CHAPTER 8
How to Forget (and Remember) The Greatest Punk Rock Band in the World: Bad Brains, Hardcore Punk and Black
Popular Culture
Tara Martin Lopez and Michael Mills
On 24 June 1979, an unknown punk band opened for British musicians, the Damned, at a small venue in Washington, DC.1 While the audience was expectantly waiting for the headliners, the frenetic and explosive opening act, Bad Brains, stole the show. One audience member remarked that the show was an absolute benchmark. Punk rock icon, Henry Rollins, went so far as to say, Bad Brains blew the Damned with all their makeup and shit right off the stage.2
What was even more remarkable about Bad Brains was that they were all Black musicians in what is commonly perceived as an all-White music genre. Band members Paul Hudson (or HR), Earl Hudson, Gary Miller (or Dr. Know) and Darryl Jenifer made Bad Brains central to the formation of American hardcore punk. Like first-wave punk, hardcore sought to define
T.M. Lopez (*) Department of Sociology, Peninsula College, Port Angeles, WA, USA e-mail: TMartin@pencol.edu
M. Mills Department of English, Peninsula College, Port Angeles, WA, USA e-mail: MMills@pencol.edu
© The Author(s) 2017 K. Gildart et al. (eds.), Youth Culture and Social Change, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52911-4_8
175
itself in opposition to mainstream, feel good music, particularly pop, disco and stadium rock, with its perceived intricate musicianship, nine-minute songs, concept albums and bloated drum and guitar solos. Hardcore responded with short, fast, songs, simple chords and beats and biting lyrics that spoke to disaffected youth. The birth of hardcore was also the result of punks disgust with new wave and the record industrys promotion of an inauthentic version of punk. The same punks harboured a certain degree of distrust for first-wave punk bands who inadvertently or otherwise brought punk to mainstream consciousness. While such bands remained heroes to many for their innovation in sound and attitude, hardcore punks found the Ramones lyrics lacking in substance and the Sex Pistols image to be excessively nihilistic.3 The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the conservative, neoliberal ascendancy throughout the 1980s, also created a sense of political urgency, especially in Washington, DC. Therefore, bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat made personal and social change central to their message. Consequently, the resulting music and subculture of hardcore thrived in the underground, operating with a Do It Yourself (DIY) men- tality, progressive left-wing politics, and attempting to keep itself at arms length from popular culture and the music industry.4
Nevertheless, the images of bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag have emblazoned a specific visage of hardcore punk on collective memory, that of alienated White male youth. Some White punk musicians were the first to perpetuate this idea. When interviewed in 1979, for instance, Johnny Ramone from the Ramones asserted that they were playing pure rock & roll with no blues or folk or any of that stuff in it.5 That singular and isolated idea stuck, and in 1986 journalist Mykel Board proclaimed that punk was the first white music since the 1960s psychedelic stuff.6
Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff critically summarises the overall shape of this hegemonic understanding of history when he writes: Like many facets of pop culture, [punks] historical image has been whitewashed: when you think of punks history, its bands like the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Ramones that spring to mind.7
Despite the prevalence of this dominant image of punk, among musi- cians and fans, a powerful undercurrent of memory exists that attests to the undeniably formative influence of Bad Brains. Anthrax guitarist, Scott Ian, is frank when he states, The Bad Brains invented hardcore, not Black Flag or Fear. Those bands ruled as well, but they didnt have the density of the Bad Brains.8 Obviously, the explosiveness of these upstart punks was not momentary, but for many, Bad Brains had an integral, transformative
176 T.M. LOPEZ AND M. MILLS
and long-lasting role in the creation of hardcore punk. Therefore, our aim is to situate Bad Brains in hardcore punk rock history not as an anomaly or a side note, but as an essential force.
More importantly, our study will look beyond the late 1970s and early 1980s to the present, and to the memory of Bad Brains and its importance to punks of colour. We will demonstrate that since 2000, a flood of texts, both written and visual, remembering Bad Brains and reclaiming their space in the hardcore punk rock pantheon have appeared. By analysing documentaries, books, zines and interviews, we will argue that these recent excavations represent George Lipsitzs understanding of counter-memory. According to Lipsitz groups like women and African Americans have been ignored in dominant narratives of history. In order to defy such universalising forces that obliterate the traces of subordinate groups histories, such marginalised groups focus on their localised experiences and engage in a form of remem- bering that reconstructs histor
