DOGGIE STYLE "Janitor Man"
5. RAW POWER "We Shall Overcome"
6. ATTITUDE "Big Time"
7. NAKED RAYGUN "Rocks of Sweden"
8. VERBAL ABUSE "Fun Fun Fun (With My Machine Gun)"
9. MOJO NIXON & SKID ROPER "I Ain't Gonna Piss In No Jar"
10. WHITE FLAG "Loaded", "Kitchen Disaster"
11. SACRILEGE "Party With God"
12. ADRENALIN OD "Sightseeing"
13. FRONTLINE "Survive"
14. ADOLESCENTS "All Day and All of the Night"
(by this time I had checked out - why torture yourself with COC and Adrenalin OD when there's Big Black and Scratch Acid to be had?)

I guess I don't see why it has to be either/or.

http://www.barringtonbuild.com/eereviews.html

having said that, i LIKE dag nasty, cro mags, and murphys law. and all that blockhead mid-80's straightedge stuff and all the blockhead metal stuff and on and on. and i think things got even more interesting in the 90's with grindcore and the metallic reworking of harcore by bands like converge and their pals. i LOVE what converge did with hardcore. and yeah, there was always metal in hardcore - and not just with the crossover stuff, but all the youth of today-inspired metalness - and there is plenty of metal in a band like converge, but they are still a hardcore band. and a very inventive one at that. i had no interest in a world where the mr.t experience was king, really. i won't defend everything. but i also think that as a genre or sub-genre or micro-genre it is less monolithic than people say it is. i also have no problem with the idea of a genre being monolithic though. if i like how it sounds and what it does.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

-- Colonel Poo (colonelpo...), August 2nd, 2006.

If you're standing in a record store in 1987 with 10 bucks in your hand, do you buy Rat Music for Rat People Volume 3 or God's Favorite Dog? At the time it was pretty clear to me who was making the more interesting music. Maybe I just wasn't a big enough hardcore fan?

it all went downhill once mojo nixon took over hardcore.

-- scott seward (skotro...), August 2nd, 2006.

I know! That Agnostic Front album with the washboard was teh suck...

now playing: his hero is gone - fifteen counts of arson

Maybe I'm being dilettantish in viewing them as evidence of diminishing returns... I had friends in the hardcore scene so I was exposed to a ton of it, and it never grabbed me (though I had my revenge by torturing them w/ Drunks With Guns and Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel). I agree that the grindcore of the early 90s produced scads of interesting stuff, though.

i think my first hardcore bummer was bringing home new wind by 7 seconds all excited and being very sad once i heard it. and when youth brigade came back with that first brigade album....oof. a lot of those guys were trying to go beyond what they had started or helped to start and some were more successful than others.

I hear ya - hardcore broke my heart, too!

Remember Wargasm?

this bugs me! those guys didn't want to make hardcore records so hardcore isn't worth talking about anymore? after new day rising husker du were pretty much over for me. they just got more and more boring. die kreuzen's last record wasn't as great as the one before it. the meat puppets i stopped listening to after that one ep they put out after up on the sun. buttholes did stay pretty good up until the album after hairway to steven. i never listened to minutemen much. i'd probably enjoy listening to them more now that i'm an old fat rock critic (their target audience, apparently) than i did in the 80's.

It's more like, "these guys didn't want to make hardcore records and nobody else moved in to fill the vacuum the way they did." Nobody followed up and took the game to another level, or operated at even a similar level - I mean, this isn't TS: Black Flag vs. Youth of Today. (I agree with your assessment of every one of those SST/T&G bands, BTW).

I'm not saying every hardcore band has to become a stoner freak to rate - but there was a passion for musical evolution in that batch o' bands that the followers couldn't lay claim to, and it's part of what made the early stuff so electric. By the mid 80s a lot of the wind had gone out of hardcore's sails, and what few critics had picked up on it at the time moved along. Subsequent resurgences never had the same power of the first wave or two to capture music critics/snobs' attentions (which is what Pop Ryan inquired about in the first place). Let's keep in mind that audience attention and critical attention are not the same thing - if anything the audience for hardcore grew over time.

I do too. Though "Too High to Die" is a great bit of 90s commercial-alt.

It's not singled out. Punk is often noted for its early descent into formula (hence postpunk) - but punk conventions are not quite as strict. There's punk style (Rancid) and punk attitude (Magik Markers) which speaks to a wider degree of influence. The number of non-punk bands influenced by the punk movement is much much greater than the number of non-hardcore bands influenced by hardcore.

