Hardcore punk

The following is Part One and the first chapter of Part Two of “Storia geografia e concetto del rock hardcore. Usa 1978-1991” by Tommaso Franci, published in 2006 by Arduino Sacco Editore in Rome, which holds the copyright. The volume can be ordered, besides directly from the Publisher, in bookshops throughout Italy and on sites such as www.ibs.it, www.libreriauniversitaria.it, www.unilibro.it.

Part One. The Concepts of Proto-hardcore, Hardcore and Post-hardcore

Foreword

The meaning of the term “rock” adopted in this work is a narrow one. By it we mean a genre of popular music performed with three instruments: electric guitar and bass and drums; sung with a single voice; derived from country music for certain themes and certain vocal and instrumental approaches, as well as for its song form, and above all - passing through the rock 'n' roll of the Fifties - derived from rhythm and blues through the accentuation of rhythm and the fragmentation of the blues flow. Historically, the expression of these traits took hold in the United States around 1967 and, again in the United States, closed the horizon of its own research around 1991.

From a content standpoint, rock can be seen as a side effect of that spread among the masses of basic scientific-literary culture that marks the modern and contemporary era in the West. In the short span of its history, rock has ideally and rather simplistically retraced the fundamental stages of this culture, whose trajectory can be described as a shift from positions of integration and openness in the relationship between man and world, to positions of conflict and rupture. Hardcore is a style that expresses this second and final phase of rock.

1. Proto-hardcore

By “new wave” we refer to a season of rock music and culture that originated in New York in the second half of the 1970s and, beyond its many different manifestations, was defined by the will to change the conception of rock music toward greater conscientiousness and attention to the content being expressed. The New York movement on one hand criticized traditional rock, and especially the rock of its own time, for its lack of socio-existential reflection; on the other, it put forward subjects and methods for carrying out this reflection, which amounted to a radical renewal.

The subjects could involve social issues just as much as extremely personal ones, but they had to be approached with intelligence and in polemic opposition to common opinion. The methods, whether expressed vehemently or in a controlled manner, had to convey a sense of unease, a deep darkening of one's worldview, and apathy. Barring various exceptions held up as sources of inspiration, the limitation of traditional rock, in the eyes of new wave, was that it failed to sufficiently press on critical consciousness and remained largely confined to the level of entertainment for its own sake.

New wave was the first to take rock seriously as a matter of principle, no longer viewing it as a pastime but as something that life itself hinged upon. The important thing to note here is that, through this, issues such as nihilism - which literary and artistic culture had already been grappling with for at least two centuries - entered the realm of ideas of ordinary people and the masses. The consequence, in principle, is an upheaval in the relationship between man and world perhaps never before recorded in such a radical and widespread way.

Just as art history moves from the classical aesthetics of the beautiful to the modern aesthetics of the ugly, so rock - which in its own way retraces the fundamental stages of Western civilization - moves from the aesthetics of the beautiful of the Sixties and Seventies, with predominantly harmonious sounds and mostly in-tune singing, to the aesthetics of the ugly typical of new wave, with cacophonous sounds and unpleasant singing. It goes without saying that, as early as the Sixties, there were rock avant-gardes - later taken as models by new wave - that already boasted flat notes and dissonance; after all, we are well past the mid-twentieth century: art had long since arrived at the aesthetics of the ugly, and philosophy at the contemplation of nothingness.

Even the apocalyptic relationship with technology typical of new wave is, of course, something well-worn within the higher spheres of reflection and thought from which it at least indirectly stems: but it is equally important because it signals the popular spread of such concepts.

One part of new wave, which soon became a phenomenon of global proportions, found its language in a return to the simplest, rawest origins of rock, as opposed to the sophistication this music was thought to have reached over the years. We use the category of “proto-hardcore” to find a common denominator among the American rock musicians who followed this strand of new wave, because it is through the reworking of certain of their devices that hardcore proper would be produced. What has instead gone down in history as “punk”, within the scope of our discussion, can in theory be considered either as proto-hardcore or as a form of new wave that developed in London starting in 1976. The choice of this second interpretation is nonetheless recommended by the fact that hardcore would be an eminently American phenomenon.

Punk was not born in England, even though it found its fullest expression there. It was in fact born in New York as a subcategory of new wave. The export of this subcategory to England should therefore not be regarded as the true birth of punk, but rather as its christening. And perhaps not even that, given that as early as December 1975 the magazine “Punk” was already being published in New York, the mother of all the hardcore “fanzines” that would follow. In England, punk found, more than new forms, strong content to express, drawn from the disadvantaged social and existential conditions of the working class. As often happens in rock, while inventions are made in America, in England they are patented, or rather commercialized: punk was born in the United States but, so to speak, no one noticed; only after it took off in London did people believe they were importing it into America, believing they were importing something new when it was nothing but homegrown goods. In any case, if one wants to speak of American punk, it is only possible to do so by understanding it as proto-hardcore, and above all in reference to certain developments occurring between the spread of punk in England starting in 1976 and the institutionalization of hardcore in America in 1978 and the years that followed.

Proto-hardcore has both a chronological and an ideal application. The former corresponds roughly to the years 1976-1978; the latter to those American rock groups which, working before or after this period, nonetheless possess traits that make it useful to ideally trace them back to it.

Broadly speaking, proto-hardcore was the province of socially maladjusted twenty-somethings who, in the suburbs of major cities, at a time of a marked rise in urban crime, found meaning in their existence by following a path — perhaps never truly broken — that ran from the most violent Fifties rock'n'roll, through the Sixties rhythm and blues revival and garage-rock, and culminated in what became known as "Detroit rock".

In Detroit, though in close contact with New York, a number of bands had been active between the late Sixties and early Seventies who, for all their differences, shared a violent, metallic, fast and abrasive sound, topped by a voice that didn't so much sing as bawl, raw and feral. The subject matter of their songs was, all things considered, traceable back to the classic themes of rock'n'roll and rhythm and blues before it, and rock afterwards: sex, immorality, indifference to social concerns, the celebration of the basest and meanest instincts, all under the banner of a hedonism that became protest and social destabilization only indirectly. Yet opposite themes and tones were also emerging, ones that were then fully new wave and would later be absorbed by hardcore: the desolation and poverty of city life, dissatisfaction, restlessness, reflection on the meaning of life itself. If rock'n'roll and rhythm and blues had been about fun, Detroit rock began to reflect on non-fun, on its impossibility and its senselessness; and it began to speculate on its opposite: depression and apathy. The fact is that while rock'n'roll used frantic music to make people dance and to give life the shape of a wild dance, now an even more deafening music than rock'n'roll was being used to preach inertia, emptiness of soul, the impossibility of a real life. Disvalues began, polemically, to be set up as values: starting with bodily filth as the mirror of a soul degenerate despite itself, all the way to writing songs of hate where, traditionally, songs of love had always been written. The canonical formula for summing up these phenomena is "teenage depression".

The protagonists of proto-hardcore — not to be identified with the exponents of "Detroit rock" but rather with their putative offspring — thus possessed a solid grounding in the history of American popular music of the previous twenty years. From this, too, came a not inconsiderable technical grounding, which showed itself in fiery live performances. These took place in the various clubs for young people that were springing up for the very same reasons the bands who played in them were forming: to create opportunities for the need for new forms of youth self-identity. This underlying motivation was, however, immediately both cause and effect of proto-hardcore being adopted as fashion or trend, as would later happen in part with hardcore too. The main venue of the era, and the reference point for the whole new wave scene, was New York's "CBGB's" (note that even in its name, "Country Blues Grass Blues", the club harked back to tradition).

Proto-hardcore bands rarely managed to release an album. The most extreme acts in particular had to make do with putting out the odd single. This was because these manifestations had not yet developed self-awareness, had not become a movement, had no name, and so could not be marketed by record labels — except in sporadic, if significant, cases of a deliberate push aimed specifically at creating a new trend. Moreover, the network of independent labels that would later make hardcore's very existence possible did not yet exist.

2. Hardcore

Just as our understanding of the term "rock" is a narrow one, so — even more so — is our understanding of the term "hardcore". By it we mean a subgenre of rock music that developed in various waves in the United States, above all in Los Angeles, between 1978 and 1991, formally characterized by extremely short, extremely fast, violent, screamed songs, and in terms of content by a kind of post-nihilist philanthropy.

The forms

The average rock song runs three or four minutes, with taut but not overwrought rhythms, sounds that are rough and noisy but not deafening, and vocals that are trained and pained yet mostly reducible to a conversational tone. If, since 1967, the various rock subgenres — "hard" rock, "acid" or "psychedelic" rock, "progressive" rock and so on — have all been busy warping this middle ground in one direction or another, hardcore is the most extreme distortion of rock forms, pushed to their absolute limit. The average hardcore song runs a single minute, with unstoppable rhythms, sounds that hit like a blinding blast and a deafening screech, and vocals that amount to a rant, at times unintelligible, running the gamut from weeping to screaming to bestial grunts, to harangue, to bitter irony.

Such forms proved necessary, on the one hand, because of the content of protest they had to express, and on the other, in relation to the age of their creators.

The content

Fifties rock'n'roll had torn down social and racial barriers; even so, it would take until the end of the Sixties for popular music, through rock, to become more self-aware. Yet the musical revolution of the late Sixties was likewise swallowed up by the pre-existing civil order and frozen for a decade: until the explosion of new wave in the late Seventies, which was in turn frozen until the establishment of "grunge" between the Eighties and Nineties, followed by the death of rock.

Within this cycle, which apparently came to nothing in the end, genuinely revolutionary content can nonetheless be identified: it was effective, and found its fullest expression through that particular strain of new wave that was hardcore. It was made possible by the spread of literacy, which brought certain themes into the popular sphere, themes that then spread like wildfire until they became fashionable, even though historically they had seemed destined to remain confined to university lecture halls or cultural circles. One of the means the people had at their disposal — one that arose in tandem with this very expressive urgency — was rock, culminating in this sense with hardcore, since it was the only movement historically and organically capable of shouldering the burden of tackling such questions, questions that had, all things considered, been ignored or treated too superficially even by the only prior youth movement comparable in scale to hardcore: Sixties hippie psychedelia.

This content, having reached the masses following a blanket spread of literacy, is of two kinds: one historical, one existential; and both function as a form of collective self-awareness.

Within the context of a literacy and acculturation induced in the masses not only through schooling but also, and in certain respects above all, through what are for that very reason called the "mass media", the individual is bombarded daily and in real time with news and events — initially just news items, but ready to become contemporary history — in a way that has no precedent. The step from raw news and events to their more or less simplistic and forced conceptualization is a short one, if not an inevitable one. So that from the tenderest age, the individual is all but compelled to form his own view of the historical world he lives in. And since history is the history of existences, to deal with the former is also to deal with the latter. That is to say, the individual, from boyhood on, is led to reflect on his own existence — objective, insofar as the individual is a historical figure, and subjective, insofar as the individual is a sentient being. The instruments of this reflection, instruments that function almost as causes, are school on the one hand and the mass media on the other. The most well-worn ideas of the great thinkers and artists of past and present, trivialized and diminished, get mixed in with the slogans and commentary of journalists on current events and on various aspects of society. The result is a considerable propulsive charge which, needing an outlet and a catharsis, seeks out or creates for itself the simplest and most direct expressive tools. Hardcore was one such expressive tool, in a given context and in a given season of the twentieth century.

If punk was one of the means of expression — alternative or parallel to crime — available to the children of the weakest and most exasperated classes of English society, then even in punk, as a current within new wave, economic motives were already inseparable from existential reflection. Existential reflection becomes paramount in hardcore, for which the historical and social world functions as a mirror of the soul. And yet, to the extent that human nature is identified with history and society, dealing with the one or the other ultimately yields the same results. Hardcore's reflection on the individual is thus inseparable, even if not indistinguishable, from its reflection on society: the former, after all, lives within the latter and so, in large part, being its offspring, is identified with it.

It would take at least a textbook of contemporary history and one of sociology to get even a superficial idea of the issues underlying hardcore's existential reflection as root causes. In broad terms, it can be noted here that these issues stem, on one hand, from the macroscopic phenomena of contemporary world history, and on the other from the microscopic ones tied to power relations within a specific social and geographic context - namely the American metropolitan one. The two aspects are then understood as one, since they are seen as caused by a single, perverse, global system. After all, the United States maintains relations with every country in the world, and indeed, at least in a certain sense, is currently the most prominent nation on planet Earth - the one with which today's humanity effectively identifies, or must reckon with.

In one single sweep, hardcore stands against war, military and economic imperialism, injustice, mass conformity, cruelty, indifference, sexism, racism, fascism, corruption, authority, religious and political ideologies, animal cruelty, pollution, and of course the barbaric American tradition of the death penalty. The State, the Church and the family are its polemical targets, as the main pillars of a flawed society and as the channels through which the aforementioned disvalues are transmitted.

The polar opposite of hardcore is upheld by the bourgeois conformist. From the hardcore perspective, the bourgeoisie, through its conformism, has led socially to fatal economic contradictions, ideologically to alienation and mass conformity, and existentially to nihilism. A conformist, here, is someone whose thoughts or opinions are the result of a real or imagined conditioning by another person or group of people; someone who relies on the observation of others to gain information about their own thinking and being; someone who is a "social actor," a "mask," and not a person. Work, race and sex are the main arenas in which the conformist takes a stand, and in which hardcore aims to refute them, thereby declaring itself anti-conformist. The conformist is in favor of authority, the anti-conformist against it. It becomes all the harder to oppose an authority embodied by the masses, precisely because it is a lack of will.

After all, according to hardcore, there is no such thing as a person who is "normal" simply by virtue of being a person; normalization and institutionalization are, in fact, forms of depersonalization - that is, dehumanization. For this reason, by contrast, since "normal" people are not truly human because they've been standardized, one must, in order to be human in the full, creative sense of the word, call oneself abnormal. For hardcore, one must be curious, critical, active, ambitious, sensitive - as opposed to conformists, who are massified, apathetic, who are zombies, the not-quite-alive, who are boxed in and sit glassy-eyed in front of the "American dream" broadcast on television.

Fascist ideology, the ultimate expression of conformism and authority, is hardcore's worst enemy - except when it is provocatively adopted on the surface, in certain of its dynamics, as a means of destabilizing the present order of things, itself regarded as neo-fascist. Bourgeoisie and fascism become, for hardcore, one and the same equation.

To be against society means to be against its institutions (school, police, family) and against the notion of progress conceived solely as technological, industrial and material - a progress that amounts to a progress of alienation, which in turn means regression, in the form of inhumanity.

The critical part is followed by the propositional part, which coincides with an “anarchy” understood and lived both utopically and pragmatically. From the fanzines and testimonies of the hardcore era, it emerges that anarchy was conceived as the duty to respect others' freedom and the right to one's own: solidarity and freedom are considered the essence of humankind. Anarchy is the refusal to be controlled and the will to take one's own life into one's own hands: the idea of anarchy as chaos and destruction is held to be merely a popular misconception. There is an awareness that eliminating the foundations of society without first having a valid alternative is criminal, as the Nazi and Communist regimes, for instance, were; but hardcore anarchy sets out to stand as a concrete, workable alternative. Hardcore anarchy is a conception in the Buddhist sense of an inner path; gradually and reflectively, it seeks through persuasion to change people's hearts and minds: it is not just upheaval (“riot”) and the destruction of objects (which represent “the system”). In the utopian anarchist society, everyone is their own police officer: if everyone is an anarchist there's no need for police, because no one is threatened, since no one would ever harm anyone else. Anarchist hardcore doesn't say no to law, but argues that there should be no need for law because everyone must be a law unto themselves and respect others. Anarchy will come, according to this conception, only when people become responsible for their own actions. When individuals live in peace without authorities to punish them, when people have enough courage and good sense to speak honestly and fairly with one another, only then will there be anarchy. Hardcore people have no leader because they don't want a leader; and this, according to hardcore, is right, because it's impossible to have a leader without that leader becoming corrupt.

Both the Marxist left and the capitalist right are, in hardcore's view, wrong: the change proposed by the left always takes place within a corrupt system. Anarchy calls for total change.

This peculiar anarchism is then paired with an individualism understood as the only possible reaction and antidote for the anarch living within capitalist mass society. Within this individualism there is room for inner reflection. In the fanzines one reads statements like the following: “Search for an honest, often frightening, point of view inside yourself and ask yourself questions like: Who am I? What do I want from my life? What could I want? What could I do? In the end, the process will undoubtedly lead you to refuse to conform to many social roles and expectations.” Or: “Use your mind, treat others with respect, don't judge by appearances, support others in their struggle to have the right to be themselves, contribute to a positive change in our world.” And finally: “To begin with, I'll tell you what I think hardcore is not: it's not a fashion, a certain way of dressing, a passing phase of youthful rebellion against parents, it's not the latest trendy thing, nor a particular musical style; it's an idea that guides and drives your life. The hardcore community that exists, exists to support this idea through music, art, fanzines and other expressions of personal creativity. And what is this idea? Think for yourself, be yourself, don't just take what society hands you, create your own role, live your own life.”

With Kierkegaard one could sum up, in all its naivety and gravity, the existential problem of hardcore, which ultimately coincides with the existential problem in an absolute sense: Where am I? What does the world mean? What does this word mean? Who lured me into the whole and then abandoned me? Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why wasn't I asked anything? How did I become an interested party in the great enterprise called reality? Why must I be an interested party? Isn't it a free thing? And if I'm obliged to be part of it, at least tell me where the manager is, I have a few remarks to make to him. Is there no manager?

By contrast, and without knowing it, hardcore's analysis coincides with that of Schopenhauer, two centuries earlier (or two centuries ahead): Such is the life of most people: they want, they know what they want, and they pursue it with just enough success to keep them from falling into despair, and just enough failure to protect them from boredom and its consequences. Hence a certain serenity, a certain inner peace. And everyone works, always works, with gravity and an air of importance, like children absorbed in play. It is always an exception if a life of this kind is (briefly) diverted from its course. Hardcore takes it upon itself to bring about this diversion, in the conviction that true life consists precisely in it.

American society is accused by hardcore of being puritanical and patriarchal: “We are the heirs of white supremacy, of a patriarchal, capitalist world. We reject our race and our social standing, our culture, history and morality, and all the institutions (work and parents first among them) that perpetuate them.” Patriarchal society, among other things, prevents males from crying, from showing their most intimate, tender, vulnerable and contradictory feelings: those feelings that make a man human, and which hardcore expresses through its singing, which is precisely a form of crying.

The police on one side and religion on the other embody everything that is wrong with authority: mass conformity, corruption, sadism, sexism, racism, fascism. Hence the hardcore motto: “I swear to God, I hate cops.” Hardcore also seems to share Russell's view that persecution and the loss of freedom always occur wherever these two factors come together: the belief that a general orthodoxy must be upheld, and a body of officials with the right and duty to punish possible deviations.

If we wanted to trace the cultural references behind the tangle of content in hardcore rock, we would have to start with Socrates' “know thyself” and “knowing that one knows nothing,” move through Locke's tolerance and anti-dogmatism, Beccaria's Enlightenment thought, Feuerbach's critique of religion, Marx's sociology and Stirner's individualism; we would then have to reach Basedow's pedagogical philanthropism, Bakunin's anarchist “alienation of alienation,” American pragmatism, the pacifism of a Russell, and the liberal “Declaration of Independence” by Jefferson with its call to happiness; not forgetting the positive existentialism of an Augustine and the negative existentialism of a Kafka, as well as Pirandello's category of the mask.

Hardcore, moreover, considered itself an avant-garde movement and did not fail to draw on the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes such as “Futurism” and “Dada,” which, even before having artistic value, had an attitudinal value (a term dear to punk as much as to hardcore) that manifested itself in subversiveness, outrageousness, eccentricity and arrogance.

Human nature on one hand and capitalist society on the other lead to nihilism, according to hardcore, which, focusing on the positive aspects of nature, utopistically negates the established society in order to negate nihilism, and actively urges young people with force not to fall into the grip of nihilism and, even if forced to live within a hostile and inhuman nature and society, to do so in the best way possible, in the most human and dignified way — that is, according to the precepts of love, peace, freedom and critical intelligence.

The Artists

Hardcore is the rock movement with the youngest protagonists: most hardcore bands were formed by minors, at times little more than children. Typically they ranged from 12 to 18 years old.

These teenagers, the "kids", lived in American metropolises, first and foremost Los Angeles, which between the late Seventies and early Eighties was experiencing a massive, uncontrolled population boom, with all the consequences that entailed. Coming from middle or lower-middle class backgrounds, they attended school or in any case orbited around that environment: partly for this reason, and given their age, their problems did not primarily concern, as was the case in English punk, issues of employment, unemployment and poverty.

