American Hardcore DVD Review

Since I saw AHC in the theaters the one thing  on my mind was the potential for special features. In my ideal world this would be a two DVD set with the second disc being all unedited interviews and full sets of live rare live footage. The special features that accompany the DVD do clock in at a little over 90 minutes which even I will admit is pretty generous. Most of the 90 minutes are taken up by interviews. While these segments are given a choppy editing job which often cuts off people mid sentence (and sentences that sound like they will be interesting at that) the subjects remain captivating. The highlights of the interviews are with Vinnie Stigma (Agnostic Front guitarist), and Edward Colver (early LA hardcore photographer). I must admit that I also was pretty satisfied by the footage of the director and writer pulling up to Al Barille's  (SSD) house and seeing that he still drives a huge black van.

The live footage consists of one song clips of Void ("My Rules"), Bad Brains ("Big Takeover"), SSD ("Boiling Point"), Jerry's Kids ("I Don't Belong" which cuts off as they go into "Is This My World?"), and MDC ("Corporate Deathburger"). All of the live footage is pretty intense with Bad Brains, Void, and SSD sticking out the most. The sound quality of these clips varies, but the Bad Brains and SSD footage seems to be taken from professionally made videos.

The film itself comes off as more affective upon re- watching. It takes a sort of reversed  Turner's Thesis (the idea that the creation of American culture was fueled on expansion to the Western part of the continent) approach to the history of hardcore. For Blush and Rachman Black Flag and the Circle Jerks were the frontiersmen who expanded their subculture across the nation and like the American pioneers who traveled West rather than East once hardcore punks established themselves on the other side of the the country there was nothing left for them to do and the original urgency was lost. Of course this means that the film makers fail to acknowledge the importance of anything that happened after hardcore expanded to New York, but nonetheless they do make a decent case for their argument and the raw live footage and interviews will capture the imagination of Punk rock nerds like myself.

 
-Ditch-