Damaged

One of the problems I've had with reading punk-history books such as Please Kill Me or England's Dreaming is that, except for postludes describing the eventual fates of their main characters, the books stop their narratives in around 1979. I found this frustrating, because anyone can see that dead as the cognoscentic declared punk to be, it never went belly up. Where's the history of the 80's or 90's? "We were great then, and we're [expletive] now?"


For Christmas, my girlfriend's mother bought me Dance of Days, which would seem to be the answer to my prayers, as it covers the rise of hardcore, post-hardcore, and what we now call emo, all of which appeared in the underground in the 80's while everyone was listening to Pat Benetar and Poison. The book has more than a little lefty posturing (anyone remember when "ignorant" meant "does not know about something," and not "possessing views which are insufficiently progressive"?), and leaves plenty out, but it's an interesting read for all that. It describes how hardcore punk -- Bad Brains/Minor Threat-style fasterlouder sheets of feedback and rumble -- hit the aesthetic wall, and hard. The scene was taken over by thugs and drugs, and the founding bands discovered that loud noise did not relieve them of the hassles of relating to one another as human beings, with the same set of human problems as people who got down on Kajagoogoo. Some of them, such as Ian MacKaye, used the opportunity to learn and grow, and some didn't. A tale as bracing in it's familiarity as it is intriquing for it's proximity to me (I live in Southern Maryland, not too far from the Washington D.C. that is the setting for the story).


Round about the same time, I got my very first new (in the sense of being firsthand) piece of vinyl, Black Flag's Damaged. I'd bought the band's compilation The First Four Years, and was taken aback by the purity of their skronk, so I decided to dig in a little further. Damaged has a few of the same songs, but they're re-recorded with Henry Rollins' vocals, so have a slightly different taste. I'm still absorbing, but there is a freedom of noisemaking here that I rather dig. Outside of the guitar sludge, the songs are almost skittish in their unwillingness to set into a gentle, easy pattern. The lyrics aren't terrible, either. In fact, my favorite track is probably "TV Party," which justly and sarcastically sums up the tedium that is devotion to television watching and joyless drinking. One could probably suggest that the self-nausea described by Rollins in his lyrics is probably caused by too much focus on the self, but he's hardly the worst offender in his industry on that score. I'm hardly one to point fingers myself, truth be told.


This month I'm gonna keep trawling the SST site (take that, RIAA!) for my music. The plan is to go on a live album bender, picking Black Flag's Live '84 and a similiar platter from Bad Brains. Whenever I go to concerts, I always find a wierd distance between me and the music, like I'm not fooled that anything really special is going on. I want to see how the spontanaiety of a live gig affects hardcore. Are the tunes set in symphonic order or do they start to spin into their own tiny little unverses? We shall see.