Engraved Silver Plated Yo Yo
Old fashioned mischief in swanky silver
plate. This toy-lover's dream can be personalized for a keepsake gift that's also a heck
of a lot of fun. Each yo-yo measures 1"x 2" in size. Personalize with 2 lines of
15 characters per line.
Punk didn't die in 1980, when mainstream media stopped paying attention. It just
went underground, sprouting up in small, insular scenes in nearly every American city and
town, and it started calling itself "hardcore," because to be devoted to punk
rock in the lean years, you had to feel it in your blood. Steven Blush spent those years
writing fanzine articles, booking bands on tour after tour, and releasing independent
records that, at best, broke even. In this book, he's attempted to gain some kind of
overarching perspective on it all. He's fairly successful, mostly because, like everything
connected with hardcore, this book is a group effort. American Hardcore is an
oral history, with contributions from literally dozens of musicians, fans, writers, label
owners, and anybody else who might have a story to tell or an opinion to offer.
The book's chapters document regional scenes, a tribute to hardcore's
extremely localized sensibility. The music was always about the deflation of rock-star
myths. Hardcore reasserted the idea that anyone could start a band, that everyone's ideas
were valid, and that unity was more important than grandstanding. So to properly analyze
the music, it's vital that each part of the country be described separately, and Blush
does this very well. The chapters on California and Washington, D.C. will probably be the
ones most casual readers will turn to first. San Francisco's Dead Kennedys, Los Angeles's
Black Flag, and Washington, D.C.'s Minor Threat were the three hardcore bands to achieve
the greatest nationwide recognition, if not commercial success. The chapters on smaller
scenes like the ones in New Jersey, Boston, Detroit and Texas are more important, though,
because they contain information found almost nowhere else. Capsule histories of bands
almost no one remembers abound in these pages, and each one is given a fair
assessment--not every hardcore band was as good as Black Flag or the Bad Brains.
The politics of hardcore are addressed quite explicitly as well. While
the music's public image, at least in the mainstream media, was that of angry Nazi
skinheads beating each other unconscious at shows, there were just as many, if not more,
left-wing bands, like the Dead Kennedys, who took every opportunity to berate the
right-wing U.S. government. Indeed, much of the violence in the hardcore scene (and there
was quite a bit, a fact Blush neither soft-pedals nor wallows in) came from battles
between left-wing and right-wing bands and fans. The story of a fight between Washington,
D.C.'s Bad Brains (a black Rasta hardcore band) and Texas's openly gay Big Boys, which
eventually had nationwide negative consequences for the Rastas, illustrates the way in
which politics and scene unity made hardcore unique among American rock subgenres. When
the scene is tiny, and close-knit, word travels fast, and bands can be blacklisted in a
hurry, a fact the Bad Brains learned the hard way. American Hardcore has its problems. Blush isn't the wittiest
writer in the world, and he doesn't even try to advance any new insights into the creative
process, or into "punk" as an attitude, a philosophy, or a social movement.
Instead, he's offering mostly hard, cold facts, embellished with his opinions on bands and
records. The book is also beset by typos and grammatical fumbles, but perhaps a certain
degree of textual rawness is only fitting. Any superficial flaws in the text are more than
balanced by the rare photographs, interviews with long-forgotten hardcore veterans, and
the obsessive discography the book provides. Again, this is information which would have
likely vanished altogether, if not for this book.
Hardcore punks created a community ex nihilo. They formed
bands with their friends, and saved their own money to put out records. They printed
fanzines which documented every small-town scene, sending the word to punks in every small
town that they weren't alone. Without anyone paying attention to them, they built
themselves a world, and musicians that came out of that world (most notably the Beastie
Boys, but plenty of currently-successful rock acts have ex-hardcore kids in their ranks)
went on to become the biggest acts in music. Perhaps the most interesting thing about American
Hardcore is that it only serves to document the first half-dozen years of the music
and the movement. Do-it-yourself punk rock is still vibrant and active in America. There's
still an entire invisible nation of kids making music while nobody's looking, and only
their friends are listening. (Indeed, it's often been said that a right-wing government
produces the best punk rock, so hardcore may be due for a whole new set of glory days.) American
Hardcore doesn't mark the end of that scene--it just fills in the blanks for anyone
who wants to know where it started.
- Phil Freeman
