Punk Record Reviews
This is a new blog that will consist only of reviews of punk and hardcore records. Its historical premise is simple: hardcore was a revision of punk, and not merely its continuation. “Punk” essentially names a sound, a period of time—the late 1970s—and a genealogy. “Hardcore” names the attempt to employ elements of punk (sonic or otherwise) to do something quite different. The only questions for this blog will be what those goals were, and whether they were achieved.
The main “enemy” of this blog is the viewpoint that punk and hardcore exist as equivalents within other lo-fi or obscure music. This is the position of reissue label Mississippi Record; of noise and black metal fans who see all this music as having an essentially negative, dark, “out there” basis; of mediocre Japanese bands such as Death Dust Extractor; of record label Youth Attack, which consistently confuses ambient, rape-themed, or otherwise unpleasant and ugly music as having something to do with punk and hardcore; lastly, this is the position of the webzine Shit-Fi.com, which reviews obscure blues, hard rock, or other reissue-core as having a political relation to punk music, but which is incapable of knowing that the Ramones and the Bad Brains are better than any given obnoxious KBD “hit.”
Like the Platonic philosophy, the main question for this blog will be: “What is the good?” This question has been lost sight of far too often in considerations of music. Yesterday someone told me that a new indie rock band “sounds like the Beach Boys.” I was quick to point out that the Beach Boys were not good *because* they sounded like the Beach Boys. No more is a hardcore band good because they “sound like a bomb going off in your brain,” as I read Framtid described in a zine recently.
Even in so inconsequential subject as punk records, it is hugely important to set the right questions first. THE question is my experience of a record. To substitute for the basic categories of that experience (enjoyment, memorability, catchiness, irritation, boredom, repeated plays) some OTHER categories—invariably related to my self-esteem or self-image (“I am cool for liking this”)—is an obfuscating and immensely damaging procedure you may recognize from every day life and which it is no small object of this blog to reverse. Therein lies the “political” content of music reviewing.
