American hardcore was not exactly a direct descendant of the original New York scene that gave us Television, Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads, who were directly inspirational to the UK punk scene in the late Seventies, but, almost ironically, was a reaction to the UK punks, in different parts of the United States, where kids had nothing going for them in the repressed, religious middle American heartland, and the soul deadening suburbs around affluent cities.
UK punk was a social, fashion and musical revolution against the stultifying circumstances of Great Britain in the late Seventies but the bottom line of most punk, especially the first wave, and of the successor New Wave bands, was that melody and tune were as important as fast paced noise rock. The Sex Pistols wrote and performed pop songs, as did The Clash, The Damned or The Jam, as much as they tried to outrage the establishment with their conduct or statements. Their songs had choruses and hooks, they were hummable and memorable. The same applies to the Ramones or any of the other New York proto punk bands.
In fact, apart from the fact that the musicians were younger, dressed differently and expressed political opinions, there was not a huge difference between the punk bands and the glam. pub rock and post-Stones rock and roll bands that preceded them.
Over the past year I’ve watched a bunch of documentaries on the variations of US hardcore from the late Seventies to the Nineties, and beyond, and the one single impression is that, at least at first, the point and purpose of hardcore was to make a fast, loud, aggressive noise with no regard for melody, tune, hooks (apart from a shouted chorus), structure, or any element that would appeal to anyone not in the scene or who has an appreciation for old fashioned musical values. I can imagine an older, straight-laced person who might mistakenly have wandered into a hardcore gig, to be physically, emotionally, psychologically and conceptually repulsed by the wall of noise the bands produce on stage.
Hardcore, like extreme metal, seems designed to be liked, if one could truly like such a thing, only by the people who make it and their fans, who want an exclusive club of outsiders who take pride in making and listening to a style of music that will not and cannot ever, be mainstream. This tribalism also leads to the accusation of “selling out” against bands who develop a more commercial sound, probably because the musicians have more ambition, and eventually develop the technique, to play something more than basic noise rock and who believe it’s time to earn a living from their art. After a while, it must be exhausting to anyone to keep on doing the same old noise schtick. Everyone grows older, and matures, and grows to like more diverse styles of, and more sophisticated, music.
Hüsker Dü did not receive much, if any, airplay on South African rock radio in the Eighties (and neither did the UK punks when they emerged), and I knew of the band only because the NME, Spin and the other rock publications I bought at the time, regularly covered the band and heaped praise on it, and in fact followed guitarist Bob Mould in his solo ventures too.
A handful of the early hardcore scene bands became semi-famous, such as Minutemen, Black Flag and Hüsker Dü, and the take on the latter was that it was the first, or one of the first, hardcore bands who progressed from loud, fast songs with shouty vocals to loud, fast songs with recognisable melodies and a pop sensibility that, ultimately, influenced the pop punk generation who broke in 1994, with Green Day and Offspring leading the pack. Hüsker Dü can’t be classified as pop punk but the musical ambitions and abilities of Bob Mould and Grant Hart, the two songwriters, led them closer to that point and further away from their noise roots than they and their audience might have anticipated at the start of their career.
The double album Warehouse (Songs and Stories)(1987) was the first Hüsker Dü album I bought, and probably about 20 years later, Zen Arcade(1984) (coincidentally also a double album), in its CD format, was the second. I don’t even know whether any other Hüsker Dü records were readily available in Cape Town when they were released but, frankly, Warehousedid not inspire or motivate me to buy anything else by the band. I didn’t even listen to the record much or record it on audio cassette as I customarily did with my records, to save the vinyl.
Apple Music has given me the opportunity to catch up on what I’d missed in the Eighties (and, for that matter, the Sixties and Seventies) and I’m ambivalent. Back then the contemporary rock I liked could be represented by most of what U2 released, The Cult, John Mellencamp and Guns N’ Roses. I wasn’t a Smiths or R.E.M. fan. I never heard US hardcore so it’s impossible now to tell whether I would’ve have been a fan. Doing a quick catchup of Hüsker Dü’s albums before Warehouseconfirms, on the surface, that I probably wouldn’t have cared much for the music but that’s probably just from listening once and not giving anything enough chance to grow on me.
The one thing I can say is that Grant Hart’s songs are more appealing than Mould’s because they are the pop heart of the generally abrasive Hüsker Dü output, and he seems to sing where Mould prefers a hoarse bellow, but the post-hardcore music of Hüsker Dü somehow didn’t strike a chord.
If I think about it now, it’s possible that I hadn’t listened to Zen Arcademuch either, having bought it because it was cheap and not because I was compelled to own it because of its “legendary” status. It seems, as is the case with my relationship to R.E.M., that I can perhaps appreciate that Hüsker Dü, though never in the same commercial realms as R.E.M., is regarded as a great, ground breaking band who deserves all the accolades, but that I will never like the music much. At least, where I find R.E.M. generally just irritating, some of Hüsker Dü’s output rocks hard and is tuneful enough that I can dig the pop smarts and a cherry picked collection of their songs would be nice to have.