Plus, once you get past the early 80s, there's a lack of transcendent hardcore albums - that is, albums that appeal to non-hardcore fans.

The number of non-punk bands influenced by the punk movement is much much greater than the number of non-hardcore bands influenced by hardcore.

Yer probably right, but hardcore in America has had a HUGE influence on Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Sun City Girls, Flaming Lips, Flipper, emo, Slint, Rodan, grindcore, death metal, speed metal, lo fi noise a la Sebadoh, skate punk, thrash, Metallica, Slayer, punk funk, underground noise, as well as all that late-80s no depression stuff. I don't think HC's influence can be underestimated. It's a big, thick strata in our pop cultural landscape.

And as for the Magik Markers, I recently interviewed them, and they were all heavily inlfuenced by early-90s Connecticut HC. So they're attitude is in part informed by hardcore as well. And this goes for so many modern noise-rock outfits. So many of them (and me included grew up going to HC matinees and basement shows.

Great hardcore after the early 80s: COC, Fat Day, Born Against, Rorshach, Gravity Records, Charles Bronson, the Slap-a-Ham label, and too many others to name.

Latebloomer is right. There's a lot of Germs in Black Flag. Maybe the Germs were the first hardcore band, since I can't think of anyway else to describe them.

hardcore is one of the biggest unsung influences on american youth culture in the past ten years

It's kind of uncharted territory though, isn't it, because you don't have that critics' interest that piques the interest of people not immersed in the whole thing. Whether this is because nothing was being released worth writing about is another matter, but I don't think that was the case, personally. Gravity released a bunch of stuff that could (and did) appeal to non-HC kids, for example.

On another note: what about sludge and doom? Listen to High on Fire, and you'll hear a dude playing not Sabbath riffs but slowed down hardcore riffs. This comes from the tradition of Asbestos Death, Killslug, Melvins, etc.

This makes a lot of sense although if we're splitting hairs, '12XU' and 'Janie Jones' are both pretty fast, for the time, and both predate Middle Class comfortably. There are prob better examples than 'Janie Jones'

When I read Edward III's, "There's punk style (Rancid) and punk attitude (Magik Markers)," a few posts back, the first thing I thought was, "yeah, but aren't the Magic Markers kinda/sorta HC?"

A lot of American metal and noise bands have roots in HC (Mastodon, Wolf Eyes, whatever). The whole nu-metal thing, even if it's a dead horse, was heavily HC influenced. And emo is a similarly direct outgrowth of the hardore scene. And tons crazy-influential 80s bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth came up outta that. Nirvana, too, through bands like the Melvins.

Mr. Que's formula nails it. Hardcore and post-hardcore forms have been the gateway drug for TONS of American bands/musicians who eventually went on to do other things. It's like this dirty little secret. Hardcore is snubbed by critics and ignored by anyone who isn't actively into "the scene," but it's kinda the hidden history of left-field American music since the 80s.

Unless you know something I don't, this is pushing it

Yeah, hardcore doesn't have the acceptable myth surrounding it that punk does. The violence of punks is so much more accepted than the violence of hardcore kids.

First couple of Lurkers singles are pretty fast for the time I think... probably better examples than those too though, that's just what came to mind.

>> even if it's a dead horse, was heavily HC influenced

Dead Horse were a great late 80s metalcore band!

Hidden history or influence is absolutely right. People say hardcore is a stylistic straightjacket, it's funny then that a straightjacket has spawned so many innovative bands - Sonic Youth, Sunn))o, Laddio Blocko, Melvins, Earth, etc. Just maybe it's not such a restricted genre after all.

Good point. HC is a kids' thing. That isolates from the more "adult" tastes of critics and grown-up audiences. And HC prizes that isolation, even making belligerent threats towards anyone who doesn't "get it." Hardcore keeps the dukes up.

Punk (as it was understood in England) never really happened here. American punk was a small, marginalized, largely urban movement. Appealed to junkies, artists, thinkers, outsiders and rebels. But it never became the unified voice of an inclusive youth movement, the way British punk seemed to.

Harcore, on the other hand, slowly and kinda quietly, became the American equivalent. The disreputable voice of urban and perhaps especially suburban kids all across the country. Not just misfits. Not just arty kids or middle-class kids. But all kindsa kids. Mostly white, sure, but blue-collar, white-collar, intellectual or thugged-out, it doesn't matter. Hardcore wants you.

