When shopping at the record store, one must choose sides, argues Keith Morris of punk rock band Circle Jerks in American Hardcore. A documentary on the birth and death of hardcore punk music from 1980 to 1986, the film features analytic and well-articulated modern interviews with the aged frontliners, mixed with hazy, intimate concert footage from the period. Morris states that to love original punk rock, one had to reject the formulaic, melodic tradition of bands like Fleetwood Mac. What Morris ignores is that the whole point of punk, or any kind of dissonant music, is to unpack the tune for its melody. Plus, Fleetwood Mac rules.
The film gives a sense of punk's vast informal spread across D.C. and L.A. The desire to stretch the limits of free speech is clear in the bands' ultra-suggestive lyrics: their songs shouted about slipping it into a lady, not feeling guilty about being white, even accepting a homo-punk agenda. The lyrics are a brave backlash against being force-fed what was acceptable in a hypocritical American culture.
The interviews progress chronologically through the period, avoid nostalgia, and add a surprising amount of insight to the youthful, primitive genre. Aside from the concert footage, the most entertaining moments are the interviewees' anecdotes: in one, Henry Rollins of Black Flag describes his awkward run-in with the rest of the band when they discovered a fleck of chocolate on his upper lip. In another, band members discuss whether or not a musician held a two-day stint singing for Black Flag, flashing between accounts from the self-proclaimed "bald musician" and the band.
The movement declined when the fans' focus strayed from the music into violence. The musicians of American Hardcore tell people to go home, that punk is dead. Yet punk was always meant for the outsiders, and though the culture might have come and gone, any relating teenager can still blast the Dead Kennedys' "Chickenshit Conformist." Hardcore may not just be for the punk fans, but is slightly geared towards those who can stand their tunes angry and loud.
