American Hardcore

Too young for hardcore and too young for grunge, I had to learn about most of the bands in Paul Rachman's documentary American HARDCORE after their demise or during their declining years. The emptiest screening I attended at the festival, Rachman covers the oft-overlooked hardcore music scene of the early 1980s via a montage of maps, concert footage, and talking head interviews. Feeling like it was edited with a food processor, American HARDCORE does a fair job of cracking the lid on the hardcore scene but doesn't come close to presenting the material in any kind of cohesive way.

While the footage and photos of these myriad classic bands are fun to see (and the music is a blast), the film's narrative thrust is a muddled mess and some bands are conspicuously missing (old cliques die hard?). Hopefully a soundtrack will come from this.

You would go out at night with a friend or two, look for some no name building where you would see a couple of punks hanging outside, go inside, pay your $6.00 and walk through a door or a small hallway, go down the stairs and feel the heat & smell the sweat, and then the assault of noise would fill the "club". In L.A. it could be the Cathy De Grand with D.R.I. or the Circle Jerks at the Sunset Ballroom with Youth Brigade, or, well it didn't matter who you went to see, you just had to get there and be a part of it. It was 90 MPH music coming at you with every possible watt there was. It was Loud,Fast, and Relentelss. That is Hardcore punk rock. When the bands were done, you gathered yourself, took a deep breath, looked yourself over to make sure you were all there, and you walked outside to get some fresh air. You survived another show. As the cars drove past, you laughed at yourself thinking, No one know's what just went on inside here. Well, This movie lets you inside. It's the real deal. When I watched some of the videos of the bands playing, I could not help myself from belting out some of the words from these great songs. This is American Hardcore the way I remember it. Great job on telling this story.

"Ameican Hardcore," is a pretty good documentary for those even a bit interested in the genre. Personally I found it heavily lacking in a number of departments. The film itself was put together pretty well over all and moves along at a good pace. What is lacking though is the appreciation of the entire other side of the West Coast scene. Most of the bands from San Francisco, or who centered themselves from S.F. were not covered at all. Obviously someone did not want to include Jello Biafra and DK, but whatever, they were there and they were important to the scene. Those from the mid-west probably felt a bit slighted by the fact that the Crucif*cks were not included as well. Way to many major bands were not even mentioned and it was very irritating. Overall this documentary was just okay. I was expecting much more considering that the book "American Hardcore" was quite a bit more thorough overall.

Nice and nostalgic for those who were there.

Potentially misleading and perhaps too long for those who were not there and don't get the nostalgia.

My comments are more of a reaction than a review.

I won't pretend to be objective. I lived through this and experienced it differently from the 'leading lights' who were interviewed in the film. I met and even hung out with a few of the folks in the film over the three years (1980-1982) when I was in and out of NYC and Philly scenes. Of course, hardcore had not yet been commercialized at this time and none of them were regarded as legends. It's great to see that most of them are still true believers and haven't developed regrets, but it's really odd that they are still saying exactly the same things about HC that they were saying twenty years ago. Isn't hindsight supposed to be 20/20 or something? Well... really... it's all a matter of perspective, and that's the point of this review.

From 1979 to 1984 I was a member of a band which crossed over from punk to hardcore in 1980. I began with them at the age of 14 and stuck around until, as Ian Mackaye put it, "hardcore checked out". Being part of the NJ/NYC punk community, and having grown up in a small rural town in central Jersey, my perspective on the whole business is a bit different.... But, again... that's the point, isn't it?

From my point of view, the film has one major flaw - Most of the interviews seem to have developed out of a set of basic misconceptions: (1) that hardcore was about something in particular, (2) that the leaders of the most popular hardcore bands were somehow experts in what hardcore was and (3) that the portion of the country where hardcore got the most early media attention was somehow more important than the rest of the world.

I was never a big fan of hardcore's regionalism (which was a big deal in the scenes I was involved with) and was interested mainly in bands which were original, energetic and fun regardless of where they came from. Sadly, the east coast frequently exhibited symptoms of an inferiority complex because of the commercial and media attention California got - a couple of examples are the titles of early eastern Punk and HC compilations:

Philadelphia: Get Off Our Backs We're Doing it Too. NYC: New York Thrash and The Big Apple Rotten to the Core Boston: This is Boston, Not L.A.

