Introduction

Well. This is my blog about Hardcore Punk. In ye grande olde tradition of sub-culutral studies, its very much looking from the outside in. To kick things off, a moment's contemplation about the nature of punk music:

"For performing rock & roll, or punk rock, or call it any damn thing you please, there's only one thing you need: NERVE. Rock & Roll is an attitude, and if you've got the attitude you can do it, no matter what anybody says. Believing that is one of the things punk rock is about. Rock is for everybody, it should be so implicitly anti-elitist that the question of whether somebody's qualified to perfom it should never even arise."

-Lester Bangs (the "Godfather of punk journalism")


Now, let us consider:

We've got that attitude hey,
we've got that attitude.
Don't care what they may say,
we got that attitude.
Don't care what they may do,
we got that attitude. Now.

- Bad Brains "Attitude"


So, I guess it's fairly well accepted that the term 'punk' these days can describe the intangible. Its a fairly hard term to nail down. But then you have to be fluid in what you hate. Spitting bile at Reagan and Thatcher can get old quick when you're young, pissed off and there's always new stuff to get your knickers in a knot about. Assuming of course your glorification of living rough has done sweet nothing to change anything that's making you furious.

Anyway, from here on in I'm all about the hardcore. No soft focus. No creative camera angles. Hardcore is special forces to punk's army reserves. Or at least that's what people in the American hardcore scene of the early 80s would have you believe...



Note: I got Lester Bangs' essay In Which Yet Another Pompous Blowhard Purports to Possess the True Meaning of Punk Rock from the The Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing edited by Clinton Heylin and published in 1992. Heylin labelled Bangs the "Godfather of punk journalism" in his notes on Bangs' essay on page 103.

Bad Brains' 1:19 second classic "Attitude" is track 3 on their self-titled first full length studio album, unveiled in 1982.