Lucy E. Parsons ( – 1942) was an American social anarchist and later anarcho-communist. Her early life is shrouded in mystery: she herself said she was of mixed Mexican and Native American ancestry; historians believe she was born to an African-American slave, possibly in Virginia, then married a black freedman in Texas. In addition to Parsons, she went by different surnames during her life including Carter, Diaz, Gonzalez and Hull. She met Albert Parsons in Waco, Texas, and claimed to have married him although no records have been found. They moved to Chicago together around 1873 and Parsons' politics were shaped by the harsh repression of the Chicago railroad strike of 1877. She argued for labor organization and class struggle, writing polemical texts and speaking publicly at events. She joined the International Workingmen's Association and later the Knights of Labor, and she set up the Chicago Working Women's Union with her friend Lizzie Swank and other women.

She had two children and worked in Chicago as a seamstress, later opening her own shop. After Albert Parsons was executed in 1887 following the Haymarket affair, she became internationally famous as an anarchist speaker, touring frequently across the United States and visiting England. She was a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World and edited radical newspapers. She was helped financially by the Pioneer Aid and Support Association and completed The Life of Albert R. Parsons with her young lover Martin Lacher. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Parsons moved towards communism. She became a notorious political figure and Chicago police attempted for decades to stop her speaking publicly. She clashed with Emma Goldman over their differing attitudes to free love and continued her activism as she grew older, supporting Angelo Herndon, Tom Mooney, and the Scottsboro Boys.

Parsons died in a house fire on March 7, 1942. Her partner George Markstall returned to find the building on fire and was unable to rescue her; he died the following day. She was buried in the German Waldheim Cemetery, where the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument stands. After her death, Parsons was primarily referenced as the wife of Albert Parsons, until recent scholarship and two book-length biographies have commemorated her own achievements. The Chicago Park District named a park on Belmont Avenue after her in 2004.

Early life

Little is known for certain about Parsons' early life. Biographer Caroline Ashbaugh states she was born the daughter of a slave in 1849 and was possibly called Lucy Gathings; through her life Parsons also used the surnames Carter, Diaz, Gonzalez and Hull. There is confusion over Parsons' middle name; while historians such as Philip S. Foner give it as Eldine, both the birth certificate of her daughter and her own death certificate supply the name Ella. Throughout her life, Parsons denied being of African heritage and said that she had Mexican and Native American parents, mixing up their genders. When later events made her famous, national newspapers tried to investigate her Texas heritage but were unable to do so. One story she told was that she was born in Texas to Marie del Gather (who was of Spanish-Mexican ancestry) and John Waller, a Muscogee Native American. Her entry in the American National Biography suggests she may have been daughter to Pedro Diáz González and his wife Marie. Her contemporaries remarked upon her beautiful appearance and dark hair.

In Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical, social historian Jacqueline Jones states that Parsons was born a slave in Virginia and in 1863 at the age of 12 was brought to McLennan County, Texas, by her owner Thomas J. Taliaferro along with her mother and brother. On this account she was called Lucia; she then moved to Waco, Texas, which had been founded in 1849 and in the postwar period was a place where people were reinventing their identities as they moved on from their past lives as slaves or Confederate soldiers. The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln had freed enslaved African Americans and in Texas General Order No. 3 emancipated slaves on June 19, 1865. Parsons, then known as Lucia Carter, began living with (and possibly married) a black freedman called Oliver Benton, formerly known as Oliver Gathings because slaves were given the surnames of their owners. She was about 16 or 17 years old and he was around 35 or 36. Benton paid $1.50 per month for her education at a local black school. They may have had a child together who died at a young age. Ashbaugh suggests that Parsons was (like Benton) a former slave of the Gathings brothers, since Philip Gathings had a daughter named Lucy in 1849 and Parsons may have been named after her. While slave records preserve no names, the Gathings brothers did each own two slave girls in 1860 who would have been around Parsons' age. Parsons herself told different versions of her life history.

Lucy Gathings met the white Albert Parsons in Waco. It is doubtful they were ever married since no records have been found and there were at the time anti-miscegenation laws. Both Lucy and Albert Parsons claimed that they married in Austin in 1872, while Parsons told the Dictionary of American Biography for Albert's entry that they married on June 10, 1871. The historian Lucie C. Price was unable to find any records either of the marriage certificate or of the official whom Parsons said had recorded the marriage. They lived together as man and wife, Lucy taking the name Parsons. Albert had fought in the American Civil War on the losing Confederate side and after the war had become a Radical Republican agitating for black civil rights. Lucy Parsons always opposed racism and it is likely she had witnessed the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in Waco, while Albert was shot in the leg for helping black people to register to vote.

Moving to Chicago

Lucy and Albert Parsons moved to Chicago in about 1873. The industrial city was growing quickly as it recovered from the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, with the population rocketing from 112,000 to 1.1 million inhabitants between 1870 and 1890. The couple lived in poor working-class slum tenements around Larrabee Street and North Avenue on the North Side. Albert Parsons worked as a compositor for newspapers and Lucy Parsons earned money as a seamstress. The couple became involved in the Social Democratic Party of North America and later the Workingmen's Party of the United States after the dissolution of the International Workingmen's Association (which had also been known as the First International). Parsons demonstrated her willingness to stand up for her rights by twice taking white people to court in 1875, over an unpaid bill and a neighbor disturbance, respectively.

