Major Labels by Kelefa Sanneh

Author:Kelefa Sanneh [Sanneh, Kelefa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

I’m a person, just like you

But I’ve got better things to do

Than sit around and fuck my head

Hang out with the living dead

All he really meant was that he didn’t use drugs or alcohol, unlike some of the punks he knew. And yet this declaration became the basis of an unlikely subculture: ever since the early eighties, there have been “straight-edge” acolytes and bands around the world, using militant language in defense of sobriety. For many years I was straight-edge, too, though somewhat ironically, and mainly by default, since none of my friends really cared about getting high or getting drunk. (By the nineties, the militance and self-righteousness of the straight-edge movement had become a running joke, even among those of us who were, in fact, straight-edge.) If punk rock was antisocial, hardcore was often anti-antisocial, combining a general truculence with a pious commitment to community-mindedness. “Don’t go out alone, go with a friend / You might need him in the end,” MacKaye sang. He was expounding on the joy of fellowship, and the necessity of self-defense. Or maybe it was the other way around.

MacKaye’s best friend was Henry Rollins, who was working in a Washington, DC, ice cream shop and leading a bare-bones hardcore band called S.O.A., for State of Alert, when he agreed to move across the country to join Black Flag, one of the first and biggest and best bands in the hardcore universe. Ever since the late 1970s, there had been a fashionable and creative punk-rock scene in Hollywood, but Black Flag was different: a feral fraternity in street clothes, from the unhip Southern California town of Hermosa Beach. Police officers often raided Black Flag’s concerts, and this conflict inspired a furious, scene-centric protest song called “Police Story”: “This fucking city is run by pigs / They take the rights away from all the kids!” The band’s leader was Greg Ginn, a guitarist whose scabrous and squally playing made Black Flag sound at once angry and slightly psychedelic. Rollins was a theatrical front man, shouting about depression and insanity while growing increasingly muscular and increasingly shaggy—in the course of a few years, he went from looking like a skinhead to looking like a caveman. After Black Flag broke up, in 1986, Rollins became an all-purpose countercultural icon, touring the world with his own band and as a poet and speaker, and working as an actor, a model, and a radio DJ. In 1994, he published the tour diaries he kept during his time in Black Flag, which provided an edifying record of the atmosphere at Black Flag concerts. One entry, written after a 1983 London gig, documented the emerging cultural divide between English punk and American hardcore. “A man with a mohawk started to fuck with Greg and I beat him up,” Rollins wrote. “His mohawk made a good handle to hold onto when I beat his face into the floor. The bouncers were afraid to break it up. They stood nearby and asked me to please let the guy go.

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