Hardcore for Nerds

"Why sneer at the intellectuals?"*
punk music, left politics, and cultural history - previously found here.
contact: gabbaweeks[at]gmail.com (sorry, no promos/submissions, thanks) or ask
Dublin, Ireland. 24, male, history graduate
HFN | HFN 2011 HFN 2010 hfn2k9 HRO 2k9 Hoover Genealogy Project | Hitler Runoff | @HC4N
*from the title of a review of Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Departure by Michael Foot, Evening Standard, Nov. 26, 1943.
May 10
Permalink moss icon emo punk post-hardcore
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May 08
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The Radiators from Space - ‘Head for the Sun’ from Sound City Beat (2012) - originally by The Movement (1968)

[buy here]

This is the opening track of the Radiators’ new album of covers from Irish ‘beat’ groups, between 1964 and 1971. It’s a really good record, that combines the band’s own versatility and musical strengths with a wide variety of styles from their formative era (being a late-70s punk and post-punk band). Indeed, as singer and guitarist Phil Chevron remarks in the liner notes which give a track-by-track guide to the history, of those bands “who got to cut whole albums and not just a smattering of singles…. [t]heir eclectic impulses are often striking, as they used the album format to commit as much of their musical DNA as possible to vinyl.” Yet in turn the Radiators add their own interpretations of what the music should sound like, often drawing on their, later, punk influences in order to bring out the protean character of the music, or simply to have fun - as in the case of this song: “For no better reason than it seemed to work and that we were big fans of da bruddas back in our garage days, our version channels The Ramones in surfin’ mode…” (which is slightly bizarre in the damp Irish context, as I’ve mentioned before in relation to the Undertones’ similar ‘Here Comes The Summer’, but that’s the genius of cultural influences… they’re not limited to the one situation).

So Sound City Beat isn’t an exactly faithful transcription of past music, and all the better for it (it also means you can dig out the originals on YouTube - full list here - and expect them to be somewhat different). Neither is it a rendering of certain ‘classics’ into a single recognisable style - I can imagine the band had a lot of fun working with the various styles on show here, and at its best it echoes the diversity of their own great eclectic masterpiece, Ghostown. The only song I did know before (admittedly my pre-1970s, or non-punk, musical knowledge is pretty terrible) is one of the best, the inestimable ‘Gloria’. Which I first encountered through the Patti Smith version on Horses, but was originally written by Van Morrison in the band Them, in 1965. I like to think of this as rediscovering an Irish treasure - after having it exported back to you in Americanised form - but the truth is it was a UK hit and a global song, so it’s kinda churlish to be too possessive of something just because the author was from Belfast. There’s something simple and effective but inherently transformative, or adaptable, about the song, that seems to suit its role in both proto-punk and Irish rock:

“it was, as it happens, the first song ever played by the Radiators. Taking our cue from Morrison’s own performances - at the Maritime Hotel, he is said to have stretched the song to fifteen minutes or more on occasion - we found it useful for extended arrangements, especially in venues outside Dublin where the standard thirty minute sets favoured by punk bands would have been profoundly frowned upon.”

It’s not all obscurities otherwise, though, at least in terms of authorship - there’s an early Rory Gallagher track from his Taste days, an early Thin Lizzy, and a (literally) lost Horslips debut single. But the real fun is in the miniature Nuggets-like quality of the rest of the album, from excellent band names (Eire Apparent) and predictable song titles (“Yes, I Need Someone”), and sounds expanding to folk and psychedelia, to some thrilling pop hooks. Throughout it’s possible to recognise large elements of the Radiators’ own sound, but depending on the vocals and the style of the cover, it can be sometimes hard to remember that it is all just the one band playing the songs. Or sometimes, bizarrely, to remember that this is music that existed in its own time and place and isn’t totally the reimaginings of contemporary punks - not to deny the adherence in spirit to and difference of the styles used, but hearing this music mostly as a blank slate, the Radiators definitely place their own modern (or at least post-‘77, which is not very new after all) stamp on it. 

