Secret Hate - Evergreen Hardcore

Among the hundreds of hardcore and post-hardcore bands from Southern California in the early '80s, Secret Hate, out of Long Beach, crafted a far-from-negligible work (though a criminally overlooked one) that cuts across hardcore in a way that, more than twenty years on, still sounds fresh and enjoyable.

Somewhere between Dead Kennedys on one side and Minutemen on the other, Secret Hate, across the 10 miniatures of Vegetables Dancing (1983), demonstrate with real skill and imagination just how versatile a medium hardcore can be; a means to an end, that end being post-hardcore, which in this particular version consists, formally, in a loosening and diversifying of the songwriting (in a minute and a half, with just three instruments, they manage to work in jazz, blues and cabaret) — and, in terms of content, in a humor that revisits the typical themes and demands of hardcore for an audience that is older, or at least more mature, than the one from '77 (we're in '83 now), an audience that has to learn to look at itself with the detachment needed for self-awareness and reflection.

Vegetables Dancing was produced by the man who was then the youngest and smartest producer in hardcore: Spot (with, to his name, essential works by Black Flag, Minutemen and, outside Los Angeles, Meat Puppets and Husker Du).

"Death In The Desert" and "Bomb Chic" are, miniature as they are, intricate, carefully worked-out compositions that, moving at a tribal pace (not without tempo shifts, sudden accelerations and conflagrations), no longer aim to subvert reality but to endure it, understanding it with all the bitterness of humor and the sarcasm of play. The oddities of other tracks like "Midas Touch" and "Edge Marin" — always tightly structured yet somehow ineffable — make this music a genuine rock avant-garde (one, moreover, that can't be reduced to its stated models: Dead Kennedys for Mike Davis's voice and the thickness of the sound; Minutemen for the rhythmic derailments and audacity).

Secret Hate's work, brief and tightly focused as it is, has no peaks, because it isn't after hit songs or tracks more representative than one another; rather, it's a flawless sequence of variations on the same theme, none of them an end in itself, because that theme is experimentation as unflinching reflection and surrealist aesthetic; a surrealism that is always, one way or another, steeped in black humor. "Latin Chongo" and "The Ballad Of Johnny Budd" are the most programmatic and least hardcore examples: near-reggae hiccups (on the other side of the United States, Bad Brains were doing roughly comparable things) that spring from sturdy bass structures and a versatile, full-bodied vocal capable of breathing its own life into the routines of some hypothetical cabaret performer or spoken-word artist.

It was with bands like Secret Hate that the hardcore/punk community came to realize that theirs wasn't the only burned-out youth, but that this burnout was a chronic condition of the human race at large. What remained was to draw the proper conclusions from that premise: chiefly, the fact that rebellion was no longer possible (since no medicine can cure a chronic illness). As a formal consequence, hardcore had to change its sound; whether that happened through an excess of power and speed (thrash) or a lack thereof (indie, etc.), either way, the new phenomenon would have to be called post-hardcore.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google