Author:
Felix Von Havoc

Book Review - American Hardcore
Blush, Steven
American Hardcore
A Tribal History
Feral House, Los Angeles, 2001

I was really excited to get this book and I really wanted to like it. Don't misunderstand me, it's a great piece of oral history, but I feel that it is deeply, tragically flawed. Author Steven Blush has compiled an impressive oral history of the early 80's US Hardcore scene. He has interviewed most of the major (and many minor) players from the 80-84 "Heroic" era of American hardcore. The interviews, flyers and photos reproduced in this book are golden and it is great to see this sort of thing finally compiled and preserved for posterity with some care. Unfortunately what the editor does with this information is nothing short of scandalous. Blush is definitely no intellectual and one must admit there is a healthy absence of cultural studies jargon. The author claims in the preface that he's objective but isn't for one minute. He totally laces every paragraph with biased judgements about bands and people. Despite claiming to do the opposite he prints quite a bit of subjective rubbish based on hearsay, rumor and false impressions. To even claim a work that is part autobiography and part tour diary, written largely in the first person is objective is hogwash. The whole thing is like a college term paper someone spent months doing research for then stayed up all night to write the night before it was due. It is chock full of spelling, grammar mistakes and simple but stupid errors that any decent proofreader with any knowledge of punk could have corrected. The author has big biases against MRR, leftists/political punks, Straight edge and women, and a strange but confused agenda with gay men. The shit he writes about women is nothing short of offensive. He goes out of his way to downplay political bands like MDC, Crucifix, Reagan Youth etc. or to marginalize said bands politics.

Instead he grossly over-emphasizes violence as the major theme in early 80's hardcore. He spills much ink on fights at shows, white power skinheads, and thug violence, that was at best marginal to most of the scene. Certainly there was a great deal of violence in the early 80's most of it on the streets battling hardcore's foes. But it was a fact of life and not the dominant theme for anyone but a few bonehead thugs. By interviewing participants 20 years or so after the fact and limiting his primary source materials to flyers and photos we get a picture of hardcore drained of any youthful idealism or social consciousness. Instead it's all these old dudes who probably haven't been to a punk show in 10 or 15 years talking about how great their band was and how little money they made. While this book is admittedly about American Hardcore the international side of hardcore is totally ignored, with the exception of DOA. And worst of all Stephen Blush repeats the moronic myth that hardcore "died" circa 1986.

Hardcore may have changed or gotten more underground but certainly it never died. In fact I would argue that more people around the world are into early 80's hardcore today than in it's heyday. I'd be interested to see sales figures for Minor Threat and Black Flag records today versus 1982. I bet they sell quite a few more now then anyone ever dreamed back in the day. But like straight edgers who start drinking, Blush seems to think that the movement ended for everyone and ceased to be valid when he lost interest in it. Hardcore is of course the most important social or musical movement of all time (how's that for a little Blush style objectivity) but this book doesn't really give it the treatment it deserves. It's anti-straight edge, anti-MRR, anti-women, and general macho right wing thug bias make it painful reading for anyone who was there and will seriously mislead and misinform those who weren't.

The one real benefit I can see from this project is the interviews he collected, if he preserves them, would be an invaluable source material for a more qualified and objective future historian of hardcore punk. Blush interviewed just about everyone involved in early 80's hardcore except any of the MRR or Flipside staff and Pushead. He includes a useful discography that is pretty complete but not as easy to use or with as much information as Flex, but is still a most noble piece of work. As I sit and reflect on this book I'm just disappointed and little angry that someone could do such an awesome amount of research and just fuck it up so bad with a lousy "analysis" sloppy editing and personal biases. You would think that someone who cared enough about this music to do all the research involved would truly want to do something more worthwhile with it.

Publication Date:
January 1, 1984

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