Electric Wizards: A Tapestry of Heavy Music, 1968 to the Present by JR Moores

Author:JR Moores [Moores, JR]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, General, Genres & Styles, Heavy Metal, Rock
ISBN: 9781789144499
Google: Ldg7EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2022-11-28T20:39:47+00:00

Bad Brains

Punk also made it possible to do all this the other way round, so to speak. Rather than forming as a hardcore band, the members of Bad Brains had started out by specializing in jazz fusion under the name Mind Power. They had been raised on James Brown and admired the likes of Frank Zappa and Yes. On bearing witness to the punk boom, Mind Power renamed themselves after the Ramones’ song ‘Bad Brain’ and repurposed their musical chops for altogether different purposes. While their friends from their neighbourhood in Washington DC were attending shows by Trouble Funk, the members of Bad Brains would be the only black people over at a different venue, watching a gig by Dead Boys. Back at home they would listen to the Ramones, The Dickies and The Clash, but they’d speed the records up to 78 rpm, and this helped Bad Brains to develop a faster and more original style of their own.21 They also discovered reggae and Rastafarianism, and after their initial hardcore outings would use their skills to straddle punk, funk, metal, rap, reggae, dub and other styles. Put off by the violent nihilism they heard in Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, Bad Brains also strove to forge a more positive take on punk. Paul ‘H.R.’ Hudson sang about ‘PMA’, the initials standing for ‘Positive Mental Attitude’, an idea taken from a self-improvement book that H.R.’s father had recommended: Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937).

Self-help books don’t hold all the answers. Bad Brains had to watch certain rivals grow rich while they themselves were left floundering behind as highly respected forerunners who would never make the grade of superstar status. In an interview promoting 1986’s I Against I, bassist Darryl Jenifer credited his band with basically inventing the speed/thrash metal sound, while also having the foresight to keep developing beyond that narrow style. Jenifer found it hard to understand why so few metal bands who had adopted that sound themselves and subsequently risen up to the arena circuit level wished to associate or ally themselves with his own pioneering crew. ‘I mean, Metallica have said they dig us, which is cool,’ he told Sounds magazine, ‘but most of those bands don’t want anything to do with us. When people like Megadeth and Slayer were no doubt listening to Boston and shit, we were playing the sort of music they still can only dream of. Now what has happened? They’re all signed to major labels and doing big deal tours and we’re still on the fringes.’22 Where were the support slots that should have been offered to Bad Brains in reciprocation for their part in originating the form of music that had propelled to fame the likes of Slayer et al.? ‘Maybe they’re all just scared of getting blown away,’ Jenifer laughed. He posited that Bad Brains also got overlooked by conservative metal fans, journalists and magazines because his band didn’t have the right hair styles, didn’t wear earrings, weren’t white-skinned and didn’t engage in ‘stupid heavy metal poses’.

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