When the Chicago railroad strike of 1877 occurred as part of the Great Upheaval, Albert Parsons at first told the crowds to remain non-violent and to vote for the Workingmen's Party to achieve political change. Soon, all railway workers were on strike and the Chicago Board of Trade was concerned that a situation similar to the 1871 Paris Commune might develop. On July 23, Albert Parsons and fellow socialists Philip Van Patten and George Schilling spoke to a crowd of 25,000 people. He was then fired from his job at the Chicago Times and blacklisted. Armed men took him to Mayor of Chicago Monroe Heath's office, where the police chief and angry business leaders threatened him; later that day he had gun put to his head by two unknown men when he went to the Chicago Tribune to ask for work. Lucy Parsons resolved to get a job to support her family, starting a shop selling suits and dresses. She expanded the business into Parsons & Co., Manufacturers of Ladies' and Children's Clothing, opening a workspace at 306 Mohawk Street and employing her partner since he was now blacklisted.

Parsons' first writings to be published were letters to the editor of The Socialist concerning the hunger and poverty of the working class. She began to lecture after the birth of her son, Albert Parsons Jr., in September 1879. Her biographer Jones notes that on the birth certificate she wrote her maiden name as Carter and Virginia as her place of birth. Parsons' political perspective was evolving and she determined that her personal problems were insignificant since only social movements could achieve change. She was more militant than her partner, campaigning against voting at a time when she did not have the right to do it herself. Her observations of the strike taught her that workers were powerful when united. She developed her social anarchist approach, in which she condoned political violence, urged self-defense against racial violence and called for class struggle against religion. Alongside women such as Elizabeth Chambers Morgan, Elizabeth Flynn Rodgers, Alzina Stevens and Lizzie Swank she helped to set up the Chicago Working Women's Union (WWU) and attended meetings while pregnant, at a time when child-bearing women were expected to stay at home. Swank became a good friend of Parsons and as soon as the Knights of Labor decided to admit women, they both joined up. The WWU encouraged women to unionise and promoted the eight-hour day.

On April 20, 1881, Parsons gave birth to her second child, Lulu Eda, who was to die of lymphedema at the age of eight. In 1883, Johann Most visited Chicago and met the Parsons family. He was an insurrectionary anarchist who promoted propaganda of the deed. In November, Albert Parsons founded the American Group of Chicago as local part of the International Working People's Association (IWPA), which contained five of the eight men who would later be the Haymarket affair defendants, namely himself and Samuel Fielden, Adolph Fischer, Oscar Neebe and August Spies. When it published the radical newspaper The Alarm in 1884, the four main contributors were Lucy Parsons, Albert Parsons, William Holmes and Lizzie Swank. Lucy Parsons published texts including "Our Civilization. Is it Worth Saving?", "The Factory Child. Their Wrongs Portrayed and Their Rescue Demanded" and "The Negro. Let Him Leave Politics to the Politician and Prayers to the Preacher". Her article "To Tramps, the Unemployed, the Disinherited and Miserable" was reprinted from The Alarm and sold more than 100,000 copies between May and November 1885. The same year Parsons published "Dynamite! The only voice the oppressors of the people can understand" in the Denver Labor Enquirer. She saw violence as inevitable in class struggle and also believed in trade unions as the engine of the revolution. On April 28, 1885, Parsons and Lizzie Holmes () led an IWPA march to the Board of Trade building. During this time period, Parsons and her partner would often address crowds of 500 to 1,000 people on Sundays at the shore of Lake Michigan. Labor organizer Mother Jones attended and thought the speeches advocated too much violence.

Haymarket affair

On Saturday May 1, 1888, 300,000 workers went on strike across the US. In Chicago, the Parsons family led a peaceful demonstration of 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue, demanding the eight-hour day. Two days later, August Spies addressed striking workers at the McCormick Reaper factory; Chicago Police and private security guards known as Pinkertons attacked the gathering, shooting at least one person dead. On May 4, Lucy Parsons was organizing a meeting to support striking sewing women and asked Albert Parsons to join her; on the same night, there was a protest against the recent police brutality at the nearby Haymarket Square. At the square there were a few thousand people and Albert Parsons took the podium after August Spies. After the speeches, 176 police officers marched into the square and ordered the demonstrators to disperse; in response, a bomb was thrown from the crowd. The police immediately opened fire, shooting at least seven workers dead, while one police officer died and six others succumbed to their injuries later; it is likely that in the chaos the officers were killed by police bullets. The incident became known as the Haymarket affair. The Parsons family was at Zepf's Hall nearby and heard the blast; Lucy urged Albert to flee the city and he first went to Geneva, Illinois to stay with Lizzie and William Holmes, then moved to Waukesha, Wisconsin where he worked as a laborer and stayed with Daniel Hoan.

On May 5, the day after the bombing, Lucy Parsons was in the office of the Arbeiter-Zeitung when it was raided by police officers without a search warrant. They arrested the entire staff including Parsons, whom an officer called "a black bitch"; she was released without charge since the police were hoping she would lead them to her partner. Over the next six months she was briefly detained several times. Other mass arrests and unlawful searches were made and Julius S. Grinnell, the Illinois Attorney General who would later prosecute the case, said "Make the raids first then look up the law afterwards". Lucy Parsons reported in the Denver Labor Enquirer: "They have invaded the homes of everyone who has ever been known to have raised a voice or sympathized with those who have had aught to say against the present system of robbery and oppression". A Grand Jury announced charges against 31 men on May 27, including murder charges against ten. Lizzie Holmes was not charged since prosecutors did not want to cause a scandal by sentencing a woman to death. All but one of the men were members of the Central Labor Union and the most fervent advocates of propaganda by the deed (including Lucy Parsons and Lizzie Holmes) had not been charged.

