Agnostic Front- Victim in Pain (1984)
I don’t think one really understands America without understanding 1980s hardcore. Not that there’s any great truth written there, any great analysis. You might say that 1980s hardcore *also* does not understand America. But the frustrations, the stupidity, the dirtiness, the moral decay of Reaganism, the death of the 1960s vision of flying to the moon and a “Great Society,” is nowhere more vivid. And this looks a hundred different ways across the map. Negative Approach seem almost to have crawled out of the post-apocalyptic bunkers of Detroit. It’s impossible to imagine Black Flag’s “Wasted” being written anywhere but in the vapid skate-and-surf culture of bleached masculinity that was late 70s Los Angeles, the L.A. of “I forgot my mantra.” I’ve treated of the Dicks and the Austin scene elsewhere. And while Minor Threat’s message of judgmental asceticism was universal precisely because it was so unlocalized, Agnostic Front’s incoherent populism could only come from New York City locals. Agnostic Front are the punk band of the New York Post ideology: its anti-intellectualism, parochial outlook, its melange of spontaneous moral outbursts (against corruption, against corporate greed, against decent blue collar types) combined with its anecdote-centered conservatism: xenophobia, vigilantism, plus the exact mentality that leads to corruption (because it is more “direct” and “gets things done”).
In the world of ideas, then, Agnostic Front are not to be placed along a spectrum from left to right. Their lyrics and image name instead a time and a place. This obviates the cognitive dissonance that I felt as a young punk, trying to sort out my world from the world of my parents, when I first heard Agnostic Front. “But…” I quivered with confusion, “they don’t seem to think the same things as Crass!” Our favorite bands at that age are a kind of ego-ideal, and Agnostic Front were clearly a bad one. And even though I lived in New York at the time, they were more distant from me—more exotic—than the Swedish or Finnish bands I loved.
These are all false problems, of course, but not irrelevant to the experience of listening to Victim in Pain. You can hear Agnostic Front trying to get it right: pleading for understanding, for unity—but at the same time boiling over with contempt, with blind idiotic myopia, with the flailing violence of self-castigation. These are angry, ill-adjusted people, who haven’t put much thought into anything.
Because of the later developments in the New York hardcore scene, namely the Youth Crew movement of straight-edge bands, and the metallic sound that gave the world Madball and Biohazard, it is easy to isolate the New York scene and reduce it to a teleology that could only yield these results. But the Agnostic Front of Victim in Pain is much closer to Crucifix, Poison Idea, or Battalion of Saints than to the Agnostic Front of their second album, Cause for Alarm. Neither do contemporary NY bands like Antidote, Cause for Alarm, and Urban Waste suggest the subsequent emo sludge of Judge, any more than they imply the Beastie Boys.
What, then, are Agnostic Front “about”, if we take away everything that came after this classic statement? Let me digress for a second. Minor Threat stopped being a hardcore band because their hardcore was polemical: against X, Y, and Z. When they went off to college, they got laid and started listening to U2, hence they weren’t interested in making this music anymore. Minor Threat’s hardcore, once their targets (assholes, black people, drunks, religious girlfriends) weren’t directly in front of them, didn’t have any reason to exist. So the third Minor Threat record is just about what does exist: some reflective feelings, and a re-do of the song “Out of Step.” Void, on the other hand, seemingly just go further and further down their own rabbit hole—they “leave” hardcore just by drifting off the page.
Most of the great hardcore bands—Negative Approach, Poison Idea, Negative FX, Black Flag, Jerry’s Kids—are not addressed towards real obstructions that could be circumvented or fixed. The problem is rather an inward brokenness, the arduous slog that is waking up and being a person. “Fix *me*,” says Black Flag. What you get with these bands is the raw pain of just existing in an indifferent world, one that (with Jerry’s Kids) you can hardly recognize as your own.
Agnostic Front are just such a misguided, militant, bolt of confused, fearful terror. Why?, they ask, every day, am I shit upon, blamed? I’m ready to fight ANYONE. But the real cause is not something I can punch. Is it “society”? the “capitalistic prison”? this fucking guy right in front of me? “Should I live my life in a mess? Feel confused and lonely at this moment, but maybe with some time, everything will pile off my mind.”
On Victim in Pain, this agony is thoroughly situated in a real world, one in fact purged of the kind of emasculated self-reflection I am describing. Utterly without cynicism, without cleverness, without insight or intelligence or sympathy, this is the sound of someone scrambling up each day, with blind hope that today might be different, and with no reason to expect that it will be. And not for “naturalist,” deterministic reasons, for which one could blame society—but because life sucks and you are a fuck-up. Almost every song on this album is a record of trying to piece together some dignity—ineptly, self-defeatingly, sometimes—and reject obviously false consolations, to just go on.
