American Hardcore

I remember reading a review of American Hardcore in one of the weeklies in Portland. It stated something to the extent that if you know hardcore, you will not learn anything and if you know nothing about hardcore, you won't learn much. I can't agree more.

As someone that has a fair amount of knowledge of the history of the American Hardcore movement, I don't feel like I learned much new about hardcore. And, I have talked to others that know little about hardcore and they had a hard time tracking.

I was also surprised about some of the things that were missing. How could Maximum Rock n' Roll be left out? Maybe the Dead Kennedys were left out because of all the legal stuff going on with them now or maybe because a lot of old punks don't like them now. I know there is only so much room and info someone can squeeze into two hours, but it is hard to see how certain things were left out of it.

I think it was a good attempt. The director should have made a better decision and either make it a movie for someone that knew nothing or a movie for the more advanced viewer. Still, if you are a fan of hardcore or you are perhaps a younger viewer that has some interest in the hardcore punk movement of the early 80's, it is worth renting.

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.

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!?

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.

Just came out of a preview screening of this fine film here at the Natfilm festival in Copenhagen, Denmark! In short, 'American Hardcore' lives up to the expectations: Made in a D.I.Y. fashion befitting its' subject, it gives you an excellent overview of the first wave of American hardcore music, nicely balancing the violence that characterized the early days with the positive message that came out of it.

You'll get to see lots and lots of never-seen-before amateur footage from (really) early hardcore shows, interwoven with many, many, many excellent interviews with key figures from the scene.

Fact is, the filmmakers have managed to dig up pretty much everybody who was a nobody back in the day: Where one could have expected a long line of New York art critics, psychologists, social anthropologists and the like yakitiyaking away about form and substance, with perhaps a single Henry Rollins getting to represent the "hardcore punk subculture" as a whole, instead what you get is a literal who's-who of early American hardcore: You've got your Gang Green and your Circle Jerks, your SS Decontrol and your Jerry's Kids, your Negative F/X and your Cro-Mags, and so on and so forth.

On a side-note, some personal favorites will inevitably be missing from any such line-up -- yours truly specially misses Choke from Slapshot, Billy Milano from S.O.D., and Paul Bearer from Sheer Terror -- but that goes with the territory.

A bigger fault, perhaps, lies in the radically negative view one gets of what happened next. Towards the end of the film you're bombarded with clip after clip of hardcore veterans telling you that after '86, it was all over. Granted, what happened next falls outside of the framework of this movie (it specifically deals only with the years 1980-1986) and to make it sound like if it all actually ended in '86 makes for good drama -- but of course in fact it just isn't true.

In '88 you had the Gorilla Biscuits, Youth Of Today, Bold, Judge, and so on and so forth, and during the 90's, well, the thing kinda went on and on, evolving or degenerating depending on how you see things. In the eyes of purists perhaps what came after '86 doesn't count -- but if so, it would have been nice to hear something said about it, to hear these guys explain what it is about, say, Integrity or Floorpunch or Catharsis or His Hero Is Gone or Good Clean Fun that makes them so decidedly un-hardcore.

But why whine about such wee little things? All in all, the film is an excellent piece of documentary about the finest underground movement in music anywhere in the world between Roky Erickson came out of the asylum in the 70's and the churches burned in Norway in the 90's!