The attitude of the US labor movement towards those accused was mixed, with some militants voicing support and others concerned by the loss of life. While Albert was in hiding, he wrote to Lucy Parsons asking her to talk to the lawyer William P. Black and discuss the conditions of his surrender. Black encouraged her to bring him to court, believing there was little chance of conviction. His chief aide William A. Foster disagreed, thinking it best that Parsons remained free. On the first day of trial, Albert Parsons appeared after spending some hours with Lucy and surrendered to Judge Joseph Gary. The mainstream media campaign against anarchists was intense, with the Chicago Tribune calling for executions and Texas newspapers revisiting the presumed scandal of Parsons leaving her marriage with Oliver Benton for Albert. The Waco Day headlined a story "Beast Parsons: the sneaking snarl from some moral morass in which he hides; miscegenationist, murderer, moral outlaw, for whom the gallows waits". In response, Parsons visited her partner in jail with a journalist from the Tribune and he said he had been romantically attached to Benton's wife but that she was a different person to Lucy.

Lucy Parsons attended every day of the trial and then after her partner was sentenced to death, she made a seven-week lecture tour in order to raise funds for the defense committee; she addressed more than 200,000 people in places such as Cincinnati, New York and Philadelphia. In New Haven, Connecticut, she said "You may have expected me to belch forth great flames of dynamite and stand before you with bombs in my hands. If you are disappointed, you have only the capitalist press to thank for it". She spoke with the socialist Thomas J. Morgan at a rally in Sheffield, Indiana, which was just across the state line from Illinois, so that the Chicago police were unable to stop the event. In Columbus, Ohio, she was prevented from speaking and sent by the mayor to Franklin County Jail. When not lecturing, Parsons would visit her partner in jail, taking the children with her. She stopped her tailoring shop and the family was forced to move out of their Indiana Street apartment to another on Milwaukee Avenue. After his death sentence was announced, Albert Parsons wrote to his wife "I have one request to make of you: Commit no rash act to yourself when I am gone, but take up the great cause of Socialism where I am compelled to lay it down." An Amnesty Association was founded and took action to save Albert Parsons and the six other men on death row; Lucy Parsons spent her time fundraising and collecting signatures on the street, and the campaign to commute the sentences was supported even by those such as Melville Elijah Stone, editor of the Chicago Daily News, who had previously condemned the anarchists.

On Thursday November 10, Louis Lingg was either murdered or committed suicide in his cell. In the evening Governor of Illinois Richard J. Oglesby announced that of the other men condemned to death, Fielden and Schwab would have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment and Engel, Fischer, Parsons and Spies would be executed the next day. On the morning of Parsons' execution, Lucy Parsons took the children to see him for the last time, accompanied by Lizzie Holmes. Despite being promised by a deputy sheriff the day before that she would gain access, she was prevented from entering the jail by a police cordon. When she attempted to cross the cordon, the group was arrested and taken to the Chicago Avenue police station where they were strip-searched for explosives and detained until 15:00. The casket containing the corpse of Albert Parsons was taken to Lucy Parsons' shop, where over 10,000 people came to pay respects in one day. A total of between 10,000 and 15,000 people attended the funeral on Sunday, November 13; Parsons walked behind the casket. Twenty years later, she edited and published The Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists in Court: When asked if they had anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon them: October 7, 8, and 9, 1886, and sold more than 10,000 copies in 18 months.

Continued activism

After the funeral of her partner, Parsons continued her political activism. The Pioneer Aid and Support Association gave her a stipend of $12 per week and in March 1888 she toured the East Coast making speeches. During the 1887 Chicago mayoral election, Parsons supported the United Labor Party candidate against the eventual victor, Republican John A. Roche. Roche framed the contest as a battle between the US flag and the flags of anarchism and communism, later attempting to ban the use of red flags at left-wing meetings. Parsons began to work on the book which she later published as The Life of Albert R. Parsons. She was helped by Martin Lacher, a young German who lived with her from 1889 onwards. In October 1888, she took the boat to London, where she met anarchists Peter Kropotkin and William Morris, and visited the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey with Jane Morris. She addressed the Socialist League and clashed with Annie Besant, a leader of the matchgirls' strike, over the issue of violence. When she arrived back in New York City by boat, a reporter interviewed her and then claimed that she was getting married to the German democratic socialist Eduard Bernstein. Parsons' anarchist contemporaries such as Justus Schwab condemned the story and she denied it.

After Parsons returned to Chicago in 1889, the newly renamed Albert R. Parsons Assembly of the Knights of Labor publicized a forthcoming lecture by her entitled Review of the Labor Movement in Europe. Chicago police chief George W. Hubbard resolved to stop the event and on the day itself, Lacher and another man were arrested as they protested for Parsons' right to speak. She developed a rivalry with Thomas J. Morgan, who advocated a socialist approach to work as opposed to her syndicalism. Hubbard announced that "she simply can't speak in Chicago" and repeatedly stopped events occurring. The same year, Parsons published The Life of Albert R. Parsons with a foreword by George Schilling. In November 1890, Johann Most, Parsons and Hugh O. Pentecost were prevented from speaking in Newark, New Jersey when the police closed the hall. Parsons then attempted to speak on the street: she was arrested and charged with incitement to riot.  Parsons edited the newspaper Freedom, A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly from 1891 onwards. Parsons built a house at 999 Hammond Avenue, later North Troy Street in Avondale with the aid of the Pioneer Aid and Support Association, but some members of the group began to resent her need for funds, alleging that she was still claiming a stipend for her daughter who had died. Her relationship with Lacher was controversial since he remained married to someone else. The couple were by 1890 seen together publicly until their relationship ended in a court battle, when Parsons accused him of attacking her household belongings with an axe. Lacher admitted destroying furniture but argued it belonged to him; he was fined $25 plus costs for disorderly conduct. He also alleged that he had written the majority of the Life of Albert R. Parsons. Parsons used her position as editor of Freedom to attack Lacher, claiming he had stolen money from a local group and was pursuing a vendetta against her.

