Ray Pride

What a fierce, vital history! Moving at a crushing clip appropriate to the music scene that it looks back on, Paul Rachman's superb "American Hardcore" (subtitled "The History of American Punk Rock 1980-1986"), written by Steven Blush ("American Hardcore: A Tribal History") and shot and edited over the course of five years, after more than a hundred interviews, "American Hardcore" is overloaded with sound and information, including a flurry of orchestrated chaos from self-chronicles by the bands presented, often in deliciously cruddy VHS. (The form of the movie takes on the same DIY ethos of the scene.) A big chunk of the witnesses are bald, tattooed white guys in their late forties who still draw much of their vocabulary from the Book of Fuck! Rachman and Blush also take care to accent one of the pioneer groups of the Reagan era, DC's African-American Bad Brains. Among the other sturdy weeds are Henry Rollins, Lucky Lehrer of Circle Jerks, Vic Bondi from Articles of Faith, Mike Watt from Minutemen, Dave Dictor from Millions of Dead Cops, Greg Ginn from Black Flag, Moby, Alec MacKaye from The Faith, Flea, Zander Schloss and almost eighty more. There's velocity and tenacity and anarchistic tendencies to admire here, as well as a portrait of the tribal urge and, suggestively, what it means in the youth cultures that came afterwards. 99m.

American Hardcore opens Friday.

(2006-10-17)

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