Minor Threat - A Journey Beyond the Boundaries of Hardcore

By 1980, Californian hardcore had already codified its own laws with Germs (1977-1980), Fear (1977), Misfits (1977-1983, though based in New Jersey), Black Flag (1977-1986), T.S.O.L. (1978), Dead Kennedys (1978-1987) and Circle Jerks (1979). It had been born in 1977 with Germs ("GI", 1979). The Germs had reshaped the formal devices of New York's Ramones (1974, first release '76). Hardcore means playing rock instruments (guitar, bass, drums) as fast and violently as possible, screaming curses, insults and foul language at the top of your lungs, with existential nihilism as the only claim to authenticity. All packed into songs lasting a minute. 1980 marked the diaspora of hardcore.

After 1980, one can no longer speak of a single hardcore, but of as many hardcores as there are bands associated with the genre; bands each constituting, almost without exception, their own subgenre. This diaspora held true geographically as well. Minor Threat (1980-1983), from Washington, DC, were the ones who kicked it off. Eighteen years old, shaved head, a thuggish, hoarse, dark, raw-throated vocal style, Ian MacKaye (childhood friend of Henry Rollins before the latter moved from Washington to Los Angeles after jumping onstage during a Black Flag show and grabbing the microphone) had formed, with anti-punk drummer Jeff Nelson (who regularly halved the tempo of the genre), the Teen Idles: they lasted one season (1979-1980), leaving behind the EP "Minor Disturbance".

The two continue their project of refounding hardcore from within (pushing its structures to the furthest, most extreme and potent limits possible) by forming Minor Threat. They're joined by a blond guy with a bowl haircut and big teardrop glasses, with the air of a child-scientist crossed with a paranoid-cold maniac, Brian Baker (ex-Government Issue, 1981-1989) on bass, and Lyle Preslar, a young preppy type who wouldn't have looked out of place among English mods, on guitar. The four stay together for 10 months in 1981, living a communal life centered on work (recordings, shows, rehearsals); a life that transposes into the age of nihilism, depression and alienation the model of those (far more numerous) peace-and-love communities of the mid-1960s.

The ideology shifts from pacifism to indifference, from feeling and belief to reification and suicidal impulse. From the ideology of social revolution (present in part even in punk anarchy) we move to asociality, to non-ideology. Symbolizing perpetual loneliness, incomprehension and aphasia, groups of young artists in the Eighties replace the many members of Sixties communities with the bare minimum of adherents strictly necessary. In between came the reflective yet critical Seventies, years that kept loading the gun without ever firing it, thereby justifying, by a kind of contortion, the inexhaustible and unprecedented violence of the years to come.

The group, almost always a quartet, had always served to formalize the existential and experiential component; this had always been the case, and it had always been changing: but in this history a point of no return had now been reached, represented by the "no to life". Given their age, their era, and the enthusiasm they sparked at their many yet deeply felt and elitist shows (based not on sadism, as metal shows and partly even punk shows were, but on self-destruction), these four sons of the lower-to-middle middle class (the point applies to Minor Threat, but could hold for almost every hardcore band of the era), who had carved out a niche of expression and escape for themselves, wanted to do everything fast and extreme, as befit the sincerity of the situation.

Anti-stars par excellence (and by "anti" we should also understand the exhibitionism of suffering), young and ruthless yet original and spontaneous, Minor Threat hold a place in music history as a solid point of reference for all of hardcore, a genre they managed to interpret in its deepest, most extreme and most artistically valuable dynamics.

Hardcore songs last one minute. And that minute has to contain everything. It has to be worth as much as, or more than, a quarter-hour of progressive. By simple probabilistic deduction, it becomes easy to argue that many hardcore EPs are better than the albums. Indeed, that the dimension best suited to hardcore is the EP: it's one thing to deliver 8 top-level tracks (8-10 tracks being the standard length of a canonical rock album, averaging 3 minutes per song), quite another to deliver 15 or 20 (essentially two rock albums in one go). This should be kept in mind to understand why Minor Threat, like most hardcore bands, were most truly themselves on their EPs. A footnote to this point concerns the distribution requirements that almost always demand a minimum album length: 16 hardcore songs cover at most 15-20 minutes; and so, even unconsciously, it becomes easy to fall into the temptation of padding things out here and there, diluting the material to stretch it.

In 1981, on what would become the historic Dischord Records, the EP Minor Threat was released: 8 tracks, 9 minutes. Minor Threat's finest work and a milestone for all of hardcore. The law of the Germs gets applied to the Eighties, the decade of metal; the hardcore genre moves on from the clattering rattle of the Seventies (see Ramones) toward the power and ferocity that will lead it to post-hardcore — a calculated, despondent reflection of the genre upon itself, made either more searing by melody or more alienating through anti-aesthetic sounds.

