Black Flag

Despite their vocation for burning out fast amid antisocial fast forward and nihilistic accelerations, Black Flag were one of the hardcore bands with the widest and most lasting influence on the fate of alternative music as a whole. This is down to the sonic arsenal they honed over time, their ability to shed their skin, and their uncommon technical skill in forging the entropy of rage and noise inherited from first-generation punk.

In some passages of “Damaged” (1981) they anticipated grind; in others, a certain Albini-school noise-rock; “My War” (1983) is cited by many as the forefather of the rawest, most extreme grunge; “Slip It In” (1984) and “Loose Nut” (1985) left a decisive mark on the development of heavy subgenres such as sludge, stoner and punk-metal; their swan song, the Ep “Process Of Weeding Out” (1985), with its eccentric jazz-punk, pushed the metamorphosis even further, foreshadowing math-rock outcomes. Not to mention that the Ginn family's label (Greg, guitarist and band leader, and his brother Ray, who goes by Raymond Pettibon), Sst, originally founded with the sole purpose of supporting Black Flag's debut full-length, would itself become a reference point for the entire post-hardcore and pre-grunge scene, releasing, throughout the Eighties, records by landmark bands such as Bad Brains, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Husker Du and, for a brief period, Soundgarden and Sonic Youth.

Born in the fateful year of '77, though under the name Panic, the “black flag” was only planted in the sand of Hermosa Beach, Los Angeles, CA, the following year. Black Flag recorded “Damaged” in 1981, the culmination of two aborted attempts at a full-length that ended up as Eps (“Jealous Again” and “Six Pack”) and of a newfound (and relative) stability in the line-up. It was a five-piece formation – unusual for the punk-core of the period and closer, also in terms of volume and sonic power, to hard rock or heavy metal standards – in which Dez Cadena, initially hired as singer to replace the departed Keith Morris (later founder of Circle Jerks), switched to rhythm guitar, freeing Ginn to focus on lead parts; Chuck Dukowski played bass; ROBO (Roberto Valverde: half American, half Colombian) sat behind the drums; and, skull and crossbones against a pitch-black backdrop, the twenty-year-old Henry Rollins from Washington DC (who had joined the band as a roadie and was later promoted, also thanks to the encouragement of his friend Ian MacKaye, another young man we'd hear a lot about) took care of various things out front, including screaming his lungs out and keeping the audience in check (by fair means or, more often, foul).

“Damaged” crystallizes hardcore in a pivotal year for its evolution, caught between the exodus of the late-Seventies beach-punk scene and the great jubilee of the following year, when the original sound would progressively lose all remaining “purity,” becoming contaminated on many fronts (ethnic, melodic, political…). The songs come in a blistering rush, feverish and ferocious (15 tracks packed into just 34 minutes of music), the structure basic and repetitive (bass and drums always lead the charge, the driving vectors for the torrential blasts of voice and guitars that hurtle forward at breakneck speed through a motion that is anything but uniformly accelerated). Piercing like the screech of brakes a second before a fatal impact, twisted like a heap of wreckage, moments later.

The strengths of their sound lie in Ginn's technical, ultrasonic, out-of-tune guitar work, which blends Hendrix-esque licks, Sabbath-esque riffs and noise distortions into dizzying microtonal variations, and in Rollins' delivery, desperate, visceral, resurrecting, closer to the masochism of certain performance art than to the sedition of rock'n'roll.

The ideology (or lack of ideology) it conveys expresses itself in a kind of nihilistic intoxication, where abandonment, poverty, childhood trauma, and the violence that plays out in the slums and is learned only to be repaid with interest (vividly captured on the cover, with Rollins emblematically punching his own double on the other side of the mirror) generate an unbridled, primordial vitality; the closeness of death and the tormenting fixation on suicide push, by contrast, toward saying yes to life.

It opens with “Rise Above”, an insurrectionist anthem against “Reaganite” purges and police brutality, which, in its naive Freudian symptomatology, feels less like a militant leaflet and more like a transference of hatred and rebellion toward violent, unfeeling fathers (“We are tired of your abuse/ Try to stop us, it’s no use”); the descending chromatic-scale attack is unique and legendary in its own right, the riff heavy and tough as a boulder, the backing vocals precisely doubling Rollins's hoarse outbursts. “Police Story” belongs to the same vein: pounding, compressed, convulsive, almost grind, with Rollins foaming at the mouth as he devours Ginn's uncertain proclamations (“This fucking city is run by pigs/ They take the rights away from all the kids/ Understand we’re fightin’ a war we can win/ they hate us, we hate them/ We can’t win no way”). “Six Pack”, its intro drawn-out and intimidating like a baseball bat smashed against the curb, and “Spray Pant”, a 30-second splinter, focus on the band's two other favorite themes: alcohol (“I was born with a bottle in my mouth, six pack!”) and vandalism (“It feels good to say what i want/ It feels good to knock things down/ It feels good to see the disgust in their eyes/ It feels good and i’m gonna go wild”).

On the more “intimate” side, notable tracks include: “What I See”, whipped by off-beats, with its comic-book existentialism and blatant suicidal trip (“I wanna live/ I wish i was dead”, which could be the epitome of the record); “Room 13”, with machine-gun bursts of guitar and drums and a riff that sounds like a starter motor about to explode into a thousand pieces; and then “Damaged II”, raging noise-core, at once brutal and refined, like someone who has learned the finesse of boxing but uses it in a street brawl, with short, laconic yet indelible lines (“Damaged by you/ Damaged by me/ I’m confused/ Confused/ Don’t wanna be confused”) written by Ginn as if he were a pathologist of frustration.

“Tv Party”, a prescient satire on TV addiction (two telling dates: CNN was born in 1980, and MTV would follow the year after), propelled by clapping, a strut worthy of the Sex Pistols and call and response in the style of the Ramones, and “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme”, those same Pistols and Ramones put through the meat grinder, are two frames from punk's own “back to the future”. At the opposite pole, “Damaged I”, perhaps the album's peak, gives a sense of what hardcore (and, more broadly, that strain of alternative rock) could become when the band eases off the gas: a Black Sabbath song as played by the future Sonic Youth, an unbearable, semi-improvised psychodrama from a Rollins who screams and writhes as if in a regressive hypnosis session, as though the psychoanalyst's couch were lined with sharp, burning nails.

Irreversible, inestimable “damage” to the history of rock music.

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29/03/2009