American Hardcore: A Tribal History. By Steve Blush. Feral House. 336 pp.

Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth. Edited by Kim Cooper and David Smay. Feral House. 326 pp.

feral house, my kind of publisher

Like a lot of kids who were ten in 1968, the first piece of music I really paid attention to was "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies. I didn't think much about the lyrics (not that "I just can't believe the loveliness of loving you" would have repaid much scrutiny), or even about whether Jughead was a guitar player. But perfect pop songs are a universal language, and "Sugar Sugar" was a great segue from nursery rhymes to the Grateful Dead.

Cut to 1982. I was working as a rock critic for the Baltimore City Paper and covering a gig by the California hardcore band Flipper. They were playing a place called the Marble Bar, in an abandoned hotel downtown. The room was mostly empty. The crowd was drunk; the band was drunk; I was drunk. The members of Flipper emerged, pushed horrific feedback through the speakers for ten minutes, screamed "You're the worst audience we've ever seen," and left.

We'd all come so far. But it was a comprehensible progression. Too much Archies makes Flipper inevitable.

***

The genres themselves would certainly seem to be opposites. Bubblegum music - as represented by such late-sixties progenitors of the form as the Cuff Links and Captain Groovy and His Bubblegum Army - was a pure commercial confection. These groups did not exist, but were the inventions of producers and the performances of studio musicians. None of these people were trying to make anything that would endure beyond a brief chart run; certainly none were trying to produce cultural artifacts of enduring significance. They hardly aspired to any audience aside from people ages 8-14.

Bubblegum music reveled, and revels - if we count such contemporary acts as the Spice Girls or O-Town as bubblegum - in inauthenticity. It is a flimsy thing of sequined costumes and marginal talents, but it is in part compelling for exactly that reason. It has a sort of drag queen celebration of surface, as if nothing is important but fashion and a few moments of pleasure.

Hardcore punk, on the other hand, in its first incarnation in Los Angeles and D.C. among bands such as Black Flag and Bad Brains, was precisely to an absolute standard of artistic integrity and authenticity. Any compromise with fashion or melody or production values or pleasure or popularity was a sell-out, and these very young kids sought to express their rage with total directness.

This music and the people who made it were actually dangerous. The first hardcore band I ever saw was Minor Threat. At the Ontario Theater in DC, 1980, large young men in combat boots were leaping feet first off the stage into what would now be called the mosh pit. People were dancing and bleeding. Even with the glow of nostalgia bathing these events, I'm not sure that is a good idea.

There are, however, subterranean similarities. As Steve Blush writes in American Hardcore, "The first HC bands came out of suburban LA beach towns, probably 'cause there they lived as close to The American Dream as you could get. Born of a doomed ideal of middle-class utopia, Punk juiced their nihilism." And, we might add, it expressed and communicated their nihilism. But it also, at least for those who survived, cured their nihilism: turned them from disaffected kids into artists, made nihilism into power. Bubblegum, with its innocence and utopianism, is the sort of thing that drove these kids to nihilism into the first place: it was a perfect embodiment of the falseness they felt in their lives. And so we might conceive bubblegum/hardcore as a swirl of interdependent opposites, the surface and the underbelly of the dream, the eternal suburban yin/yang.

Hardcore punk and bubblegum music are among the least pretentious and the most straightforward musics ever made. Neither, that is, pretended to be anything that it was not, and both achieved a sort of perfect presence in their moment. Each was an opposite of "art rock," the bloated music that originated in the late Beatles and by the early seventies had spawned such groups as Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and Yes. Bubblegum music employed sophisticated production techniques, and also some of the best songwriters and musicians of the era, but was dedicated to selling records rather than making high art. And its inauthenticity was, we might say, honest: it didn't pretend not to pretend. The title Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth is, hence, both ironic and right. Hardcore punk was simplistic, blistering, Thoreauvian in its demand for directness and honesty. It was a sort of back-to-nature movement, though the nature involved was human rather than arboreal.

Bubblegum and hardcore crystallize fundamental aspects of the American ethos, if that's not too anachronistic a notion: shameless commerce and rugged individualism taken to the point of blunt brutality, respectively. Americans are inclined to think that there's nothing wrong with making a shitload of money through salesmanship, if you have a good product. Bubblegum music is honest greed, fleecing kids by giving them what they want. No decent American would begrudge either the kids or the producers their honestly dishonest pleasures. Hardcore bands, on the other hand, were usually pointedly broke, driving up and down the coast in messed up old vans trying, like Flipper, to alienate their audiences.

And surprisingly, perhaps, there are explicit connections of bubblegum to hardcore. Almost all the hardcore acts started by listening to the Ramones, and the Ramones themselves collected bubblegum albums and covered the songs. Indeed, from here the Ramones sound almost bubblegummy: the early albums are sweet, melodic, poppy as hell even though they never made it onto the radio. The great Joan Jett produced the only album by the Germs (perhaps the first hardcore band), and she too has had a career, starting with the all-jailbait group the Runaways in the seventies, that straddled the two genres.

We might even trace the bubblegum and hardcore impulses in American politics, albeit in rather toned-down form. Al Gore presenting a focus-grouped, scripted simulation of passion and truth is bubblegum politics. He's hardly trying to conceal the falsity. John McCain traveling to the headquarters of the Christian coalition to deliver a diatribe against the participation of evangelicals in politics is hardcore. We seem to admire, or at least vote in large numbers for, both. Just to make this thing nonpartisan, let's adduce Elizabeth Dole and Paul Wellstone. The only thing needed to make the parallel complete is for Gore and Dole to wink as they mumble their cliches, and for McCain and Wellstone to shave their heads.

Indeed the dominant rock 'n roll of the moment, the music of bands such as Blink 182, Weezer, and Sum 41, is probably best accounted for as a synthesis of bubblegum and punk: funny, childish vocals over modified thrash guitars.

***

Bubblegum music depended on the idea that the artist of a pop song was not necessarily the person who performed it. This was true of the early-sixties girl groups, assembled and recorded by svengalis such as Phil Spector, and supplied with material by Brill Building writers such as Carole King. The Shirelles or the Ronettes were assembled to do the singing, and they did it with distinction. The same approach was taken in the heyday of Motown, when production teams such as Holland-Dozier-Holland developed material and studio sound for the Supremes or the Four Tops. This could be compared to the Hollywood studio system, with producers using staff writers and contract players to make a collaborative, highly artificial, and excellent work of art. But classic bubblegum of the late sixties, though it used some of the same writers and musicians as the girl group recordings, took the whole thing to the point of maximum artificiality. An exemplary case - developed in detail in Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth - is the Ohio Express. The "band" was "discovered" in Mansfield Ohio, performing as Sir Timothy and the Royals, by the paradigmatic bubble producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz. The first thing Kasenetz and Katz did was change the name, which they thought sounded too British. Then, just after the boys signed their contracts, their first single, "Beg, Borrow, and Steal," was released. In fact, however, the kids from Ohio didn't perform it at all, and the very same recording had already been issued by Kasenetz and Katz with the artist listed as Rare Breed. It was simply a Super K studio recording, and the vocalist was one Joey Levine.

The job of the Ohio Express was to pose for the publicity photos and album covers, and to tour around the country doing a Joey Levine imitation. On their LPs, cuts of the band's own high school psychedelia clashed with Super K hit singles such as "Yummy Yummy Yummy," nonsense rhymes performed with deeply disingenuous childish innocence and a vague double entendre for the teen set: in short, bubblegum classics. Occasionally, the band would be stunned to hear their own latest single for the first time on the radio.

By 1968, Don Kirshner, bubblegum's other great or at least successful producer (whom Naked Truth memorably describes as "carved out of a solid block of suet") , had become disillusioned by the band he had assembled through a casting call, the Monkees. They had tended to show some slight independence and desire for artistic control, as well as for cash. Kirshner had the inspired idea of dropping the human beings entirely and recording cartoon characters. Thus the Archies had a Saturday-morning cartoon series and a string of hits (sung by Ron Dante and Toni Wine), the biggest of which was "Sugar Sugar," the only piece of golden-era gum that many people remember. Perhaps the major political parties could take a hint, especially with the striking advances in animation since 1968.

Since then there have been any number of acts that could be considered bubblegum, from the Partridge Family to various disco acts to eighties lip-syncers such as Milli Vanilli and Paula Abdul to assembly-line boy groups such as N'Sync and the Backstreet Boys and fantasy girlfriends Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson. At their best, the recordings attributed to such "artists" reflect perfect craft: hooks that infest your head like monstrous parasites and studio musicianship that is flawless. At their worst, they are so formulaic and repetitive as to be unlistenable.

***

Hardcore originated perhaps independently in Los Angeles and D.C. in and around 1980. By that time the original punk revolt of 1976 had run out of momentum, and the Sex Pistols and Ramones started to sound a bit staid and dated to a very young generation of pissed-off suburban teenagers. "Post-punk" and new wave tended to retreat toward glam, with big purple hair and synthesizers. So the idea was to reinstate brutality and simplicity, and to play as fast as possible. Among the earliest bands on each coast were the Germs and the Bad Brains. The former burned out fast as "singer" Darby Crash overdosed, but the latter - a bunch of middle-class black kids from Maryland who eventually became Rastas complete with faux patois - just got better and better until they were playing cleanly at 100 mph.

Within a few months there were "scenes" on both coasts, and very young audiences were slam-dancing, stage-diving, and "pig-piling," a Boston practice in which kids stacked up sometimes to the ceiling of a club, crushing the people at the bottom. Some of the bands, such as San Francisco's seminal Dead Kennedys, were quite serious about leftist politics. Labels such as Dischord and Alternative Tentacles sold records at cost.