The traumas that pushed these kids to express themselves through rock were psychological and existential well before they were social: the fact that the latter caused the former should be considered a secondary or indirect element. The "kids" had to deal, before low wages, with broken or puritanical families, with a bigoted and conservative school system, with the loneliness produced by urban life, with acts of violence that presented themselves daily and on every level before their eyes.

As ignorant of everything — from the history of civilization to that of rock — as they were ignored, these small human beings had the time of an entire adolescence, lasting at least seven years, to look at and question the world into which they had been born. They thus asked themselves questions about the meaning of life whose exploration dates back at least to Socrates, but without having the cultural and intellectual tools to properly tackle such issues — questions that school and society had led them to without ever assisting them in any way. Existentially, a spiral of unanswered questions took shape, amounting to a sentence of nihilism and suicide: alone, the young, against parents and school, found the way out of this spiral through hardcore, which thus takes shape as the negation of nihilism and suicide and, above all, as the affirmation of humanity and of life itself.

Turning from the existential side to the historical and social one, here too the kids found valid reasons for nihilism and suicide: politically, wars and injustices, socially, mass conformity and alienation, seemed to lead nowhere else — and yet, with the more conscious strand of hardcore, these young people gave rise to an anarchic utopia under the banner of a rebellion that took on the meaning of a struggle for survival in a world that was suffocating on every level.

But if the world is wrong both in public and in private, then to change it, or to change ourselves within it, all that's left is to do everything on our own: that's the motto of "Do it yourself", which could only have come from children abandoned in the deepest, most chronic sense by their parents, and which led to the various facets of hardcore — truly the only rock phenomenon to be entirely dominated by its own protagonists. These kids were in fact not only the authors, producers and performers of the music they played but, besides being its consumers too — so much so that in hardcore the audience or the recipient of the music ends up coinciding with the author of the music itself — they were also the ones who organized concerts and ran venues, invented dances and ways of dressing, founded magazines and, above all, small independent record labels.

The fight against sexism waged by hardcore anarchy, at least in principle, allowed girls to become protagonists of the movement. In practice, there were female bands and a considerable female presence within mixed bands; but even though this female presence is the most substantial that the history of rock music can recall, the vast majority of hardcore artists were nonetheless male. It goes without saying that the only rock movement designed solely by women, that of the "riot grrrls", when it arose in the early Nineties, would have to be understood, in both form and content, as an eminent offshoot or derivation of hardcore.

If the kids, deliberately ignorant of the rock music of the past, with which they did not identify, and for this reason true children of new wave, brought into rock the most demanding content it had ever carried, given their age they also had to think, not secondarily, about having fun. The hardcore world, then, and above all the unstoppable speed of hardcore music, was also a world of fun. But it was fun in the way catharsis can be fun — understood as the public exorcism of paralyzing private thoughts.

With as much cynicism as awareness of their own limits, but also with a depth of reasoning that betrays the awareness of knowing a certain state of things to be unchangeable, the hardcore "kid" was urged by fanzines to adopt this attitude toward parents and society: "Tell them you're angry, then go home and watch Tv". This is solid proof that hardcore is both diagnosis and symptom of that same sickness — contemporary society on one hand and human nature on the other — for which it acts as therapist.

Testimonies from the era, from outside the hardcore world, describe the typical hardcore follower as "a sixteen-year-old bleached blond who lives alone in a hotel on the outskirts of town; who is paid by the Government to stay out of trouble and who rents a rehearsal studio with his monthly check; who drops out of his job or his studies to put together a band of pimply kids".

The Audience and the Show

Hardcore artists, due to their age, record sales and ideology, were not rockstars. They mixed, in fact, both in everyday life and during the show, with the peers who were part of the various hardcore communities even if they didn't play instruments. The artists should almost be considered as spokespeople for the hardcore community, which identified with them and which, during the show, celebrated its own values. Hardcore removes the separation between musician and audience, and what one attends — or rather, takes part in — is not a "concert" but a "show".

In the show one witnesses a ritual as contradictory as the content it seeks to express, content that lends itself to being misunderstood. On one hand, in fact, there is the solidarity of the hardcore community around values of peace, tolerance and life; on the other, there is a way of expressing these values that is antiphrastic, that is, one that passes through violent, bestial and self-destructive representations and acts — mirroring the very anti-values being fought against.

The music during the show is a deafening, enraged noise; hardcore dancing is, like punk dancing, the “pogo”, a mutual shoving and shouldering more or less violent and disorderly; alongside this there's “stage-diving”, the practice of climbing onto the stage and hurling oneself into the crowd below. What's more, the performer – though this is by no means a rule – spits, vomits, urinates, self-mutilates, throws objects, smashes instruments, screams incessantly: not because he endorses such behaviour, but because by acting it out during the show he exorcises it, so as to deny it in real life. The hardcore performance, in short, is nihilistic because it represents a state of affairs – historical, social and existential – that is itself nihilistic, but that representation isn't an endorsement: it's a protest, and therefore a way of moving beyond nihilism. Spit, vomit and screams are produced by the performer almost against his will, because he's compelled to it by a perverse state of affairs. This doesn't mean, of course, that there isn't sometimes real relish in such behaviour – something that can partly be traced back to the immaturity of the hardcore scene's members.

The relationship with drugs, alcohol and sex is likewise contradictory. On one hand, hardcore condemns the first two and insists that the third be lived only as love; on the other, in some of its dynamics it gives in to drugs, alcohol and sex for its own sake, almost as if to throw the world's perversity back in its face. In any case, all three elements – broadly and casually championed first by rock'n'roll and then by rock – are in principle rejected, and when they are indulged in, it's with an existential awareness unknown to earlier popular music.

Shows usually took place on Saturday nights, in small venues with no separation between musicians and audience, in front of just a hundred or two hundred people – often far fewer: hardcore is about as far as you can get from the idea of the big rock gathering, where anonymous masses passively worship their idols. Indeed, it criticises rock precisely for this way of being, which it sees as complicit with a dehumanised, commodified system.

A show, moreover, never featured just one band, but generally three, each playing roughly half an hour given the brevity of the songs and the fury of the performances. Among the clubs that went down in history are, in Los Angeles, the “Masque” and the “Whiskey”; in San Francisco, the “Mabuhay Gardens”; but every American town had its own historic club.

Many shows were cut short by police intervention.

The magazines

The magazines, known as “fanzines”, played a fundamental role in shaping hardcore rock. While they steered the music's forms, content and customs, they were, for the most part and to be clear, run by kids who lived the same life and shared the same ideals as the musicians themselves. As in any community, some took care of one task, some of another. Just as every American town or village had its own hardcore venue, so it had its own homemade magazine – often conceived, printed (usually just photocopies) and distributed within school circles. And just as bands and venues sprang up and died within a few months, so did most fanzines.

Only a few titles, but hugely significant ones, achieved print runs worthy of proper professional magazines: in New York there was the mother of all fanzines, “Punk”, which in the mid-Seventies launched the phenomenon that bore its name. Strictly speaking, and for obvious reasons, this shouldn't be counted as a hardcore fanzine; the true points of reference in that sense are the three legendary Californian fanzines that emerged in the early Eighties: “Maximum Rock n' Roll”, “Flipside” and “Slash”; along with “Profane Existence”, from Minneapolis.

The independent labels

With hardcore, in effect, independent labels were also born. It was almost standard practice for a band, once formed, to fund the release of its debut single or album out of its own pocket and, self-producing and self-releasing it, to invent a name for a supposed record label: its own. Some of these independent labels, well-organised from the very start, managed to survive, and today, more than twenty years on, have in some cases become almost majors. Among them: SST and Epitaph (both from Los Angeles), Alternative Tentacles (from San Francisco), Touch and Go (from Chicago), Dischord (from Washington), Twin/Tone (from Minneapolis) and Taang (from Boston), all founded between 1977 and 1981 and destined to become some of the greatest independent labels in American history.

Compilations were also widely circulated; usually produced and distributed by fanzines, they fully embodied the communal, committed, self-reliant spirit of hardcore.

The clothing

Unlike punk, hardcore never had a uniform of its own; hardcore kids wore, with more or less eccentric touches, everyday clothes: trousers, shirt and shoes – not even necessarily jeans, t-shirt and trainers. They limited themselves, so to speak, to taking it out on whatever clothes they happened to be wearing, wearing them down, tearing them, wrecking them until they fell apart. This stood as a mirror of a life that was internal, not external, to a society or situation that was nonetheless contested and disapproved of. This literally casual style of dress didn't stop punk-style badges and dyed hair from spreading widely; nor did it stop the habit of always wearing the t-shirt of one's favourite band; nor did it stop people personalising their clothes with slogans and rips. What matters is understanding that there were no rules or diktats, and that belonging to the hardcore community didn't require, even in terms of dress, conforming in the way punks did within the punk community, or metalheads within the metal one, or, earlier still, the “flower children” within the psychedelic community.

Clothing, or rather look, depended – beyond individual flair – to some extent on the peculiarities of different areas and scenes: in Washington, for instance, people shaved their heads and wore combat boots; among skateboarders (the hardcore/skateboard pairing was extremely common) shorts and sneakers were the norm. What mattered was the poverty of the clothing: not just no brand names, but preferably worn-out clothes. It's only with hardcore that the widespread use – even among the well-off – of torn clothes and busted shoes, indistinguishable from those of the poor of any era, truly became commonplace. Rock'n'roll in the Fifties had its various sequins and glitter, and even new wave (with several notable exceptions) hadn't strayed too far from that tradition. With hardcore, clothing loses all value, and it's partly thanks to this – echoed later by grunge – that today one can walk down the street in ripped trousers or dishevelled hair without being branded poor or dirty. The idea of not judging people by their outward appearance is perhaps the one maxim of hardcore culture to have had any real social impact.

The historical and social context

Purely for the record, it's worth recalling how in America the shift from the Seventies to the Eighties was marked, among other things — and limiting ourselves to the most direct influences on the social and existential lives of the kids of that era — by technical innovations like the VCR, the Walkman and video games; by scourges like AIDS; by rising crime, pollution and pornography; and by the Cold War.

It was against this backdrop that MTV was born — on August 1, 1981 — while TV serials and talk shows proliferated: all things that helped forge that mass-market society so despised by hardcore.

Three names historically embodied the three ideals that hardcore fought against: Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and John Lennon (who had died in 1980). For virtually the entire history of hardcore, these three names represented its three mortal enemies, as the supreme representatives, respectively, of the State, the Church and the star-system — that is, of the most degenerate and noxious sectors of that mass-market (pop) society which, for hardcore, was the great evil of the century, if not the very end of humanity. (Among the other pop stars inherently despised by hardcore — this rebellious child of pop that critiques pop while still being forced to exist within it — were Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin.)

Society, pop culture, responded to the hardcore phenomenon either by condemning it, isolating it, or, wherever profit could be glimpsed, reducing it to a mere trend. Hardcore's self-destructive and violent streak was fuelled by the shoddy, superficial portrayal offered by television and newspapers: on mid-Eighties talk shows, hardcore became a hot topic, and in TV dramas the hardcore kid became a stock character. Talk shows spoke of "curing the hardcore sickness or madness" with money and psychologists. In films, hardcore rock was treated as a direct cause of sadomasochism, suicide, murder, rape, drug addiction — when it was Hollywood itself that was the true homeland of all that.

Between '84 and '87 especially, there was a concerted effort to turn hardcore into a parody of itself. The blame for this obviously didn't lie entirely with a distorted popular perception: hardcore kids — first and foremost because they were kids — with their often unjustified, self-indulgent posturing, and their attempt to answer the inhuman shock of modern society with an equally inhuman and nihilistic musical and existential shock — the negation of negation — did nothing but validate the position of the "adults" or the "parents"; who, in any case, were guilty not only of having created the hardcore world themselves, but also of having failed to help their kids understand their own world, and of having failed to understand why their kids called that world "hardcore" and lived it as such.

The worst damage inflicted by the media on hardcore society was lumping hardcore together with "skinheads." Skinheads (the neo-fascist "shaved heads") existed before hardcore and continued to exist after it, and while it's true that many skinheads were hardcore, it's equally true that very few hardcore kids were skinheads. It was the skinheads who appropriated hardcore's language, not hardcore — an anti-racist movement — that went looking for racism. In Washington, the ones shaving their heads and lacing up combat boots were members of the hardcore sub-movement known as "straight-edge," explicitly defined by the philanthropy, solidarity and tolerance of the most evolved and conscious strand of hardcore.

The geographic context

Hardcore was a phenomenon that operated on both a national and a local scale. Spread in a widespread, capillary fashion across the entire United States, it was for that very reason extremely fragmented; bands, clubs and fanzines tended to remain confined mostly to their place of origin. This was because the "do it yourself" ethos made it impossible — and undesirable — to significantly extend one's reach. Amid the swarm of bands, clubs and fanzines, only a few had a resonance that went beyond their city or region. Hardcore band tours (also organized by the kids themselves) were either extremely short-range or, in any case, so improvised as to be exhausting for those who had to endure them.

It's important to note that one of the fundamental concepts of the hardcore world was the "scene." The "scene" was, in effect, the local hardcore scene: the hardcore community present in various states, cities, or even neighborhoods. Hence people spoke of a Texas "scene," a San Francisco "scene," and so on — depending on how clearly definable the shared traits of each local reality were.

Hardcore was born as an urban music and an urban form of reflection; later, as it spread — and while the progress/regress of alienated man kept spreading along with it — it proved to be a language equally suited to expressing the loneliness of rural life. This is because, by definition, it carries not only historical-social — and therefore particular — meanings, but also, and perhaps above all, existential — and therefore universal — ones.

Periodization

The era from 1978 to 1991, as far as the history of hardcore is concerned, can be divided in various ways. Nor would it be at all unreasonable to instead stress the formal and thematic continuity of hardcore and treat its history as a single, unbroken arc. Still, as should become clear in "Part Two," it is both useful and justified to distinguish three main phases of hardcore.

The first phase, running from 1978 to 1983 and itself divisible into the periods 1978-1980 and 1980-1983, sees the birth of the genre (1978-1980) and its maturation into what is, in certain respects, its definitive form (1980-1983). The second phase — from 1983 onward — is marked by a refounding of the genre, with an intensification of its forms and the telling shift of its center of gravity from Los Angeles to cities and rural areas across America. Out of this second phase emerges a kind of middle age (1984-1987), which makes room for the great post-hardcore bands. The third phase, finally (1987-1991), sees a sort of hardcore revival, with a return to the original Los Angeles hardcore sound, albeit duly enhanced and complicated.

3. Post-hardcore

Whereas for the category of hardcore we adopted an exclusive criterion, for that of "post-hardcore" we will do the opposite and adopt an inclusive one. Indeed, categories drawn up after the fact, like ours, find their justification not merely in their general usefulness but above all in their function as tools for developing concepts and meanings. If in the first case the essential task was to outline the orthodoxy of a genre based on examples of formal and thematic purity, now the essential task is to identify those genres and subgenres of rock music whose representatives were, in some cases, significantly influenced by hardcore.

The post-hardcore category is thus effectively granted two meanings. The first, with both a temporal and an ideal value, refers to those bands and albums that, while still on the hardcore line, fail to fully honor its dictates, whether through excess or deficiency. This is post-hardcore in the strict sense, but also the least interesting kind, since it can be traced directly back to hardcore itself — so much so that much of the critics, the audience and the musicians themselves happily use the two terms interchangeably. A confusion we have deliberately avoided, it should be said, purely for the sake of conventional, though not arbitrary, choices, since they carry real weight when it comes to critical work or listening practice.

The second meaning of the term post-hardcore is the one with the most significant repercussions, because, following the analysis through to its conclusion, we realize that a large part of American rock in the Eighties and Nineties is inexplicable without the hardcore experience. It should come as no surprise, then, if, for very different reasons, this category ends up including not only bands belonging to genres as distant from hardcore as rock-folk or metal, but entire rock genres such as grunge or so-called indie-rock.

Finally, it is worth returning to the category of nihilism in order to better understand the differences between hardcore and post-hardcore. We have seen that hardcore stood in opposition to the nihilism of contemporary society and, more broadly, to nihilism as such — that is, to every devaluation, willed or unwilled, of life and of being. This opposition took place bluntly, as a negation of negation. Having passed through nihilism, hardcore was then able to put forward positive values. But if hardcore, as a movement, met its end — or rather, its many ends — this means that its attempt to overcome nihilism either failed or could not sustain itself for long. Post-hardcore, conceptually, is thus born out of a stalemate: from the opposition between nihilism and anti-nihilism came a sort of zero-sum result. What to do, then? The answer post-hardcore effectively gives is to live within this zero: that is, without the negativity of nihilism — condemned — but also without the positivity of hardcore — which had proven unworkable.

If hardcore stands apart from punk because it marks the shift from conceiving revolution in social terms to conceiving it in existential or individual terms, post-hardcore stands worlds apart from punk because it no longer envisions revolution on any level at all.

1. Los Angeles and Southern California

Los Angeles is the city where hardcore is born and where it dies. Hardcore is, first and foremost, Los Angeles rock — not only because this is where the largest number of hardcore bands and the most important independent labels are found, but also because the social fabric of this metropolis produces exactly the kind of human type that serves as the ideal target for hardcore's indictment, Los Angeles being — all the more so at the end of the Seventies — the place on earth where the degenerations and contradictions of our civilization show themselves most glaringly and most blatantly.

It is no coincidence that, in successive waves, a genuine exodus of hardcore bands took place from other states toward California, and toward Los Angeles in particular.

Proto-hardcore

Starting in 1976, nine main groups can be traced back to the Los Angeles proto-hardcore lineage: Zeros, Dils, Weirdos, Simpletones, Controllers, Rotters, X, Legal Weapon.

Javier Escovedo's Zeros were a textbook proto-hardcore outfit, significant more for what they represented than for the music they actually played: the 1977 single "Don't Push Me Around/Wimp" and the 1978 "Wild Weekend/Beat Your Heart Out" never really rise above a listless, melodic garage-punk lifted wholesale from the Ramones. Far more interesting are Escovedo's own statements on the matter. The favorite musicians of his circle, not to say his generation, were New York Dolls, Stooges, Velvet Underground and Lou Reed, David Bowie, Kiss, T-Rex; while even the Seeds and the Animals were labeled punk.

The Zeros played alongside a huge number of bands, both well-known and obscure, from Germs to Wipers to the Clash. The venues were mostly the usual suspects: the Masque and the Whisky in Los Angeles, Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco, CBGB's and Max's Kansas City in New York. As one can see, even the most prestigious stages of the era were open to second-tier acts like the Zeros. As for the age of the band members, suffice it to say that only Escovedo was old enough to drive, and in a single day the Zeros might rack up hundreds of miles in his car just to make a show and get back in time for school the next morning. At their gigs, despite how mild the music actually was, the crowd would break into the "pogo dance" — proof that, at the time, even the Zeros' harmless little songs were experienced as anything but toothless.

The Kinman brothers' Dils were likewise a prime example of a proto-hardcore band, caught somewhere between the most melodic strain of English punk and echoes of the mid-Sixties, from English Merseybeat to the Byrds. Their classic 1977 single, "198 Seconds Of The Dils", featuring "Class War" and "Mr. Big", offered ninety-second compositions that were granite-hard, noisy and immediate, all chorus and urgency — tracks that would have a considerable influence on the birth of hardcore, and could even be considered among its earliest examples, both in form and theme, standing up for the working class and the most vulnerable. But taken as a whole, the Dils' output is too flimsy, too inconclusive and too fun-oriented to be fully claimed by hardcore: the otherwise pivotal "Class War" sounds like a happy, perhaps accidental, exception.

The Last, led by the three Nolte brothers, were, between 1976 and 1985, an excellent power-pop band steeped in Sixties revivalism — folk, psychedelia, surf. They shared nothing with hardcore beyond certain surface attitudes and the occasional sharply punctuated rhythm. Their classic is the 1979 album "L.A. Explosion!".

The Weirdos, on the other hand, delivered across a series of singles and EPs between '77 and '80 a brash, deliberately cynical and disengaged punk-rock that, with real skill and command of its tools, mocked everything in sight, starting with punk-rock itself. The legacy of "We Got The Neutron Bomb", "Destroy All Music" and "Skateboards to Hell" — which in turn drew on the American tradition only to twist it into cacophony — is far greater than it has generally been given credit for.

One step away from hardcore in terms of rhythm, the simplicity of their sound, and their ambiguous, provocative lyrics, the Simpletones are perhaps better placed — given their Beach Boys-style falsetto harmonies and general blandness — in the proto-hardcore camp, not unlike the Ramones, whom they closely resemble. Their material recorded between '78 and '79 is collected on "I Have A Date": "I Like Drugs", "Nasty Nazi", "God Save the Pope", "I Wanna Be Dead" are frail, frantic songs that say terrible things in a jovial, serene manner. The effect is that of the Beach Boys ruthlessly sped up, singing lyrics worthy of the Sex Pistols.

