Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, Keith Morris, H.R. Dir. Paul Rachman, Sony Pictures Classics
As an '80s teen, I loved punk rock. First Wave acts like Sex Pistols and Ramones, hardcore bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Husker Du - didn't matter to me. If it sounded as angry as I felt, if it moved fast and howled like a cat in heat, if it pissed off my parents or any authority figure close to hand, I loved it and I wanted more. Many of my friends felt much the same but, unlike me, they took it further. Much further.
They went to the Jockey Club, a one-time nightclub/casino in Newport, Ky., and hung out, underage, any night there was a punk show, which was most nights. They got into booze, drugs, sex. They ran away from home, got bounced into early treatment cults like Straight, Inc., dropped out of high school, got pregnant, arrested, and in a few cases dead. Not all of them, of course, but the Greater Cincinnati punk rock scene in the 1980s consisted largely of the kids with whom I grew up and went to school - it might have been an underground, but it wasn't hard to find. If you had a Ramones record and knew someone else who had one, you already had one foot in the scene.
I ran away three times in high school, went to treatment a year after graduating, but none of it has any direct connection to owning a Dead Kennedys T-shirt sophomore year. Despite my own turbulence between 1982 & 1986, I played it safe. My friends who went to the JC every night laughed when I said I had no ID, but I never took the risk. Getting grounded I could deal with - going to juvie, knowing my parents might well leave me there if they could, hard pass. I didn't want to get away from home piecemeal, I wanted to go to college and never return.
Calling myself punk mattered a great deal to me in high school, which today strikes me as remarkable because I never was one. Not really. I listened to the hardcore punk radio show, SEARCH&DESTROY, on the community radio station, listened to hardcore records at friends' houses, saw all-ages shows at Bogart's, the local rock club, but I was never a punk as my friends. I barely owned any real punk records outside of Sex Pistols, Ramones, and Stranglers - First Wave acts, not hardcore. I never wore the uniform, never owned a leather biker jacket, never dyed my hair or pierced my ears, either of which would have gotten me suspended from my Catholic high school if not grounded for life.
Which is not to say a wardrobe or hairstyle defined whether someone was punk, but it's telling in my case. It needs to be, especially as I approach a documentary like Paul Rachman's 2006 AMERICAN HARDCORE. I was around the Cincinnati punk scene, if not in it, and I listened to a lot of the music, so I have some amount of valid personal experience and perspective going in, but it's important to be clear with myself: I was not a punk rocker. This film does not tell my story. I can make no sweeping, generalized pronouncements about it that possess even a shred of credibility.
As an '80s teen I grew tired of how much popular culture centered on Boomers' endless celebration of their glorious '60s youth. I wonder if it still feels as close and as real to them as it did in the '80s. I know that whenever I watch documentaries or even feature films set in that decade it seems impossible that any of it ever happened. AMERICAN HARDCORE contributed to that feeling in me. Thanksgiving weekend of 1987, members of Drunk Injuns and Doggy Style, two Southern California hardcore bands, the former fronted by The Adolescents' Rikk Agnew, stayed in my parents' house after playing a Jockey Club gig. Despite several of those who stayed in my house appearing in the movie, the era doesn't seem any more possible than ever.
In the UK, punk came from the working class. In the US, hardcore came largely from the suburban middle class. For all that the police hated and harrassed punks, for all those who did get into trouble, even for all those who died young, most people I know who got deeply into the scene now lead quiet, conventional middle class lives. Punk rockers like to talk about police and even government harrassment, but much of the hardcore era looks now like a case study in privilege. Sure, white punks got maced and worse by the police, even went to jail on occasion, but imagine the police reaction to an out-of-control, overcrowded hip hop show. Heck, we don't have to imagine. We have microfilm.
Some who critiqued AMERICAN HARDCORE did so from the perspective that it's a study of white male rage and privilege. In one sense, that's silly - hardcore punk between 1980-1986 largely WAS an all-male, majority-white proposition so criticizing it for being about what it has to be about doesn't make much sense. On the other hand, neither the filmmakers nor any of the musicians and others interviewed ever reflects on how extraordinarily UN-oppressed and interfered-with their subculture was, particularly compared to what people of color and those on the LGBTQ+ spectrum faced. For a movement supposedly about resistance and protest of the American status quo, that's a mindboggling disconnect.
Of course, as director Paul Rachman points out in his commentary, punk mostly rebelled against/reacted to "bad music," a charge echoed by most of the film's talking heads in its first section. Listening to guys like Rollins and MacKaye and Morris grouse about that music only drove home to me their privilege - they may have resented Reagan, but what drove them to pick up instruments was Album Oriented Radio, hardly the face of oppression. It also drove home to me how well some of that bad music stands up compared to the average Minor Threat record. Sure, Peter Frampton bit it, but as artist after artist railed against Fleetwood Mac I kept wishing my copy of RUMORS still played.
All of this reads like a bad review and that's a mistake. AMERICAN HARDCORE mostly works, covering the roots of the subgenre, the important acts like Black Flag and Bad Brains, the regional scenes, the Do It Yourself and Straight Edge ethos so crucial in the Washington, D.C. scene, and speaking to almost anyone still alive from those days, though Husker Du's Bob Mould is notable by his absence. It's an effective, heartfelt look back at a subculture and its passions.
Toward the end, as the various talking heads discuss the end of the golden age of hardcore, they come at it from the angle that the touring and struggling burned everyone out. It did, but the movie talks around what had begun to happen musically, namely that bands like Black Flag, Meat Puppets, and Husker Du all began writing slow and midtempo songs which incorporated the influence of classic rock acts like Grateful Dead and Black Sabbath. Hard-fast-loud music proved as unsustainable as the lifestyle. At a certain point, musicians branch out and experiment, rebelling against the rebellion. All art does, but AMERICAN HARDCORE shies away from this conclusion.
AMERICAN HARDCORE is not at all a bad documentary. It's mostly pretty great. It offers a narrative that feels incomplete, and possibly that on purpose. For such a seething, vibrant scene, Rachman does a better job of presenting the parts most interesting to him and his conclusions. I suppose that's true of all documentary, but it's a liability, and a troubling one, in this case.
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