As the years past, there were events to mark the anniversary of the Haymarket affair and the police continued to stop Parsons addressing these and other meetings. When the anarchist Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892, Parsons wrote in  Freedom "For our part we have only the greatest admiration for a hero like Berkman" and she supported her friends Henry Bauer and Carl Nold who were arrested on conspiracy charges despite not being involved. Berkman was handed a sentence of 22 years and Nold and Bauer each received five years. In 1893, Parsons negotiated with the mayor that she could speak on the condition that she did not denounce him, then took the stage and immediately said the mayor was no better than a czar. In August 1896, her house burned down and her stock of books was damaged, although she later sold fire-damaged copies of Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis and The Life of Albert R. Parsons.

Parsons was attracted to the activism of the Social Democracy of America, led by Eugene V. Debs, and met Emma Goldman through the group in 1897. While Goldman promoted free love, emancipation for women and the freedom of the individual, Parsons (despite having extra-marital sex in her private life) publicly endorsed monogamy, marriage and motherhood, still believing in the primacy of the struggle of the working class as a whole. At the time Goldman, Parsons and Louise Michel were amongst a small cohort of women who were internationally famous as anarchists and labor activists. When Oscar Rotter wrote about free love and the destruction of property relations in the anarchist newspaper Free Society, Parsons responded angrily in support of monogamy and this led to a long-lasting feud with Goldman, who complained that Parsons was living off her executed partner's legacy.  Parsons opposed both the Spanish–American War and the Philippine–American War; after her son Albert Jr. attempted to enlist, she had him committed to the Northern Illinois State Mental Hospital in 1899; he remained there for the rest of his life, dying in 1919 of tuberculosis.

1900s

Parsons was visited by anarchist Errico Malatesta in 1900 and the same year made a speech alongside trade unionist Jay Fox at a picnic on Memorial Day. By that time, Parsons was the Chicago correspondent for Free Society; the next year, following the assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz, the police destroyed its printing press. In 1905, Parsons set up the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) with Eugene V. Debs, Bill Haywood and Mother Jones. She continued to tour the US making speeches and selling pamphlets, while editing the radical newspapers The Liberator and The Alarm. She was often prevented from speaking by the police, particularly in Chicago, yet she continued to lecture until the 1920s. Around 1912, she was involved with the Syndicalist League of North America, which was led by William Z. Foster.

An affair famous from this era was her speech in the Hull House. After she spoke at a January 1915 hunger march in Chicago which ended in 1,500 unemployed people fighting with the police near Hull House on Halsted Street, Parsons was arrested alongside Father Irwin St. John Tucker and 19 other people.

Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Parsons moved towards communism. She later wrote to Carl Nold that the communists were "the only bunch who are making a vigorous protest against the present horrible conditions!" and lamented that "anarchism is a dead issue in American life today". She became involved with the International Labor Defense and in 1930, she spoke to thousands of people at the May Day (International Workers' Day) event at Ashland Auditorium in Chicago, making a speech that was reprinted in Hearings Before a Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the U.S.. In a continuance of their rivalry, Emma Goldman criticized her for jumping from one revolutionary cause to the next. Parsons finally joined the Communist Party in 1939.

Parsons suffered an attack of pleurisy in 1932, recovering enough to visit the Chicago World's Fair the following year. She was despondent about the US anarchist movement, discussing its failure with friends such as Nord, yet she continued her activism, supporting Angelo Herndon, Tom Mooney and the Scottsboro Boys. She went blind, received a pension and lived in poverty in Avondale at North Troy Street with a library of around 3,000 books which featured the work of Engels, French socialists, Victor Hugo, Jack London, Marx, Rousseau, Leo Tolstoy and Voltaire.

Death

On her last May Day in 1941, Parsons accompanied the Farm Equipment Workers' Organizing Committee as guest of honor. At the age of around 91, she died in a house fire on March 7, 1942. Her long-term partner George Markstall returned to find the building on fire and was unable to rescue her; he died of his injuries the next day. Parsons had spoken to Ben Reitman about her funeral and drawn up a will in 1938, leaving the house to Markstall and upon his death to the  Pioneer Aid and Support Association. Her will was declared invalid and the building was sold for $800 in 1943. The fire had destroyed part of her library, but many books remained undamaged; when a friend went to the house to save the books, he discovered that only burnt copies remained. He asked the police where the library had gone and was told the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had taken it. The FBI denied any knowledge of the books and when Reitman asked the head of the Chicago Red Squad, he was told the FBI had them; the books were not recovered. Years later, a signed copy of William Morris' The Signs of Change: Seven Lectures with the dedication "To Lucy E. Parsons, from William Morris, Nov. 15th 1888" was put up for sale, bearing stamps from the Library of Congress and the FBI.

