Our
punk/metal/drone comparison timeline reaches the Eighties and even
touches on the Nineties. (First part covers the Sixties here while the second recounts the Seventies over here.)
Black
Flag: 'My War' (1984)
Black
Flag were our man at the crossroads, this is the the point where the
streams cross. People argue over who first hit on the phrase “like
a cross between Black Flag and Black Sabbath”. But there's no real
debate over the first band to do it – and that
band was Black Flag themselves. Which makes the crossover more
significant. Black Flag hasn't been a hardcore
band, they'd virtually been the hardcore band.
They were the one who defined the sound – angry, direct, assertive,
uncompromising, and above all over inside of two and a half minutes.
Moreover,
legal problems had prevented the workaholic and once-prolific band
releasing anything for the past three years. (Once off the leash,
they released two further albums before '84 was even up.) And in the
intervening time their sound had shifted massively, shaving off the
punk spikiness for something much more sludgy, more glowering, more
ominous – more (you guessed it) Black Sabbath. All of which
accentuated the sense that they were not just now slow but
anti-fast, like a calculated rebuke to the jock
slamdancers. (In that way it also weirdly seems to match the mood of
some of the more primal-screamy stuff off Lennon's 'Plastic
Ono Band', such as 'God'.)
If
it sounds unbelievably bleak, hold it up against their earlier output
- it just gets darker. Earlier lyrics slipped into the united third
person as easily as the Doors track from the first part (“We are
tired of your abuse/Try to stop us, its no use”), this time its all
first person versus third. It's like Sartre's 'No Exit'
in song form. “You say that you're my friend/But you're one of
them” is like the end-point of existentialism, an accusation
hitched on the back of an tautology. Notably, Rollins sings as if
facing down his audience rather than performing to them. This confrontational interview with him, simultaneously
hilarious and excruciating, dates from the same era.
“Destroy!
Annihilate! Incinerate!” You have now reached utter nihilism. All
change please...
Bad
Brains: 'I Against I' (1986)
Followers
of Rastafarianism, the band would have been familiar with and
probably used the Rasta expression “I and I”. (Used in daily
speech, such as “I and I need to sign on next Tuesday”, but to
signify spiritual connection - “Jah and I”.) Except of course
they invert it to depict modern America as in the most ungodly of
states – the war of each against all, which can only serve to bring
us all down. In that sense, despite their outward similarities, it's
almost the counter to 'My War' - it rails against
a situation in which its companion virtually revels. (“I said whose
gonna tell the youth about...the rotten stinkin' rackets and the
fantasies around the nation.”) Not for the first time HR sounds
almost like a preacher as he cries “I tell you the truth is looking
straight at you!”
As
I often like to point out, great bands are able to straddle apparent
contradictions, and Bad Brains could sound heavy at the same time
they sounded lithe and nimble. Their roots were as a jazz fusion band
and those roots never quite went away.
This
was about the point where I'd first left home and was going to see
bands. While at school there'd been a virtual Berlin wall between the
punks and the headbangers, by then it simply never occurred to me to
try and divide up the bands I was seeing into punk and metal
categories. Slightly earlier than that other wall, the barriers had
been busted down.
More
than usual, this next one ain't for the fainthearted...
Swans:
'Coward' (1986)
This
is Swans from their early brutal noise era, described by the uploader
as “cathartic performance, mountains of sound without melody”. I
went a little back and forward about including this, as it could be
said to really belong in another timeline. Despite strong
similarities to Black Flag's unremitting bleakness, the band came
more from the New York noise and art punk scene than from hardcore.
Hardcore fundamentalists often nursed an antipathy to 'bohemian' New
York, and it may be notable that every subsequent name on this list
(with one exception) will be West Coast. For his part frontman Gira
despised metal so much he was known to attack audience members for
headbanging. (I shall leave it to the reader's judgement whether he
himself is headbanging in this clip.)
