The furious intensity of L.A. hardcore punk

I never got a chance to see the band Black Flag live, but having read about them and listened to their records, I know that they were amazing. They embodied the spirit of furious intensity of punk rock in the form of Los Angeles based hardcore, and a movement for which they were, whether they wanted to be or not, among the leaders.

The music of Black Flag was a kind of hard pounding. It was the sound of a fistfight (or perhaps a riot; punk bands have long been artistically inspired by riots as sociocultural phenomena). Yet, unlike most fistfights, it was also quite intelligent, meaningful, and message driven. In that sense, the fistfight was more of a war of ideas; other hardcore bands - notably the Dicks, Dead Kennedys, Millions of Dead Cops (MDC), The Proletariat, and in the U.K., bands like the Business and the Exploited, might have all been more explicitly political. Black Flag's politics were concrete, and pragmatic. Guitarist Greg Ginn was, after all, the enterpreneurial wiz who put out SST records ; eventual lead singer, in fact the essential Black Flag lead singer, Henry Rollins - one of my cultural heroes and a Renaissance man for my generation - would eventually surpass Ginn's entprenerialism with his own 2-13-61 Publications, putting out books, CDs, DVDs, t-shirts, and more significantly, contributing via these a number of alternative voices (something vitally needed in today's conformist, repressive, corporatized climate). Rollins would eventually do this, along with his acting gigs, his successful career as a monologuist, his radio show, his IFC talk show hosting duties - and, lest we forget about the music, his leadership of the (punk/metal/funk/jazz influenced) Rollins Band and the occasional Black Flag reunion, as well as other musical forays; when the man gets to sleep, I don't know.

However, thanks to the magic of video, one can look back to the past. Black Flag's Rise Above video gives a good look at what a Black Flag show must have been like. Here, Henry Rollins is shown as his younger, somewhat skinnier self. He/they are intense. And the song - all about bouncing up when you are beaten down - is about as hopeful a message as a song can be.

Punk rock today, or what passes for "punk" according to mainstream media/the music industry's accounts, doesn't even come close to this. One is reminded of religion, in which a religious community attempts to convey its divinely inspired experiences, but has a hard time doing this over time. The community keeps the words, and invokes rituals, but what these may have eventually denoted, or tried to invoke, gets altered, and in some cases watered down.