Action Pact: The Punk Singles Collection (Captain Oil, 1995) Remember roots-rock? The Long Ryders, Green On Red, and of course Jason and the Nashville Scorchers? Neither does anybody else. But ifTortoise can make Spirogyra hip to a new generation of people with disposable income, you know it's only a matter of time before every forgotten rock subgenre becomes somebody's cool hermetic influence. Except early Eighties British hardcore. This music will never be cool. The aroma of secondhandness sticks to it like the smell of McDonald's special sauce on Clinton's trousers. The funny thing is, this was also true of California hardcore for a long time. Go back and check out the Village Voice's music pages from the early Eighties; Cali and Brit hardcore are constantly lumped together as the music of teenage lunkheads, too out of it to realize the action had moved on to the Mudd Club. Ten years later, though, something happened. With the advent of Nirvana and the mass-marketing of (formerly) indie rock, Cali hardcore now stood as the venerable ancestor of the new classic rock, Robert Johnson to Cobain's Eric Clapton. The shit was now canonical. Compelled to figure out where this stuff came from, to set up a lineage for it, rock critics revised their take on hardcore, at least in its American incarnation. What had seemed like the frantic scrawlings of a caged animal now looked like a diagram for genuine rock auteurdom. In a bizarre final twist to the rehabilitation
of the original, tenth-generation Cali hardcore itself became a respectable genre with the success of Green Day, Offspring, et al. Now we get to read these retrospective pieces in rock mags and books about how we all know how seminal Black Flag and the Germs were, when in fact those same canon-makers were writing stuff well into the Eighties depicting hardcore as terminal, the punk rock equivalent of a rabid mule. Luckily it couldn't breed, they thought. While American hardcore led eventually to the creation of several important industries (though Puffy's gonna wipe 'em all out soon) British hardcore led nowhere. The music retains its stigma as a dead end. Few critics are willing to appreciate it on its own terms. (They're not willing to do that with its early Eighties peers in Cali either, but that stuff they can look at through the lens of the stuff it influenced, which is what they really like to do anyway, which is why everything they write about it comes off canned.) What sucks is that the best of this music which has been so blithely written out of the history books not only rocked like mad, it also tells us something about the history of its own time in a way you won't find anywhere else, tells it so that if you let yourself into its world you'll never forget it. Its world was the beginning of our world, the world of neoliberalism and expendable people. That may have something to do with why Brit hardcore left no survivors. American hardcore was oriented toward the personal, almost private angst