American Hardcore - The History of Punk Rock 1980 - 1986
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Actor: Alex Gonzalez (IX), Alvin Robertson, Dave Smalley, Dez Cadena, Vic BondiBrand: Sony
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.0
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.78:1
Running Time: 100 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-02-20
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of American Hardcore - The History of Punk Rock 1980 - 1986
DVD Review: the fallacy of reminiscence
Summary: 2 Stars
This documentary cames across to me as being VERY disingenuous and full of faulty reminiscence--basically, a reminder that eye witness accounts, especially in retrospect, should be taken with more than a grain of salt.
This film is a documentary of sorts about the early hardcore punk scene--post-Sex Pistols and post-Ramones, after the initial flux of punk rock. America faced a new threat (the Reagan era), and a whole new crew of young kids had reason to feel ousted from the dream world of the institutions of the country.
And so began a nationwide network of bands who pressed their own records, drew their own album covers and played in laundromats and abandoned gas stations. Bands who slept on the floors of apartments of other bands and knew that their time was short, because their music was all about energy and rage and throwing your fist at whatever face was nearby. And they called themselves hardcore. In the course of this documentary are interviews with members of Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, SSD, Jerry's Kids, and all kinds of punk rockers who lived and thrashed in those days.
But just like the conservative fantasy of the 'good ol' days,' when, as Reagan himself put it so appropriately, "before there were racial problems in America," we know that reminiscence can lie, and even those who lived and worked in the days that are being reminisced upon can often get them wrong. There are moments of wonderful honesty in this film about the unreserved anger and energy of the early-80s hardcore scene, both its glories and its horrors, and then there are people who just want to feel important and self-righteous, and unfortunately this film cannot distinguish between the two.
There are some moments to admire--H.R. of Bad Brains is, as always, a joy to hear, mainly because of the spirituality he infuses into music. He discusses not so much the glory of the scene itself but he and the band's philosophy behind their actions. Rollins and Ginn of Black Flag remain steadfastly honest about their scene and their roles in it. Rollins especially carries the distinction of a man who knows who he is and who he has been, able to look at the drive towards violence in the scene, and report on the abuses he took from police, but also able to look back and know that it was a momentary scene, good for what it could do but also knowing that the violence could only go so far, as Ginn acknowledges as his reason for getting out.
But there is a lot that this film very much white-washes or simply ignores. The minority (and sometimes hatred) of women, which is dealt with in an obligatory couple of minutes, kind of like watching a black man tap-dance on the white-as-hell "Lawrence Welk Show," insisting that there were women in the scene, but the few provided stills conflicting with the primarily testosterone-packed live footage.
But my main issue has to do with the overtones of White Power that eventually took over the hardcore scene and had its roots in the early 80s, while in this movie those overtones dismissed by Ian MacKaye insisting that there is "no racism" about the Minor Threat song, "Guilty of Being White." The 80s hardcore scene used White Power and Nazi references in two different ways: on one hand, you had songs like "The Big Takeover" by Bad Brains that used Nazi references to make political statements, to liken the conservative noose of Reagan clones to the Final Solution.
But on the other hand, you had those who simply used the hardcore scene as a way to establish White Power and turn every good idea upside-down. And this is where the movie fails in a big way, because while I wouldn't say that Minor Threat engendered the White Power movement, there were many who made it its bastardized first step.
The problem may lie in the lack of rather distinguished names from the hardcore scene. Though Hüsker Dü is mentioned a couple of times, no one from the band is ever interviewed. The same with Dead Kennedys, who clearly saw such a problem in the scene when they wrote a song like "Nazi Punks F*** Off." But in the end, swastikas and KKK hoods and stormtrooper S's are carted across the screen with little sense of who was using them in what way. It is also curious that the film wants to drop in the Beastie Boys, but never gains any access for comments--did the Beastie Boys simply have no interest in providing any reflection on the hardcore scene, or did they offer comments that didn't fit into the narrow view the filmmakers wanted to expound? In this respect, I feel that the filmmakers wanted to portray a very predetermined vision of the hardcore years and didn't want anything to get in the way of that.
The film is also disingenuous in the way is documents the fall of the hardcore scene. Yes, there were many bands who dropped their tempos and lamed out into 'hard rock' or metal. But to present Bad Brains as a band that lost their edge when they started doing reggae? Even the classic yellow ROIR cassette (which I bought at least 4 or 5 times because people kept stealing mine, since I was the only person in my town who was insane enough to buy that stuff) that they offered as a seminal hardcore album had not only reggae but a dub groove, so to try to say that Bad Brains went the way of the lame by doing reggae after being such great hardcore punks is simply false.
In the end, this film comes across as a bunch of older punks harking back on the good old days. While some can still tell us stories of what really happened, others come across no better than fat and slow varsity letter football players who want to hold on to the myths of their past so deparately that they'll change the facts to make their stories sound plausible. Dave Brockie puts it best in this movie when he scorns modern punk and follows that up by saying that he just might be "old and bitter." Unfortunately, these filmmakers seem to think that the old and bitter have something honest to say.
Description of American Hardcore - The History of Punk Rock 1980 - 1986
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