Adolescents - Supersonic hardcore

Rikk Agnew is the embodiment of the typical 80s punk-dark figure. In life as much as in music. Only the other hero who managed to pull it off alongside him — Rozz Williams — could know how he managed to paint Los Angeles and Beverly Hills in such dark black. Before forming Christian Death with Williams and conceiving the manifesto-album "Only Theatre of pain", Agnew let the punk-hardcore side of his persona take precedence over the dark one: he paired his jagged guitar with Steve Soto's bass, and the Adolescents were born (with Rikk's brother Frank Agnew on second guitar and Casey Royer on drums). The band lasted just one season, fully embodying the Circle Jerks' creed of "live fast and die young" — a season that was enough to add another gem to the "one-album wonder" chapter.

The album Adolescents sums up everything that the punk of the Sex Pistols, translated (and here's the hardcore), sped up and pushed to extremes by the Germs in light of the Ramones' lesson, institutionalized by the Circle Jerks, and toned down and dressed in black by Siouxsie and the Banshees (and here's the dark-punk), was capable of achieving. On the same label, and in the same year, T.S.O.L. would release "Dance with me": the two are two sides of the same coin; and not just because that coin is minted in Los Angeles, but because with these albums an alternative to pure punk and hardcore is carved out (something, in the end, only a precious few — and only the greatest — managed to do), achieved through a reworking of content (the dark angle) and of form (power-pop). The reason is simple: to speak you need a language, and punk — let alone hardcore — doesn't really allow for speech; power-pop became the tool for "surviving" by describing, and identifying with, graveyard existences.

It should be noted that, while with T.S.O.L.'s first album (or with Siouxsie and the

Banshees, who released their masterpiece "Juju" in '81) we're already in power-pop-dark territory, with Adolescents we're in power-pop pure and simple. Hence the difference in face even within the same coin. The themes of Adolescents, though tinged with black, are the usual punk-college ones (the same ones later bound by the sarcastic thread of self-irony in Angry Samoans and Descendents): rebellion on every front — against society, against family, against nature, and if possible against oneself too. A rebellion so thoroughly internalized that, in becoming a lifestyle, it risks becoming an end in itself. Actually, it is deliberately and consciously an end in itself (otherwise, where would the nihilism be?): the line between quality and mediocrity lies in whether that self-referential stance is backed by some personality driven by an aesthetic-existential motivation — in which case the results are worthy, substantial works; otherwise, they're just tedious nonsense. With Adolescents we're in the former case, and its 13 tracks across 28 minutes prove it.

"I hate children" is an instant masterpiece: a manifesto; violence, noise, speed, melody and choruses are calibrated with expressionistic precision for an effect that lodges itself indelibly in the listener's memory. As for subject matter, nothing could be more punk (more "politically incorrect") than this. Cadena's voice is the quintessential punk "drawl".

"Who is who" is another masterpiece, less exemplary than the first but more moving: it has an irresistible chorus that can't help but stir something.

"Wrecking crew" opens with a slow, metal-style passage, then launches into breakneck garage rock, before settling back into the opening slow section and finally dissolving into noise.

"L.A. girl" would later have its opening riff echoed by Metallica in "Anesthesia"; the rest is seminal punk.

"Self destruct" is the third masterpiece, both in theme (see the title) and execution (supersonic and unredeemed): it cements hardcore as a genre in its own right.

"Kids of the black hole" is what the band shouldn't have done: a long power ballad (5'26") that indulges Agnew's megalomania: it says nothing and it's a bore. Its sound, however, would go on to be the blueprint for Agnew's entire All about myself.

"No way" lingers in a bit of psychedelia before establishing itself as a "total" classic: it alternates a Motorhead-style theme with music-western effects (the choruses, wonderfully original and not remotely "jokey"). The tempo is pure punk.

"Amoeba" is one of the most revolutionary tracks in rock music. Built on the concept of a continuously repeated magic formula, it uses punk as a pretext to justify the recursive cyclone represented by the "choral magic formula itself": it pulls off the miracle of making the chorus never come across as off-puttingly self-referential (something even many theatrical pieces fail to achieve), while turning it into an existential protagonist. The magic lies then in a kind of "urban or suburban fantasy". Within its 3'02" there's even room for a highly experimental guitar effect and for an ending supremely screamed (breathless and harrowing) by Cadena, who dominates over the chorus - a chorus straight out of Greek tragedy.

"Word attack" is programmatically, institutionalizingly hardcore.

"Rip it up" plays the kind of punk (college punk) that the Descendents, Angry Samoans and other far lesser bands would later play, all the way down to Offspring and Green Day. Still, it exudes a muggy, breath-constricting summer air. Cadena on vocals is an essential reference point: he can be considered (Johnny Rotten aside) the punk singer par excellence: a physique and a voice built on weakness/ attack/ defense/ limit/ anguish/ dismay/ survival/ frailty.

