Here at the Skinhead Crispy Home for ancient punks, we've been obsessed the last few weeks with our own family of origin. Let's talk for a minute about harDCore. Of all styles of punk music, it is perhaps the most serious, the most pointed, and the most enduring. I will, I promise, review some albums eventually. But first, the history lecture.

It began in 1980 among kids at Woodrow Wilson High and Georgetown Day School: kids like Ian MacKaye and Henry Garfield (later Rollins). Their band the Teen Idles was pointedly shambolic; they just couldn't really play, or sing. But they had focus; they had rage; they had something to say.

And the fact that they sucked was itself a political statement. If you think of most of the music current in the late seventies, it was crafted to within an inch of its life. Ponder Elton John, disco, Dolly Parton (at that moment). There was no power in that music, no truth, no point except kind of nice melodies and a chance to dance.

In fact in some sense, though the lyrics were highly personal, everything that the harDCore bands did was political, which surely had something to do with where they were from. Not only is DC relentlessly political, but as a city it was torn up in the late seventies along racial and income lines. It was not an easy place to be a little pissed-off white boy; I was there.

Government Issue, Iron Cross, Youth Brigade and so on (bands collected on "Flex Your Head" (Dischord)) played hardcore punk that was very similar to L.A. bands' like the Germs, Black Flag. But there was one huge difference. The LA bands sang about drugs and stayed drunk. The Germs were dead before they got properly started. But at least some of the DC bands were "straight edge": as the Minor Threat Song put it: "Don't drink; don't smoke; don't fuck; at least I can fuckin think." Or Embrace: "Death is not glamorous." Straight Edge is perhaps the only non-religious ascetic youth movement in history, fueled at least in part by the fact that NW DC was insanely drug-infested, and we had already started dropping like flies (I myself lost 2 brothers).

I saw Minor Threat open for the Damned at the Ontario Theater 1980 or '81, and I had never seen anything like it; the DC punks slammed and stage-dived, but more, they actually rushed the stage and virtually attacked the musicians, until the stage was more riot than performance, or the performance was a riot and the riot a performance. My model of a rock show at that time was the Grateful Dead, where we all wore tie-dye, tripped, and expressed our bullshit love of everything.

The Minor Threat recordings have something that is rare in any context: a kind of total aliveness or presence that you might associate with performers such as Hank Williams or Louis Armstrong. Utterly raw and utterly urgent.

It was part of the ethics of harDCore that as band consisted without remainder of its members, that members could not be replaced. So bands tended to break up in a matter of months. Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto - who later ended up together in Fugazi - invented emo (emotional hardcore) after Minor Threat disbanded, with their bands Embrace ("Embrace" Dischord 1987) and Rites of Spring (Dischord 1985) respectively.

By then, the boys were men and they started getting serious about politics. One thing was that hardcore punk music was dominated by males, and the melees in front of the stage tended to exclude girls. By the time Fugazi came around, they played music that was intended to preclude slamming by slower and much more varied rhythms. In order to understand the evolution of harDCore, you have to understand the DC punks' rejection of the "fascist" elements in their music.

Dischord floated in several directions at once. There was the hilarious but unlistenable Nation of Ulysses (which purported to be an extremely violent terrorist organization with ties to Hezbollah), as well as less terroristic bands such as Shudder to Think and Slant 6 (featuring Christina Billotte).

They also worked outside the record industry, though they were not doctrinaire anti-capitalists. Fugazi demanded that all shows be all ages and that tickets cost $5 or less, an insanely low price considering they ended up selling hundreds of thousands of records. Dischord Records was founded simply to "document" the DC punk scene and has never done anything else. No t-shirts, videos, bullshit. Just music.

For my money, believe it or not, Ian McKaye is one of the few real and interesting American leaders of his era. Certainly he is obviously a truer leader than such non-entities as George Bush, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, George W. Those guys mean nothing; they say nothing; the believe nothing; they are nothing. But MacKaye's leadership rests on the integrity of his life, not on force or media access.

So where are we now? Far, far from 1980 musically, though maybe consistent with its spirit. The music of Fugazi as represented in "The Argument" (Dischord, 2001) is sophisticated but also passionate. They play with structure: songs start straightforwardly, fall apart, and then coalesce in a different form. It's not dance music.

To be honest, Fugazi is a little *too* sophisticated for my taste. It threatens to become the art rock that punk was dedicated to tearing apart. Better for my money was Ian MacKaye's brother Alex's The Warmers ("The Warmers" Dischord 1996), minimalist postcore, which to me feels like a more organic development out of Minor Threat ("Complete Discography" (Dischord)) and Alex's great early band the Faith ("Faith/Void" (Dischord)).

