American Hardcore

Just now, I've finished watching a documentary called American Hardcore about (as you can probably guess) the hardcore punk scene of the early to mid '80s in America.This movement was spawned out of a frustrated desire by young America to go against their context. Someone once said that during times of social unrest, the best art flourishes. Ronald Regan had just been inaugurated as President of The USA and 'good old American family values' had become commonplace again; the Right was getting in.Hardcore punk was seen as an anti-movement, whereby everything was lean. It was about getting as much energy and emotion across to your audience as possible in as little time as possible. In fact, hardcore is distinguished by minimal song lengths. Notoriously, it was fast - there was a lot to cram in so lyrics were spit out and guitarists barely had time move their fingers. To the ignorant people, this was just noise. To those in the know, this was bliss, this was energy & this was a release.Like the songs, the scene did not have time to fully develop, and by the mid-'80s, it had all but died out; at least the first wave. Many people involved in the scene, most famously Ian Mackaye [The Teen Idles, Minor Threat, Fugazi], decided to get out and completely burn their ties with the scene. By this point in its history, hardcore had become synonymous with violent riots, an association many were not comfortable with. going back to Ian Mackaye once again, he later used to personally eject people from Fugazi shows who were doing things that could be conceived as violent.