"Democracy" is so predictably anti-proletarian that it ends up proletarianizing itself. "No friends", excellent lyrically, doesn't leave much of a musical mark. "Creatures" is a technically well-crafted hardcore/rap track but lacking in substance: it fails to be cathartic.

With the band's breakup as inevitable as it was unjustified, right after the release of the album Adolescents, Rick Agnew took a handful of songs and instruments (he now literally does everything himself) and coined the genre of "punk singer-songwriting" with the work All by my self. It's 1982. "Punk singer-songwriting" means that - something inherently very rare (Richard Hell and few others) - it's not a band but an individual making music that can be traced back to the punk genre, and that therefore the dimension of the "self" necessarily prevails over that of the "impersonal manifesto". In one single move, Rick Agnew refounds two genres: the singer-songwriter genre is upended from the outside, since for the first time it reaches sonorities that are the very opposite of what is typical of it (country-folk-blues), and from the inside, since the themes are certainly not the usual post-romantic or politically correct ones, but rather depraved and cancerous. Punk (unfortunately though softened into power-pop) becomes a universal language capable of ferrying and communicating the various movements of the soul (a soul prey to a life of suburbs, drugs, mythologized alternative culture, and controlled self-flagellation).

All by myself can be considered a one-of-a-kind in rock history, and all the more worth rediscovering carefully for it. It runs 36 minutes and consists of 10 tracks whose tempos stretch from hardcore (1'-2') to punk (2'-3') to classic-rock (3'-4').

"O.c. life" feels almost live in its immediacy; its tempo is power pop, but a power pop so extreme and desperate, even within its Beatles-esque melodic choruses, that it makes you forget the second half of the term and keep only the first, reread here as the power to self-destruct. The album's theme is introduced right away: a monologue that would like to be a three-way dialogue - the author, his soul, and the more or less former beloved: of the three, only the first remains, hence the lack of answer to the various questions he asks, the silence that crushes him, and the help he can't even give himself.

"10" looks out onto the hoped-for suicide of this wreck, this larva of a man that remains. The melody, once you've caught its hook, though confined to '81 - and precisely because of that - is nostalgically stirring.

"Yur 2 late" is one of the album's three masterpieces, and the greatest: the initial charge of the bass drum is a stroke of genius, followed by a long flight toward one's own annihilation, all the more piercing for being underpinned by an anguishingly melodic undercurrent; as if to say: when something beautiful dies, the regret is greater. No one will draw inspiration from a track like this: just like with "Amoeba": these are things too exalted to be reproduced or even emulated. The ending is a continuous, breathtaking, cutting rush of ragged echoes and devastating slide guitar.

"Everyday" is an unlistenable Beatles watercolor.

"One shot" puts things back on the road to perdition with abrupt tempo changes, chant-like vocals, and pained voices. Against everyone and everything, it leaves no room but to be swept along in its irresistible surge of noise and melody (bass straight out of Police, garage-rock drums, dark/punk guitar, a voice now punk, now rock'n'roll choir).

"Falling out" recites the punk warning par excellence (see "God save the queen"): "no future no time", setting it within a meditative power-pop framework, with keyboards in the style of Roxy Music, mumbled backing vocals and sudden bursts of guitar reverb.

"Surfside" is the second masterpiece. A bass intro, then the unrepeatable guitar-and-drums riff that deserves by rights to rank among the most memorable in rock history. A whirlwind of granite-solid, roaring riffs. "Suicide days, destructive ways" goes the climactic line of the chorus, which follows as a reconciling bridge ferrying us toward the next cyclone of sonic conflagrations.

"It's doing something" is an epic, psychedelic blend of formulaic choruses, sacrifices to one's own goddess-demon, life-death, self-harming rituals; it seems to say: if you want to hurt me, I'll do it myself first. Then everything stops for a cabaret interlude in the style of Public Image, before starting back up again in full chorus (like the whole album is "choral": every instrument always takes part, in an extreme paradox all played by a single person).

"Fast" is a fake hardcore track, retaining only the tempo and the length (1'24") of the genre, while remaining otherwise subjugated to redemptive power-pop contemplation.

"Section 8" is the closing masterpiece: 7'28" of perfectly balanced madness, a speculative investigation into a devastated mind: funk, hardcore, punk, spoken-word recitation, psychedelia, orchestral fanfares - enough to make the best Public Image or Birthday Party envious, something "Kinds of the Black Hole" hadn't even tried to be. Perfect in every part, this "section" aimed to be a summa of "total music," but not disjointed like a bad tragedy - rather, pivoting on the deepest existential knot, like the finest tragedy.

After taking part in the finest work of Christian Death and D.I., Rikk Agnew released Brats in Battalions (Triple X, 1987) and Balboa Funzine (Triple X, 1988) under the Adolescents name, but, as usual, it wasn't worth the trouble.

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