A memorial service for Parsons and Markstall was attended by 300 people on March 12. Reitman spoke, calling her "the last of the dinosaurs, that brave group of Chicago Anarchists." Parsons was buried in the German Waldheim Cemetery, where the Haymarket Martyrs Monument stands. Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman are also buried there.

Legacy

Fellow activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn remembered Parsons as a passionate speaker and revolutionary. As philosopher Ruth Kinna notes, Parsons has historically been referred to primarily as the wife of Albert Parsons, yet she was in fact a "talented writer, orator and organizer in her own right". Until Ashbaugh's 1976 biography, Parsons was often only mentioned in footnotes: more recently coverage of her career has increased. She has been claimed by various left-wing groups as a figurehead and a self-managed social center in Boston was named after her.

Historians have criticised Parsons' lack of interest in the struggles of African Americans, with her stance reflecting a belief in the need for the working class generally to rise up against its employers, rather than appealing to the need for racial equality. One explanation is that since she denied her own black heritage, she focused more on class struggle. As a result, she did not work with the contemporaneous black Chicago activist Ida Wells-Barnett, nor the National Association of Colored Women and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Historians have also focused on the question of Parsons' specific political affiliations, while at the time labels were more fluid and Albert Parsons wrote: "We are called by some Communists, or Socialists, or Anarchists. We accept all three of the terms."

Parsons is one of the historical figures depicted in Annalee Newitz's science fiction novel The Future of Another Timeline, part of which is set in Chicago in the 1890s. The Chicago Park District named a small area on Belmont Avenue the "Lucy Ella Gonzales Parsons" park in 2004, a decision which was opposed by the Fraternal Order of Police. In 2022, a new housing development in Logan Square, Chicago with 100 percent affordable units was named the Lucy Gonzalez Parsons Apartments.

Selected works

Notes

References

External links

Lucy Parsons Labs, a Chicago-based digital rights organization

1850s births
1942 deaths
20th-century American women writers
Accidental deaths in Illinois
Activists from Chicago
African-American anarchists
African-American communists
African-American trade unionists
American anti-capitalists
American anti-fascists
American communists
American revolutionaries
American trade union leaders
American women journalists
Anarcha-feminists
Anarcho-communists
Burials at Forest Home Cemetery, Chicago
Communist women writers
Deaths from fire in the United States
Industrial Workers of the World leaders
Industrial Workers of the World members
Members of the Communist Party USA
Year of birth uncertain

Lucy Parsons


James F. Stuart (23 December 1928, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana – 7 March 2005) was an American opera director and operatic tenor. He began his career performing and touring with Dorothy Raedler's American Savoyards. He became a specialist in the patter roles of Gilbert and Sullivan, including Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B. in H.M.S. Pinafore, Ko-Ko in The Mikado, and Reginald Bunthorne in Patience among others. In 1979 he founded the Ohio Light Opera in Wooster, Ohio, serving as the company's artistic director for two decades. During his tenure there he also often worked as producer, stage director, translator, and performer. He himself performed in fifty of the more than two hundred productions mounted by the company while he was director. He also sang on twenty of the company's live operetta recordings, which encompassed works by both Americans and Europeans.

References

1928 births
2005 deaths
American operatic tenors
Opera managers
American theatre directors
20th-century American male opera singers
Musicians from Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Singers from Louisiana

James Stuart (opera director)


Hardcore punk (also known as simply hardcore) is a punk rock music genre and subculture that originated in the late 1970s. It is generally faster, harder, and more aggressive than other forms of punk rock.  Its roots can be traced to earlier punk scenes in San Francisco and Southern California which arose as a reaction against the still predominant hippie cultural climate of the time. It  was also inspired by Washington D.C. and New York punk rock and early proto-punk. Hardcore punk generally disavows commercialism, the established music industry and "anything similar to the characteristics of mainstream rock" and often addresses social and political topics with "confrontational, politically-charged lyrics".

Hardcore sprouted underground scenes across the United States in the early 1980s, particularly in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, and New York, as well as in Canada and the United Kingdom. Hardcore has spawned the straight edge movement and its associated sub-movements, hardline and youth crew. Hardcore was heavily involved in the rise of the independent record labels in the 1980s and with the DIY ethics in underground music scenes. It has also influenced various music genres that have experienced widespread commercial success, including grunge and thrash metal.

Although the music genre started in English-speaking western countries, notable hardcore scenes have existed in Italy and Japan.

Characteristics

Hardcore historian Steven Blush credits Minor Threat's Ian MacKaye with starting a "die-hard mindset that begat almost everything we now call Hardcore", which was virulently anti-music industry and anti-rock star. An article in Drowned in Sound argues that late 1970s/early 1980s-era hardcore is the true spirit of punk, because "all the poseurs and fashionistas fucked off to the next trend of skinny pink ties with New Romantic haircuts, singing wimpy lyrics" and the punk scene now consisted of people like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Black Flag, and Circle Jerks, dedicated to DIY ethics.
Other writers have also attributed hardcore to a reaction against artsy and mellower sub-genres that punk grew into, such as post-punk and new wave. Hardcore punk additionally broke with original punk rock song patterns and visuals, favoring lower key aesthetics. According to Eli Enis of Billboard magazine, hardcore shows are known to be violent. In 2002,  during an interview with Nardwuar, Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra was asked what he believed to be the first hardcore record, he remarked: "Sound Of Imker Train of Doomsday single in the late '60s in Holland. The only true '60s hardcore record I know."