In 2003 Rolling Stone, insofar as it’s establishment views carry any weight, placed New Day Rising(1985) (the follow up to Zen Arcade) in its list of the 500 best of most essential records of all time. It’s a pleasant record, with the usual mix of abrasive and melodic songs, yet I can hardly think of it as an essential album, much less featuring amongst the top 500 of them. It could be a useful example of the maturation of a style of rock, from confrontational to appealing, but no more.
To be honest, I prefer Flip Your Wig(1985), mostly because it has plenty of what you might call old school guitar, and even some riffing, on it, rather than the hardcore template. Even so, I still ask myself, if I’d bought the album when it was released (and I was 26 years old), would I have listened to it more than a few times, or more than I did listen to Warehouse? I guess not.
A thought that immediately occurs when I listen to this style of punk, is the question: how do the musicians remember the chord progressions of all these songs, and some of the band specialised in many, extremely brief songs, when there are so many and they all sound similar? That’s the thing: how does one distinguish one Hüsker Dü track from another over the length of 10 or so LPs, especially if you listen to all of them in sequence? After a while, one track of fast, raging guitar and hoarse, shouting vocals buried in the mix sounds like the previous one and the next one and the act of listening becomes an endurance contest or everything just becomes background white noise because one’s concentration goes.
In a club, when the audience is young, hormonal, drunk and/or stoned, and only a few feet from the band, this music can make sense as an escape from whatever reality the youth want to escape and as a dividing line between being young, cool and alienated from society, and being a member of the establishment of that society. Kids versus parents, if you will. Parents don’t like music they can’t understand and that seems to be a wilfully brutal noise with no apparent redeeming qualities, and kids want to have music that will piss their elders off, music that’s designed to be nothing like the music the parents understand. Perhaps, in time, as these kids grow older, their rebel music will become orthodox and they, in turn, will hate the terrible music their kids are listening to or making.
Bob Mould has had a solo career (including the band Sugar, which with the album Copper Blue (1992) was his commercial highpoint, but he’s effectively remained no more than a major cult figure who would never have, and has never had, sustained, material commercial success. Whatever it is that he’s doing, presumably it’s successful enough as a low key career, with few of the pressures being a major commercial artist, and he can promote his brand amongst his devoted followers who will always at least attend performances and buy enough albums, whether hard copy or online, to make it worthwhile to continue recording songs.
Many of the rock acts that broke through in the Sixties are still touring and playing shows because there’s a market for it and a decent income to be derived from cashing in on nostalgia. Even major artists, like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, however, have not made any essential contributions to their oeuvres although they regularly release new material. Regardless of how much critical praise the contemporary material receives, it’ll never be held in the same esteem as the songs and albums these guys released in, say, the first 10 years of their respective careers, though Young seems to have done rather better than Dylan. In both cases, too, there is an emphasis on archival releases of material that was never deemed commercial enough at the time of recording, or simply didn’t fit into record company release schedules. Now, there is the opportunity, and apparently the hunger, for previously unknown or legendary live recordings or outtakes to be released for fans, no doubt because this is also a new income stream.
Bob Mould might not be there yet, and perhaps never will be, because one can’t conceive of him ever being mentioned in the same company as Dylan and Young, for after all, if a critical darling, Hüsker Dü was just a big fish in the small pond of the rock sub-genre of Eighties hard ore punk. Conceivably there are hours of recorded live sets from Hüsker Dü, Sugar or solo Mould, and as many hours of unreleased recordings and outtakes and alternate versions, and, equally conceivably, there might be a market, however selective, for this stuff but I really can’t see, other than for obsessive Hüsker Dü fans, why any of that would be essential listening or be regarded as essential rock archival material that would shed more light on the creative impulses and inspirations of a major rock artist. Obviously, my view is biased because I’m no great fan of Mould but I also believe, taking the rock orthodoxy of Hüsker Dü’s importance and relevance into account, that my assessment is correct.
The plan had been to listen to the Hüsker Dü albums on Apple Music in sequence, for a proper appreciation of the band’s output but I just couldn’t do it. It’s like my attempts to binge watch series. After a few episodes I get bored and must call a halt and most often it’s difficult , if not impossible, to get back to it. Few series are that compelling that I’d want to watch seven seasons in a week, and that’s how I felt about Hüsker Dü’s music. After two or three records it just felt like more of the same time after time, with nothing much to distinguish one song, or one album, from another, and I didn’t engage with the songs all that much in the first place. This isn’t the kind of loud, fast music I like.
Hüsker Dü was important and significant in its time and that was, and will always be, the Eighties. I guess I don’t get why it was ever a thing, or influential, and I never will, File with The Smiths and R.E.M.
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