I do agree though, that the only hardcore I ever really loved was the stuff I dug in my teens. Black Flag, Minor Threat, early Husker Du, Dag Nasty, Cro Mags, first Die Kreuzen album, Negative Approach, Meatmen, etc. Occasionally, I'll stumble across something cool, like Orchid, Dillinger Escape Plan, or Charles Bronson, but for the most part, I don't expect much of the genre.

Dunno why. Maybe 'cuz I'm old...

Even forgetting Inside Out, I'm still having trouble figuring this in any way

Even if you don't buy that, Rage (with Korn, I guess) was the spearhead nu-metal band. And they came out of hardcore, and retained a lot of HC identity. Which kinda makes nu-metal a harcore offshoot as much as a metal thing.

I never heard Korn say a word for or against HC, nor Slipknot, nor Limp Bizkit (except they covered 'Waiting Room' at one point didn't they?) nor any of them lot. Hatebreed have sort of bridged a gap, but if anything's followed them over that bridge, it's been Avenged Sevenfold and 18 Visions and bands like that who are more or less reviving hair metal nowadays

This may be true! But I think of hardcore as a punk sect, so I dunno. When I hear the Magik Markers I think of no wave/punk and wilder hardcore (Black Flag), the craziness that seemed to get bred out of hardcore. I don't hear Jawbreaker or Gorilla Biscuits in their music.

I never said hardcore wasn't influential (quite the opposite if you read my posts above) but I think if you include Stooges/Velvet Underground/Talking Heads/Television/Suicide as part of the punk world, then punk influenced plenty of scenes that hardcore didn't (e.g. New Zealand). And punk influenced hardcore itself, no?

Plus, once you get past the early 80s, there's a lack of transcendent hardcore albums - that is, albums that appeal to non-hardcore fans.

It's kind of uncharted territory though, isn't it, because you don't have that critics' interest that piques the interest of people not immersed in the whole thing. Whether this is because nothing was being released worth writing about is another matter, but I don't think that was the case, personally. Gravity released a bunch of stuff that could (and did) appeal to non-HC kids, for example.

-- DJ Mencap (lackofinteres...), August 2nd, 2006.

I guess my question is, is there a post-mid-80s hardcore album as good/influential/groundbreaking as Damaged, In My Eyes, or Bad Brains and if there is why has everyone been hiding it from me all these years? I've heard VOD and Quicksand, they're okay I guess. I liked Dead Guy's first single.

Do they really need to? To these ears it's pretty obvious that that stuff retains a layer of HC and metalcore influence on a fundamental level. It's in the water and totally internalized.

Rorshach, Born Against, and the Young Ginns totally embodied that craziness.

I'd agree with this, but only really in the sense of a trickle down effect. If there was a major Slapshot element to Fred Durst's music, god knows he'd have banged on about it at some point (ref. those damn photos of him in Sonic Youth shirts and the like). Of course, fast forward a few years - to the point when nu-metal was the herpes of genres - and you get bands coming out taking equally from Victory metalcore and Korn, which is interesting in every respect that doesn't involve listening to the music

dude, back in the olden days Korn opened for Sick of it All! korn may have little to do with the HC scene proper but hardcore is a part of nu-metal's DNA

As to the question at hand - I will take Black Flag for lyrical content and riffs that are enjoyable for all ages - not just 16 year olds who can't get laid.

"I don't understand the rollins fixation" made me laugh. sure, BF was Ginn's baby - but he wasn't the front man - Hank was. the frontman is there to get the attention. Is Mick the best thing about the stones? Hell no! but does he get most of the attention? Yes.

Hank's charisma, not the other singers - is what put Ginn' songs over the top. The recent Hank WM3 tour proved that. Just ask anyone who saw Hank's version and the Ginn's abomination of a Black flag reunion a few years back.

let us not underestimate the influence of the mighty dickies on american punk. i know for a fact that in 1979 their version of paranoid was the fastest thing i had ever heard. plus, you could actually find their records in record stores. god bless my brother for buying a copy of their debut. the first black flag single came out in 79, no? first dickies singles came out in 78, i think. california had its share of speedy punk bands pre-black flag. and then there were bands like the pagans. there was definitely hardcore attitude out there in the 70's. and, yeah, speedy u.k. bands up the butt. black flag were definitely ground zero for the aggression/speed/violence of what hardcore would become though. there's no doubt about that.