Musical elements
One definition of the genre is "a form of exceptionally harsh punk rock". Hardcore has been called a faster meaner genre of punk rock, that was a stern refutation against it, being more primal and immediate, with speed and aggression as the starting point.

In the vein of earlier punk rock, most hardcore punk bands have followed the traditional singer/guitar/bass/drum format. The songwriting has more emphasis on rhythm rather than melody. Blush writes "The Sex Pistols were still rock'n'roll...like the craziest version of Chuck Berry. Hardcore was a radical departure from that. It wasn't verse-chorus rock. It dispelled any notion of what songwriting is supposed to be. It's its own form." According to AllMusic, the overall blueprint for hardcore was playing louder, harder and faster. Hardcore was a reaction to the "cosmopolitan art-school" style of new wave music. Hardcore "eschew[ed] nuance, technique, [and] the avant-garde", and instead emphasized "speed and rhythmic intensity" using unpredictable song forms and abrupt tempo changes.

The impact of powerful volume is important in hardcore. Noisey magazine describes one hardcore band as "an all-encompassing, full-volume assault" in which "[e]very instrument sounds like it's competing for the most power and highest volume". Scott Wilson states that the hardcore of the Bad Brains emphasized two elements: "off-the-charts" loudness which reached a level of threatening, powerful "uncompromising noise" and rhythm, in place of the typically focused-on elements in mainstream rock music, harmony and pitch (i.e., melody).

Hardcore vocalists often shout, scream or chant along with the music, using "vocal intensity" and an abrasive tone. The shouting of hardcore vocalists is often accompanied by audience members who are singing along, making the hardcore vocalist like the "leader of a mob". Steven Blush describes one early Minor Threat show where the crowd was singing the lyrics so loud they could be heard over the PA system. Hardcore vocal lines are often based on minor scales and songs may include shouted background vocals from the other band members. Hardcore lyrics expressed the "frustration and political disillusionment" of youth who were against 1980s-era affluence, consumerism, greed, Reagan politics and authority. The polarizing socio-political messages in hardcore lyrics (and outrageous on-stage behaviour) meant that the genre garnered no mainstream popularity.

In hardcore, guitarists frequently play fast power chords with a heavily distorted and amplified tone, creating what has been called a "buzzsaw" sound. Guitar parts can sometimes be complex, technically versatile, and rhythmically challenging. Guitar melody lines usually use the same minor scales used by vocalists (although some solos use pentatonic scales). Hardcore guitarists sometimes play solos, octave leads and grooves, as well as tapping into the various feedback and harmonic noises available to them. There are generally fewer guitar solos in hardcore than in mainstream rock, because solos were viewed as representing the "excess and superficiality" of mainstream commercial rock.

Hardcore bassists use varied rhythms in their basslines, ranging from longer held notes (whole notes and half notes) to quarter notes, to rapid eighth note or sixteenth note runs. To play rapid bass lines that would be hard to play with the fingers, some bassists use a pick. Some bassists play fuzz bass by overdriving their bass tone.

Hardcore drumming, with the drummer hitting them aggressively, has been called the "engine" and most essential element of the genre's aggressive sound of "unrelenting anger".   Two other key elements for hardcore drummers are playing "tight" with the other musicians, especially the bassist (this does not mean metronomic time; indeed coordinated tempo shifts are used in many important hardcore albums) and the drummer should have listened to a lot of hardcore, so that they can understand the "raw emotions" it expresses. Lucky Lehrer, the drummer and co-founder of the Circle Jerks in 1979, was an early developer of hardcore drumming; he has been called the "Godfather of hardcore drumming" and Flipside zine calls him the best punk drummer. According to Tobias Hurwitz, "[h]ardcore drumming falls somewhere between the straight-ahead rock styles of old-school punk and the frantic, warp-speed bashing of thrash." Some hardcore punk drummers play fast D-beat one moment and then drop tempo into elaborate musical breakdowns in the next. Drummers typically play eighth notes on the cymbals, because at the tempos used in hardcore it would be difficult to play a smaller subdivision of the beat.

Dancing

The early 1980s hardcore punk scene developed slam dancing (also called moshing), a style of dance in which participants push or slam into each other, and stage diving. Moshing works as a vehicle for expressing anger by "represent[ing] a way of playing at violence or roughness that allowed participants to mark their difference from the banal niceties of middle-class culture". Moshing is in another way a "parody of violence", that nevertheless leaves participants bruised and sometimes bleeding. The term mosh came into use in the early 1980s American hardcore scene in Washington, D.C. A performance by Fear on the 1981 Halloween episode of Saturday Night Live was cut short when moshers, including John Belushi and members of a few hardcore punk bands, invaded the stage, damaged studio equipment and used profanity.

Fashion
Many North American hardcore punk fans adopted a dressed-down style of T-shirts, jeans or work chinos, combat boots or sneakers, and crew cut-style haircuts. Women in the hardcore scene typically wore army pants, band T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts. The clothing style was a reflection of hardcore ideology, which included dissatisfaction with suburban America and the hypocrisy of American culture. It was essentially a deconstruction of American fashion staples—ripped jeans, holey T-shirts, torn stockings for women, and work boots.

