DC Hardcore: Why Am I Only Now Discovering It?

What we call punk rock emerged in the 1970s, in multiple locations around the world. There had been New York “proto punk” (Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground with Lou Reed dates from 1966), and Iggy Pop in Ann Arbor (the Stooges, 1968), but in the early ‘70s, several West Coast bands, not to mention Britain’s The Clash , entered the fray. What these angry young rock bands seemed to share was a disdain for the psychedelic “hippie” rock of the sixties. They wanted to return to a more primitive, louder presence. The beat was more important than the melody and screaming from the frontman was more important than heartfelt lyrics. It was not merely “anti-establishment,” which even the early Beatles attempted to market — but anti-music business as a whole!

I have been aware of this trend in rock music for many years (Warp & Woof’s “Beats” page is its paean). Even though I remember both the punk era and the preceding psychedelic era, I appreciated the hard blues heritage of punk more than the ballad-oriented, softer style of other pop groups of the sixties and seventies. Jazz-oriented singers like DC’s Roberta Flack may be artistically appealing, or soothing, but less than gripping.

Despite following pop generally, something happened to me in the early ‘80s: I got married, bought an entire house, and started a family! Pop music became merely background for the far more demanding aspects of life. I lost track of new developments and trends in its art.

One of these new trends was happening right outside my door, in my adopted DMV home. It was shared, from its beginning, with LA and San Francisco and took the collective name “hardcore” punk. Hardcore was a creature of the early 1980s. It was ignited by Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and was basically a much harder-edged, louder, angrier version of the previous decade’s punk rock. It had less connection to those primeval blues roots of the Great Migration in the ‘20s and ‘30s, when music migrated from cotton fields in Mississippi to Chicago and Detroit (the genesis of rock-n-roll in the ‘50s). It was not Willie Dixon or John Lee Hooker, or Chuck Berry, or the Ramones.

When Hardcore first emerged, critics derided it as whiny, privileged white kids complaining about things that didn’t affect THEM. Yet the alternatives for these bands seemed “weak sauce” – neither folk’s social messages, seen as virtue signaling, nor romantic challenges (traditional blues songs had that covered) would satisfy them. I see DC’s Bad Brains and Minor Threat, and LA’s Black Flag or San Francisco’s Dead Kennedys, as something like “social rock.” It was not gentle in its messaging. Kevin Mattson’s book, We’re Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America, is a good summary of the social meaning of Hardcore, even though he barely mentions that label.

One critique of Hardcore that is hard to refute for the DC practitioners is the privileged background enjoyed by its musicians. Bad Brains original frontman, H.R., was the exception that proved the rule – he not only is Black but his band blended reggae with hard rock (his successors continued that style). But Henry Rollins, who became frontman for Black Flag, was the product of DC’s elite Bullis School. His teen buddy Ian MacKaye, early founder of DC Hardcore with Minor Threat (and then Fugazi), inspired a slightly younger Northern Virginia drummer, from the band Scream, Dave Grohl. Grohl eventually moved to Seattle for a four-year stint as drummer for a new “post-punk” band, Nirvana, but only after his parents withdrew him from Thomas Jefferson High School after one year for cannabis use, enrolling him in Bishop Ireton High School in Alexandria. He later achieved his own rock stardom with Foo Fighters.

The emergence in Seattle of the famous independent record label Sub Pop, along with its unique style of alternative rock which became known as “grunge,” followed Ian MacKaye’s DC project of starting his own independent label, Dischord Records. Dischord had become the centerpiece of the DC Hardcore movement, just as Sub Pop would later be the centerpiece of Seattle Grunge. Independent production, the “DIY ethic,” was fundamental to the Hardcore movement. Dave Grohl knew MacKaye’s Dischord Records before he moved to Seattle.

Arlington (my home for 50 years) was the technical hub of DC Hardcore with Don Zientara’s Inner Ear Studios as its recording center, now an Arlington Arts Center near Jenny Dean Park. MacKaye’s “Dischord House” was a small 1920s bungalow in Lyon Park.

What about live performances? In many ways, the zenith of the movement may have been the period when Bad Brains was “in residence” at CBGB in New York. The band had been “banned in DC” due to violence among concertgoers here. But my own discovery of DC Hardcore, much delayed from its historical moment, is primarily due to reading about DC Public Library’s rooftop “archive” concerts, written up by the Washington Post’s Petula Dvorak. The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg also recently did a tribute to his friend Dave Grohl (although I don’t count Foo Fighters as Hardcore – instead they’re better known for rock anthems). Of course, these articles from the mainstream establishment media surely must be anathema to the Hardcore movement! Sigh, the paradox of success. Admittedly, that media exposure is the sole reason I’ve even heard about this engaging cultural phenomenon from the 1980s.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I still maintain that there is something raw and creative about the feelings expressed by these bands back then. Only because some became successful as recording and performance artists does the media establishment find it necessary to neutralize their power over youth! Alienation bad, economic success good. Remember the dual centers of the movement – DC and LA — media fulcrums both. Ian MacKaye himself made a point of what became the “straight edge” movement: abstinence from drugs, alcohol, even promiscuous sex (after a Minor Threat song by the same name). He saw the movement as fighting alienation, conceptually at least.

Perhaps the offshoots of Hardcore found in other locales – especially the Midwest – are worth looking at. I’ve long been a fan of David Thomas’ Pere Ubu from Cleveland. They may indulge in what Henry Rollins or Ian MacKaye would call decadent avant-garde, but there’s no mistaking the Bad Brains-style reggae influence in a song like “Humor Me.” Then, going back to the proto-punk origins in the sixties, who can doubt that Iggy Pop’s band The Stooges (John Cale, alumnus of Lou Reed’s original Velvet Underground, was its producer) blended standard rock-n-roll roots with a dark mocking of teenage romantic angst? (Listen to “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”) Proto punk may have been the inspiration for Hardcore, but some themes were notable well before reaching the apocalyptic 1980s in Washington politics or California entertainment conglomerates. Even Jim Morrison and The Doors, from that “decadent” LA psychedelic scene of the sixties, combined similar blues origins with some biting social messaging (try “Five to One”).

Furthermore, now in the third decade of the 21^st century, we have seemingly reached another inflection point with our raging culture wars. Those DC Public Library rooftop concerts may be a statement for 2023.

— William Sundwick