Bands like the Simpletones, although they didn't produce particularly memorable material nor were especially aware of what they were doing, were decisively important in establishing the coordinates of the hardcore genre. They found themselves right at the crossroads between the old world and the new, with elements of both leaving their position undecided while at the same time making it central and exemplary. The choruses of "Tiger Beat Twist", "I Have a Date" and "California" — bordering on a revival split between the sickly and the beach — as well as the knowing experimentalism of "Disco Dave" and "Crisco Disco", lie at the foundation of Californian melodic hardcore, including its Nineties incarnation, which would form by quadrupling the tempo and making the hooks all the more agonizing.

Rounding out the Simpletones' repertoire are "T.V. Love", "Don't Brother Me", "Dead Meat", "Kirsty Q", "Rock 'n' Roll" and the tougher "Dee Jwah" and "Love Is Wrong": songs that differ from each other in their sameness, all deserving mention and remembrance for being, one way or another, fundamental.

The Controllers are also a highly instructive case. Torn on one hand between American tradition — both country and surf — and the new English gospel of punk, as shown by "Controllers", the collection of their unreleased material put out in 2000, and on the other hand anticipating various shades of what hardcore would become, even in its more recent forms, with the track "Slow Boy", from the 1979 single of the same name, they arrived rhythmically at a result that could already be called hardcore.

Finally, their poses as self-destructive, unscrupulous teenagers, and their having a Black kid in the lineup in defiance of racist prejudice and, above all, in defiance of a society deemed as such, resonated considerably among the protagonists of the emerging hardcore scene.

The Rotters were a sincere and remarkable punk-rock outfit; slow like English punk compared to hardcore, and reckless like American hardcore compared to orthodox punk; they bordered on noise. Morbid and dark, their singles from '78 and '79 transfigured everyday aspects of life at the time but also launched into bleak provocations like "I Wanna Be The Feuhrer".

The Rotters appropriately warmed up the scene for the hardcore outfits that would soon follow, and embodied, in their live shows, what would in part become the genre's standard aesthetic: torn jeans, greasy t-shirts, unbuttoned shirts, worn-out shoes on bodies not yet fully grown. They also paved the way for a rotten, sulphurous, anti-aesthetic — though never trashy — and thoroughly compelling take on rock, backed by genuine skill in both performance and songwriting.

New wave-era rockers X, the two-voiced quartet fronted by John Doe and Exene Cervenka, forged a distinctive sound that was as steeped in Fifties rock 'n' roll as it was rooted in an age of youthful depression and decay. "Los Angeles", the 1980 debut album, formalizes this sound, but it takes the following "Wild Gift" (1981) for inspiration to catch up with form.

Thus came "We're Desperate" and "White Girl", sentimental, fatalistic laments of despair, where the ugliness of the content is always redeemed by the beauty of the form, as in the male voice alternating with the female one, creating a searing effect of youth and hope slipping away. "Universal Corner" then stands as the definitive X sound.

"Under The Big Black Sun" (1982) is even more inspired, featuring the overwhelming "Because I Do" and the tragic "Real Child Of Hell", surrounded by a constellation of melodic episodes charged with drama and invention. Four more albums followed (1983, 1985, 1987, 1993).

Comparable in some ways to X, Legal Weapon had an even more visceral pathos thanks to a dark sound and Kat Arthur's heartbroken vocals. Among the most distinctive and sincere experiences of new wave, they released two albums in 1982, both brimming with inspiration: "Death Of Innocence" and "Your Weapon". The latter contains the power-ballad "Caught In The Reign", the masterpiece that X would never have been capable of — not so much writing as performing — and which alone stands as testimony to the entire new wave era, with its youth who, having internalized despair and death, expelled them in beauty and life.

Hardcore

Even limiting ourselves to the main ones, the hardcore bands of Los Angeles number in the hundreds. We must therefore make a selection that serves as a representative sample.

It's essential to start with the Germs. Germs had the historic role of bringing to America the punk of London's Sex Pistols, which would then transform into Californian hardcore — a genre that, only at this point, was recognized as largely coinciding with the music already invented in the mid-Seventies by New York's Ramones, music now, however, recast in a tragic, heavy key rather than a comic, pop one.

The Germs didn't emerge out of nowhere: nevertheless, they were the first to give concrete shape, in a programmatic album, to the hardcore genre, despite all its contradictions; for this reason they must be considered the single most important band in all of hardcore — regardless of whether or not they were the best — and one of the most important in all of rock, if we consider as such those bands that open up a subgenre and thereby enrich and ensure the survival of the genre as a whole.

The Ramones are the fathers of the Sex Pistols but not of punk; the Sex Pistols are the fathers of the Germs but not of hardcore. The Ramones' innovations (beyond the look and the lyrics) were twofold: extremely short songs (a minute long) and guitars that shunned any solo, confined instead to a violent, noisy accompaniment. The Sex Pistols carried on the rhythm section's understatement, but compared to the Ramones they added, with Johnny Rotten, the most systematically extreme voice heard up to that point (it's Rotten's throat that makes the Sex Pistols' songs what they are). What's more, with "Anarchy In The U.K." the Sex Pistols gave rock music its most socially important song: for the first time in many thousands of years, man, the people, pop, punk, laid claim to their own self-destructive will. Before '77 the phenomenon was limited to isolated individuals or narrow circles at best; after '77 it would become a fashion; in the Eighties, the very nature one starts from.

The Germs added to the violence of the Ramones' guitar and Rotten's voice the first truly systematically violent and powerful rhythm section in the history of rock. In terms of sheer power, if the Ramones are worth 1 (the guitar), like the Sex Pistols (the voice), the Germs – like hardcore itself, of which they are the fathers – are worth 4 (voice, guitar, bass, drums). Hardcore is a phenomenon as opposite to punk as the outer is to the inner; it concerns interiority more than form, reflection more than the physical, nature more than history. Punk is anarchic, hardcore is anarch. Punk arrives at nihilism, hardcore takes it as a given from the start. Punk arrives at suicide; hardcore starts from the post-mortem, from innate impotence. In 1977 this was still in nuce, as shown by the sum of contradictions and uncertainties that characterize the Germs phenomenon; contradictions and uncertainties that nonetheless wouldn't stop them from being the first to institutionalize the hardcore genre.

Jan Paul Beahm (later Darby Crash) and George Ruthen (later Pat Smear) were (like all the hardcore kids to come) two schoolboys (born in 1958), sons of the middle class (unlike the English punks, sons of the working class, the very same subject and referent of their music).

Crash, whatever era he'd been born in, whatever he'd gone through, would have been the same: his problem, his defining trait, was inherent to his personality, was the personality itself: beyond time and any other conditioning, he was a force of nature. He satisfied that force with homosexuality, alcoholism and heroin addiction. He was all the more fragile and delicate the more irreducibly and pathologically averse he was to conforming – not just to any pre-established state, but to any state whatsoever, in an absolute sense. Perpetually dissatisfied, uneasy, on edge. This led him, more than to neurosis, to depression and a fatal dismay. In order to prolong or give some scant purpose to his existence, he needed to find an expressive form suited to this legacy; his good fortune, his death sentence, was finding that expressive form at eighteen, in early '77, on a TV show: the Sex Pistols were on.

Pat Smear accompanied Crash's voice – the prototype of every hardcore voice, that is, within the realm of non-singing, less sing-song than Rotten's punk delivery, less conversational, and more raw-throated, deeper, less iconoclastic, more self-destructive – with an out-of-tune, exhausted, illiterate guitar. A young blonde girl, somewhere between lived experience and affectation, at first dressed like a London punkette, soon a forerunner of dark/goth fashion, Lorna Doom, playing bass in the Germs, would revolutionize the use of the instrument on a grand scale; her bass – fast, powerful, booming, far more than a mere rhythmic instrument, indeed an atmospheric one – would become a point of reference both for hardcore (speed), for dark/new-wave (depressive atmosphere), and for metal (power). Don Bolles, on drums (whose use of the hi-hat and cymbals in general he pushed to extremes), completed the definitive shift from the New York Dolls' rock'n'roll revivalism, from the Sex Pistols' (much milder) punk, to hardcore. The Ramones had already gotten there as far as speed was concerned; what they lacked, though, was power and systematic consistency. With these technical breakthroughs the Germs, who were meant to be the last English-style punk band, became the first American hardcore band. They lasted less than three years, from 1977 to 1980: back then punk barely existed yet; after them would come hardcore, goth and grunge.

Even outwardly, the Germs seem to have prophesied such movements. You won't find a single photograph in which Crash is recognizable. The look in his eyes, at least – frightened, absent, resigned – stays the same; for the rest, and it's not just a matter of look but also of expressive symbols, he goes from mohawk-punk, to goth through and through, to hardcore's ostentatious casual style, to various glam touches, to nazi-fascist imagery, to grunge's ripped jeans; from blond to dark-haired, from fat to thin. In this case, mentioning such details isn't coquetry but a necessary duty, needed to fully grasp the profound spirit hovering around every Germs song.

Crash was dissatisfied with every outfit, as with every song, with every man as with every woman (and not only on a sexual level), with every drug as with himself, with England (where he went in 1980) as with America. Had he not killed himself on December 7, 1980 with a massive dose of heroin, the Germs would have come to an end anyway, given all these diverging forces within his personality.

After the July 1977 single "Forming"/"Sex Boy" and the 1978 EP "Lexicon Devil", October 1979 saw the release of the album "(GI)", produced by Joan Jett of the Runaways. Fifteen tracks, 28 minutes (an average, then, of under two minutes per song); plus a closing 9-minute progression. Two spots on the album stand out as essential: "Land of Treason", for its form: exemplary hardcore, saturated with emotion, that unfolds ever the same and ever different, with no chorus, over the span of two minutes, when it could go on forever; "The Other Newest One", for its content: a heartbroken, jagged ballad that recites "You're not the first you're not the last / Another day another crash". "What We Do Is Secret" is hardcore's quintessence, already declared by its brevity – half a minute. The strength of the piece lies in the rhythm section: full-bodied and fast as never heard before. Then the verse and the drawn-out chorus, always at full throttle, of Crash, who from here already displays a moving melodic aftertaste. "Manimal" stretches out the hardcore formula into a composition that seems longer but also somewhat cooler, until Crash's choral, war-cry-like howl, a sort of counterpart to Ennio Morricone's epic western scores. A gem of sensibility and aesthetic feeling, this device would mean a great deal for the Dead Kennedys, and for Jello Biafra's vocal approach in particular. "Our Way" hinges on an obsessive, moving melodicism; hardcore in slow motion, where Smear's syncopated, out-of-tune guitar – already grunge – emerges: from T.S.O.L. to Bad Religion, whenever it comes to making hardcore particularly inspired by lyricism, this will be the most sincere and heartfelt starting point. "We Must Bleed" is a sort of exploding precipice which, given the power of its structures and the obsessiveness of drums and bass, could already pass for speed-metal (which is why Metallica are the opposite of Iron Maiden...).

The finale, with Crash's throat on the verge of choking, is the only possible explanation for the excesses of Nirvana tracks like "Territorial Pissings". With "Media Blitz" we move onto Cheap Trick territory, which, set to hardcore tempo, delivers one of the most nostalgic and moving sounds of the Eighties. The closing "Shut Down (Annihilation Man)", at 9 minutes, should have been the usual more-or-less psychedelic, more-or-less progressive epic. Instead, not since "White Light/White Heat" had anything like this been heard in terms of symphonic noise put to expressive use.

Here the Germs carry the Velvet Underground into the punk era, they carry noise into punk. Here the Germs invent Sonic Youth. More specifically, from the individual dissonances (and violence: Crash just screams) of this composition, the most extreme grunge bands would draw inspiration: Mudhoney, Babes In Toyland – but also more alternative acts like Melvins. The only composition of the era comparable to this anti-suite suite is, not by chance, "Sex Bomb" by Flipper. The inhuman principle running through the whole track can then be found scattered from the garage-industrial of Chrome to the acid blues-punk of Birthday Party. Smear, by playing next to no notes, proves himself a key architect of instrumental innovation, and shows, along with the other players, that the tired old line about hardcore bands not knowing how to play only holds true for a handful of frustrated, dry-as-dust technicians.

Not only for chronological reasons, after the Germs we need to turn to Black Flag. Considered the greatest hardcore band and taken as a model by a vast number of hardcore and non-hardcore bands alike throughout the Eighties, the work of Black Flag nonetheless needs to be partly reassessed and put into perspective. Formed in 1977 by guitarist Greg Ginn, who at twenty-four could almost have been the father of the hardcore kids soon to follow, they debuted the following year with the EP "Nervous Breakdown". This is historically Black Flag's most important record. First, because it inaugurates the practice of founding independent labels to release one's own work: Ginn's SST, still active today, would become one of the most important, also working with Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Descendents, Saccharine Trust, Husker Du, Dinosaur Jr, Bad Brains; second, because the EP's four tracks effectively lay the groundwork for the genre. "Nervous Breakdown", "Fix Me", "I've Had It" and "Wasted", while still owing a debt to rock'n'roll tradition, stood out as the most violent, short and incisive songs of their time.

Keith Morris, who would go on to sing for Circle Jerks, immediately establishes the standard hardcore vocal: strained, exhausted and childlike. Bassist Chuck Dukowski puts all his experience to use helping drummer Brian Migdol keep as jittery and manic a rhythm as possible. Lyrically, though, we're still in the territory that had belonged, for instance, to the Detroit school.

Two years later, in 1980, when hardcore had by then already been established, came the EP "Jealous Again", produced by Spot (who would work with Black Flag until '84), with Chavo Pederast on vocals and Robo on drums.

Then, in 1981, came the significant single "Louie Louie", with Dez Cadena on vocals and second guitar. Here the coexistence within Black Flag of tradition and innovation becomes plain to see. Tradition lies in the cover of Richard Berry's classic, innovation in the track "Damaged I", which, with its dissonances, jagged edges and slowdowns, already stands beyond hardcore. This track would form the basis, that same year, for the sound of Black Flag's first album, the classic "Damaged", with, on vocals and as the band's fifth member, former S.O.A. singer Henry Garfield, now known as Henry Rollins.

The album's 15 tracks are grim, heavy, dissonant, pushed to extremes by Rollins' hoarse vocals, closer, not by chance, to the contemporary, masculine sound of Washington (where Rollins came from) and almost entirely alien to the collegiate Californian sound. Out of an unpleasantness that runs through every aspect of the record, an aesthetic of scourge and abjection emerges: "Six Pack", "Thirsty and Miserable", "Depression", "Room 13" are a succession of calculated retches that shun the song-form and, while still remaining within the hardcore fold, stand as a model for a whole series of genres and subgenres to come, from metal to grunge to the heaviest electronic music.

There's no denying the record's depth, quality, and above all its sense of purpose. What it partly lacks is spontaneity of inspiration: what seems like unbridled chaos is in fact all too calculated. This is proven by pieces that have since become classics, like "Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie," which nonetheless fall prey to self-indulgence. Either way, "Damaged" ranks among the most historically significant rock albums to appear in 1981.

After three years of touring that made Black Flag, alongside Dead Kennedys, the most popular band in the hardcore scene, 1984 saw the release of no fewer than three albums under the Black Flag name, marking numerous changes. On one hand, the shift toward post-hardcore was completed; on the other, the line-up changed once again, with Bill Stevenson of Descendents on drums and (from the third '84 album onward) Kira Roessler on bass.

"My War" is a harsh work, bordering on metal, carried in its best moments — the title track and "Forever Time" — by Rollins' shredded howl. The sound grows even darker without abandoning the dissonance, tempo shifts, and calculated roughness that had made the band's name. The sheer variety of Rollins' rhythms and vocal deliveries paved the way for the fortunes of a whole string of so-called alternative bands, Faith No More among them. "My War" also proves capable of real atmosphere, leaning into desolation and helplessness, given flesh in the sobs of "Scream." "Family Man," on the other hand, is an avant-garde work. It splits Black Flag's two great strengths — Rollins' sermonizing and Ginn's dissonance — offering six tracks of pure Rollins spoken word, four purely instrumental, and one combining voice and music.

On the whole the experiment is justified, never boring and genuinely engaging, especially in Ginn's anguished guitar textures, expressive and full of imagination. All the ingredients are now in place for "Slip It In," formally the most complete Black Flag work after "Damaged." There's a certain pursuit of song-form in the rock'n'roll of the title track, along with rhythmic and noise experiments, and supersonic surges like "My Ghetto." What's missing, though, are the screams of "My War," which, as evocative as they were, make that album the preferable one.

In 1985 Black Flag released yet three more albums: "Loose Nut," "In My Head," plus the instrumental "The Process of Weeding Out," which effectively kicks off what would become Ginn's post-Black Flag career. The sonic impact, despite a certain heavy-metal heft, is on the whole muted, and even the imagination feels somewhat cooled; add to that the fact that, whether by choice or by style, Black Flag never really wrote memorable songs, and we're left with albums well above average yet largely self-contained, more interested in exercising chops than in communicating. This is especially true of "Loose Nut," whereas "In My Head" shows real character and purpose, standing proudly alongside an era whose protagonists included Naked Raygun. Indeed, every track on this album, given the variety of its inspirations and stylistic devices — from jazz on down — would deserve its own separate analysis, and it should be ranked, alongside "Damaged" and "My War," at the very peak of Black Flag's output, which was in any case almost always of a high standard.

The third foundational band of L.A. hardcore — which is largely to say of hardcore as a whole — was Bad Religion. In a rare instance of merit matching popularity, Bad Religion, led by singer Greg Graffin and guitarist Brett Gurewitz, must be counted among the greatest hardcore bands, both for having, together with others, refounded the genre one last time, ushering in the late-Eighties/early-Nineties season, and for having, early on, founded the independent label "Epitaph," which would in time become one of America's three or four biggest, releasing hardcore bands in the Bad Religion mold — that is, hardcore that is exceedingly fast and powerful as well as melodic.

Thematically, Graffin's lyrics start from the usual questions of social politics and go on to set to music — reliving them on a moral level — biology, anthropology and cosmology, whose findings are drawn upon for a bitter yet not nihilistic reflection on the fate of humankind. Bad Religion are thus a band devoted mostly to the public dimension: they don't pair the social with the existential, the public with the private, but rather objective historical fact with objective natural fact. They're an exception, too, in having needed as many as eight years before reaching their true dimension, when the vast majority of rock bands say what they have to say right from the start. Perhaps this is due to the high formal accomplishment that defines Bad Religion's true dimension, one that could not have been reached by fifteen-year-olds, which is what they were when they started, in 1980.

As was still possible in 1981, for the release of their first self-titled EP, Bad Religion founded "Epitaph" with just a handful of spare change. The EP, necessarily rough around the edges, contains their first small classic, "Bad Religion": beyond the anticlerical slogans, musically it's a hardcore heavily indebted to English punk and garage-rock; the lyrics, however, immediately rank among the most mature and humanly responsible of the era: "See my body, it's nothing to get hung about/ I'm nobody except genetic runaround/ Spiritual era's gone, it ain't comin' back/ Don't you know the place you live's a piece of shit?/ Don't you know blind faith in life will conquer it?/ Don't you know responsibility is ours?"

On their mediocre debut album, "How Could Hell Be Any Worse?", from 1982, another classic appears, "Fuck Armageddon … This Is Hell," dark, frustrated, searing, cathartic.

After the 1983 album, "Into the Unknown," the partnership between Graffin and Gurewitz broke up for the first time. Still under the Bad Religion name, however, Graffin released the EP "Back to the Known" in 1984, containing the introspective "Frogger" and "Along the Way," his first two high points of lyricism and human sentiment.

After four years, Bad Religion reformed and truly began their career in earnest. The first album of the new era, "Suffer," ushered in, in 1988, the new and thriving season of California hardcore; more broadly, alongside the work of Screeching Weasel, it gave hardcore, after Germs and Bad Brains, a third and final youth. What's new here is the extreme speed, power and tightness of the songs, yet without metal on one hand, or screaming on the other: Graffin's delivery is a kind of sung recitation built on delicate shifts of nuance within an overall monotone tone.

