by Ian Wise

Created on: February 18, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

A very, very brief and incomplete history of hardcore.

Hardcore music came about in the early 1980s from the American punk rock scene. West coast punk bands like FEAR, Black Flag, The Germs, and Agent Orange all started speeding up their sound and becoming more and more aggressive with their music. In the words of Black Flag's Greg Ginn, "The songs were fast because that's what got us off, and they were short because that's how long the inspiration lasted." On the East Coast, the same thing was pulling together, with bands like the Bad Brains (all ex-jazz players from DC) trying to push themselves to play harder and faster because they were simply bored with what they saw as mid-tempo music.

When Minor Threat came out of DC in 1981, everything changed. They were the first band to draw attention to the new scene on a whole and influence other bands to start "hardcore" bands as opposed to "punk rock" bands. Minor Threat's loud, screamed vocals, fast tempos, and straight edge ideology inspired a million copy-cats, but also inspired a million to pick up guitars and do their own thing.

Every region of the US developed its own style. Midwestern bands like the Effigies, Naked Raygun, and the Zero Boys took on a more polished, melodic sound. Boston bands took after Minor Threat in all aspects, and their music was stripped down, fast, and angry. When straight edge hit Boston, it caused more violence then anywhere else in the US due to militant bands like SSD and Slapshot (earlier incarnations of Slapshot include Negative FX and Last Rites) preaching against people who made decisions to drink or smoke.

New York harbored a great hardcore scene. After the Bad Brains transplanted themselves into NYC, things really took off. Bands like Reagan Youth were mixing Ramones style punk rock with heavy Black Sabbath-esque riffs already, but when everyone got a dose of the Bad Brains, they all the bands wanted to play faster and faster, even if that meant losing some of the heavy end. Some of the earliest New York Hardcore bands were the Beastie Boys (yes, the same ones who went on to be famous rappers) and the Misfits. New York is also where things changed drastically in the mid 1980s with the rebirth of the skinhead scene, and the subsequent bands Warzone, Agnostic Front, and the Cro-Mags, the three bands that it seems every hardcore band since has been trying to emulate. These three bands took the hardcore sound and were able to add in the metal aspect of earlier NYHC (a la Reagan

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