So the DC scene has persevered and never gotten stuck, and I think that actually has something to do with their attitude toward drugs, alcohol and promiscuity. The LA scene, for example, just fell off the edge of the table. And though I have just been slightly critical of Fugazi, I absolutely affirm Ian MacKaye's right to rethink his music as often and thoroughly as he likes.

And of course, the harDCore ethic is everywhere now; DIY punk became "alternative" and "alternative" musicians became major-label rock stars and celebrities and whatever. The whole thing got kind of sold. But actually, who cares? Ian MacKaye's message has been, what they do is what they do; just keep making stuff you believe in and doing what you think is right. That's all you've got, and finally it's all you need.

HarDCore both sprang from and was opposed to the "pop" punk of bands like the Ramones and the Clash, which in turn sprang out rock traditions and made use of blues tonalities. From this moment, the Ramones and Clash sound extremely sweet and melodic. Hardcore was all driving rhythm, little melody, and, at first at least, no past, no tradition. OK so now I'm going to get into some reviews. First the pop, then the core.

The Peawees, Dead End City (Stardumb)
Nasty punks, hanging out on the streets, cigarettes dangling from their lips. Joey, Dee Dee, Marky? No. Pulcio, Jacapo, Herve, and Lalo. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Peawees. Okay: so it has suddenly become obvious to me that the massive yet lightasafeather legacy of the Ramones is in the hands of youthful Europeans who sing in English with heavy accents. How has this become obvious to me, you ask? Or even if you don't: because Stardumb Records out of the Netherlands sent me this amazing package of disks. Eventually, I'll be telling you about the other bands. But straight up the best is the Italian Peawees. Actually, they make you hear that the Jersey accent has Milan in it. And they play like mothers. So damn excellent. The Stardumb packages are collages, and there's Buddy Holly on the labels and in the music. In fact, they Peawees make you see the direct connections of fifties rock with seventies punk, and then they read it all into a this-decade sensibility. So they're archivists and in some sense the whole history of good rock is here. But they're much more than archivists, because the stuff is very alive. "'Cause You Don't Know Me" is currently my favorite song. If Buddy Holly was playing with Green Day tonight, this'd be what it'd sound like. Lord knows what else they're listening to in Italy these days: probably some horrifying glam, techno, extremely pale hip-hop. But there is hope for an Italian Renaissance, because someone there knows how to rock.

The Deadlines, Fashion Over Function (Tooth and Nail)
Well! When was the last time you listened to a great new rock 'n roll record? The way to think about the Deadlines is as a mating of the Stones and Billy Idol, with just a hint of the contempo poppunk roar underneath. They are to the fashion industry what Nation of Ulysses is to al Qaeda. The songs are fucking great. In its way, this is a concept album on the theme broached by the title, and the insert is a hilarious parody of the fashion spread. I'm pretty enamored of the opener - "I Want a Stalker" - but the whole thing is damn good. This sucker should be all over the pop radio, though I doubt it will be.

Various Artists, The European Pop-Punk Virus (Stardumb)

OK. There are 28 tracks on this thing by bands from all over the continent, and they range from pretty good to the extremely good and shit. The last cut, by a band called the Travoltas, is a perfection of the Misfits early style. But dude, how can you fail to appreciate bands like The Shits, the Battledykes, the Lulabelles, the Retarded, the Reekys, the Kling-Ons, Dirtshakes? Well, you can't, can you? Part of the adventure is listening to these folks try to sing in English. The Manges, for example, who have their own cd out on Stardumb, really have a problem and should simply switch to their native language, which I'm suspecting is Flemish, or maybe Basque.

Soul Embraced, This is my Blood (Solid State)

To be honest, I don't think this a golden era for hardcore, even though there is a lot lot of it out there. This moment doesn't seem to be conducive to rage for some reason, and so the hardcore bands tend to sound like they're simulating being all bad and pissed off. If there are really pissed-off kids out there making hc, will they send me their albums please? But anyway, I'm still giving up some props to Soul Embraced, which sounds like a band of good musicians who have been possessed by Satan. This is rather an odd effect, considering that they "would like to thank above all our Lord and savior Jesus Christ." One influence on hardcore that is rarely given ewnough credit is the voice of the demon possessing Linda Blair in the Exorcist, which I think is the source of a whole style of snarling. I just wish I actually believed in the appearance of being extremely messed up and dark these people present.

No Warning, No Warning (Bridge Nine)

On the other hand, I believe the Toronto group No Warning when they bellow

Ever day it's always the same

No point in fighting, it's not going to change. . . .

Sick of life, sick of talk, sick of you .

Now it's obvious that they're using the tropes of early eighties hardcore self-consciously. But they come as close to the spirit of truth and rage as I've heard lately. And you know it's a fine line but it actually does help that they know how to play their instruments: the rhythm section is fucking ferocious. So dude, we gonna leave this shit to Canadians? How pissed off can you really be in Canada (well, never mind). Don't you people from Orange County and Gaithersburg have any pride?