Minor Threat thus stand as the apex of hardcore and as the point from which the downward arc (in terms of power, though not musical quality) begins, leading to post-hardcore. MacKaye is the protagonist and the symbol of all this. His main commitment after Minor Threat will be Fugazi (from 1987), the single most important band in all of post-hardcore, who will attempt to ferry the genre all the way to post-rock, ultimately failing when they collide with non-rock.

"Filler" is Minor Threat's hardcore masterpiece; it's not an anthem — hardcore will never produce one — nor even a memorable track for any particular melody or despondent chorus: it is instead the manifesto track of hardcore at its most evolved and, at the same time, most "hardcore". To push any further would mean ceasing to make hardcore. And that is exactly what will happen to Fugazi (as it did to many bands before them too; above all the far too little-known Minutemen). Bass, drums, vocals, guitar: all relentless, all teetering on the edge of being out of tune and off-key, amid phrasing full of stops and restarts, but rigorously without dynamics: everything at full volume. Tracks like this would make the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who think they're spending their time wisely listening to Offspring, Rancid, NOFX, or worse, think again.

"I Don't Wanna Hear It" doesn't let up on the tension at all, even if (in the obsessive repetition of the title) it takes on a more chanted, almost trashy tone rather than that of a lightning-fast (and punk) tirade.

"Seeing Red", as usual, starts out limping and then erupts into a gallery of sonic and vocal devastation. The quintessence of hardcore.

"Straight Edge" has even been used to name an entire hardcore subgenre that criticizes — in favor of a broader humanism — the use of drugs and alcohol, a manifesto of punk, i.e. of the Sex Pistols (inhumanity). In truth, you can't get more "punk" than that, criticizing, offending, disparaging even yourself and your own (or presumed) category. The Dead Kennedys were doing something similar to today's "politically correct" at the same time, with manifestos like "Nazi Punks Fuck Off". Yet in truth, the Sex Pistols' "creed", being a "non-creed", being nihilism itself, didn't even spare itself, and so couldn't actually praise anything, drugs, alcohol and sadism included; such things could at most be seen as extreme tests on the road to achieving contempt for the world. So, given an equal lack of regard for the same phenomenon (evil), it's really a matter of seeing the differences within that lack of regard: more humanist or compassionate, but perhaps also more internalized, in Minor Threat's case; decidedly uncompromising and free of second thoughts, but perhaps also more calculated, in the Sex Pistols' case.

"Small Man, Big Mouth" rightly persists in the whirlwind of despair and violence, not only internal but also physical, visceral. Both for its rhythmic structures, which deafeningly allow no room to breathe, and for MacKaye's thuggish vocals (more powerful and deeper than the average hardcore voice, and more mature than the average punk one), these tracks constitute a necessary precursor, among other things, to street metal too, to the metal-core of bands active in the Nineties like the famous Pantera; bands that created a sound (the sound of the Nineties, the most powerful ever achieved) simply by drawing on the tonal range opened up in the Eighties thanks to hardcore and heavy metal, a range that could not be expanded any further.

"Screaming at a Wall" keeps the same speed and intensity, the kind that allows Minor Threat to drift away from and disown punk forms, in favor of heavily accentuated metallic excess: metallic, not metal; the tempos of the rhythm section and the detuned guitar do everything they can not to be metal, even as they reach metal's level of violence and noise.

"Bottled Violence" seals the formula: ever-present vocal delivery, perpetually pushed to the limit, reaching "overkill" down to a faint whisper in the chorus; drums first building in progression, then settling into a recursive, rolling pattern in the middle section; guitar frayed, explosive, choral and at the same time granite-solid.

Note too the titles of these songs; not just their meaning, but also how they sound when spoken aloud: you'll get that effect somewhere between self-flagellation and endurance, between self-destruction and self-defense, between pain and a veiled self-satisfaction necessary to live with it, an effect that will reach all the way to the Patton-era Faith No More.

"Minor Threat" is the comparatively most relaxed track, the most "college" one. Even so, MacKaye's voice always gives it everything, however brief the performance, and within it lies all the pain of regret, the aching sorrow for the transience and inconsistency of all things.

After this EP the band, not by chance, breaks up: when it reappears shortly after, it can no longer properly be called hardcore. In the later works, in fact, Minor Threat (or MacKaye?) progressively softened, stretched, refined and articulated their hardcore: five years later, Fugazi would emerge as its logical and natural consequence. A wild card in this process is the importance of the Minutemen's influence: without them Fugazi would be unthinkable, but to some extent the jazz-core Angelenos also had some bearing on "late" Minor Threat.