Even though it launched a whole school of followers, Bad Religion's approach, sophisticated as it is, would prove largely inimitable: "Suffer," the album that defines it, brings epic scope to hardcore — it's an album of hardcore epic, made of extremely short, extremely concentrated tracks that seem alike on the surface but are in truth quite different, each one symphonically elaborated. Within a whole that is at once encyclopedic in form and content and rigidly polished in its final result, melody also emerges — not easy to spot, more stumbled upon than sought after. The following "No Control," from 1989, takes these forms to the peak of inspiration and harmony, standing as Bad Religion's finest album: "Change of Ideas," "Sanity," "Progress," "Anxiety," and "The World Won't Stop," each with its own precise theme and angle, embody the ideal of a hyper-concentrated progressive hardcore. The post-nuclear setting evokes, by contrast, the prehistoric, laying bare humanity's eternal nature.

Mission accomplished, "Against the Grain," from 1990, doesn't even try to continue down the road of its predecessor, which had by then been taken to its logical conclusion. Instead, it finds its strength in hard-rock grafts and in the sheer breadth of its offerings: "Modern Man," the last great achievement of the "No Control" aesthetic, along with "Anesthesia" and "Flat Earth Society" — heretical, mischievous arena-rock overflowing with feeling — give it a stature that is anything but negligible.

Nine more albums would follow, up to 2004, with Bad Religion — the longest-running hardcore outfit in history and the one with the most releases to its name — going on to conquer worldwide fame.

Behind the three aforementioned bands come Circle Jerks and Descendents, or so it would seem. In truth, Circle Jerks and Descendents, leaving Germs out of the equation, are no less important than Black Flag and Bad Religion. If anything, strictly speaking, it was they who coined the signature sound of L.A. hardcore, commonly known as beach-punk, built on speed and melody.

Having left Black Flag, Keith Morris formed Circle Jerks in 1979. Their debut the following year, the album "Group Sex", must be considered one of the foundational milestones of hardcore, which at the time represented, alongside the work of the Germs, its most complete definition. While the Germs were still writing songs and Black Flag were loaded with influences from the past, Circle Jerks swept everything away, leaving behind a sound stripped to the bone, dry, blindingly fast and elemental. In a quarter of an hour they cram in 14 tracks – a record – nearly indistinguishable from one another and systematically hostile to even the slightest hint of beauty or melody. It's a fragmented scourge conceived for the most frenzied pits at shows, one that finds the fulfilment of its propulsive drive in long lyrics screamed at breakneck speed, carrying articulate but partly irresponsible and extremist content, at a time when the hardcore genre had not yet fully come to terms with itself.

The key text here is the manifesto "Live Fast Die Young", which, contrary to popular belief, is on one hand a case of antiphrastic irony – saying one thing to mean another – and on the other preaches living fast and dying young only insofar as that allows one to tap into the true essence of life. Properly understood, then, it's a hymn to life, not to self-destruction. You have to die young because the perverse world built by adults leads thirty- and forty-year-olds, so-called mature men, to live lives that aren't really lives at all, sold off to conformism and impersonality, or used as either victims or architects of nuclear wars.

Every track, in any case, is a repository of ideas and themes fundamental to the future of hardcore: from the commodification of sex – they're against, not in favour of, the concept of "group sex" – to the resulting impossibility nowadays of genuine feelings, to the mockery of frivolous trends and the dominance of big brands over everything, to the injustices of justice itself, to bureaucracy, and more generally to the perversion whereby those in power, preaching goodness, are in fact the ones doing all the harm – true both at the level of the state and of the family.

Over the course of the Eighties, Circle Jerks, though they had already accomplished their vanguard mission, would go on to produce four more albums, each better than the last. "Wild In the Streets", in 1982, is notably impressive for its great propulsive force and tireless energy, which nevertheless almost never results in a track conceived as an actual, memorable song. Still, this further landmark album, more polished, varied and powerful than the first, would go on to lay the groundwork for the final wave of Californian melodic hardcore of the late Eighties and early Nineties. "Golden Shower of Hits", the following year, shows not the slightest sign of flagging and cements Circle Jerks' place among the greatest hardcore bands of all time: "Parade of the Horribles" even manages to find a catchy melody.

Moreover, the Circle Jerks' sound keeps getting fresher and more knowing, genuinely capable of serving as an example for everyone. "Wonderful", in 1985, leans decisively on irony for the first time, and in this it finds both its cross and its delight. Still, Morris's voice grows ever more versatile and, when he wants it to, positively roars; and Greg Hetson's guitar is never banal, capable of the most varied twists and turns. A work as inferior to its predecessors as it is above the average standard, capable of energetic bursts like "Firebaugh" and "I&I". "VI", in 1987, returns skilfully to harder sounds: "Beat Me Senseless" borders on metal, "Casualty Vampire" sweeps away any last-minute imitators and shows just how far Circle Jerks had come since their fundamental but still raw debut. Throughout the record, they make generous use of the riffs banished back in 1980, letting melodies emerge that grow hand in hand with the increasing musical power.

Drummer Bill Stevenson's Descendents effectively ushered in the golden age of the genre in the early Eighties, and would necessarily serve as a reference point even for those who, by decade's end, would offer the last examples of hardcore. Descendents represent, first and foremost, the kids – that's what they are, and that's who they speak to; so their themes are more concerned with everyday life and family relationships than with politics in the strict sense. Even their treatment of relationships with girls, when it comes up, is deliberately childish, which doesn't mean it lacks sensitivity.

While Stevenson wrote the material, the band's fast, melodic sound came from Tony Lombardo's bass and Frank Navetta's guitar, while Milo Aukerman, with his boyish voice, is the true star and defining feature of Descendents, embodying the model for every melodic hardcore singer to come.

After the flimsy 1979 debut single, "Ride The Wild", 1981 brought the EP "Fat", where "My Dad Sucks" and "Mr. Bass" show a marked leap in compositional and performative maturity, ranking among the year's formal high points and demonstrating just what the hardcore canon consists of. The following year came the band's defining album, "Milo Goes To College", containing the masterpieces "Parents", "Jean Is Dead" and "Hope": mournful, driving, cathartic elegies, melodically sublimated and wrapped up in a minute and a half – songs capable of sustaining and comforting the abandonment of a whole generation.

After three years' absence – an eternity for a hardcore band that had, in fact, already been written off – and with Ry Cooper on guitar, "I Don't Want to Grow Up" came out in 1985. A work considerably inferior to its predecessor, but one that significantly manages to affirm hardcore orthodoxy in an era of crisis; it includes "Ace" and "My World".

The following year, "Enjoy!" featured Doug Carrion on bass and marked a return to a more stripped-down sound – if not less melodic, then certainly less polished. The inspired, gripping atmospheres of the first album are a distant memory, replaced by experiments that are at times an end in themselves. "Days Are Blood", "Kids" and "Hurtin' Crue" are propelled by breakneck rhythms, sure, but mostly by a grown-up Aukerman who now snarls.

The third album in three years, "All", from 1987, with Stephen Egerton on guitar and Karl Alvarez on bass, has yet another different sound; not lacking in energy or ideas, even if not entirely convincing, it still offers a variety of melodies and, above all, squared-off, metal-derived rhythms as well as intriguing depraved inflections. Technical skill seems to have taken over from inspiration, but a spark of imagination, however cold and dormant, is still very much present – enough to make this varied, well-rounded and original album the best since the debut, and one that could make bands like Faith No More envious.

Descendents broke up shortly after. They would reappear a decade later, in 1996, with all the original '82 members plus Alvarez and Egerton. "Everything Sucks", unlike what usually happens in such circumstances, is an inspired and ferocious work, the closest thing to the '82 classic, and one still capable of astonishing, after all these years, with the vitality of a band it ends up representing one of the high points of. Eight years later, in 2004, came "Cool To Be You", unfortunately rather poor and lacklustre.

Circle Jerks are to Descendents what, on a perhaps lesser but no less important level, Angry Samoans are to Adolescents.

Angry Samoans, led by drummer Mike Saunders and singer Gregg Turner, were among the first hardcore bands out of Los Angeles. Their flaw, perhaps, was not taking themselves too seriously, leaning too heavily on the most goofball modes of social critique and ending up trivialising songs that would otherwise have been thoroughly ahead of their time. On their 1980 debut, "Inside My Brain", produced by Lee Ving with help from Spot, the openly declared influences of Dictators, Ramones and Damned fade into the background on fast, powerful tracks like "Hot Cars" and "Inside My Brian", allowing Angry Samoans to serve as the model for a whole series of things to come.

A significant leap forward came with their classic "Back From Samoa" in 1982, with Jeff Dahl on bass. Fourteen tracks, each a minute long, of bitter sarcasm, including the melodic "My Old Man's a Fatso", the choppy "Lights Out" with its trend-setting chorus, the obscene "They Saved Hitler's Cock", and above all, on one hand, the fifteen seconds of "You Stupid Jerk" bordering on grindcore, and on the other, the semi-ballad "Ballad of Jerry Curlan", a gripping, cathartic masterpiece that foreshadows grunge.

1987 brought the nostalgic, contemplative EP "Yesterday Started Tomorrow", featuring "Electrocution" and "It's Raining Today". The following year, now firmly in post-hardcore territory, came the lively album "STP Not LSD", which leaned heavily on melody in an attempt to win over the new indie generation.

The Adolescents, too, in both form and content, stand as one of the pivotal bands of the entire hardcore scene. Made up of singer Tony Cadena, guitarists Rikk and Frank Agnew, bassist Steve Soto and drummer Casey Royer, on their self-titled 1981 album they carried forward the lesson of the Germs amid the gloomy climate brought on by the first stirrings of goth rock proposed, among others, by T.S.O.L. The thirteen tracks on the album each outdo one another in importance. For sheer conciseness and scope of agenda, the manifestos of the record have to be "I Hate Children", "Self Destruct" and "No Friends", which dispense a sadomasochistic, irresponsible nihilism, with an antiphrastic intent less evident here than in other bands.

The Adolescents are "adolescents", and they say "I hate children", meaning they hate themselves: in theory this ought to be an indictment of parents and a society whose educational failings drive their own children to despair; but the deeply anguished vocals, the murky rhythm section, the sullen guitars might just as well not call for that reading, and instead point toward the literal one, which would then lead straight to suicide. The peaks of melody and tragedy are "Who Is Who" and "No Way", which overflow with youthful loneliness, powerlessness and fatalism. The avant-garde number is "Amoeba", a funereal, surrealist choral piece that at the speed of light conjures the very depths of darkness.

Let's now look at three more illustrative cases: Gears, M.I.A. and Wasted Youth.

Apparently an old-school outfit devoted to the most chauvinistic and reactionary strain of rock'n'roll, the Gears proved in 1980 that they could cut a classic like "Rockin At Ground Zero", which absorbed hardcore's percussive velocity only after thoroughly assimilating its grimy underground dimension. It's a well-played record, with songs that verge on revivalism in style but are always written with sharp awareness and, if not inspiration, considerable imagination. The music is fun and games only in part; barely concealed, almost everywhere, is a sense of precariousness and despair that the whistling on the masterpiece "Wasting Time" sharpens and opens up into a touching chorus, before handing it over to the gloom of "Teenage Brain" and the jagged rhythms of "Heartbeat Baby" and "Last Chance", where melody exists only to be defiled. Every song, in any case, manages to shine on its own terms and stand entirely on its own, working as a potential single that, had it possessed a little less intelligence, could have been called chart material.

The Gears move from proto-hardcore to post-hardcore, placing themselves squarely within a full-blown, if never extreme, strain of hardcore — one, moreover, practiced with the awareness of people who sense that the games are over and the ideologies have fallen, and who, as a final form of seriousness, know how to do nothing but not take themselves seriously.

M.I.A., led by guitarist Nick Adams and singer Mike Conley, formed in 1979 in Nevada, but like so many others were forced to relocate to that Southern California where melodic hardcore was very much at home. 1982 brought the mini-album "Last Rites for Genocide & M.I.A.", quite close to the darkly tinged pop-core of Rikk Agnew and T.S.O.L. but at the same time capable of standing as a credible standard-bearer for the whole of Californian hardcore; formally through the zigzagging "Cold Sweat" and "Angry Youth", and in terms of content through "I Hate Hippies", a polemic against the naive and hypocritical idealism of the "flower children". 1984 brought "Murder In A Foreign Place", M.I.A.'s reference work, a concentrate of melancholy, disillusioned laments, not without grotesque touches and bolstered by driving rhythms. "Boredom Is the Reason", "Who Will Survive" — especially — and "Used T Know Me" are M.I.A.'s finest achievements; the band closed out their career without particular fanfare with "Notes From The Underground" in 1985 and "After The Fact" in 1987.

Among the most faithful followers of the Germs, though in terms of content they replaced the Germs' apolitical existentialism with an anarchist political commitment, were Wasted Youth. "Reagan's In", from 1981, contained "Fuck Authority", "We Were On Heroin" (which goes "I don't care if I die / I'll take the money from my mum just to buy it [heroin]"), "Flush the Bouncers", with the "search & destroy" line that two years later would belong to Metallica, and "Problem Child", which aspires to be the biography of the average, unredeemed punk/hoodlum untouched by hardcore.

After a long silence, guitarist and leader Chett Leher gave the band new life in the second half of the Eighties, unexpectedly moving, like the Bad Brains but with lesser results, toward an original, experimental arena-rock — fast rather than powerful, pared to the bone yet baroque, all-encompassing of a historical-biographical state of neither-flesh-nor-fowl in which the only task is to survive, perhaps by indulging in humor and hedonism purely for their own sake. Joking aside, this opened the door to the likes of Faith No More, Jane's Addiction and Extreme, while also institutionalizing the most classic sound of the turn from the Eighties into the Nineties.

"Get Out of My Yard" (1986) is a masterpiece of its kind: without ever abandoning rock, it adopts funk and pop-metal grooves, compacting them into two-minute hardcore bursts.

A case apart is Channel 3, led by Mike Magrann, who stood as an important example of a melodic band — one that, on closer inspection, wasn't entirely orthodox either in form, being more articulate, expansive and varied than standard practice, or in content, which had little to nothing to do with the shared aims of any hardcore scene or youth movement. Channel 3's reference album is "I've Got A Gun"; released in 1982, it contains at least four anthology-worthy tracks. "Fear Of Life" is a manifesto of political and moral incorrectness, one of those bolts from the blue capable of undermining the value system championed by the hardcore world at its very foundations: "No responsibilities/ I'm not ready to the real world/ I'm twenty-three/ Got no job, got no girl, got nothing at all/ I live in my own little fantasy/ Hey man, fuck you!". "Catholic Boy", on the other hand, feeds back into the hardcore mill, in its recurring polemic against that form of depersonalization represented by religion, and by Christianity in particular: the song is framed as a dialogue or an appeal to a boy who needs saving from what here stands for perdition, and which would have him live and die "by the same ten rules".

The same argument, applied to an equally dogmatic and aberrant civilization, runs through "Strength in Numbers". By every measure, the high point is "Double Standard Boys", a portrait of a girl orphaned of her mother and neglected by her father, whom the narrator would be willing to love just as in her romantic dreams, if only she too hadn't bought into the prevailing inhuman logic. She'll end up with someone who, like everyone nowadays, doesn't realize that "sex has nothing to do with love".

In 1983, the second album, "After The Lights Go Out", while not abandoning hardcore, softens its impact through helpings of hard-rock riffs, rock'n'roll chants, and more polished production. With this further important work, Channel 3 anticipate a whole strand that would carry on through the second half of the decade and beyond. The best track, though, remains the more old-fashioned "What About Me?", with its scenarios of despair, only partly rendered through parossistic speed: "Another early motel morning/ Just another lonely person in this cold dark world/ No more love no more dreams".

Before reaching the turning point brought about by Suicidal Tendencies, which led to a genuine refounding of hardcore, we need to look at the bands who, with varying degrees of awareness, positioned themselves along the lines of this second wave by intensifying canonical hardcore practice. There are four of them: Battalion Of Saints, Youth Brigade, Ill Repute and Stalag 13; to which should be added the far more mediocre Decry and Mad Parade.

Battalion Of Saints, fronted by singer George Anthony, played a role within the hardcore scene that was at once heretical and reactionary-orthodox. The heretical side showed up in the band's outward attitude; the more important, orthodox side, in a music that, while adopting devices from the then-fashionable thrash metal, nonetheless conceded nothing to the various strands of post-hardcore, whether understood as sonic extremism or as sonic dilution. The lyrical content, moreover, fell squarely within hardcore's usual canon, making words of peace, tolerance, and humanitarian and social protest sound all the more jarring coming from the mouths of alcoholic, drugged-up, no-good drifters. Battalion Of Saints emerged in 1982, less at the peak of hardcore's first season than at the moment of its eclipse. The following year, 1983, would be the year of Bad Brains, Suicidal Tendencies, D.R.I., and the refounding of a movement with no intention whatsoever of running out of steam. For the old guard, in any case, it spelled twilight. A choice had to be made: either push toward extremes and cross over into second-wave hardcore, or give up and invent one's own post-hardcore, perhaps ending up somewhere near heavy metal.

In 1984, right in the thick of this process, came the only album by Battalion Of Saints, “Second Coming”, which, while it doesn't challenge an irreversible course of events, not only finds its own reason for being but also seals shut an era over which the curtain would truly have to fall at this point. Were it not for the lack of guitar solos, the halved tempos and the brevity of the songs, and finally Anthony's deliberately artless voice, this music could almost be considered close to that of thrash metal bands of the time like Exodus. Still, that line is never crossed, and what we get is fourteen songs of a minute and a half each, played with verve and passion and carried by the frontman's tortured, wrecked voice. “My Minds Disease”, “Buddies and Pals” and “Doomed World” race by quickly and easily, but they're fully sustained by a sincerity and an attention to detail that enriches their pauseless advance, hostilely closed off to melody.

After the band's breakup, its two former guitarists (Chris Smith and Donny Diaz) would die from the excesses of their lifestyle — tangible proof of just how alien Battalion Of Saints were, by nature, to a world that seemed degenerate but was in fact as ethical as the hardcore scene, which counts almost no victims of its own, and in any case far fewer than any other rock movement since the Sixties onward.

Adam Stern's Youth Brigade, backed by his two brothers on the rhythm section, dictated in 1984 with “Sink With Kalifornija” a solid example of that hardcore orthodoxy now in its autumn. Aside from the successful “Modest Proposal”, which does contain the pacifist line “I hate you, you hate me but we don’t know why”, the album stands out above all for its programmatic content, which really amounts to a summa of hardcore ideology: philanthropy, social critique, solidarity, understanding of teenage struggles, pacifism, a will to live. “Fight To Unite” tells a new recruit to the hardcore brotherhood: “You get discouraged, about wasting time/ On a bunch of kinds with simple minds/ But kinds can grow and minds get smart/ Don’t be negative it’s a start/ No one’s forced you, you can leave/ It’s no impossibile if you believe”. In “What Are You Fighting For” it's argued that even those who believe they're fighting for peace and freedom are inevitably fighting to kill and out of hatred, because “fighting” is “stupid” regardless; faced with racism, discrimination and nihilism, one asks “Is this the virtute of a rational man?”; after all, “Knowledge is the way to see/ Ignorance is your enemy”. The highest value remains the individual — to be respected while respecting others; and the questions posed are: “What price happiness?” and “Where are we going?”.

The horizon widens too, to musings that, however naive, are still philosophical in nature, like those of “Who Can You Believe”: “It seems that life is a system a duality at best/ A choice of taking this or that/ Yet there’s more than east or west/ Don’t limit yourself dispite what you’ve been taught/ It’s so hard to decide what’s right or wrong/ Trust and Faith are just mere words/ Everything is relative and most is just for show/ Close your eyes and listen to yourself and then let go”. Youth Brigade bear witness that hardcore stands against apathy, against War — seen as a kind of metaphysical monster — against the nuclear threat and against holocausts, and in favor of responsibility and self-awareness. The final word of encouragement comes from “Care”: “Care, you’ve got to care/ Search for a way to live more than a day” — words that carry real weight, in a context as degraded and devoid of values as adolescence in the early Eighties.

Ill Repute were nothing short of exemplary, both in form — a hardcore so powerful and full-bodied that it practically ushered in the genre's second wave — and in content, driven by an uncompromising, sensitive philanthropy. Their cathartic masterpiece, one that skillfully weds these two elements, is the anthem “Book and It’s Cover”, from the 1984 EP “What Happens Next”, an essential release packed with a string of savage, polemical tracks aimed against the logic of “sex, love and rock n’ roll”, fully mirroring hardcore's ideological orthodoxy. 1983 had already seen the release of the EP “Oxnard Land of No Toilets”, featuring “Turn the Guns Around”, which goes: “The next day all the papers write/ Another girl was killed last night/ Her mutilated body/ Was found out on the beach/ Why do people die?/ I sit and wonder why”; and in the chorus: “The only solution is a inside revolution” — practically the finest possible statement of hardcore's existential anarchy.