The style of the 1980s hardcore scene contrasted with the more provocative fashion styles of late 1970s punk rockers. Siri C. Brockmeier writes that "hardcore kids do not look like punks", since hardcore scene members wore basic clothing and short haircuts, in contrast to the "embellished leather jackets and pants" worn in the punk scene. Lauraine Leblanc, however, claims that the standard hardcore punk clothing and styles included torn jeans, leather jackets, spiked armbands, dog collars, mohawk hairstyles, DIY ornamentation of clothes with studs, painted band names, political statements, and patches. Tiffini A. Travis and Perry Hardy describe the look that was common in the San Francisco hardcore scene as consisting of biker-style leather jackets, chains, studded wristbands, multiple piercings, painted or tattooed statements (e.g., an anarchy symbol) and hairstyles ranging from military-style haircuts dyed black or blonde to mohawks and shaved heads.

Circle Jerks frontman Keith Morris wrote: "[Punk] was basically based on English fashion. But we had nothing to do with that. Black Flag and the Circle Jerks were so far from that. We looked like the kid who worked at the gas station or sub. shop." Henry Rollins stated that for him, getting dressed up meant putting on a black shirt and some dark pants; taking an interest in fashion as being a distraction. Jimmy Gestapo from Murphy's Law describes his own transition from dressing in a punk style (spiked hair and a bondage belt) to adopting a hardcore style (shaved head and boots) as being based on needing more functional clothing.

Skateboard culture, streetwear, and workwear are also major influences on clothing worn by participants in both past and present eras of hardcore.

Politics

Music writer Barney Hoskyns attributed hardcore being younger, faster and angrier than punk rock, to adolescents who were sick of their life in a "bland Republican" America. Hardcore punk lyrics often express anti-establishment, anti-militarist, anti-authoritarian, anti-violence, and pro-environmentalist sentiments, in addition to other typically left-wing, anarchist, or egalitarian political views. During the 1980s, the subculture often rejected what was perceived to be "yuppie" materialism and interventionist American foreign policy. Numerous hardcore punk bands have taken far left political stances, such as anarchism or other varieties of socialism, and in the 1980s expressed opposition to political leaders such as then US president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Reagan's economic policies, sometimes dubbed Reaganomics, and social conservatism were common subjects for criticism by hardcore bands of the time. Jimmy Gestapo of Murphy's Law, however, endorsed Reagan and even went as far to call then former-president Jimmy Carter a "pussy" in a 1986 New York Magazine cover story. Shortly after Reagan's death in 2004, the Maximumrocknroll radio show aired an episode composed of anti-Reagan songs by early hardcore punk bands.

Certain hardcore punk bands have conveyed messages sometimes deemed "politically incorrect" by placing offensive content in their lyrics and relying on stage antics to shock listeners and people in their audience. Boston band The F.U.'s generated controversy with their 1983 album, "My America", whose lyrics contained what appeared to be conservative and patriotic views. Its messages were sometimes taken literally, when they were actually intended as a parody of conservative bands. Another act from Massachusetts, Vile, were known to insult women, minorities and gay people in their lyrics and would even go as far as putting their albums on the windshields of people's cars. On the other hand, Tim Yohannan and the influential punk rock fanzine Maximumrocknroll were criticized by some punks for acting as the "politically correct scene police", having what was perceived to be "a very narrow definition of what fits into Punk", apparently being "authoritarian and trying to dominate the scene" with their views.

During the 2001–2009 United States presidency of George W. Bush, it was not uncommon for hardcore bands to express anti-Bush messages. During the 2004 United States presidential election, several hardcore punk artists and bands were involved with the anti-Bush political activist group PunkVoter. A minority of hardcore musicians have expressed right wing views, such as the band Antiseen, whose guitarist Joe Young ran for public office as a North Carolina Libertarian.  Former Misfits singer Michale Graves appeared on an episode of The Daily Show, voicing support for George W. Bush, on behalf of the Conservative Punk website.

Demographics
While the early hardcore scene was mostly young white males, both onstage and in the audience, there are notable exceptions. Black musicians include Bad Brains, Fred "Freak" Smith of Beefeater, Dead Kennedys drummer D.H. Peligro, and Scream bassist Skeeter Thompson. Numerous Black and Latino members have been in the band Suicidal Tendencies, including Mike Muir, Rocky George, R.J. Herrera, Louiche Mayorga, Robert Trujillo, Thundercat, Dean Pleasants, Ra Díaz, Dave Lombardo, Eric Moore, Tim "Rawbiz" Williams, David Hidalgo Jr., and Ronald Bruner Jr. Other Latinos in early hardcore bands include Black Flag members Ron Reyes, Dez Cadena, Robo, and Anthony Martinez, Agnostic Front singer Roger Miret, his brother Madball singer Freddy Cricien, Adolescents guitarist Steve Soto, and Wasted Youth drummer Joey Castillo. Soto would later form the all-Latino punk band Manic Hispanic, which also featured Efrem Schulz from Death By Stereo. There are also notable women such as Crass singers Joy de Vivre and Eve Libertine, Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler, and Germs bassist Lorna Doom.

Several documentaries, including 2003's Afro-Punk and 2016's Los Punks, chronicle these subcultures within American punk and hardcore.

As of 2019, the genre is still overwhelmingly represented by white males. However, as sonic-diversity has increased in the genre, so too has its fanbase. This has helped bring greater attention to inclusivity within the scene.
Bands like War On Women, Limp Wrist, Gouge Away, and G.L.O.S.S. have helped bring attention to subjects like women's rights, transphobia, rape, mental health, queer rights, and misogyny.

