Friday, October 20, 2006
Review: American Hardcore
Most accounts of the history of punk rock go something like this: punk was originated in the late 60's by The Velvet Underground and The Stooges, continued in the early 70's by The New York Dolls, and finally took root in a lower Manhattan dive bar called CBGB, where bands like The Ramones, Patti Smith and Television established the aesthetic of the punk scene. From there it spread to England, where an explosion of bands like The Sex Pistols and The Clash played a more aggressive, politically-fueled brand of punk. Then the Sex Pistols broke up, Sid Vicious died, and nothing else of any importance happened until 1991, when Nirvana finally unleashed punk on the American masses with Nevermind. If your awareness of that period between 1978 and 1991 is based on the music that could be heard on the radio, seen on MTV or read about in Rolling Stone, you could be forgiven for buying into this incomplete history. And the makers of American Hardcore want to set you straight.
The title American Hardcore, currently expanding its run through independent theaters across America, does not refer to porn, although the confusion is probably helping them sell a few more tickets. It refers to the music of bands like Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys and Bad Brains, a harsh distillation of the earlier punk sound that could best be described as sounding like the earliest Ramones or Clash records played at 45 rpm. Hardcore was faster, more aggressive, and more directly political than earlier punk, an angry response to the conservatism of the Reagan era and the oppressive dullness of suburban life. This doc attempts to capture the exhilaration of hardcore, and in its first minutes, scored to Bad Brains' "Pay to Cum" and Black Flag's "Rise Above," it's electrical enough to make you want to get out of your seat and start a mosh pit in the theater. That energy doesn't really last, largely because few hardcore tunes are as exhilarating as those two. I find it doubtful that many new fans will be won over to MDC or Gangrene by the live clips on display here. Just as it's impossible to imagine how people could listen to techno unless you've experienced it at a rave, or to understand the appeal of The Grateful Dead without having been in a stadium full of tripping hippies, most hardcore is music that makes the most sense in a tightly-packed club while rushing on adolescent adrenalin.
Possibly what is most important about this movement has nothing to do with the music itself, but with the DIY ethic that propelled it. Whereas most of the 70's bands were signed to major labels, hardcore was completely ignored by the record industry and the media, so the bands had to take a grassroots approach to promoting their music. They started their own labels and magazines, distributed their records through direct mail order, and played gigs at any space available: American Legion Halls, school auditoriums, houses of kids whose parents were on vacation. In doing so, they blazed a trail across America, producing a network that independent bands would continue to build throughout the decade, until, by the early 90's, even the record industry would have to take notice.This is the stuff that makes for the best part of the film. Minor Threat's Ian McKaye describing how they personally cut and folded 10,000 record covers by hand over the years, Bad Brains singer H.R. describing gigs that took place in basements and art schools, others describing touring as sleeping on the floor of a series of other bands' houses. There's a great visual device of a map of America showing the spread of hardcore across the country "like a spilled beer," starting in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, then sprouting up in D.C. and Boston, then to major urban centers across the Midwest, until every city and college town, and eventually every small town and suburb across the country had their own local scene and original bands playing this music. As several musicians point out, it was music so simple that anybody could figure out how to play it about as well as the major, national bands. It was sort of like folk music, except it didn't suck.
If nothing else, I have to give this document credit for being honest about the scene, and the violence and stupidity that overran it. It is suggested that, more than anything, it was the mosh pit that killed the scene, attracting a violent, lunkheaded crowd who eventually overran the scene until the intelligent people just wanted out. While that's certainly part of it, I would suggest that the real reason hardcore died was because it was just so musically limited (and so narrowly defined by its fans). Several musicians mention that the scene was active and vital from 1980 to 1984, then died almost overnight by 1985. That's one interpretation, although I have another. 1984 seems to me like a year of transition, as bands like The Butthole Surfers, Husker Du and The Minutemen were releasing albums that were taking the punk sound into new directions, clearing the way for a new wave of indie rock bands like Sonic Youth, The Pixies and Fugazi, bands that would be as exhilarating to the mind and heart as the hardcore bands were to the body. And this is where I think American Hardcore fails. It fails to make any connection to earlier or later bands, as if this music (or any music) happened in a vacuum. It didn't. Art never does. It's always part of a larger continuum, and anyone that would set out to document a movement has to examine how it fits into that continuum.
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