For example, the atypical “stone solid Mod groove” of showband The Blue Aces (a central theme of the album’s historical revisionism is the distinction between the popular history of 60s, “in which the conventional wisdom habitually depicts the secular pulpit of Gay Byrne’s television show set against a soundtrack of Showband Scene mania”, and the underground of Beat Clubs - although one of my parents describes it as more of a straightforward rural-urban divide between the showbands and the tennis pavilions) is given a take that “acknowledges its kinship with the spirit of the punk bands of a decade later”; but which sounds to me very much like Rancid’s early 90s album Let’s Go. Of course, some bands are always arch-revivalists, but it’s fascinating to hear everything connected on a long line and collapsed together into one asynchronous celebration of a past. To quote an American band (if only because I can’t think of similar lyrics from an Irish one), Drink deep, it’s just a taste, and it might not come this way again…

2012 60s 70s NO PAST irish punk radiators HFN
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Apr 30
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The avowedly politicized language of the punk rock bands, exemplified in the Sex Pistols’ 1976 hit ‘Anarchy in the UK’, caught the sour mood of the time. But the punk band’s politics were as one-dimensional as their musical range, the latter all too often restricted to three chords and a single beat and dependent upon volume for its effect. Like the Red Army Fraction, the Sex Pistols and other punk rock groups wanted above all to shock. Even their subversive appearance and manner came packaged in irony and a certain amount of camp: ‘Remember the Sixties?’ they seemed to say; ‘Well, like it or not, we are what’s left.’ Musical subversion now consisted of angry songs decrying ‘hegemony’, their counterfeit political content masking the steady evisceration of musical form.
However bogus their politics and their music, the punk generation’s cynicism at least was real, and honestly come by. They were the sour and mostly untalented end of a growing spectrum of disrespect: for the past, for authority, for public figures and public affairs.
— Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
judt history punk
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Apr 12
Permalink punk odd future sex pistols fucked up pop
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Apr 05
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Iceage - ‘Never Return’ from New Brigade 

This is my favourite song from the album (slightly ahead of ‘White Rune’), probably because it’s by far the most melodic - and a lot of what I like about this band is how they remind me of Male Bonding on their first album. Although Iceage are ‘punker’, I think that’s a relatively good place to situate them, as an ostensibly grotty lo-fi punk band that’s really quite listenable and that gets noticed by ears normally preoccupied with indie. I have to repeat the Joy Division comparisons, because they really do have that metallic, clangy Factory Records post-punk sound (I think the singing is a good deal cheerier though) and it’s far from a bad thing - especially as Joy Division are one of those bands I rarely listen to at length, so it can be nice to enjoy them through vicarious influences. (The chorus in ‘Eyes’, by the way, reminds me a lot of the ‘3-1-G’ line of my favourite Joy Division song - by way of Swing Kids cover - ‘Warsaw’)

Plus, and aside from wading through the whole are-they-xenophobic-neo-nazis thing (I’m reasonably satisfied they’re not), they do have a certain satisfying edge to them, don’t they?

iceage punk
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Apr 04
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livsrock asked: How did you get into punk music? :)

Completely randomly. A friend’s brother, I think it was, listened to Green Day, and I didn’t really listen to anything, so it seemed like as good as place as any to start. So the first CD I ever bought was Warning, and then I worked it out from there.

green day punk 00s
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Mar 23
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Husker Du - ‘Real World’ from Metal Circus (1983)

Just had a moment of historical anxiety there about my (probably technically incorrect) statement in the previous post that 1982 as an end-date was “essentially before hardcore establishes itself”. I could go back and add a qualification like “properly”, but then I’ve already staked myself on essentialism… and anyway, to my mind established hardcore is probably the least interesting thing connected with punk other than the Sex Pistols. 

However, I usually date my conception of ‘post-hardcore’ from the above record - precocious in just about everything, including the following year’s epic Zen Arcade, as Husker Du were - and I think it also serves specifically as an encapsulation of the potential of punk as progressive as well as a reactive musical movement, from the lyrics of the opening song above through polemics like ‘It’s Not Funny Anymore’ and the dark, queered satire of ‘Diane’; culminating in its arc of thrashy brevity with the metallic twists of ‘Out on a Limb’.

post-hardcore husker du hardcore punk
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A beginner’s guide to punk music:

