New York City weekly, The Village Voice, has written an homage to 25 years of Agnostic Front: The Bowery gave birth to New York City punk; 10 years later, a pack of street kids bloodied it up a few blocks east. By the early '80s, most first-wave punk bands (including Television and the Ramones) were going belly-up, going new wave, or going on to release awful albums like Pleasant Dreams. Unimpressed, these new punks, many still teenagers, lived in a series of squats and abandoned storefronts near Tompkins Square Park, where they formed bands, grubbed out a living, and fought vicious battles on the avenues with local thugs who viewed a gang of punk kids as, well, another gang. Beaten and bruised, the young punks traded spiky hair and leather jackets for a more combat-ready look—steel-toe boots, chain belts, shaved heads—and toughened up punk music the same way. They didn't "Beat on the Brat." They swung socks filled with billiard balls. As Murphy's Law frontman Jimmy Gestapo frequently puts it, they were punks who were beaten into being hardcore.
Nothing captures the sound of that chaos like Agnostic Front's Victim in Pain, widely regarded as the first New York hardcore album.
Continue reading over at The Village Voice.
No comments:
Post a Comment