Some acts were pointedly apolitical. And some, like the otherwise extremely amusing Fear, played around with the iron cross and the swastika and established the image of the reactionary skinhead. One Fear lyric: "New York's alright if you like homosexuals." Black Flag's "White Minority" and Minor Threat's "Guilty of Being White" seemed to have disturbing implications, even if it was hard to tell what they were actually saying. New York spawned a truly reactionary skinhead culture featuring bands such as Agnostic Front, players with names like Jimmy Gestapo, and songs like "Kill For Cash." The actual political intention and effect was negligible, but it would be wrong to dismiss all this as harmless hijinks; many people got badly beaten, the favorite weapon being a sock with an eight ball inside.

Nevertheless, the spirit was never simple viciousness; it was always an extremely American rebellion, and at its best even the politically disturbing material was aesthetically fundamental. The basic purpose was to offend, and it was rebellious precisely because it was the first hard-right movement in the history of rock.

Fear was utterly booze-soaked, and by the mid-80s lead singer Lee Ving was bellowing out "More Beer" and "Have a Beer With Fear." On the back of their albums, where most groups thank God, they acknowledged Budweiser. In fact most of the West Coast bands were drug and drink-addled. But in DC, Minor Threat performed a song called "Straight Edge" and spawned a movement of scary clean punks who practiced abstinence and celibacy. Some of the Boston and New York straight edge punks were militant: they'd storm bars and parties and knock bottles out of people's hands.

The hardcore movement eventually imploded into its own demand for purity, rage, poverty, and tunelessness. A few years into it, many of the bands had learned to play their instruments and were interested in developing artistically. Everyone blamed everyone else for selling out. But the bands that did develop did so in extremely prescient ways. The lead screamer and spirit of Minor Threat, Ian MacKaye, founded Fugazi, a great band who retained an edge while slowing down and finding a melody amidst the cacaphony. Hardcore still has an audience and artists; even mainstream acts such as Linkin Park are inconceivable without it.

***

The two books under review are as definitive as even fanatic fans of their genres could desire. They are exhaustive and well-written, with useful discographies.

Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth is a true encyclopedia, with separate entries for different acts, producers, and trends by many different hands. The entries by the editors themselves are notable for their good humor, their obsessive devotion to camp, their crisp formulations and their ingenious defense of the music: "We're not immune to the allure of the Romantic Artist, nor have we traded our Townes Van Zandt collections for BSB memorabilia. But this myth of the Self-Contained Band (beginning with the Beatles) and its offspring . . . breeds in the ripe compost of abandoned lefty utopias. It's not measure of the music." That is just. But it of course does not entail that we have to go all the way to the Sugar Bears, who were not only spawned by a cartoon, but by a cartoon advertisement for Sugar Puffs breakfast cereal.

To be honest there is more here than I really want, perhaps because while the music is interesting as a symptom of its world and while it was occasionally truly infectious and memorable, it is not, mostly and finally, very good or interesting in itself. At its best it is perfectly crafted and from this vantage point as kitschy as anything could possibly be, but there is a limit to how much kitsch a grown man can stand, and I found myself getting a bit lost and a bit bored as I wandered through the lost worlds of Salt Water Taffy, Peppermint Rainbow, and the Yummies, not to mention television tie-ins such as the Banana Splits, the Hardy Boys, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revolution, and so on, and on. By the time I was reading extended meditations on whether the Bay City Rollers and Abba were bubblegum groups I had developed crap fatigue.

American Hardcore is indeed, as the subtitle suggests, "tribal." Blush himself was part of the DC scene and eventually, as a promoter, roadie, record producer, and friend, got to know many of the hardcore bands from all over the country. The arrangement of American Hardcore is risky: each chapter consists of a host of quotes from participants. Most of them appear without editorial comment and in the form of dialogue, though Blush's own reminiscences and assessments provide a frame for the others. Unexpectedly, perhaps, the result is a book that gathers considerable momentum and takes shape into a coherent narrative. It's long, but almost never dull, and what you get finally is a collective account not only of the music but of its makers, its time, and its purpose.

The photos and other images are numerous and vibrant; scenes from clubs and snapshots of bands frame the narrative perfectly. Many originate in the author's own collection, with much material gathered from a variety of other sources. The book is obviously the result of a long labor: with the music, the interviews, the images. And the music, as Blush asserts, stands up. Listening to early Black Flag or Minor Threat is almost as compelling an experience now as it was in 1981.

***

One lesson of bubblegum and hardcore is that art made for its moment lasts forever, while art that's made to lasts forever is trapped in its moment. Whereas Yes and ELP sound like they originate in a dead civilization, Captain Groovy and Agnostic Front remain forever young.