"American Hardcore" - Book review
American Hardcore by Steven Blush
Feral House has been putting out cool books about various scenes and
"marginalist" music culture for awhile now; readers of HM are probably
familiar with Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal
Underground, which depressingly chronicled the bizarre behavior and extreme music of the Northern European death (and related) metal scene(s). (HM readers probably could care less about Bubblegum Music Is The Naked Truthbut Feral House even put that baby out as well! BTW, both are informative, biased, and compellingly readable tomes.)
American Hardcore has actually been out since 2001, but a lot of people have been talking about it ever since, so now seems to be a good time for a less hyperbolic, more reasoned review in this mag.As part of the tide of punk history books put out since the late 1990s --"Please Kill Me" (NYC proto-punk to NE New Wave era), "We've Got the Neutron Bomb" (SoCal glam to the start of '80s hardcore), "Lexicon Devil," (Darby Crash bio), "Forming," (ditto "Neutron"), "Our Band Could Be Your Life" ('80s American indie-punk history), wubba wubba wubba -- "AH" has been under the gun as much if not more than all of those. Part of it is that "hardcore" is often a very misunderstood word sometimes, and its fierce regionality through its first few years of existence make sure it's author chases the topics and history around like retarded kittens hopping from a PCP-enhanced sack. No, this isn't "hardcore" as in the '90s, screaming monster vocal sense of the term, for the most part. "Hardcore" here only covers the first couple waves of the "genre" -- from Dead Kennedys to Effigies to Necros to latter day Husker Du to Murphy's Law (his contention being that HC is a primal, youth-based impulse, and will always remain so, and his taste for it withered by the late '80s).
For latter day HC fans this book will probably seem like another world (with
the same name), far removed from their mosh pits, and not particularly
relevant to how they regard the term. Blush understands this -- his own mostly unknown band back in the '80s was more art-punk than HC, anyways, and though he has been an asset to the music scene as an HC show promoter, label owner, radio DJ, and eventually a writer for Spin and the founder of the wonderful interviews-mostly Seconds mag (now defunct) -- and tries to assert both the subjectivity of the period he's timelining (this is what I was in contact with, what I saw, who ripped us off) and his own somewhat ambivalent feelings about the genre's occasional misogyny, homophobia, racism, and paradoxical political correctness.The backlash on "AH" has been steadily building in the zines and gossip of people who claim to have "been through it all back then." Unfortunately, as sloppy and banal and overreaching as "AH" can occasionally be, it did give me a LOT of new appreciation for some music I previously tucked away in my past. It made me want to relive my own old HC experiences again, regardless of all of the musical and sociological reservations inherent in a form that rewards and explores extremity as an aesthetic.
So I think these dismissals are agenda-set and don't recognize that one of
the greatest strengths of this history may be its own evolutionary flaw, a
flaw inherent in HC itself: Hardcore was, and is, all about radical forms
of possibilities. It is a spiritual practice with lifestyle disciplines unmutated by the status quo. It is indestructible poetry against the Moloch of society, to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg.What did people want: A slick, positive, affirming view of a scene that by its own nature is ferociously committed to change and often negativity, even if it involves chaos and outward aggression?
If you're at all intrigued on reading a nicely personal account of American
punk rock scenes back when hardcore first started, this is a very
personable, in-the-spirit, fun-to-read book. [Feral House/ Chris Estey]
For more information:
www.feralhouse.com
info@feralhouse.com
$20
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