Minor Threat, along with Dead Kennedys and a handful of others, rebuilt hardcore from within, ferrying the punk-garage sound of the late '70s into the metal sound of the '80s, which would struggle through various forms until it folded in on itself into post-hardcore. Minor Threat are the essential link in that chain.

In My Eyes is a 1981 EP, 4 tracks, 7 minutes long. Understanding this second act, released when the band had already broken up, hinges entirely on the length of the tracks (double the usual): this corresponds to a "post" dimension that nonetheless reads more as a natural continuation than as a betrayal or change of course. From the lyrics onward, Minor Threat never had the reactionary nihilism of bands like Circle Jerks, for instance: no threats, no sadism, no calls for revolution. In them, in short, the punk dimension (in the historical sense of the term) is entirely suppressed. And that is precisely why they are so thoroughly hardcore. The lyrics and their titles already start from nihilism and present themselves as a meditation on it, or as its inevitable endurance. Hence the choice to live a life that, for all its inauthenticity, feels like a non-life: it's the acknowledgment of an inevitability, the duty to live because the alternative serves no purpose at all. And it's done without self-indulgence. The fact is that the non-punk of the first EP was hardcore, while the non-punk that followed would be the start of the long road toward "post-hardcore."

"In My Eyes" shows how much the band had improved technically. It's a track (symptomatic of the whole EP) half hardcore, half reflection on hardcore, with a chorus that mocks itself (and is catchy precisely for being so cocky). This incarnation of Minor Threat sits between Dead Kennedys, Descendents and Minutemen: they have the adolescent spirit and touching charm of the first (the idea of the young person who's allowed everything because of their age, and who surprises us when, as time passes, that attitude doesn't change but actually hardens); the cockiness of the second; the jazz-art of the third. This version of Minor Threat has the Minutemen on top of all that.

"Out of Step" is a hardcore track stuffed with deliberately childlike melody: the guitar solo and the melody are already non-hardcore; the violence of the performance, the voice pushed to its limit, the screamed finale, all stay within the genre's orthodoxy.

"Guilty of Being White" is one of the band's most violent tracks, and one of the most Black Flag-like: in the opening scream, the choral drive, the echoes, the restlessness of every instrument that seems to want to change tempo or explode every second. In what appears to be confusion and anarchy, every single instrument stands out with maximum clarity (hence the band's greatness).

In 1983, Minor Threat reformed and recorded their first album, Out of Step: 8 tracks, 17 minutes: a continuation of the same discourse. "Betray" could easily be a Fugazi song; it has all the elements: the adolescent apocalypse, the symbolism, the primal quality, the instruments (strictly rock ones) playing somewhere between rock 'n' roll and a chamber ensemble, MacKaye's voice somewhere between an atheist dirge and a nursery rhyme so ancient it feels extraterrestrial; and finally the melody, always courted but never fully embraced, making the sense of unease, alienation and neurosis all the more piercing. For the genre, a masterpiece. Except the genre isn't hardcore.

"It Follows" returns, in its own way, to punk chants, the kind with sing-along choruses: but it does so in a way so distorted, so technically flawless and so varied that it strips them of their essence (the sheer goofiness). It ends with a faint whistle, more zombie than cowboy: as if to say that when the malaise is internal it weighs far more than the external kind, which by comparison starts to look like naivety (even the band's look follows this line: plain, careless clothes, ripped jeans, shirts, sweatshirts: just like everyone else, nothing more; and just like the look, the music too, precisely because of this eternal ordinariness, will always stay relevant: as if to say that indifference is the truth).

"Think Again" once again changes the rulebook in ways that are fully Fugazi: another masterpiece, built from conservatory-grade bass-and-drum passages, dark, scorching guitars holding everything together, crowned by a voice that's just as gripping in the verses, machine-gunned out at the speed of light, as in the choruses, where the melody arrives at the last possible second, at the tail end of a word, as if tossed off, almost in passing: and done with exquisite finesse. The ending is then handed over to a bass that ends up becoming the lead instrument, with the guitar simply accompanying it. And that's exactly what would carry over into Fugazi: the rhythm section as protagonist, guitars sketching the outlines around which the voice emerges.

"Look Back and Laugh", in its primitive sophistication, in its prehistoric nuclear charge, confirms that this is Minor Threat's finest work and the foundational work for Fugazi: but it also confirms that this work is not hardcore, being far too evolved, cultured, complex, conceptual. Not an electric guitar playing Mozart, but Mozart playing the electric guitar. Pretty much everyone would draw inspiration from tracks like these on this album: and rightly so. Having brought hardcore back to life, or steered it to its definitive and, in part, unsurpassable form, Minor Threat also laid down the rules for what came "after."