All
of which might go some way to explaining my wondering whether this
band actually belong here. But they were perhaps the ultimate in
boiling music down to a blunt instrument. Why go for more when you
can just have less? The pummelling force denies any concept of
release, rock without the roll. (Try imagining dancing
to this.) Like the Stooges, its stripped back to such a degree you
can't tell any more whether its regressive or avant garde. There's
the lyrical parallels between themes of annihilation and
transcendence, as can be found in many other places round here. Plus
Gira even dedicated a later track ('Just a Little Boy'
from 'To Be Kind') to Chester Burnett, real name
of Howling Wolf. So the similarities are there, if not the direct
links.
(I've
written about the current incarnation of Swans not once but twice.)
Nomeansno:
'The Tower' (1989)
The
Peanuts character Pigpen was always depicted carrying a cloud of dust
around with him. Similarly, Nomeansno always seemed to be wading
waist-deep in thick, thick bass. To look at Eighties hardcore and
decide what it needed was to be more bass-driven
and rhythmic, I'm not sure whether that took an excess of guts or a
deficiency of reason. The band have since confirmed that they arrived
at that sound simply because in the early days they didn't have
anyone to play guitar.
Though
perhaps their killer app was to stretch out songs from the standard
abrupt hardcore length, and their Bad Brains-like ability to bend the
music without breaking the heavy riffing. It was a style described as "Devo on a jazz trip, Motörhead after art school,
or Wire on psychotic steroids”. In a scene which too quickly became
identikit they were immediately recognisable as hardcore and
completely unique at the same time.
I
partly picked this track because of the uncanny ease with which they
lyrically match punk existentialism to hard rock's dark romanticism.
The human figure who narrates and the Tower/black obelisk he
encounters are the ultimate irresistible force and immovable object
combination. And “The sword is truth is just another weapon/ Let me
live for one more second” must be one of the great opening
couplets.
The
Melvins: 'Boris' (1991)
Though
the Melvins formed back in '83, and were important from early on,
this may be the point they hit their lumbering epitome. (Even if it
officially pushes us into the Nineties.) It sounds like a hardcore
punk song stretched out and slowed down, like a single played on '33
with the bottom end of the sound turned up all the way. Rather than
sluggish, the result is something remorseless. The way the distortion
becomes part of the track is very similar to the Stooges or
Motorhead. If Swans were like blows repeatedly pummelling you, the
Melvins sound like a landslide slowly but surely tearing up
everything in it's path.
By going for weight not speed they allowed
hardcore punk to escape from it's louder/faster corner, gave it a way
to hook up with hard rock that bypassed all the then-trendy hair
metal bollocks and piledrove a road that led to grunge. Though
Flipper were also an important band, they were too arch, too
bohemian, too native of San Francisco to truly embrace metal. Whereas
the Melvins hailed from Washington state.
If
Swans don't quite fit the family tree, the Melvins couldn't be any
more in the DNA. Dale Crover drummed for an early version of Nirvana,
while Buzz Osborne later introduced Dave Grohl to the rest of the
band. Ex-bassist Matt Lukin went on to form Mudhoney. They've made
albums with Jello Biafra, and legendary Japanese band Boris are named after this very track. The
Melvins are one of those foundations bands, who most people haven't
heard of but they made so much possible. (More by me on the Melvins here.)
Mudhoney:
'Touch me I'm Sick' (1988)
There's
no doubting grunge rescued punk, ended its self-imposed cornering
from the rest of the room and got it back into talking with other
genres. (Something it had always done before all that dead-end
harder-than-hardcore malarkey.) But while grunge did take up from the
Melvins, that band had a definite metal influence while grunge was
much more focused on classic rock. (Plus, though no-one ever seems to
want to mention it, the fuzztoned Sixties garage punk of those fabled
Nuggets and Pebbles compilations. Try playing this against the
earlier Electric Prunes track.)
The
title, simultaneously engaging and threatening, is pretty typical of
punk's agitational engagement of the audience, and the band's black
sense of humour. Mudhoney were, as an flue kno, the definitive grunge
band, even if they weren't the best-known one. (More by me on
Mudhoney here.)
Coming
soon! The Nineties to the present day...
No comments:
Post a Comment