John Phaneuf's raw-throated vocals deserve a separate mention, giving their best in breakneck Minor Threat-flavored episodes like “Fill It Up” or in Dead Kennedys-esque romps like “Cherokee Nation”, in support of Native Americans. Without a doubt, Ill Repute stand as the best band among those we're examining here, straddling classic L.A. hardcore and Suicidal Tendencies.

Following in the footsteps of Minor Threat, whose principal disciples they were in both form and content, Stalag 13 delivered in 1984, with “In Control”, an energetic, uncompromising work that considerably replenished the coffers of a hardcore nation then generally suffering a recession of both imagination and authenticity. “Conditioned”, “No Excuse” and “The Choice Is Yours” are full-bodied, visceral, fast tracks, built on broken-up tempos and sudden bursts of voice and guitar. A long-awaited, effective shot of vitamins and carbs into a body and a scene that badly needed them.

We'll close with the mediocre Decry, whose 1984 album “Falling”, with its dark-tinged accents and tones, never rises above the genre's standard average, and with Mad Parade, mere unconvincing, unimaginative epigones, caught between elementary melodies and cold, sturdy rhythms bordering on metal. If nothing else, they were telling signs of a state of affairs: the exhaustion of classic Californian hardcore.

Alongside Bad Brains and D.R.I., Suicidal Tendencies — who thus round out what might be called “the bands of the '83 turning point” — fronted by singer Mike Muir, were the chief architects of hardcore's second wave, the more extreme one, closer to metal, a genre they would go on to influence heavily in its heavier corners. This second wave of hardcore, which arose around 1983, would later be present, in one form or another, in almost every future strain of extreme rock: from Metallica to Napalm Death to Pantera, there's no band that doesn't owe it a debt.

Suicidal Tendencies are not an avant-garde act the way D.R.I. are, nor does their ideology fully conform to hardcore orthodoxy, even if their ambiguous moral musings are mostly meant to be read ironically. The band's expressionist hyper-realism functions as a critique of a degraded, monstrous reality and society. Suicidal Tendencies' self-titled debut, from 1983, is in any case one of rock's essential albums. Hardcore's quest is pushed to its most extreme consequences, both in form and content, with an inventiveness, a fervor and a sincerity that have few rivals. The album's 12 tracks are, for one reason or another, all essential. Consider the theatrics of “I Saw Your Mommy (And Your Mommy Is Dead)” and the tirade of “Fascist Pig” for their content, as well as “I Shot the Devil” — with the Devil, as ever, taking the form of Reagan, Lennon and the Pope — “Suicide’s An Alternative/ You’ll Be Sorry” and “Institutionalized” for their form: psychotic, heartbroken vocals, music that's now hyperkinetic, now bouncing along in a sly, cynical way.

After a four-year hiatus, Suicidal Tendencies re-emerged as a metal band, somewhere between Anthrax and Megadeth, but with all manner of contaminations, from the Beastie Boys on down. “Join The Army” (1987) and “How Will I Laugh Tomorrow” (1988) boast — the latter especially — one of the freshest sounds on the rock scene of the era, with squared-off guitars, at times remarkable rhythmic ideas, and melodramatic spoken-word delivery. If “Controlled By Hatred” (1989) is a misstep, “Lights Camera Revolution” (1990) represents the heaviest assault and the bitterest reflection of Suicidal Tendencies' career, with points of reference shifting from Anthrax and Megadeth all the way to anticipating 1991-era Metallica and Pantera.

Once hardcore's second wave had crossed the sonic threshold of the first wave — once thought insurmountable — the possible alternatives were either the end of hardcore (post-hardcore) or the development of a new quest starting from these freshly achieved results. It's in this latter sense, though with a steadfastness of principle harking back to classic hardcore, that the activities of Rich Kids on LSD and Insted should be understood.

In 1985, “Keep Laughing” by Rich Kids on LSD had an impact that can never be stressed enough. In that in-between age, when it seemed only isolated, exceptional works of value were possible, or rather, when it seemed there was no room left for anything but post-hardcore, R.K.L. managed to erect a colossal wall of hardcore orthodoxy, picking up from the genre's 1983 refounding by other bands while placing themselves fully within the genre itself, rather than pushing past it all the way to metal as a form of post-hardcore. The album, still built around frenzied rhythms, overflows with fervor, imagination and commitment to a cause — that of youth — which suddenly seems to bloom anew. “Think Positive”, “Feelings of Hate” and “Senseless Violence” are tracks powerful enough to carry the whole genre on their shoulders and haul it into what, almost without any break in continuity, could be called its final season. Still, R.K.L. should be left within their own context, rather than taken as forerunners of that less morbid, less deathly, almost sunnier style that would define hardcore at decade's end.

The Insted, too, played a historical role not to be underestimated: ferrying classic Descendents-style hardcore from the early Eighties into the early Nineties (the years of the Bad Religion and Screeching Weasel revival) through an obscure, distinguished, experimental middle age that was, precisely for that reason, forgetful of hardcore's most original sound. A fairly mediocre band in terms of composition and technique, Insted find their true purpose exactly in that mediocrity, which made them reactionary right when reactionary was needed. Thrash metal and ska (two of the directions hardcore was drifting toward at the time) lend Insted's hardcore an internal push that doesn't compromise the orthodoxy respected in their lyrics or in the repetitiveness, brevity and uncompromising nature of songs that feel like a desperation unable to fully express itself.

The lyrics on one hand run parallel to Bad Religion's (main subjects: morality and reflection on human nature), while on the other they push hardcore's philanthropic line to its fullest: the values are “being yourself”, “being honest and upright”, “fighting against lies”, “protecting the world we live in”, and, in protecting it, protecting ourselves too. We shouldn't pollute the world with smog, just as we shouldn't pollute ourselves with falsehood and cruelty, with drugs and nihilism: “Your life is meant to be lived: why do you want to destroy it?”; “There's no second chance afterward”. And the bitterest thing of all, in the end, is “regret”.

In every song you can find slogans of propaganda that's not so much political as existential and social. All of it under the banner of the most extreme hardcore, as if to say that morality is compatible with fun and youthful passions. In Insted you can clearly see how, more or less consciously, hardcore took it upon itself to communicate with young people in the language of young people: not with books and sermons but with rock. And to candidly communicate ideas that have belonged to human nature for millennia: from Socrates' "know thyself" to Russell's pacifism, from stoicism to pragmatism. These kids' parents responded with utter incomprehension.

After all, since these parents were unable to show their children a path they had to find on their own, they certainly couldn't appreciate the vital worth of that path. The two manifestos of Insted aren't found on the albums "Bonds Of Friendship" (1988) and "What We Believe" (1990) but on the posthumous compilation "Proud Youth" (2004), and they are "One World" and "For The First Time", two touchstones, formally as well, for hardcore as a whole. Here's the lyrics to the first: "Mother nature will provide us with nothing, when careless living leads to destruction. And as our earth grows old, will our future generations have something to told. One world – we must protect. One world – we must correct. It's our responsibility. How many more years are we gonna live like this? We need to think about it before there's nothing left! Then there's no second chance".

The late Eighties were a period of consolidation; the programmatic hardcore revival of the early Nineties hadn't yet taken hold, so each case must be judged on its own merits, starting with the four quite different proposals from All, Gorilla Biscuits, No For An Answer and Creamers.

Taking their name from the last Descendents album, in 1987 drummer Bill Stevenson named All his project, made up of the last Descendents lineup with bassist Alvarez and guitarist Egerton, minus Aukerman. The mediocre Dave Smalley was chosen as singer; he came from two outfits as mediocre as he was: Boston's Dys and Washington's Dag Nasty. "Allroy Sez", from 1988, delivers a melodic and utterly bland hardcore, seemingly made for consumption by college kids, evidently regarded as green youngsters devoid of any sensitivity or intelligence. We're at the opposite pole from the tenets of "Milo Goes To College"; here we witness the squalor of a genre reduced to a sloppy fad. No better are the following albums with the colorless vocals of Scott Reynolds: "Allroy's Revenge" (1989) and "Allroy Saves" (1990). Further releases followed throughout the Nineties.

Gorilla Biscuits were responsible, in 1989, for the extreme hardcore album "Start Today". Fourteen well-crafted tracks, delivered with directness and command of their tools, somewhere between Insted and Youth Of Today. Yet within this tightly calibrated onslaught, few moments truly leave a mark or reveal something worth remembering. "Start Today" should mostly be regarded as a formal landmark of hardcore — a harsh, anti-melodic hardcore, standing at the opposite end from the dominant Los Angeles style of Bad Religion.

Partly comparable to Gorilla Biscuits, with their 1989 album "A Thought Crusade", were No For An Answer, who offered an uncompromising example of extreme hardcore bordering on heavy metal and rich in humanitarian proselytizing. A work of quantity more than quality, of lung power more than imagination, it nonetheless served to feed the hardcore mill and reaffirmed its stereotypes, while placing itself within the metal, non-melodic strand of hardcore's final season — the strand that, in California, was followed by the fewest bands.

The main release by Creamers is the 1989 album "Love Honor & Obey". Twelve tracks in twenty minutes, with influences from X and Avengers. Reactionary, encyclopedic, mannered, sincere: Creamers are a revival band because they were active in an era when their music was no longer current. And yet (as in the repeated screams closing "Wrong Embrace") they helped teach punk-rock to the riot grrrls, supplying them with the formal tools that would later be filled with the content of the new para-grunge movement. Two guitarists, one singer, two men on the rhythm section. It sounds almost like a joke — even the band's age is an anomaly: not teenagers, but well into their twenties. Yet it's precisely from that experience, that maturity, that awareness of working out of time and purely for the ideal, that the strength, imagination and quality of a one-of-a-kind work emerges, one that sits somewhere between Avengers and Babes in Toyland, at a Ramones-and-Bad-Religion clip.

Among the minute-and-a-half tracks, "Road Kill" and "Love Honor & Obey" stand out, showing a deep knowledge of rock, imaginative and never flat, yet without losing any tightness. These are variations, sometimes barely perceptible, almost always sophisticated, on the same theme and at the same tempo — brisk, but free of a violence that would have undercut the fundamentally narrative tone of the hardcore on display.

Within the context of the Californian hardcore revival championed by Bad Religion and their label Epitaph — even if not strictly part of it themselves — are NOFX and Offspring.

NOFX, led by bassist/singer Fat Mike and guitarist Eric Melvin, belong chronologically to the late-Eighties hardcore revival bands, even though their raw early style seems like an odd note within the melodic Californian scene. Under the wing of Bad Religion, they would, alongside Offspring and Rancid, make Epitaph's fortune. They debuted in 1988 with the frantic "Liberal Animation", carried mainly by the leader's animalistic howl. No track here is memorable, but the tension never lets up, and the scarcity of things to say is offset on one hand by a dizzying tempo and on the other by Melvin's guitar runs, which border on speed metal.

The influence of early D.R.I. looms large. "S&M Airlines", released the following year, is relatively more melodic and polished; while still keeping breakneck tempos, it registers the first hints of what would become the band's future direction: ska and reggae. "Ribbed", in 1991, now hailed by fans as a classic, continues along the same lines, further emphasizing melody, a thinness of content, and fun for its own sake.

1993 brought "White Trash, Two Heebs & A Bean", with its hefty injections of jazz, ska, and various mostly gratuitous gimmicks. NOFX prove themselves unscrupulous professionals who would, in time, achieve their goals: worldwide fame and, in other words, financial comfort. NOFX are among only four or five hardcore bands to pull this off, perhaps because, in the end, they're not really a hardcore band at all. "Punk In Drublic", in 1994, further filled Epitaph's coffers; in a year that, for the label, was like hitting the national lottery: it also released "Smash" by Offspring and "Let's Go" by Rancid — both, especially the former, massive popular bestsellers. "Heavy Pettingzoo", in 1996, is less and less music, less and less hardcore, and more and more spectacle, cabaret, music hall, with a growing weakness for ballads on top of it. "So Long & Thanks for All the Shoes", in 1997, with "It's My Job to Keep Punk Rock Elite", seems to want to reclaim some lost dignity, and despite the now-usual trumpet, trombone, tuba, tambourine and so on, plus the usual ska and reggae, it does partly bring things back toward the early albums. "Pump Up The Valuum", in 2000, instead takes another half-step backward, though it still shows plenty of craft both in composition and execution of songs that, by now, are close to assembly-line production, turning unpredictability itself into their trademark predictability.

While NOFX's biggest flaw up to this point has been excessive self-indulgence and a taste for gratuitous fun, the flaw of "The War on Errorism", from 2003 — one of the many concept records against Bush's foreign policy — is to present itself as serious and politically engaged when it has little right to.

Formed in 1985, in the depths of the hardcore dark ages, Offspring managed to hang on until the powerful new wave they'd go on to ride in 1989 with the release of their self-titled debut album. A flat, bland and poorly played record, it earns two points in its favor: Dexter Holland's hoarse, theatrical voice, and above all its strict adherence to genre conventions — in fact taking a reactionary stance against the hyperkinetic melodicism then dominant via Bad Religion, instead incorporating metal inflections. Over the course of the Nineties and 2000s, Offspring would be among the very few hardcore bands to break into the sales charts, which they would end up dominating by compromising with mainstream, commercial music.

Finally getting to the hardcore revival proper, let's turn to what are probably its greatest exponents in Los Angeles: Down By Law and Pennywise.

Down By Law represented, in 1991 with their self-titled debut album, the finest fruit of the long career of guitarist and singer Dave Smalley, formerly of Dag Nasty and All, this time backed by Brett Gurewitz's production. The album is tight and formally flawless, fitting into the then-dominant Bad Religion school, though doing so in an even more melodic way than their contemporaries Pennywise, ultimately owing much to the work of the Descendents. What's on offer, to paraphrase one of the album's titles, is surf hardcore, jovial and carefree on the whole, purpose-built as a soundtrack for teenage escapades with happy endings. The mannerism and affectation don't compromise its high degree of listenability, which is, after all, the only thing that gives it any reason to exist. Buoyed by the approval of his teenage audience, Smalley would carry on with the Down By Law project, going on to release around ten albums to date.

Pennywise are a Bad Religion clone band heavily backed by Epitaph. And yet their self-titled 1991 debut deserves to be considered a classic of hyperkinetic Los Angeles melodic hardcore, because, thanks to the quartet's instrumental skill, it achieves that seamless formal perfection found only in "No Control". This record embodies the quintessence of hardcore: philanthropic lyrics straddling the personal and the political, adolescent vocals, and rigid, frenzied rhythms. Of the fourteen razor-fresh tracks, each one essentially a variation on the others, "Bro Hymn" stands out, a choral, epic song dedicated to three young friends tragically lost, which should be a dirge but instead turns into a hymn to life. It's through examples like this that hardcore pushes back against the myth of the doomed, burnt-out youth and instead sides with reason, with an unhypocritical ethics, with a yes to life truly and humanly lived, throwing back in the face of Fifties rock'n'roll — and the rock that followed it — all the superficiality and shallowness that belongs to them.

Backed by a substantial following, Pennywise carried on with their career, reaching the notable milestone of their seventh official album in 2003.

Post-hardcore

Given our narrow definition of the term hardcore, we find ourselves considering a greater number of bands under post-hardcore than under hardcore itself. But this isn't down to our categories: it's down to reality — a reality in which, all things considered, few bands are able or willing to play orthodox hardcore, while many (most, in fact) vary the theme to the point of abandoning the original style and inevitably landing in post-hardcore. The same could be said of rock in general. Most so-called rock bands don't make rock music as we've come to define it, but rather, properly speaking, pop music.

Given the great variety of post-hardcore forms, it isn't always possible to speak of movements or trends; for the most part we have to deal with each case individually, as though every band writes its own history — indeed, as though it became a band, and thus acquired its own identity, precisely by writing that history for itself.

Somewhere between proto-hardcore, hardcore and post-hardcore, Chris Dejardins's Flesh Eaters announced themselves with their self-titled, unhinged and ramshackle 1978 EP, which remains their masterpiece. The record's four tracks, played and above all recorded in an almost amateurish way but sung with every possible vocal register, are each more original and outlandish than the last. Given the era, both the Clash on one side and the Dead Kennedys on the other end up inevitably anticipated rather than followed. "Disintegration Nation" is a witches' sabbath with an irresistible refrain that points to measured idiocy and a bedrock of desolation as the Flesh Eaters' distinguishing marks, and they excel precisely on ground where too many imitators have failed for lack of real inspiration and skill. "Agony Shorthand", more linear, speculates on a drunken melody while flaunting a fanfare-like rhythm; "Twisted Road" packs into one minute high-class rockabilly guitar runs, all-emotion choral crescendos and a little skit by way of an interlude; "Radio Dies Screaming" pulls off the miracle of never once dipping in quality or inspiration, devouring blues and epic grandeur alike as it grinds through stories and feelings in a screamed, contemplative round that reprises yet another memorable hook. Few can boast a debut like that of the Flesh Eaters, and not only within hardcore. Capable too of the right kind of detachment, they took on the whole of the American tradition, absorbing it in homeopathic doses for a probing, hardcore-paced exploration that was sharp but never an end in itself. The Feederz would remember it well.

The first album, "No Questions Asked", in 1980, while not disappointing, files down the sound, moving away from the beguiling mumbling of two years earlier. Every track, built like a taunt or a tongue-twister, is well put together; speed and variety triumph; there's no shortage of hooks to grab your attention, what's missing, perhaps, is something that isn't just a hook. Either way, this is top-tier stuff, and not only by hardcore standards.

Dejardins is a kind of shaman who conjures up surreal horror atmospheres, setting them all within the everyday world with no afterlife or transcendent elevation whatsoever. Worth noting, too, is his melodic gift, which always emerges from the dissonant tribalism of tracks steeped as much in hardcore as in the most traditional American music, from country to blues to rock'n'roll. "Suicide Saddle" is the peak of the more serious side, "Cry Baby Killer" — a Clash-style reggae-punk number but with more expressiveness — of the demented one. Yet the two sides are constantly fused, in a serious demented streak or a deranged seriousness, and they sublimate with ever-growing empathy in the frantic "Ten Inch Razor". "Diminoes" is typical: fast, hardcore verse, genuflecting, melodic chorus. In "Crazy Boy" all of the Flesh Eaters' traditional sources come to the fore, with a stunning, merciless rhythm section, somewhere between rock'n'roll and a dark undertow. "The Child Comes First" halves the tempo for a rotten hardcore somewhere between a fairground and a graveyard. "Home of the Brave" makes the formula even more searing and dizzying. What's especially worth appreciating is the ability to shift, within a matter of seconds, into entirely different atmospheres, grafting on melodies, solos or swoons exactly where you wouldn't expect them: "Police Gun Jitters" is all of this, eventually spilling into a hypnotic tongue-twister. "No Question Asked" reaches, at a jagged pace, something epic, even if sung with a kind of retching, as if the world kept shattering over and over. "Sleeping Sickness" sounds like the Ramones in tears; "Jesus Don't Come Through the Cotton" is its public counterpart, machine-gunned out at breakneck speed.

Dejardins is fundamentally a dark singer-songwriter, and the Flesh Eaters are just a vehicle for his expression. "A Minute To Pray A Second To Die", from 1981, with John Doe of X on bass, is thoroughly post-hardcore; eight tracks of mood and flagellation, intense and refined, for a gothic sound that's anything but cheap, made elegant by the extensive but well-judged use of sax, as on "Satan's Stomp". The album, ripe for rediscovery, is the high point of the Flesh Eaters' second phase.

The two following records, "Forever Came Today" (1982) and above all "A Hard Road To Follow" (1983), offer a heavier sound; hardcore speed gives way to the slowness of a morbid pop-metal lost in a swoon, rich in florid, interesting turns, all howled in an expressionistic manner; one example being "Buried Treasure". The result is, to put it simply, far more gripping than the contemporaneous work — likewise caught between sex and mummification — of England's Cure. Over the course of the Eighties, Dejardins would release three albums under the name Divine Horsemen. The Flesh Eaters would then reform for five further albums, the last of which came out in 2004.

Some connection can be drawn between Flesh Eaters and Dickies. Dickies were the biggest and, ultimately, most serious example of demented rock capable of drawing on hardcore rhythms. They served up concise, fast, raucous songs that — in principle not so different from the Ramones — drew on rock'n'roll, the vocal groups of the Forties and Fifties, and Merseybeat, filtered through cabaret and music hall, to stitch together kitsch scenarios somewhere between soap operas and cartoons, using them to offer a warped, perverse take on a society that, through sheer deformity and perversion, can only be heading for ruin. As is always the case with demented bands, the Dickies' parody was all-devouring and, starting from commercial music, soap operas and all the hypocrisies of a celluloid world, took in punk, metal and the younger generations themselves, leaving behind a bitter aftertaste of pessimism, exhaustion and disillusionment.

