Washington – popcultural suburb

Although hardcore originated in Los Angeles, where the punk scene out of some urban elitism did not include suburban teenagers, it soon came to be mainly identifed with Washington. In the late seventies Washington possessed only a small, insignificant punk and new wave scene that lacked both originality and quality. Nevertheless, even the rather banal amateur bands that dominated the early punk scene were perceived as revolutionary in a city that, despite its political status, could not claim to have an exciting, innovative music scene.

As Simon Reynolds argues in his must-read book on postpunk Rip It Up And Start Again, innovative popculture movements have the greatest impact when they cease to be hip among the urban crowd and are picked up by the allegedly less hip people in the suburbs. Unlike other hardcore scenes, however, Washington’s scene was not dominated by the suburbs. In fact, it tended to be as elitist and condescending towards the suburban crowd as the L.A. punk scene. Yet, as much as the suburban youth of Los Angeles looked up to their local urban punk scene for inspiration, a young Washingtonian interested in punk looked up to New
York. Despite its political eminence, Washington was merely a suburb of New York in terms of popular culture, a place designated to consume and reproduce music imported from the vibrant centers of cultural life. In other words, Washington was totally uncool.

The Bad Brains

In such an environment, young people are naturally hungry for, well, anything, so it’s no surprise that just one band can make a huge difference. For Washington, this band was called The Bad Brains. As much as Washington was an unlikely center of alternative music, the Bad Brains were unlikely punks as African Americans in a predominantly white genre. Originally a jazz funk band, they were introduced to punk around 1977 and felt immediately attracted to its unrelenting rage that fitted their own sentiment. That the Bad Brains were easily accepted within the Washington punk scene of the late seventies was likely a result of its marginality and therefore lack of a close-knit community. By contrast, Los Angeles, which already possessed a large preexisting punk scene even before hardcore emerged in the early eighties, tended to exclude people that did not fit into the punk archetype of the white young man.

Although the Bad Brains would eventually move to New York and switch to reggae, they undoubtedly were the most important influence on the D.C. hardcore scene. On a musical level the Bad Brains distinguished themselves from other punk bands by adopting high speed in addition to punk’s intensity and volume as a defining characteristic of their style. Playing with the highest possible speed developed into a typical feature of Washington hardcore. Ironically, this African American band provided white teenagers in Washington not only with an aesthetic ideal but also with a local cultural identity to distinguish themselves from the black majority in the capital. With go-go, a D.C. version of funk, African Americans had their own distinctive local music. For Washington’s white youth, hardcore was an opportunity to create their own local subculture.

Additionally, on a philosophical level, the Bad Brains had more to offer than punk’s habitual nihilism which still dominated most other hardcore scenes. Even before they embraced Rastafarian religion, their lyrics were influenced by a self-help book from the Great Depression, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. The book advertised Positive Mental Attitude, essentially a concept of positive thinking, which the Bad Brains included in their song Attitude: “Don’t care what you may say/ We got that attitude/ Don’t care what you may do/ We got that attitude/ We got that PMA”. Again, due to the lack of a coherent punk scene in Washington during the late seventies, this deviation from punk’s set of rules was possible. Here’s some nice footage of the Bad Brains performing Attitude: