American HardCore

By 1979, punk rock was a decadent parody of itself. As Sid Vicious was doing his best to off himself by heroin, many punks-- glue-sniffers, murderers, rabid leather spikers-- were on their way to joining him. Ronald Reagan and cocaine were ascending, disco was reaching its commercial peak, and the nascent post-punk genre hardcore was, to the extent that a bunch of 15-year-old boys were capable of articulating it, a response to both the musical and cultural moment in which they found themselves-- a music and movement in negation of damn near everything.

So there's some irony to the current wave of hardcore punk adoration and excruciatingly thorough documentation: Though Henry Rollins and Keith Morris are now, finally, inviting you to feel their quarter-century-old pain, the music to which they wistfully reminisce is vehemently anti-neophyte. But the music was, at best, half the story; the rest was something more vague, an amorphous mix equal parts camaraderie, radical politics, and geography.

Hardcore bands were inseparable from the scenes from which they hailed. D.C. was the intellectual and moral epicenter, L.A. its confrontational, aggro twin. The Midwest became the working-class wing of the movement, while New York and Boston offered its thugs and enforcers. Canada and Texas provided the scene's scant sense of humor. And compilations sprang up from each like anarchist manifestos. From its inception, D.C. Hardcore was synonymous with Dischord's Flex Your Head set, and when the city of Boston announced to the world that it too had a vibrant hardcore scene, it did so through a record deliberately titled This Is Boston Not L.A.

American Hardcore, a soundtrack culled from the film of the same name, is a very different kind of compilation than those founding documents. Rather than strive to represent a specific scene, the curators of the film aim to represent the entire movement, tracing the broad arc of hardcore's musical and geographical progression. And if the soundtrack feels a bit clinical to those already familiar with the story, it's nevertheless an invaluable summary of a scene that did its best to defy easy categorization.

The soundtrack begins, slyly, with a debate. Who wrote the first hardcore song? Was it Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown" (track one); Middle Class's "Out of Vogue" (track two); or Bad Brains' "Pay to Cum" (track three)? Of the three, two are essential, whether primary or not: "Nervous Breakdown", from the Keith Morris era of Black Flag-- before Henry Rollins joined and Morris went on to form the Circle Jerks after being evicted from the band-- is arguably the group's finest moment, but "Pay to Cum" might be the greatest track to ever emerge from the genre as a whole. Bad Brains were older, smarter, and vastly more musically gifted than Black Flag or Middle Class, and they were inspired to the point of possession. At a minute-and-a-half, "Pay to Cum" is the quintessential hardcore document: impossible speed, raging, adenoidal vocals, a fantastically apt, melodic and urgent three-chord riff, a chorus worth repeating for days, and not a single wasted second.

D.O.A. bat cleanup as the band that minted the genre's name (they titled their second record Hardcore '81) and the Circle Jerks round out the primordial bands. Then, joining Bad Brains and Black Flag as the godless third of hardcore's holy trinity, come Minor Threat. Bad Brains' protégés, articulators of the lifestyle choices that came to be associated with the music (read: straight edge), and led by Ian MacKaye, a guy more intelligent than most of the rest of his hardcore brethren combined, Minor Threat boast a discography that remains the gateway into a genre in which their greatness was (and still is) the one thing everybody agreed on. "Filler", with its "What happened to you?" sneer and repudiation of kids lost to mindless religion and loveless fucking, was the blueprint for a thousand goodbyes aimed at the larger world that dwelled beneath hardcore's exacting, self-contradictory standards.

The rest of American Hardcore brilliantly walks the tightrope between scene and chronology. There's a prolonged stop in Boston-- cherry-picked from Boston Not L.A., and featuring Gang Green, Gang Green, the Freeze, Jerry's Kids, and SSD's still classic "Boiling Point"-- a town notorious for being the most backward, close-minded, and violent of the early hardcore scenes: One episode in the movie has some knucklehead talking about staying at a kid's house on tour and threatening him with a baseball bat before robbing him blind; another has SSD calling out "new wave faggots." The city's sound brimmed with testosterone and metal-like chugging. New York would soon follow its lead (represented here, mercifully briefly, by an early Cro-Mags demo).

Equally thorough is the compilation's trip through the Midwest (Negative Approach, Articles of Faith, and Die Kreuzen), then one of the scene's most political stomping grounds, and Texas (Big Boys, Really Red, D.R.I., and MDC-- but oddly, no Dicks), a violently punked-up area often ignored in histories of the genre. And last comes Flipper, a nod to San Fran, as well as a knowing implication of things to come; their grungy sludge augured both Nirvana (Dave Grohl's early band Scream also makes a cameo elsewhere on the comp) and a virulent strain of noise-rock.

The film's curation is impeccable, but that doesn't mean there aren't omissions-- notably, the Necros, the Fix, Code of Honor, SOA, NegativeFX, and all of the borderline punk-to-hardcore bands, such as the Germs, Dead Kennedys, Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen, and the Dicks. Purists could also argue song selection for days (why not a better 7 Seconds track than "I Hate Sports", or "My Father's Dreams" instead of "Bad Attitude" by Articles of Faith?). And of course, the exciting coherence of early hardcore comps that repped scenes and held together both deep local friendships and common ideals is entirely absent here. But if American Hardcore, as a collection, fails to paint the whole picture, it does have one thing working in its favor: It contains more great music than any other post-punk-era document short of Wanna Buy a Bridge?, meaning there's little chance of finding a better summation of the music itself.