Their classic is the furious "The Incredible Shrinking" from 1979, followed by "Dawn", from the same year, and by "Stukas Over Disneyland", from 1983. The Dickies, who had in the meantime left their mark on all sorts of bands, from Fastbacks onward, reformed in 1988.

Different from the previous bands but still marked by a decidedly grim sense of humor is the case of the Urinals. The Urinals were three college roommates. John Talley-Jones (bass and vocals) was the driving force behind their venture. With a drum kit (three drums, two cymbals, one bass drum) and the rest of the equipment stripped down to the bare minimum, the trio managed to turn what was partly a forced necessity into a genuine virtue. Theirs is an amateurish sound, at times unintelligible, minimal, miniaturized, but always sustained by the intelligence that never lets the listener's engagement drop.

Over three years, from 1978 to 1980, the Urinals, through their new wave, earned their rightful place in rock history because they put forward devices and content a decade before they were codified and recognized. They gave voice to a sensitive, anguished inner life, to the cry of the metropolitan adolescent; and they did so through forms built out of fast rhythms, dissonances, and melodies that were by turns screamed and genuflecting.

The Urinals are the forefathers of indie expressions typical of the late Eighties, though these only became fashionable and appreciated today, now that they can be seen as close to what's known as "post-rock": "lo-fi" and "shoegaze". These forms, cerebral because minimalist, monstrous because too frail, found numerous breeding grounds outside the United States as well, if not especially there.

If the game can be said to have been settled first in the Scotland of the Jesus and Mary Chain (1985) and then in the Ireland of My Bloody Valentine (1991), in more recent years this discourse of peripheral lands, forgotten by the rock world and out of time, has been carried forward by young artists who, in the best cases, had the good taste or honesty to make use of electronics. The reference is to Icelandic electronic dream-pop (Sigur Ros, Mum) as much as to San Diego synth-pop (Xiu Xiu). The Urinals offer up songs lasting one or two minutes, where, somewhere between the English example of Wire and the American one of the Minutemen, a third way takes shape, built on a bitter, humorous, never vulgar sensibility that would later define the broader, more popular new wave: the English strand that, split between synth-pop and post-punk, would eventually reach the Italy of Diaframma. Underneath it all is a garage-rock foundation in the mould of the Kinks, which (via the Byrds) expresses faint, resigned, dark, adolescent moods.

The masterpiece of the first self-titled Ep, released in 1979, is "Hologram", which could easily embellish the contemporaneous "Unknown Pleasures" by Joy Division. "Hologram" fuses the Byrds (the guitar's jingle-jangle) with English new wave (itself prompted by the Byrds): a decade before shoegaze, we're faced with a minimalist, dreamlike and inhuman track — an inhumanity as if crafted by a child.

On the second Ep, also from '79 and titled "Another Ep", the standouts are "Black Hole" — a Byrds-like miniature, sung in a way that in a single minute grips the heart with a fragile, splendid epic quality comparable to Nico: yellow and black blending into a strange grey that becomes this music's colour — and "I'm Bug", a monstrous, bloodless blues capable of laying the groundwork for what would become the sound of Albini and his Big Black and Rapeman.

From 1980 comes the single "Sex"/"Go Away Girl": "Sex" foreshadows Big Black, Pussy Galore and Jon Spencer: starting again from the tensest Slick-era Jefferson Airplane, it delivers an epic, desperate garage-blues, perverse in its suicidal streak; "Go Away Girl", meanwhile, paves the way for the Meat Puppets: two liquid phrasings followed by a ferocious, thunderous hardcore.

Among the roughly thirty other tracks in the Urinals' catalogue, gathered since 1997 on the compilation "Negative Capability", at least "Scolastic Aptidude" deserves mention, with its fatalism packed into a frantic dash disrupted by reckless noise interludes (a recklessness that, say, the Cure always lacked, and that in someone like Zappa could at times become an end in itself) — as does "I Hate", a shapeless, desolate noise piece ribbed with ringing riffs torn apart by screams and snarls. "Salmonella", built on abrasive sounds and screamed vocals, stands instead among the earliest examples of grunge ante litteram — so much so that it could pass for a live Nirvana recording.

Then there's "Presence of Mind" on its own. It's like the extroverted flipside of "Hologram"'s introversion: by the late Seventies it was already teaching rock to everyone who came after — noisy, powerful garage-rock in the mould of the early Kinks (note the maniacal guitar riff), a dark gait worthy of Joy Division, piercing Velvet Underground dissonances. The vocal howls black, childlike and desperate. The rhythm section is as exasperating as on the Dicks' "Hate The Police", a track with which it shares that rare state of rock at its fullest (neither too loud nor too soft), as well as the inspiration of a fascinating, entirely inward-turned canker. In these two minutes, Sonic Youth are already present, and with them the sound of much of the Eighties. The track deserves a place — as a bonus entry, mind you — among the great unsung classics: "So Cold" by Rocket From The Tombs, "Never Tell" by the Violent Femmes, "Budd" by Rapeman, "If It Kills You" by Drive Like Jehu.

Still marked by a wholly peculiar tone and a similarly humorous streak are Fear. Extreme in content, misanthropic, and extreme in manner, thuggish, Fear, led by Lee Ving and active since 1978, deserve to be counted among the major bands of their era thanks to the classic "The Record", released in 1982. Backed by an uncommon technical skill, a reckless imagination and a broad knowledge of rock history, to which they added urgent themes of degradation, intolerance, extremism and boorishness, Fear forged their own multicoloured sound: the rhythm section evokes the swing of a metronome, the guitars are almost calligraphic, and over it all towers Ving's vocal, expressionistic, melodramatic, obscene, visceral. From Faith No More onward, and passing through the Red Hot Chili Peppers — to name just the best-known examples — Fear's disciples are countless.

The melodic, cathartic masterpiece of "The Record" is "Foreign Policy", which unfurls despair and vindication in equal measure. It's followed by the cynical "I Love Livin' In The City", a slice of urban life steeped in bitterness and disillusionment; the anti-romantic "I Don't Care About You (Fuck You)"; the overflowing, putrid "Let's Have a War", a great feat of technical songwriting; the dreamy, at times elegiac, "Camarillo"; and the murky, fetishistic, hyper-realist "Fresh Flesh", a kind of dictionary of suburban abjection. Fear, even when meant to be read ironically, were too often mistaken for irresponsible and immoral: in reality, they carried out, with full awareness, an intelligent role of social critique.

1985's "More Beer", though reckless and uncompromising, and capable of significantly influencing bands like Naked Raygun, and superior to plenty of other releases beyond post-hardcore alone, falls a touch too smugly into self-indulgence. The main novelty, besides songs that grow ever more shapeless and Ving's vocals that grow ever more unrestrained, is how prominently the guitar's raucous riffs are foregrounded. Without straying an inch from their own principles, but instead pushing the tempo ever further, Fear released a decade later, in 1995, "Have Another Beer With Fear", and in 2000 "American Beer", outclassing contemporaries who nonetheless spared the band only their own indifference.

Considerably closer to English punk than the bands discussed so far, and with a more romanticising repertoire, Mike Palm's Agent Orange debuted in 1981 with the classic "Living in Darkness". A rock-solid but not overwhelming album, it married a firm grasp of rock history with a savvy closeness to punk culture, hints of metal riffing and moods swinging between surf-music airiness and dark claustrophobia. Without the knack for writing songs as memorable as the Wipers' or as experimental as Mission of Burma's, Agent Orange still delivered a handful of loud, direct, unpredictable tracks like "Bloodstains", "Everything Turns Grey" and "The Last Goodbye". Even if perhaps lacking real substance beyond an admittedly inviting form, these songs did much to shape the mood of an era in which they must also have seemed far more savage and extreme than they may appear today. The mannerism only gives way, perhaps, in the heartfelt "A Cry For Help In a World Gone Mad", a bitter, unguarded confession whose relentless drive is softened only by its sentimental chorus.

Five years later, in 1986, "This Is The Voice" revisits a similar formula, considerably cooled down and streamlined by the melodic power-rock of "Fire In The Rain", but this time aimed at adolescents who have since grown up and must now come to terms with the road leading inexorably to middle age. There's also perhaps an intent here to join that indie strand which Agent Orange had, to some extent, helped promote, one that plays out on a level roughly halfway between the Meat Puppets and grunge. The album, which draws its strength from the drawn-out elegies of "So Strange" and "It's In Your Head", is, despite being weaker than its predecessor and carrying a touch too much self-indulgence, carefully crafted, finding its meaning in a state of melancholic, dreamlike depression.

Close to Agent Orange for their purely rock-driven approach are the very young Red Kross. In 1981, "Born Innocent", much like what the Replacements were doing at the same time with "Sorry Ma", offered a bold example of fusing hardcore rhythms and drive with traditional rock and blues. What emerged was a raw work delivered in a single breath, one that in part went against the new wave grain because, in true rock'n'roll tradition, it also aimed to be a form of fun, and in part brought out, from hardcore's own version of that fun, unmistakable traits such as sonic violence and the rise to communicative power of mere kids. "Notes and Chords Mean Nothing to Me", "Look on Up at the Bottom" and "Tatum O'Tot and the Fried Vegetables" are powerful, raw discharges of energy, as exhilarating as a drug yet always carrying a bitter, disillusioned aftertaste — one that, alongside the hardcore/traditional-rock pairing, would teach a great deal to future grunge.

Even more purist in their devotion to rock'n'roll were Jeff Drake's Joneses — with "Pill Box" about birth control pills, with the testament-like "Criminals", with "Fix Me", with the almost too blatant revivalism of "White and Pretty": early-Eighties tracks gathered on the posthumous anthology "Criminal History" (2000). Even though they walked around in Ramones T-shirts, the Joneses did it purely as a style statement; in any era they'd have lived in, they would have played rock'n'roll, a music Drake's guitar seemed born for — if not his voice, thin and modestly gifted, as is typical of punk. From Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran and Johnny Thunders, Drake took, rather like Jeff Dahl, less the music than the lifestyle of sex, drugs and disengagement; he was a small-scale macho man and guitar hero. Although, unlike the Cramps, the Joneses — whose motto, in full hardcore style, was "No studio, no budget, no promotion, no distribution" — were an end in themselves (but perhaps precisely because of that), they went on to become a model for future rockers: Guns N' Roses first among them.

Along the same lines as the Joneses, but with more conviction and intelligence, are Powertrip, led by ex-Angry Samoans man Jeff Dahl, who with the 1983 classic "When We Cut, We Bleed" offered up a display of rowdy rock'n'roll in the footsteps of Motorhead and Motley Crue: hardcore — explicitly present in thirty-second bursts — is by this point merely a pretext for pushing the excesses of life and music typical of rock'n'roll even further. Dahl is an old-school rocker who speaks of nihilism and alienation only because that's the language of his era: what actually interests him is simply getting drunk, getting high and having sex, all wrapped in a rock'n'roll full of hardcore and thrash-metal shades that, stereotyped as it may be, is also sincere and thoroughly successful.

A stronghold of far greater substance than Joneses and Powertrip, and capable of carrying weight in the California hardcore scene comparable to Descendents and Adolescents, were True Sound Of Liberty (T.S.O.L.), guitarist Ron Emory's band, active in hardcore circuits since 1978. In 1981, with the album "Dance With Me," they wedded hardcore rhythms and vocals to the morbid, depressive atmospheres of English goth or dark rock, releasing a classic of the genre. The album, well-structured though a bit unpolished, can still be considered hardcore and stands alongside the Adolescents' contemporary work, especially considering that at the time it must have seemed extreme regardless, with its most inspired moments like "Die For Me" standing out.

The following album, "Beneath The Shadows" from 1982, is instead entirely post-hardcore, featuring an at times excessive use of keyboards on symphonic, atmospheric tracks that mostly succeed, aided by an excellent production job. Above all, credit is due to the band's versatility, crafting watercolour-tinted tales of existential contemplation that are never too frustrated or depressed, occasionally sliding instead into the rhetorical in their insistence on finding value in life itself. The intimate "Forever Old," the brash blues of "She'll Be Saying," and the pathos of "Beneath the Shadows" map out the coordinates of this work. "Change Today?" in 1984, thanks above all to the skill of new singer Joe Wood, considerably strengthens and speeds up the T.S.O.L. sound, which now delivers heavy, noisy blasts recalling both soul and metal, but above all capable of being evocative and full-throated at once, stripped of frills and packed with communicative urgency. The album, extroverted and street-smart, marks a third, radical shift for a band that once again hits the mark fully, delivering perhaps its least dated work.

Along the same lines, "Revenge" in 1986 is a lesser, more self-indulgent effort, but still worthy of attention and well put together. On another planet entirely compared to their early hardcore days, "Hit And Run" in 1987 flirts a bit too much with the permed, chart-friendly hard rock fashionable at the time, yet still displays great experience and class, ranging freely from Ac/Dc to the Rolling Stones. In 1990 the band's last original member, bassist Mike Roche, released alongside Joe Wood "Strange Love," a blatant commercial attempt cut from the same cloth as its predecessor.

We can't discuss T.S.O.L. without bringing in Rikk Agnew, who had been a fervent admirer of theirs since his Adolescents days. Once the Adolescents disbanded, Rikk Agnew moved into post-hardcore and would remain there for good. Before Christian Death, D.I. and other collaborations, in 1982 he delivered a strange and thoroughly successful work, "All By Myself," in which he essentially invents a new genre: hardcore singer-songwriter music. The title, besides nodding to hardcore ideology, is also literal, since here the author plays every instrument and writes every song entirely by himself.

The inspiration is there, bearing fruit in the statement of intent "O.C. Life," the epic "10," the prodigious "Your 2 Late," the pop-core of "Falling Out," the sinuous "Surfside": apocryphal prayers that flow melodic, fast and lacerating, like a youth forced to burn who sets itself alight to deny genocide one last satisfaction. The guitar is the barely-hidden protagonist, spinning out riff after riff, often memorable ones. Closing things out is the suite "Section 8," a kind of summa of total music, made up of several pieces and styles yet never as disjointed as a bad tragedy, always devoted to expressing that most undying existential knot.

Given a certain similarity to T.S.O.L. and Agnew's occasional presence, we include here D.I. as well, the band of Casey Royer and the Agnew brothers (Rikk and Alfie). In 1985, with the album "Ancient Artifacts," D.I. put together the soundtrack for the wholly interior rituals of a youthful depression that finds its fascination in dark, shadowy states of mind, by now far removed from the exhibitionism of early-decade goth. And, crucially, without the ambiguity of assorted satanic trappings, instead wrapping up the discourse in a disenchanted reflection on a life lived as atheists. In a manner too atheistic, even, for life to feed on any meaning or purpose; hence the role of music here as company, support, or pastime — simply as a way of staying alive.

With D.I. we find ourselves in that afterlife where, with all hardcore flags lowered and no others raised in their place, all that's left is to withdraw into oneself, cancelling out hardcore content with dark form and dark content with hardcore form. What results are songs that are fast but not powerful, obsessive yet by now harmless, stretched out in evocation rather than concise in message, and no longer devoted to proselytizing. Introversion replaces extroversion, remembering replaces doing. From a recognizable common root a certain variety nonetheless branches out, always with an eye on melody: from the ancestral ritualism of "Purgatory II," to the almost sunny "Stand Up," concluding with "Spiritual," where numerous hardcore sounds are revisited and dissected with experience and creativity. "Horse Bites Dog Cries," from the same year, gains in power and speed, pushing the programmatic pursuit of Mephistophelian atmospheres into the background. What emerges is a sound that, while not always convincing, is on the whole distinctive, capable of building an imaginative mythology of the everyday and of adolescence. The catchy "Pervert Nurse" and the experimental "Youth in Asia" are the tracks that rise above the overall respectable mediocrity. "Team Goon," from 1986, carries on between the horrific and the goofy, art and amateurism, in a constant tug-of-war between recreating the artificial exploits of Manowar within post-hardcore and diving headfirst into political and social reality. Notable are the fervor of "Uncontrollable Urge" and the bitterness of "Reagan Der Fuhrer."

"What Good Is Grief to a God?" in 1988 carries on, though now without the Agnew brothers on guitar, a career sustained more by persistence and output than anything else; the dusty aura present in the band's best moments is now hardening into something obsolete. The rhythmic and symphonic experiments of "Girl Scout Camp," the headlong flight of "She's Oscene" and the explosion of "They Lie, You Die" keep afloat a work that at least gives in neither to ballads on one hand nor to heavy metal on the other, staying true to that insistent aesthetic of mediocrity and petulance that Royer favored.

In 1990 "Tragedy Again" proved that D.I. couldn't care less about the times or anyone else's music, sticking to exactly the same sound as "Ancient Artifacts"; but benefiting from better production and recording, it ends up sounding sturdier and more compact. The blazing "Backseat Driver," matched by the frenzied "Love To Me Is Sin," are the standout tracks. "State of Shock" in 1994 and "Caseyology" in 2002 bring an unworthy close to a career carried by Royer's almost always inspired voice, which however too rarely had anything truly worthwhile to sing.

Let's now look together at the two leading bands of so-called Californian gothic rock, the style dealing in horror, witches and paranormal worlds as a metaphor for reality: Christian Death and 45 Grave.

The Christian Death were the most extreme band of gothic rock, a style related to English dark rock and, like the latter, a form of post-punk consisting in framing hardcore through a horror lens. If necrophilia, vampirism, sleepwalking, demonism and superstition are the standard themes of a genre with a long tradition in both cinema and fiction, Christian Death added to it an existentialist dimension, born of an inner cancer, the suicidal nihilism of Rozz Williams (1964-1998).

"Only Theatre Of Pain" (1982) is the band's classic, and to prove its ties to hardcore it suffices to note that Rikk Agnew played guitar on it. An eighteen-year-old Williams raises bitter prayers to evil, in a mournful, distorted vocal tone that would go on to teach many, from Marilyn Manson onward. The musical backdrop is extremely depressive and claustrophobic: it would serve as a model for much of the sound of the Eighties, namely so-called new wave outside the US and UK. Rhythmic accelerations and guitar distortions are nonetheless present. So much so that the best tracks turn out to be precisely the least atmospheric, least thematic and most human ones: the morbid "Prayer," the danceable "Romeo's Distress," the feverish "Spiritual Cramp" — with its line "Killing myself for the perfect honeymoon."

The masterpiece of Christian Death, however, is the bitter and noble "Deathwish" — from the eponymous 1983 EP, which also features the symphonic "Desperate Hell" — with heavy guitars and an irresistible refrain.

Williams, blending a wandering life with a shamanic personality, alienation with suggestion, youth with death, was, thanks also to his innate gifts, one of the most emblematic figures of his era and his scene.

Already by the second album, "Catastrophe Ballett" (1984), no hardcore traces remain. And "Ashes" (1985) opens the long period of Christian Death without Williams — that is, of a Christian Death that is Christian Death in name only. Williams would return to a sound close to his early days with Shadow Project and their eponymous 1991 album.

More rock'n'roll than the deranged Christian Death, 45 Grave were a seasoned quintet fronted by guitarist Paul Cutler and singer Dinah Cancer, rounded out by drummer Don Bolles (ex-Germs), bassist Rob Graves (ex-Gun Club) and organist Paul Roessler. Their sole album, "Sleep In Safety", released in 1983, became legendary when its track "Partytime" was featured in the cult film "Return Of The Living Dead". In truth, this is indeed the most immediate 45 Grave song, but also the least atmospheric: the chorus is pure Kiss-style hard rock.

After all, the band boasts one of the most powerful sounds in goth-rock precisely because they live it through a decisive rock'n'roll vein; this produces an effect that's as irreverent and self-mocking as it is desperate: not even evil, the dead, or the afterlife would count as values. "Violent World", in fact, borders on hardcore: speed, power, screams. Underpinned by superb arrangement and production work, the lengthy "Slice O' Life" and "Procession" instead show off the evocative range of a band that's never self-indulgent, and especially in the former - buoyed by a textbook chorus - keeps the sound firmly in pure rock territory. In between, straddling hard rock and goth, come the most distinctive results: "Phantoms", with keyboards chiming like a xylophone and a resigned vocal; "45 Grave", rock-solid and mesmerizing: the enviable guitar work and inexhaustible cabaret flair, combined with a rich knowledge of rock history, account for the peculiarity of the 45 Grave sound.

Together we'll also cover two ill-fated experiments in electronic post-hardcore: those of Flyboys and Geza X.