Telling, ain't it?

Because of my own experiences, the interviews of NYC, Washington DC and Boston band members resonated more strongly with me than the California-centered stuff. Don't get me wrong, I loved the DKs, Black Flag, the CJs, Fear, X, UXA, The Avengers, and many other West-coasters, but I still reject the adoption of the archetype American Punk lifestyle which was drawn out of stereotypes imported by the mass media from California.

From my perspective, punk was truly anti-conformist, and CoC's comments about the fascist anti-fascism that became a major component of HC late in it's life were dead-on accurate. It's as if a whole bunch of fools turned on Quincy, saw an inaccurate representation of slam dancing based on things that were happening in particular parts of Southern California (where Quincy was filmed) and all-of-a-sudden decided to get mohawks and leather jackets and go beat up people at shows.

Maybe New York police have bigger and better things to do, but I do not remember a single of the 100s of shows I went to or played which were ever even threatened with a shut-down, let alone attracting the attention of more than a few squad cars. And honestly, I don't remember any NYC or Philly cops doing anything much worse than shaking their heads and rolling their eyes during these incidents. Maybe NYC punks were radically different from Calpunks, because I knew very few people in HC and/or punk who would ever espouse hating any group of people in a broad-brush manner such as police and hippies.

For me and most of my friends HC was a chance to have fun, get up on stage and play, help other people have fun, and to express ourselves socially and politically with an audience which could relate and appreciated pretty much whatever you threw at them. Most of the messages were against violence, against stereotyping, against injustice, and even against drugs. And the bands all supported each other, whether or not they agreed about politics, music or whatever. Really nice. Sure the dancing got kind of rough at times, but it only got really bad after that fateful episode of Quincy.

This is a good film. I was very excited to see the respect with which the Bad Brains were treated and the range of excellent bands chosen for the interviews. The film is really just a lengthy series of edited monologues and dialogs from interviews conducted by the director. The cinematography is straightforward and really nothing special - fine for what was intended. There are relatively few musical interludes (mostly poorly filmed cam-jobs), and no complete songs.

The film serves well as a memoir for old punks like myself, and a good introduction to the major tropes and official mythology of the hardcore movement for those of later generations. Don't mistake the generalizing opinions of the interviewees (or mine for that matter) to be representative of anything besides the individual opinions that they are, however. And remember always - no matter what anybody says about hardcore, Gang Green summed it all up better than anybody in their song "Have Fun"

We just wanna have some fun

We just wanna have some fun

While we're young enough

To get away with it.

!

Growing up in the early 1980s in one of the punk hot spots (Austin), I just had to see this film the first day it was out. I can remember like yesterday seeing the Big Boys, the Dicks, DK and Black Flag at Club Foot, the punk venue. It was a great and unique time. I have aged, but still consider myself a punk at heart. However, I was rather letdown by this film. It seems like the guy wanted to make this definitive documentary over the punk scene in the early '80s, but half the people he asked to interview turned him down. The most glaring flaw with this film is the omission of the Dead Kennedys. Yes, Black Flag and the Circle Jerks were huge during that time, but NOBODY came close to rivaling DK, they were it. Yet, there is nothing in the film about them, nothing. Fear is also ignored and so many other greats are just barely touched on. Yet, we get a ton of stuff on the Cro Mags and TSOL? Look, I know that a documentary filmmaker can only use the sources available to him, but it seems that the sources that were available to him (minus Henry Rollins and Keith Morris) were rather small in comparison to other giants like Jello Biafra and Lee Ving. Moreover, there was not enough music in the film. It opens with a nice Bad Brains' cut and montage and then they kind of go away from anymore montages. As someone that experienced the scene firsthand, I just kind of felt it was a rather thin and sloppy look at a very interesting time. Moreover, they drop Husker Du's name a lot, but then never explore anything about them. The guy could have made a better documentary, a much better one. And he could have shown how the punk scene influenced the creation of future bands like Social Distortion, the Replacments, etc.. And how about a shout-out to the freaking Ramones!?