"Sob Story" is a charging assault that digs once again (see the spastic chorus) into a certain punk absurdity, only to reveal that even that absurdity swallows up a seriousness that expresses the tragedy of existence. A tragedy without an audience, and all the more desperate for it, because it can neither show itself nor find release that way.

"No Reason" opens straight away with a rhythm section that's the antithesis of hardcore and closer to jazz: the guitar remains the genre's sole stronghold, and MacKaye's voice seems to unleash its messengers of wisdom (bass and drums: the art of post-hardcore), calling them to charge alongside the loudest, most powerful guitars and vocals (hardcore, which is fundamentally an existential matter).

"Little Friend" immediately lays down a carpet that could be, were it not for the excesses of the bass-and-drum accompaniment, hardcore, but the guitar keeps singing sparsely (unaccompanied: the rhythm section ruthlessly goes its own way) for all it's worth, like a siren amid cosmic conflagrations. The singer's scream backs it up, but almost as if to push it toward suffocation.

"Out of Step" brings back, elevating it to a manifesto, the track from the second EP: once again layers of bass and drums, on a battlefield shared in parallel by guitar and voice, which at times machine-gun on to the point of incomprehensibility and at other times, though always violently, seem to linger in some more reflective air.

In 1985 the EP Salad Days was released, collecting three tracks recorded in December '83. "Salad days" opens with a bassline that promises a lot, but goes on with a middling hardcore track that's neither full-on nor post-; mixed in with some acoustic passages and gong. The leap toward the Fugazi dimension is still, in part, premature.

"Good guys don't wear white" is a rework of a Count Bishops song (England, 1977), and shows more clearly the intent to reach the Fugazi dimension; with a cover, MacKaye can more freely experiment with the aesthetics of the operation.

"Stumped" is the masterpiece of the EP and a fully-fledged Fugazi track. Remarkably advanced for its time (at least for the average of the time): in a minute-and-a-half miniature, it manages to stretch the boundaries of time to deliver powerful, syncopated yet chamber-like effects; MacKaye's voice sounds like that of someone who has lived a lot, and lived hard, and can now use that hard-won distance to confide in a surreal kind of harmony, as far from rhetoric as it is from pop. As intricate as garage-funk, this track (which owes much to the Pop Group, but also to the Clash) achieves perfection in its emotional, conceptual and aesthetic execution. It sounds like a little pop tune, given its madcap pace and nonchalant tone, but it's a gem of finely calibrated harmonic, melodic and rhythmic architecture.

The Complete Discography, released in 1988, on top of everything mentioned above, also offers a couple of unreleased tracks, including a cover of Wire ("12XU": and note what Minor Threat do with this landmark of English garage-punk, regarded as a reference point for hardcore) and the masterpiece "Cashing In" (over three minutes long). This track anticipates much of what not only Fugazi, but also bands like Faith No More, would go on to say. It sets aside the sweeping tragic quality of "Stumped" for a series of ideas in which a melody poised between the touching (for its bitter self-destruction) and the sarcastic (for its deliberate obliviousness) coexists with sophisticated instrumental twists: still hardcore and jazz, with a thread of melodic punk running through it. After a sublime instrumental coda, it ends, surreally and metaphysically, a cappella.

Apart from Fugazi (and that's no small thing...), nothing else worth noting will come out of Minor Threat. The 1983 split will lead to a tangled family tree marked by a kind of mutual jealousy, which will in practice see each founding member of the band taking part, in turn, in projects involving the others, each with different "families". MacKaye in particular will want to be omnipresent, as if to protect or command his own offspring.

The tight-knit hardcore community thus shows its capacity to spread like wildfire among more or less neighboring bands, but in doing so it loses — even as this web of connections remains an important bonding force — its founding artistic purpose, which, in the case of Minor Threat, will only be recovered in Fugazi.

Dag Nasty (1985-89) should, in theory, be the most direct continuation of the Minor Threat project. Brian Baker takes an active part as guitarist; MacKaye handles production, Nelson the artwork. But it amounts to nothing more than bland, pointless, ugly neo-hardcore. Baker will go on to join the most mediocre phase of Meatmen, and finally the even more mediocre phase of Bad Religion (1995-2002), attempting to fill in for Brett Gurewitz.

Nelson will be in High Back Chairs (1989-1993).

Lyle Preslar will first join Baker in Meatmen, then play on the first album by the metal-hardcore band Samhain (1983-1990), Glenn Danzig's astonishing post-Misfits project.

MacKaye, still in Washington, will go on to form Embrace (1985-86), and then Fugazi (from 1987).

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