Flyboys - of the eponymous 1980 EP - are a spineless outfit hiding behind a threadbare and pointless electronics, ultimately embracing a stale dark-pop that isn't even capable of catchy melodies. Still, they serve as witnesses to an era, ushering in the 1980s, which in its most aberrant and commercial manifestations was also this. After all, hardcore and pop could coexist since both were being reworked in a new wave key. Not to mention that, thinking of it in 1980, this remained new music, or at least unfamiliar to traditional 1960s pop. Above all because of the driving, danceable rhythm, a drum sound and a vocal that today seem harmless but back then managed to get people moving. The pogo wasn't in fact the only dance of the era - far from it: most nights people danced to a mix somewhere between today's club stomping and the just-passed Seventies dance craze, perhaps dressed in carnival-like outfits and made up beyond belief. Looking back, only one instrumental holds up - "Theme Song", a fast and driving rhythmic backdrop, with guitar distortion creating a spacey effect.

Producer Geza X, credited on singles by, among others, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Weirdos, Germs, Red Kross and Avengers, delivered in 1982 an album as acclaimed as it was deplorable, titled "You Goddam Kids", which, with a pretentious electronic sound unworthy even of a Japanese cartoon theme tune, tried to shake up his generation by reviving stylistic devices borrowed from avant-garde composers like Zappa and Beefheart and from psychedelic bands like Jefferson Airplane. After various productions through the Eighties and Nineties, Geza X would reap the reward of his questionable work in 1997 with "Bitch", the bestselling single by Meredith Brooks.

As an appendix to these last two cases, we should also mention Black Randy & The Metrosquad, who in 1980, with "Pass the Dust, I Think I'm Bowie", gave a fine example of a surrealistic, futuristic reworking of rock'n'roll, following a style that was very much in vogue at the time and thoroughly new wave: after all, new wave itself amounted to a reworking, once the game was over, of rock'n'roll. The point is that, while new wave in general carried out this reworking with earnestness, the strand we're dealing with here did so with sarcasm, nonchalance, and the ostentatious poses of a mocking intellectual who delights in ridiculing others while pretending to be a fool.

The work of Black Randy & The Metrosquad, comparable to that of Geza X, is post-hardcore because it borrows from hardcore the speed of its rhythms and the weariness of the vocal, even as it then outdoes it all with piano-bar keyboard flourishes and the controlled, jazzy torments of the guitar.

Let's now open the chapter on Minutemen, the most important post-hardcore experience to come out of Los Angeles, and certainly not just there. Like all avant-garde acts, Minutemen too are hard to fully take in. Elusive like jazz, claustrophobic like hardcore, steeped in the fatalistic surrealism typical of new wave. As the Melvins would later do, and as the Germs had done - on a different level - before them, Minutemen reinvent the use of the three rock instruments; and it's no coincidence that such reinventions often originate from a band structured as a trio: Halo Of Flies and Rapeman, for instance, are both trios. This is how a typical Minutemen song is built: about a minute long, jazz-core rhythms, dissonant and minimalist guitar, a resigned and apathetic vocal delivered almost in falsetto and phrased at the edge of rap. The combinations and variations that can be built from these elements are then potentially endless.

Dennes Boon is the singer and guitarist, Mike Watt the bassist, George Hurley the drummer. In 6 years Minutemen would record over 150 songs which, miniature as they are, are no less complex than many a progressive suite; ideally, in fact, we could trace such musical forms - both for the jazz/rock pairing and for the structural intricacy - back to the Canterbury scene of the late Sixties and early Seventies, the first of which was Soft Machine.

The overall aim of the Minutemen's undertaking is to provide a giant fresco of contemporary society and, through it, of human nature; and this holds true both at the micro-level of the single song and at the macro-level that gathers them all together. One can analyze a specific track or attempt, from a distance, an overall view: either way, the result is a baroque form built out of simple or minimal components, as if the complex arose by law from the simple, chaos from order, the intelligent from the stupid. The prevailing sensations are those of the unresolved, the enigmatic, the unsettling, the diaphanous, the dissatisfaction caused by a total lack of catharsis and by an almost obsessive repetition of an ideally descriptive practice, because these are the many mirrors of a truth that is thereby held to exist.

Too sophisticated and intellectual for both hardcore circuits and, even more so, commercial ones, the Minutemen school would serve as a model for a countless number of disciples, traceable to the two extremes represented by Melvins and Fugazi. While Melvins can rightly claim to be the masters' foremost pupils, having grasped their spirit in depth and then converted it into original formal solutions, Fugazi, with their aesthetic that is at once minimalist and baroque, would be inexplicable without Minutemen, whom they follow - especially in certain rhythmic patterns - to the point of near-plagiarism. And while it's true that Melvins and Fugazi would go on to be cited as reference points by a huge number of bands, to the point of launching entire musical movements, that doesn't mean the elaborate lesson of Minutemen would be detectable in those movements as well.

Indeed, what would be picked up from Melvins and Fugazi would mostly be the surface elements - which radically divide them - rather than the essential ones, such as their shared descent from Minutemen, which unite them. We should also add, on one hand, the third fundamental band that took its cue from the architectures of Minutemen, namely Pixies; and on the other, the main touchstone from which Minutemen themselves developed their own work: Pere Ubu. Compared to the latter, Minutemen mattered more to rock because they were more faithful to its principles and more skilled at digging within its limits, doing so with minimal means. For these reasons, indeed, Minutemen must be counted among the greatest rock bands of all time. As is often the case with avant-garde acts, with Minutemen too it becomes worse than pointless - it becomes flat-out wrong - to single out some compositions as better than others, because the category of beauty, and therefore of 'better', simply doesn't apply to a body of work arrived at through theoretical deduction and aimed at expressing concepts through the sound of both instruments and voice. The tracks mentioned here should therefore be taken purely as illustrative examples.

Their debut, the 1980 EP "Paranoid Time", still sits close to hardcore, even as it already strains to blow the genre apart from within. Formally, in fact, it constitutes a revolution of all the rock conventions of the time, and thus carries a historical importance that's hard to overstate. Here the manifesto of the Minutemen avant-garde is already fully drafted. Amid swamps of bass, spikes of guitar and frenzies of drums, "Fascist" is the most melodic and tender moment.

After the 1981 single "Joy", with the shape-shifting spectacle of "Black Sheep" and the thriller-like scenario of "More Joy", that same year came the album "The Punch Line".

In 1982, the EP "Bean Spill" - with the sinuous "Afternoons", the crescendo of "Futurism Restated" and the flowing tirade of "Split Red" - was followed by the album "What Makes a Man Start Fires?", the most fully realized moment of coexistence between hardcore, jazz and rock. While "Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs" attacks, in full hardcore spirit, the hypocrisy of the famous folk singer, the rest of the album is a precious collection of miniatures, lavish in their effects and sparing in their means, ranging from the melodious ("One Chapter in the Book", "Mutiny in Jonestown", "'99"), to a sly golden mediocrity ("Fake Contest", "The Only Minority"), to the sermon ("Pure Joy"), to rapture ("Beacon Sighted Through Fog", "Plight"), to pure acidity ("Split Red"), to exoticism ("The Tin Roof"); often within the span of a single track ("East Wind/Faith", "Colors"), and in any case always under the banner of the obscure and the weighty ("Polarity"). Few bands could keep pace with such dynamism, all the more so given their superb ability to rework, through the lens of the new jazz-core - acidic, tribal and neurotic - every genre or stylistic device of popular music, from country ("The Anchor"), to New York new wave ("Sell or Be Sold" - in "Life as a Rehearsal" you can practically hear Television), to swampy blues ("This Road").

1983 saw the release of the EP "Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat," and 1984 brought the compilation "The Politics of Time," an extraordinary pot-pourri of bootlegs ("Hollering," "Suburban Dialectic," "Contained," "On Trial"), juvenilia dating all the way back to the late Seventies, when the Minutemen were still called Reactionaries ("Party With Me Punker," "Swing To The Right," "¡Raza Si!," "Times," "Badges," "Fodder," "Spraycan Wars"), remarkable recordings left unreleased ("Tony Gets Wasted in Pedro," "Shit You Hear At Parties"), and unstoppable streams of consciousness ("I Shook Hands," "Maternal Rite," "Below the Belt" – with its Ufo Robot riff). All of it delivered with a certain devotion to melody ("Working Men Are Pissed," "The Big Lounge Scene" – whose guitar kicks in just like on "Smells Like Teen Spirit").

1984 also saw the release of the double album "Double Nickels On The Dime," the best rock album of the year, which, with its 43 tracks spread over 73 minutes, seems to want to serve as the definitive, colossal testament to the Minutemen's work – yet in practice leaves hardcore behind in favor of an unstoppable, masterful gallop through the different genres of popular music, from blues to funk to country, all the while channeled through an interpretation of great character and consistency.

The Minutemen are at the peak of their performing powers here, able to move like a cocktail-lounge combo. Alongside a country quadrille like "Corona" come the exquisite Meat Puppets-style watercolor "History Lesson, Pt. 2" and the great elegy "Spillage," foundational for the Pixies. "Political Song For Michael Jackson to Sing" is the satirical counterpart to "Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs."

Unsurpassed feats of minimalist formal rigor – fundamental to the directions later pursued by, for instance, the Slint – are achieved both in instrumental form ("June 16th") and in sung form ("The Big Foist"). In the opening of "One Reporter's Opinion" you can hear how the Minutemen manage, with plain rock instruments, what Eno and Byrne need electronics to achieve. "My Heart and the Real World" is a little story full of freshness; "This Ain't No Picnic" is one of the rare shows of force – almost soul-core in feel, but with precious pointers for Fugazi. The guitar work on "Nothing Indeed" is prodigiously assured. "Jesus and Tequila," "Viet Nam," and "West Germany" render social commitment in multicolored ways, sincere precisely because it's derived from an existential one, made more valuable by being expressed through avant-garde methods. "D.'s Car Jam/Anxious Mo-Fo" and "God Bows to Math" confirm the consistently high quality of these tracks.

Usually the greatness of a song, and of whoever wrote it, lies in the song itself, in its ability to stir deep feelings in as many people as possible. The greatness of the Minutemen, on the other hand, must be sought in their extraordinary skill and intelligence as performers; before being composers, the Minutemen were players (whereas in rock it's usually the other way around). So much so that it's impossible to cover the Minutemen, because, looked at closely, they didn't write songs but improvised pieces: pieces that nonetheless carry as much meaning as songs, since their content lies precisely in the study and the framework behind and prior to their execution. The same reasoning also explains why, conversely, the Minutemen could turn covers into songs every bit as good as their own.

For sheer richness and quality of performance – regardless of whether or not it's engaging (difficult, after all, to be engaging when you're anti-melodic) – "Double Nickels On The Dime" objectively belongs among the greatest rock albums in history. Next to a work like this, the acclaimed, belated efforts of a Beck Hansen – at least loosely comparable in principle – reveal all their thinness (cf. "Mellow Gold," 1994).

1985 brought two EPs: one of covers, "Tour Spiel," and one, "Project: Mersh," that marked a decisive shift in the Minutemen's aesthetic: 6 tracks, averaging over three minutes each, with a relatively relaxed pace and the aim of making their inventions more accessible and straightforward.

1985 also saw the release of the Minutemen's fourth and final album, "3-Way Tie for Last," which reconciles their earlier explorations with the direction taken on the last EP. The band's breakup was caused by Boon's death in a car accident on December 22, 1985, when Boon was 27 years old.

With the Minutemen disbanded, Mike Watt drifted ever further from hardcore, launching, alongside singer Ed Crawford, the ambitious and elegant project Firehose, aimed on one hand at giving free rein to Watt's full imagination and mastery on bass, and on the other at tackling the most disparate genres of popular music – from folk to funk – with an approach no longer hardcore but rock-classic. "Ragin' Full On" (1986), "If'n" (1987), "Fromohio" (1989), and "Flyin' The Flannel" (1991) are refined, cleverly radio-friendly entertainment, enormously above average from every point of view. Torn between exotic, dreamlike atmospheres and a certain performing virtuosity (Hurley is still on drums), yet almost never falling into self-indulgence or losing the most genuine indie spirit, they remain thoroughly enjoyable to this day, capable of standing as a story all their own.

Let's now turn to two more of the major proposals of L.A. post-hardcore, Social Distortion and Vandals, different in every respect except for their high quality.

Thrilling and popular were Social Distortion, led by Mike Ness (born in '62), who wedded hardcore tradition and innovation, attitude and ideology, with elements of hard-rock, rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll and country. On their first album, the 1983 classic "Mommy's Little Monster," you'll find the masterpiece "Moral Threat." The long track, the non plus ultra of their live shows, is built on crescendos, pauses and accelerations; between dissonance and melody, it forms the most fitting backdrop for Ness's pained, adolescent voice, which manages, without any self-indulgence, to render the wayward, lost life of his generation as epic and sacred.

Five years later, in 1988, the band returned, celebrating ten years of activity, with the confident "Prison Bound," following the same formula but now with a touch of country epic that softens the volume somewhat. It must be said, however, that the main pillar of this music lies in Ness's voice and passion, which alone is worth more than what he actually sings. The self-titled 1990 album continues along the same lines, somewhere between the Clash and Johnny Cash, further refining the formula and leaning even more heavily on melody.

In 1992, "Somewhere Between Heaven And Hell," featuring "Cold Feelings," shows no sign of decline – quite the opposite, it boasts an interesting hardening in its approach to songwriting that brings Ness's shadow-line epos closer to that of Greg Graffin of Bad Religion. The album, which also displays plenty of craft, shamelessly borrows from the Clash on "Sometimes I Do" and edges dangerously close to R.E.M. on "King of Fools," yet, together with the debut and the album that followed, stands as the band's best, and would go on to teach a great deal, for instance, to the hard-rock of Pearl Jam: it would teach the grunge generation traditional American music.

In 1996, on "White Light White Heat White Trash," the opening of "Dear Lover" alone is enough to vouch for the record's quality and integrity. Still plenty of muscle, force, and inspiration, as if to say the good old days never really ended. Few indeed can boast of having aged as well as Ness. Cutting guitars, enveloping rhythms, guaranteed conflagrations. So much so that we can consider the last two, remarkable albums – especially the second – closer to hardcore than their predecessors. There's no need to single out particular tracks, since almost all of them are inspired, carrying a sense of purpose and an exuberance capable of sweeping away every hardcore revival band around today. Were it not for considerations of historical standing, "White Light White Heat White Trash" would deserve to be ranked as Social Distortion's finest album.

In 2004 the band returned with the more meditative, subdued "Sex, Love and Rock 'n' Roll." These boisterous ballads still rise well above average, but by now making music seems to have become a private matter, meant to keep the self alive rather than to communicate meaning to the listener.

Seemingly clunky, lacking in bite and long-winded, the twenty-five-year career of drummer and bassist Joe Escalante's Vandals turns out, all things considered, to be among the most interesting in the American underground. They debuted in 1982 with the solid EP "Peace Thru Vandalism", a bright, collegiate hardcore fully in keeping with the era of the Descendents. "Urban Struggle" was the galloping single played on local school radio stations; "Anarchy Burger" the most shouted-along track. It would remain their only work squarely within traditional hardcore. Starting with their first album in 1985, "When in Rome Do as the Vandals", the band's sound would shift into a heavy, at times self-indulgent goofiness in the vein of the Dickies, so much so that the Vandals would go down in history as the definitive demented-hardcore band.

Now, talking about demented hardcore is something of a contradiction in terms, if only because this was supposed to be music with a particular concern for content. But the fact that it came to exist at all can be traced to the failure of hardcore's own ideals, coinciding precisely with its turning into a fad and, as such, music ripe for cheap exploitation. The Vandals' aim would supposedly be to deliver social critique through absurdity, but more than anything they seem to just want to have fun, or rather, they seem more interested in the private side of a person than the public one. Setting aside the more cabaret-like episodes, their '85 output consists of fast, powerful tracks lost in bass-drum pounding, mangled beyond recognition by gang-vocal choruses and battered by guitar contortions that lay down the carpet for tunes as idiotic as they are catchy.

Having made their intentions clear, credit must be given to the band for fully achieving them, thanks above all to solid technical foundations that emerge in the more straightforward vignettes like "Airstream", with echoes of the Dead Kennedys. The whole album is inspired and a classic of the genre; the best of their deliberately demented phase. It even manages to find moments of scarcely concealed feeling, as in the air of the epic semi-acoustic dance of "Mohawk Town" or in the more frenzied one of "Big Bro Versus Johnny Sak", aiming to rewrite the mythology of the Wild West in their own personal way. The strangled Bowie of "Viking Suit" and the all-out choral singalong of "Bad Birthday Bash" confirm as much.

After this memorable effort the Vandals broke up, losing guitarist Jan Nils Ackerman and singer Stevo. The band returned in 1989, now in the hands of guitarist Warren Fitzgerald, with the peculiar semi-acoustic "Slippery When Ill", later reissued as "The Vandals Play Really Bad Original Country Tunes", offering a Vandals-style take on American country music and its world. Once again the gamble pays off: "Desert Woman" manages to be taken seriously thanks to its majestic atmospheres, and "Elvis Decanter", with its relentless country rhythm, echoes the inexorability of death.

As a third stylistic turn, 1991 brought "Fear Of A Punk Planet", perhaps the band's best-known album, which, however well played and produced, falls victim to the very verbosity between hard rock, pop and funk it means to parody in its attempt to mock the pop-metal acts fashionable at the time. Far better is "Live Fast Diarrhea", from 1995, which savagely returns to the hardcore of their early days.

The fury that "Kick Me" unleashes on the listener devours all the new pretenders in a single bite; at every turn the guitar is a stratospheric drill and the rhythm section is devastating; the songwriting is spontaneous, articulate and original: "And Now We Dance" is the standard-bearer, "Happy Birthday" the masterpiece, built from symphonic conflagrations.

The following year's "The Quickening", which brings back some of the parodic intentions set aside on the remarkable previous record, still holds to standards unreachable for mainstream music and impressive even by experimental standards. No one in '91 could have predicted such results from a band constantly written off for dead.

The richness of the Vandals' output is such that, on occasions like these, it would take pages to describe it fully. Also in 1996 came the Christmas concept album "Oi to the World: Christmas With the Vandals", which, while its sheer excess of eccentricity could end up feeling tiresome, coming across as one album too many, is on the other hand once again an outpouring of performing and compositional skill, ranging from the acoustic whispers of "Hang Myself From the Tree", which steals the trade of many a folksinger, all the way to the high-tension instrumental "Dance Of the Sugarplum Fairies", placing itself not far from the results achieved by Zappa.

In 1998, "Hitler Bad, Vandals Good" leans into melody where "Live Fast Diarrhea" had leaned into fury: the reckless "I Know, Huh?" is still there, but overall it registers as a step back; still, make no mistake, we're light years ahead of everyone else's average. "Look What I Almost Stepped In", from 2000, is incredibly fresh and enjoyable. Beefier than its predecessor, it unfurls a string of streetwise romps, opened by "Behind the Music", next to which a band like Pearl Jam, for instance, seems to belong to a bygone generation. It's certainly one of the best albums of the year, and not only that: it makes you dance and think with "Jackass", explodes and cuts with "I'm the Boss of Me", has fun with the tongue-twister of "Get a Room", rises to fatherhood in "Fourteen", and moves from ambient to hardcore in "You're Not the Boss of Me".

The pointless "Internet Dating Superstuds" from 2002 stands in relation to its predecessor as "The Quickening" does to "Live Fast Diarrhea", but with far less quality.

A third major experience within California's post-hardcore scene, though with far more elements of traditional rock than of hardcore, was that of the Dream Syndicate. Steve Wynn's Dream Syndicate are one of the touchstone acts for all of rock music, because in the 1980s they managed to place themselves along the line of essential rock that in the Sixties and Seventies had been walked by Lou Reed, Neil Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith. The Dream Syndicate followed this line, absorbing the cultural conditioning of the post-hardcore era but without arriving at the kind of formal breakthrough capable of creating a sound both new and thoroughly rock, as the great New York new-wave bands like Television had done — a band the Dream Syndicate should nonetheless be compared to.

Their first album, "The Days Of Wine And Roses" (1982), played the role of the West Coast's "Marquee Moon": nine dense tracks, hard to fully unpack, caught between acidity and apathy, inspired by Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, culminating on one side in the fatalistic "That's What You Always Say" and on the other in the cacophonous noise of "When You Smile".

"Medicine Show" (1984) marks an explosive maturation: having shed even in its rhythms the last traces of their hardcore heritage, we're faced with eight long and impeccable tracks that, with inspiration and mastery, form a kind of encyclopedia of essential rock, where structural complexity and near-ritual solemnity often find their way straight to the heart; "Burn", "Bullet With My Name On It" and "Merrittville" are the cornerstones. "Out Of The Grey" (1986) offers a run of simple, immediate rock songs, far from the rituals that made "Medicine Show" a place of unsurpassed exemplarity. "Ghost Stories" (1988), produced by Neil Young, is as mediocre as its predecessor but probably contains some better tunes.