Can you recommend a solid beginner’s guide to punk music? Though I might be doing research this summer on queer theory, anti-sociality, negativity, and all of those topics’ intersections with, and sometimes opposition to, a *lot* of stuff (“leftist communitarian” politics; mainstream and radical aesthetics objects, e.g., film, comics, music, literature; psychoanalysis and postmodern thought; the history of various radical/othered groups; etc.)—which is to say that I will probably wind up doing a lot of research on punk music—I am also just trying to find my way into appreciating punk music. I really enjoy Built to Spill’s Keep It Like A Secret, Cloud Nothings’ latest album, I’m getting to know No Age, Dismemberment Plan is awesome, and etc. But I figure you might have some particularly solid, heartfelt recommendations, seeing as you post fairly frequently about punk music. That coupled with the fact that your blog, in its punk/politics/philosophy trifecta, is pretty terrific, and therefore—in my eyes—a good source of recommendations/commentary on any one of those three things.

thropless

(Got this very interesting question through Tumblr’s ‘fanmail’ function - yes, outsiders, that is actually its name - which doesn’t allow you to publicly respond. Assuming that wasn’t the sender’s intention, I’m going to reply here, which also has the advantage, unlike the regular ‘ask’ function, that others can directly reblog this post if they have something to add…) 

Many thanks for the compliment, very happy to help!

Not sure if it is really a “solid beginner’s guide”, but Nicholas Rombes’ superb A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-1982 sounds as if it could go really well with your interests, and it’s quite accessible even if it eschews any and all attempts at a traditional account of punk bands. Also his 33 1/3 book on the Ramones self-titled debut is an excellent attempt to reframe the original classic punk album in a cultural theory context, as ‘the last great modern record, or the first great postmodern one’. 

Beyond that (and beyond books, which I’ve otherwise found to be very limited on this subject as I’m interested in or see it), I’d have to skip forward a few years to c. 1985 before my knowledge really picks up again (an arguable failing of the Rombes book is that it does end in 1982, essentially before hardcore establishes itself, and thus before all the main forms of punk rock I enjoy today) with the ‘Revolution Summer’ bands in DC and the nascent ‘emo’ movement - so Embrace, Rites of Spring, who politicise hardcore in a newly personal and emotional sense, and thence onwards (and inwards) to Fugazi, who really as a band both embodied and transcended the ‘politics’ of punk as I’d see it, as well as contributing to the expansion of its sound.

Personally, I most identify that post-hardcore sensibility, both musically and lyrically (and thus politically and philosophically) with my favourite band, Hot Water Music, who drew a lot on the earlier Fugazi sound but also went their own, more moderate experimental way with it over the past decade (or two); something like their album No Division would be a really interesting place to start I think with their sort of positive reaction to hardcore and its politics. I’m sure there are more detailed places to start with the intersection of punk and ‘anti-sociality’ (and I’m not even touching on UK or Irish punk here, of which there is a lot and a lot to be said), but aside from, or developing from, my early experiences of stuff from Green Day to basically the entire catalogue of Epitaph Records (and the standard, socially and politically vocal bands like Rancid or Bad Religion), I’ve really more gotten into punk as a positive, progressive and reflective movement, so it’s hard for me not to put that spin on it.

I get the impression from the bands you mention that you like a combination of the melodic and the somewhat abrasive, and probably around that a certain structure of complexity - which is pretty close to my own tastes, although curiously I’m not a particular fan of those specific bands, but that just goes to show that punk, particularly modern punk (or ‘post-hardcore’, and through its influence, much of today’s ‘indie rock’ - to distinguish this in part from music which sticks to punk, or hardcore, as a much more conventional image), is a wonderfully multi-threaded affair. Anybody else able to pick it up from here?

punk politics philosophy
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Mar 22
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yeah, as much as I like Smash, the Offspring’s third album (this was their debut), I don’t need Ignition to be repackaged as it. particularly as I’ve always kinda preferred Ignition, if even for relatively pedestrian reasons.

yeah, as much as I like Smash, the Offspring’s third album (this was their debut), I don’t need Ignition to be repackaged as it. particularly as I’ve always kinda preferred Ignition, if even for relatively pedestrian reasons.

offspring 90s punk
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Mar 20
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What is your favourite album cover?

distorte:

Use the photo reply. Or reblog.

My favourite album cover is not only that of my favourite album, A Flight and a Crash, but my favourite album covers are all those of the same band, Hot Water Music, and done by the same artist, Scott Sinclair. Some examples:

A Flight and a Crash

Caution

No Division

Never Ender compilation

Moonpies for Misfits EP

hot water music scott sinclair art post-hardcore punk
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