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.

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.