Perhaps even more significant than that of the Dream Syndicate is the contribution to rock history made by Jerry Lee Pierce's (1958-1996) Gun Club, who can moreover be linked to post-hardcore in a narrower sense. Without hardcore, the Gun Club would be unthinkable; especially unthinkable would be their debut album, "Fire Of Love" (1981), built on one of the most authoritative and self-aware forms of rock in the genre's history, one that draws close to the Cramps' revivalism, leads by the hand toward the frenzies of the Pixies, and above all interprets, with character and in flawless fashion, a great many of the inflections of American popular music: blues and country chief among them. All of it set to tight rhythms and a tense, evocative voice.

The long and tragic story of the Gun Club would see roughly another ten releases before reaching its end. "Miami" (1982) moves from a reworking of the blues to one of rock 'n' roll, culminating in the 1983 EP "Death Party", which alone could stand as a kind of ABC of rock. With a voice as frightened as Robert Smith's (Cure) but far more structured, Pierce delivers five intensely powerful songs that, amid exhausting atmospheres reminiscent of Siouxsie and the Banshees, position themselves, with great directness and authority, along the line of Lou Reed's classic rock, beating him on his own turf. The dreamlike "The House On Highland Avenue" (which specifically beats the Dream Syndicate on their own ground) and above all the sweeping "The Light Of The World", superbly matched by the romanticism of "The Lie", form the core of the institutionalization of rock carried out here by the Gun Club, one that can easily be seen as the foundation of all Eighties rock, Nirvana included. The St. Vitus'-dance syncopations of "Come Back Jim" and the mighty blues of "Death Party" — among the greatest in the genre's history — hark back to the chthonic rituals of "Fire of Love" with a command of craft that stands as a lesson for everyone.

"Las Vegas Story" (1984) is thus the Gun Club's widest-ranging collection of impeccable, high-class rock: perhaps no one else — Cramps included — is as comfortable placing themselves within the furrow of tradition while, with full respect, renewing it and above all reinvigorating it from within, as Pierce does on "Bad America", "Giv Up The Sun", "Moonlight Hotel", "The Stranger in Our Town". What's also striking about the Gun Club is their extraordinary ability to graft extremely elaborate and varied harmonic solutions onto hammering rhythms. Well beyond Robert Smith, one has to look here — also for Pierce's singing, poised between the mystical and the nihilistic — to the symphonies of Tim Buckley, if not those of Nick Cave.

We wrap up our analysis of proper Los Angeles post-hardcore from the first half of the 1980s with two decent presences, Secret Hate and the Pandoras, and two mediocre ones, Agression and China White.

Straddling the line between the Dead Kennedys on one side and the Minutemen on the other, Secret Hate, with the 10 minutes of "Vegetables Dancing", show with skill and imagination just how versatile a medium hardcore can be; a means to an end, that end being post-hardcore, which in this version consists, formally, of a loosening and diversifying of the compositions (in a minute and a half, and with only three instruments, room is made for jazz, blues and cabaret) — and, in terms of content, of a humour that revisits hardcore's typical themes and demands for an audience that has grown up, or at least matured (we're in '83), one that has to learn to look at itself with the necessary detachment for self-awareness and reflection. "Death In the Desert" and "Bomb Chic" are, even if miniature, articulate, carefully worked-out compositions that, moving at a tribal pace (not without tempo changes, sudden accelerations and blow-ups), aim no longer to subvert reality but to bear it, by understanding it with all the bitterness of humour and the sarcasm of play.

The oddities of other compositions like "Midas Touch" and "Edge Marin" — always well squared-off yet ineffable — make this music genuine rock avant-garde (all the more so since it can't be reduced to its recognisable models: the Dead Kennedys for the voice and the density of sound; the Minutemen for the rhythmic derailments and recklessness). Secret Hate's body of work, brief and circumscribed as it is, has no peaks, because it isn't after hits or moments more representative than one another; rather, it's an impeccable string of variations on the same theme, none of them an end in itself, because that theme is experimentation as reckless reflection and surrealist aesthetics — a surrealism that is, always and in any case, steeped in black humour. "Latin Chongo" and "The Ballad of Johnny Budd" are the most programmatic and least hardcore examples: near-reggae sobs that spring from sturdy bass structures and a versatile, vigorous voice that pumps its own lifeblood into the routines of some hypothetical cabaret performer or spoken-word artist.

The Pandoras, along with the Frightwig, are the chief forerunners of riot grrrl. A blend of the Byrds' jingle-jangle and an execution speed occasionally reminiscent of hardcore, topped off above all with hoarse, raucous screams that would prove highly influential: just add a grunge backdrop to those screams and you've got riot grrrl. But Paula Pierce's, the Pandoras' leader's, horizons were far broader. On the 1984 album "It's About Time", with experience and agility, they move from suffocated blues to blaring rockabilly marches, unembarrassed to dabble in swing and various other contaminations, all the same always steered by an imagination that uses them to communicate the sincere, urgent thoughts gripping her. A Sixties-revival album, careful, lived-in and successful, in no way confined to its era despite its authors' deliberately kitsch look.

Speed and singing that are fully hardcore, that's what you get on China White's precocious 1981 EP "Danger Zone", but it's better to speak of post-hardcore, since what's on offer is a long, stretched-out version of hardcore, with tracks running between two and four minutes, and a compact, well-orchestrated sound, with dark accents and rock'n'roll and metal-style frameworks and scaffolding. What's missing, though, is the bite of good songwriting (see "Living in Your Eyes" and "Nightlife"), and a certain mushiness and naivety prevails, with the bass too out of tune with everything else. Post-hardcore bands of far greater quality, especially from the late Eighties, will nonetheless have to pass through these same anti-melodic furrows, extreme in their mediocrity and sincerity; through these narrative, at times almost pictorially expressive, episodes. In the end, the best moment is the full-throttle instrumental "Anthem", somewhere between rock'n'roll and metal.

China White operate on the same turf as Social Distortion, but without Mike Ness's depth.

Agression, on the album "Don't Be Mistaken" (1983), are a colourless band devoid of ideas, offering hardcore slowed down and weighed down by metal; with a singer trying to make a dark but monotonous sound interesting through vocal mannerisms vaguely inspired by H.R. of Bad Brains. Agression's culture is that of the "skateboarder", the same as J.F.A. and countless other very young schoolkids. It's already something of a miracle that such amateurish bands managed to release records at all. Yet for the first time in history, the games of minors are not just games but a reflection — however rhetorical, naive and petty — on themselves and life in general, existential in nature. Complete with its own ethics and aesthetics.

Let's now offer an appendix to Los Angeles post-hardcore, looking at the metal of Metallica and Slayer. With something of a provocative intent, we've placed Metallica, the fathers of modern metal, within post-hardcore, to underline just how fundamental hardcore was to the development of metal. Without it, in fact, the speed and violence that led Metallica first to the institutionalisation of thrash and the invention of speed metal, and then to their synthesis in heavy metal proper, would be inexplicable.

There's no need to turn to Hetfield and Ulrich's own statements, or to the covers on "Garage Inc." (1998), to recognise Metallica's debt to hardcore — a debt usually left unacknowledged, given the ostentatious formal and ideological opposition of so much of metal, especially its more classic strain, to hardcore and punk.

But the new metal, Metallica's metal, took shape — rendering old that metal of Iron Maiden which at the time proclaimed itself new (NWOBHM) — precisely by starting out from hardcore. The traces of this process are evident on "Kill 'Em All", the 1983 album — not by chance, the year of hardcore's second wave — that seals the formalisation of thrash and speed metal. If "Motorbreath" is, rhythmically speaking, practically hardcore, then "Whiplash" too, and in general all the most extreme moments, owe a debt to the hardcore lesson. On the other hand, in the more properly metal field, Metallica didn't draw on the school of Iron Maiden, but rather on the unorthodox one of Motorhead, Venom and Mercyful Fate.

On the following "Ride The Lightning" (1984), the album that cements heavy metal, understood as a fusion of speed-metal solos and thrash rhythms, the hardcore legacy is by now invisible, but that doesn't matter, because it simply means the hardcore form, made of speed and power, has been fully internalised. Remember, too, the debt Motorhead, the earliest champions of thrash, owed to English punk — whose relationship with hardcore we've already examined — and add to that the decisive importance Motorhead had for Metallica; and the circle closes, within which modern metal can be considered a form that grew out of post-hardcore before gradually becoming independent.

It's no coincidence that a whole series of metal bands have, over the years, covered hardcore or punk bands, and vice versa; and heavy-metal styles like death and grind derive their most distinctive devices directly from hardcore: the so-called mouse-in-the-throat vocal style, or "larynx-shredding screaming", is widely attested, before the arrival of Possessed, in hardcore bands like the Meat Puppets; and the brevity — down to a matter of seconds — of the grind track, along with its unintelligibility, is pure hardcore — and there's no need to bring up the extreme example of D.R.I.

Like Metallica, Slayer, the other founding band of modern metal, are inexplicable without hardcore. Their classic, "Reign In Blood", from 1986, can formally be seen as an extreme development of hardcore's second wave. Indeed, from the suffocating rhythms to tracks barely a couple of minutes long, we're very close to the output of bands openly derivative of hardcore — if not, to some extent, entirely hardcore themselves — like S.O.D. On the strength of all this, we can view the hardcore era as the watershed between classic metal — the English metal of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden — and modern metal, or heavy metal proper — the American metal of Metallica, Possessed and Slayer. This doesn't mean, finally, that individual avant-garde acts like Motorhead, Venom and Mercyful Fate didn't, in their own time, play a role similar to the one hardcore arguably played on a more theoretical level in the passage from classic metal to heavy metal.

It's an objective fact, in any case, that the heaviest metal first developed in the United States, and that this is also the homeland of hardcore; hardcore that, not by chance, was born earlier and in the very same places — so much so that the circle here narrows from the United States down to the state of California — as heavy metal, which essentially breaks down into thrash, speed and death metal (and it's worth remembering that Possessed too, the fathers of death metal, baptised in 1985, were Californian).

Preceding the post-hardcore expressions contemporary with the hardcore revival, four rather different outfits represent Los Angeles post-hardcore; united, perhaps, only by a substantial mediocrity: Camper Van Beethoven, Leaving Trains, Blast and L7.

Camper Van Beethoven have nothing to do with hardcore, yet they're inexplicable without it; much like the English Pogues in relation to punk. Like the Pogues, Camper Van Beethoven don't really devote themselves to rock so much as to a more or less experimental strain of folk: they are not, as is often assumed, revolutionaries of rock music but rather - as the array of instruments and odd little instruments they employ attests - devotees of country, waltz, tango, tarantella and ethnic music. As often happens, however, someone who cultivates a certain field from the outside, as a non-expert (in this case traditional music from various countries), then folding it into a context not their own (in this case the rock and post-hardcore world), gets taken for an avant-gardist of that latter context when in fact they're nothing more than a pedant of the former.

Camper Van Beethoven released five albums between 1985 and 1989, made up of a swarm of little songs, frail and grating, many of them instrumental: the best moments are the sung ones that parody hardcore culture with merseybeat-style vignettes. After all, the English influence is the most pronounced: on one side the Pogues, on another Sixties merseybeat, and on a third - perhaps dominant - side, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, whose refined exploits Camper Van Beethoven try to retrace without possessing the same gifts.

James Moreland's Leaving Trains, on the other hand, purveyed a full-blooded, encyclopedic garage-rock, more or less weighed down with ornamentation, along the lines of the early Replacements. Their numerous albums between 1984 and 2002 were neither disgraceful nor praiseworthy. Moreland, an engaging and sincere showman, unfortunately always lacked the ability to actually write songs.

Blast, then, with three albums between 1984 and 1989, staked out territory close to Fang: a monstrously bloated, swampy, brutalized post-hardcore.

L7, finally, working along the lines of Frightwig's foxcore and with pronounced metal leanings, inaugurated the riot grrrl lineage; but they did so modestly, without Babes In Toyland's lush inventiveness or Hole's rhetoric. Their 1988 self-titled debut holds mostly historiographical importance. Five more records would follow, up to 1999.

Henry Rollins's output carries far more weight than these last four examples. After Black Flag broke up, Henry Rollins delivered two essential albums, refounding rock 'n' roll in one and metal in the other. "Hot Animal Machine", from 1987, made with guitarist Chris Haskett, is a collection of largely unadorned rock 'n' roll where imagination and brutality combine to produce an unusual effect of implosion, despair and, beyond every torment, survival. There's the antiracist "Black and White" - almost a straight edge statement - the morbid "Followed Around", the Naked Raygun-esque dirge "Lost and Found", the acrid formula of "There's a Man Outside", and above all the violent "Hot Animal Machine 1". There's material that harks back to Black Flag: the desecrating, dissonant tongue-twister "A Man and a Woman", the tormented funeral march "No One". And there are covers that alone measure what it means to forge a sound: "Ghost Rider" by Suicide, "Crazy Lover" by Chuck Berry - the album's centerpiece - and "Move Right In" by the Velvet Underground.

"Life Time", in 1988, with Andrew Weiss on bass and Sim Cain on drums, shifts the focus toward metal and, thanks to an exceptional band combined with a rich, refined streak, stands as Rollins's greatest achievement. Rock sounds could really be split into two categories: cathartic and non-cathartic. The former liberate and gratify at the cost of possible self-destruction (Nirvana being the obvious example), the latter can touch the most inhuman recesses but never lose control of a situation dominated from the outset - or by which one is dominated, in the sense that it cannot be used as a springboard toward annihilation. "Life Time", and Rollins in general, is an extreme example, regardless of intent, of non-cathartic rock, of the rock of inevitable subsistence.

The Rollins Band's sound, though it ranges masterfully in different directions, never goes beyond certain limits within which it hems itself in and grows exasperated: it never strays from its own golden mediocrity. Even Rollins's powerful screams, genuflected as they are, remain entirely within this cage, this sense of impassability and impotence. Among a dozen flawless tracks, standouts include: the vocal essay in the closing section of "Turned Out", the raw immediacy of "Do It", the heartbroken "If You're Alive", the swaggering, syncopated cynicism of "You Look at You", the endless tragedy of "Gun in Mouth Blues" - delivered with Rollins's most ferocious screams - and the triptych forming the backbone of the whole record: "1,000 Times Blind", "What Am I Doing Here?", "Burned Beyond Recognition". Philip Anselmo's Pantera, with their thuggish metal - so pervasive across much Nineties metal - descend from these achievements (cf. "Cowboys From Hell", 1990).

"End Of Silence" (1992) doubles down, with a bit less certainty, on the results of the previous masterpiece. Five more albums would follow.

At last we arrive at the post-hardcore outfits of the hardcore-revival era. We consider six of them here, mostly mediocre. A seventh, however, is exceptional.

Despite considerable technical skill, Big Drill Car's output - steeped in nostalgic, self-satisfied melody and straddling hard-rock, metal, hardcore and pop - was, on the whole, a poor showing. Active between 1987 and 1994 with four albums, the most accomplished being "Cd Type Thing" from 1989, and working along a line of sturdy, polished, ringing post-hardcore, Big Drill Car - a sort of radio-friendly version of Seaweed - nonetheless historically exerted considerable influence both on the grunge generation and on the Californian hardcore-revival crowd. From Pearl Jam to Alice In Chains to the many grunge epigones of the mid-Nineties, through the Offspring and all the way to certain aberrant expressions of today, Big Drill Car's recipe turns up almost everywhere, often without even the knowledge, skill and fundamental honesty of the parent group. Music of superficial reflection for teenagers who are, all things considered, doing fine in the world, its content matches the qualifications of the voice that states it: flat, spineless, childish, ultimately boring.

Despite trying everything, Olivelawn unfortunately also failed, musically, to escape anonymity. Their 1990 debut, "Sap", is an encyclopedic, long-winded work, composed with sweat and sincerity but incapable of lighting even a small fire - despite invoking the boldness of Green River and Mudhoney in extreme tracks that assault the song form with real executional skill. "Sophomore Jinx", the following year, put an end to the Olivelawn project for good.

Turning to Rocket From The Crypt, this is the personal project of Drive Like Jehu guitarist John Reis, which, perhaps born as a side diversion, ended up becoming his main - and also more profitable - occupation. Nowhere near as valuable as Drive Like Jehu, from 1991 onward they put out, across a handful of albums, a mannerist post-hardcore, parodic toward rock past and present, occasionally melodic and poignant, almost always studied and brimming with adolescent spirit, but ultimately an end in itself with nothing significant to say.

Tonyall is instead the name of a project by bassist Tony Lombardo and drummer Bill Stevenson, under whose banner the album "New Girl, Old Story" appeared in 1991. It consists of twelve tracks of hardcore so melodic and defanged that it barely qualifies as such anymore, devoid of ambition and with all-too-pronounced pop inflections torn between romanticism and cabaret. The chief reference point is the spacey, progressive country of the Meat Puppets, of which this offers a pale copy.

With the 1991 album "This Isn't Me", 411 broke free from the modesty of their earlier work and delivered a strikingly imaginative and inspired record, one that drew on grunge and metal without ever straying from its adolescent core or, above all, from hardcore immediacy. On a track like "Those Homophobic" they pick up where late-period Bad Brains left off and anticipate what would come to be known as nu-metal, with heavy guitars, rapped-out verses and a melodic scream in the chorus. "Naked Face" boasts a melodic sensibility that Faith No More sometimes lacked; "Destroy The Dream" gives free rein to Dan O'Mahony's traumatized, cathartic voice; "Self Help" features a cosmic guitar riff and poses later echoed by Smashing Pumpkins; "This Isn't Me" carries on that blend of rap, metal and hardcore soon after taken to its extreme by Rage Against The Machine, minus the emotional charge that's always present here; "Blackout" already lays down the skeleton for Korn's compositions; and finally "Face the Flag" doles out heavy doses of both depression and mystical exaltation. 411 managed to pave the way for all these more celebrated bands, yet went beyond what often becomes an end in itself for the others, remaining consistently effective and sincere in conveying moods and existential yearnings.

We come at last to Drive Like Jehu, the final destination reached by Los Angeles post-hardcore and by post-hardcore in general, and therefore one of the highest peaks in all of rock: because if post-hardcore marks the end of rock, and Drive Like Jehu are its final expression, then they are the final expression of rock itself.

The true greatness of Drive Like Jehu lies in having started from Fugazi's architectural and formal breakthroughs and turned them toward the expression of the last possible existential state, arrived at through meditation on the relativity of every value - even an alternative one - and on rock's own claim to meaning. Drive Like Jehu, in other words, managed to wring out the very last drop of adolescent, human feeling in the age of Slint: the age of musical atony mirroring the apathy of those who had watched even the last hardcore ideal fade away. On the plane of musical exploration, they occupy the same position Nirvana holds on the radio: the final contemplation of feeling over a void that imposes itself as the only real thing.

Drive Like Jehu, like Nirvana, had to come to terms with the unchangeable nature of a reality worth nothing, and with the fact that the only human possibility left is to build purely inner, private worlds out of it.

On their self-titled debut album, released in 1991, the same year as Nirvana's "Nevermind", a seven-minute track titled "If It Kills You" expresses, on its own and in parallel with "Smells Like Teen Spirit", these very same forms and contents: it is therefore, just as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is on the radio, not only the highest achievement in all of post-hardcore but also one of the greatest in rock. The track deserves to be placed alongside at least three other glorious precedents we've already mentioned: "So Cold" by Rocket From The Tombs, "Never Tell" by Violent Femmes and "Budd" by Rapeman. Like those other masterpieces, it unfolds through a masterful dialectic of fullness and emptiness, fragility and violence, tears and shafts of light. It opens with Mike Kennedy's basslines interspersed with the chiming of John Reis's guitar; after a minute, Mark Trombino's sharply defined drums come in, and the guitars open up into broad, sweeping curves. Then Rick Froberg's wail rises up, cradling the song with a purity as searing as it is tender, as earthly as it is celestial.

The sound, symphonic yet raw, grows ever more agitated, at turns geometric, at turns self-destructive; in the stripped-down chorus, once tried a second time and taken head-on, every technical and cultural reference point falls away in favor of the most visceral scream in the history of rock. At the four-minute mark, with an almost dance-like syncopation, the apocalyptic confession breaks off abruptly for a progressive digression; it then resumes for the towering final coda, a kind of ordeal in which all the adolescent pain of the world seems to find its footing, contained and transmuted into beauty. Every other track on the album is unsurpassed in the world of rock.

Drive Like Jehu's second and final release, dated 1994, is titled "Yank Crime".

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21/02/2026