It’s a small paradox that four black men (not kids) who began their musical career in a Washington, DC jazz fusion band called Mind Power, and who were in the thrall of a second-rate self-help book called Think and Grow Rich by some fraud and grifter named Napoleon Hill, and who by the time they put out their first album (a cassette actually) were already engaged in an internecine struggle over whether they should become a reggae band, should have become one of the two founding fathers of hardcore, along with LA’s Black Flag. But nothing in this world makes sense—chickens have wings, but the only thing they’re good for is eating.
Like Black Flag, Bad Brains changed everything. They took punk rock and speeded it up, setting land speed records that wouldn’t even be broken by Hüsker Dü’s 1982 Bonneville Salt Flats fast live album, Land Speed Record. And because they’d honed their chops playing jazz fusion and had it together in a way that flew in the face of punk rock’s “play live three days before you’ve picked up your instruments” aesthetic, and despite the fact that their “Positive Mental Attitude” shtick flew in the face of punk negativism and hostility, they mesmerized everyone who saw them play live because they played aggressive music at approximately 9,000 mph while vocalist H.R. (aka Paul Hudson) hurled himself about stage while speed-rapping in an eerie nasal bark/wail that made you think the guy was crazy, which in the end wasn’t far from the truth. Brian Eno may or may not have said, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.” That’s called hyperbole. When it came to seeing the Bad Brains play live, it comes closer to gospel truth.
But here’s the thing about their eponymous 1980 debut, which is also known as The Yellow Tape or Attitude: The ROIR Sessions—while it’s an astounding recording of an astounding band, I can’t listen to it without wishing I’d been there to see them do their thing live. In fact I never listen to it at all, because I know in my bones that seeing them live was everything. As Robert Christgau pointed out, and if could say it better I would, “great punk bands give up more than a salubrious blur.” And that’s all you hear on Bad Brains—a blur, with H.R.’s incantatory vocals serving as just another instrument because it’s virtually impossible to understand a word he’s singing.
Bad Brains has another problem, and it stemmed from H.R.’s growing interest in reggae and Rastafarianism and his diminishing interest in playing what he came to call “devil’s music” (“It’s not an easy thing for a godly man to take” he would say later). I’m talking about the three reggae tracks on the album, which are less changes of pace or musical intermissions than downright momentum killers.
Rock crit Chuck Eddy would have you believe that Bad Brains “integrated” reggae into their sound, but he couldn’t be more wrong. This isn’t integration, it’s schizophrenia, and it’s jarring. If I’m to be treated to a salubrious blur, by god I want it to be nonstop. I don’t want commercial interruptions in the form of infomercials for a religion that several of Bad Brains’ Rasta fundamentalists’ would use to justify rampant homophobia. No disrespect to Rastafarianism, of course—like every religion it has its fanatics, and religion can be used to justify any and all sorts of hatred and intolerance.
As hardcore evolved bands would increasingly incorporate heavy metal into their sound, but in the case of Bad Brains it was there from the beginning. Not the Sabbath sludge that (along with Henry Rollins) would spell the demise of Black Flag, mind you—Bad Brains played a sort of proto-thrash or speed metal, although when the band slows the tempo just a tad, as they do on songs like “Right Brigade,” “Big Take Over,” “The Regulator” and the mid-section of “Banned in D.C.” they sound like a band that could have been playing the metal circuit.
And most of the song intros are pure unadulterated metal. I don’t hear any punk in Dr. Know’s guitar solos—he’s less Greg Ginn than one of your more fastidious and flashier metal guitarists. And by the time 1986’s I Against I came out, it would have been damned foolishness to call them anything but a metal band that dabbled in reggae and funk and liked to jack up the tempos occasionally. They sound to me like Living Colour on a caffeine jag.
Smarter people than I have said that “Pay to Cum” is the only great song the band ever recorded. I would say that it’s by far the best song they ever recorded, but there are other songs on Bad Brains (chiefly “Sailin’ On” and “Banned in D.C.” and a few lesser lights) that more than stand up, and the worst that can be said of any of them is that they come up short in the melody department. Which is to say Bad Brains’ strong point wasn’t songwriting, although that’s no small complaint. They awed, but left no memorable melodies behind. Part of it has to do with sheer speed, but the fact is that I can hum the melodies of plenty of Black Flag songs but ask me to hum a Bad Brains song and I’m left with “Pay to Cum,” which just might mean that the folks who say it’s the only great song they ever wrote are right after all.
Bad Brains’ legacy is an awesome blur (and some so-so reggae) but their awesome blur may just be the most awesome blur ever committed to vinyl, and that has to mean something, right? Right? As for H.R. becoming the next Bob Marley, forget about it. The guy’s aspirations far exceeded his inspiration, which is why none of the song’s in his extensive solo discography are likely to be canonized as reggae classics.
One of the things that first attracted me to hardcore was the chuckle factor; the tempos mattered, a whole lot, but the words mattered just as much. The hardcore I loved (and when I look back I didn’t really love that much hardcore) tended to be funny—I was into it for the laughs. And a joke’s only funny if you can understand it—I don’t frequent Albanian comedy clubs. (I’ve always made a major exemption for the first Meat Puppets album, because Curt Kirkwood isn’t so much singing as doing a hilarious imitation of a lawnmower clotted to the point of stall by wet grass.)
I seldom have a clue what H.R. is saying, which doesn’t negate the fact that he’s saying it in a way that borders on the supernatural, but still—there are no punchlines. Or lyrical takeaways period. There’s no such thing as a Bad Brains song you can sing along while shit-faced drunk. (In this respect they play an interesting variation on fellow Washingtonians Minor Threat, who you could theoretically sing along with while shit-faced drunk, but why would you want to?) As I said above, H.R.’s voice may as well be just another instrument, albeit the most fascinating and amazing instrument in the band.
Bad Brains would go on, from one disaster to another, their every attempt at fame and fortune sabotaged by H.R., whose mental health issues and opposition to the forces of Babylon would prove to be a sturdy bulwark against the band’s ever getting ahead. The band would veer away from hardcore to reggae and back again, their homophobia would get them labeled as “religious fascists” and alienate many, and H.R. would make self-sabotage a career strategy, at one point shooting down what might have been a multi-million dollar record deal by introducing an Electra A&R man to bassist Darryl Jenifer with the words, “Darryl, this is Satan. Satan, meet Darryl.” Which is hilarious unless you were Jenifer, who was living hand to mouth. Whatever became of Napoleon Hill and growing rich? H.R. makes the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe look like a crass careerist.
I never saw Bad Brains live, but everyone I’ve ever spoken with who did says the same thing—seeing them in the flesh was the whole point. Which is a rarer phenomenon than you’d think. Bad Brains is a good album but a poor substitute—in some ways, it’s no substitute at all. It’s like the difference between seeing photos of the Alps and plunging to your death from the Matterhorn. If Bad Brains ultimately fails as an album, it fails for none of the usual reasons. I was mugged at gunpoint once, and it was quite the experience. There is no soundtrack for that sort of thing. There can’t be. If you weren’t there you missed it.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