Record labels

Record labels in hardcore are often DIY endeavors, run by musicians or participants within the community. Largely inspired by early labels like Dischord Records, Alternative Tentacles, Epitaph Records, SST Records, Revelation Records, and Touch & Go Records, record labels are usually run on DIY ethic, collaboration, financial trust, and an emphasis on creative control. Labels within hardcore are seldom large, profit-making operations, but rather collaborative music partners with the intent to document and release music for the underground community.

Ian Mackaye, co-founder of Dischord Records claimed, "We don't use contracts, lawyers, any of those kinds of things. We are partners – they make the music, and we make the records. From the beginning of this label, people have said that the way we do things is unsustainable, unrealistic, idealistic, and we were just dreaming", he said. "Well, the dream is now 35 years old, so they can go fuck themselves."

Etymology
Steven Blush states that the Vancouver-based band D.O.A.'s 1981 album, Hardcore '81 "was where the genre got its name". This album also helped to make people aware of the term "hardcore". Konstantin Butz states that while the origin of the expression "hardcore" "cannot be ascribed to a specific place or time", the term is "usually associated with the further evolution of California's L.A. Punk Rock scene", which included young skateboarders. A September 1981 article by Tim Sommer shows the author applying the term to the "15 or so" punk bands gigging around the city at that time, which he considered a belated development relative to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Blush said that the term "hardcore" is also a reference to the sense of being "fed up" with the existing punk and new wave music. Blush also states that the term refers to "an extreme: the absolute most Punk". Kelefa Sanneh states that the term "hardcore" referred to an attitude of "turning inwards" towards the scene and "ignoring broader society", all with the goal of achieving a sense of "shared purpose" and being part of a community. Sanneh cites Agnostic Front's band member selection approach as an example of hardcore's emphasis on "scene citizenship"; prospective members of the band were chosen based on being part of the local hardcore scene and being regularly in the moshing pit at shows, rather than based on a musical audition.

History

Late 1970s and early 1980s

United States

Los Angeles

Michael Azerrad states that "[by] 1979 the original punk scene [in Southern California] had almost completely died out" and was replaced by punk music boiled down to its essence, but with faster tempos, which became known as "hardcore". Steven Blush states that the first hardcore record to come out of the West coast was Out of Vogue by the Santa Ana band Middle Class. The band pioneered a shouted, fast version of punk rock which would shape the hardcore sound that would soon emerge. In terms of impact upon the hardcore scene, Black Flag has been deemed the most influential group. Azerrad calls Black Flag the "godfathers" of hardcore punk and states that even "...more than the flagship band of American hardcore", they were "...required listening for anyone who was interested in underground music." Blush states that Black Flag were to hardcore what the Sex Pistols and Ramones were to punk. Formed in Hermosa Beach, California by guitarist and primary songwriter Greg Ginn, they played their first show in December 1977. Originally called Panic, they changed their name to Black Flag in 1978.

By 1979, Black Flag were joined by another South Bay hardcore band, the Minutemen, who they shared a practice space with until both bands were evicted, as well as the Circle Jerks (which featured Black Flag's original singer, Keith Morris). From Hollywood, two other bands playing hardcore punk, Fear and the Germs, were featured with Black Flag and the Circle Jerks in Penelope Spheeris' 1981 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization. By the time the film was released, other hardcore bands from Los Angeles County were also making a name for themselves including Bad Religion, Descendents, Red Kross, Rhino 39, Suicidal Tendencies, Wasted Youth, Youth Brigade, and Youth Gone Mad. Neighboring Orange County had the Adolescents, Agent Orange, China White, Social Distortion, Shattered Faith, T.S.O.L., and Uniform Choice, while north of Los Angeles, around Oxnard, California, a hardcore scene known as "nardcore" developed with bands like Agression, Ill Repute, Dr. Know, and Rich Kids on LSD.

Whilst popular traditional punk bands such as the Clash, Ramones, and Sex Pistols were signed to major record labels, the hardcore punk bands were generally not. Black Flag, however, was briefly signed to MCA subsidiary Unicorn Records, but were dropped because an executive considered their music to be "anti-parent". Instead of trying to be courted by the major labels, hardcore bands started their own independent record labels and distributed their records themselves. Ginn started SST Records, which released Black Flag's debut EP Nervous Breakdown in 1979. SST went on to release a number of albums by other hardcore artists, and was described by Azerrad as "easily the most influential and popular underground indie of the Eighties." SST was followed by a number of other successful artist-run labels—including BYO Records (started by Shawn and Mark Stern of Youth Brigade), Epitaph Records (started by Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion), New Alliance Records (started by the Minutemen's D. Boon and Mike Watt), as well as fan-run labels like Frontier Records and Slash Records.

Bands also funded and organized their own tours. Black Flag's tours in 1980 and 1981 brought them in contact with developing hardcore scenes in many parts of North America, and blazed trails that were followed by other touring bands. Concerts in the early Los Angeles hardcore scene increasingly became sites of violent battles between police and concertgoers. Another source of violence in LA was tension created by what one writer calls the invasion of "antagonistic suburban poseurs" into hardcore venues. Violence at hardcore concerts was portrayed in episodes of the popular television shows CHiPs and Quincy, M.E..

In the pre-Internet era, fanzines, commonly called zines, enabled hardcore scene members to learn about bands, clubs, and record labels. Zines typically included reviews of shows and records, interviews with bands, letters, ads for records and labels, and were DIY products, "proudly amateur, usually handmade. A zine called We Got Power described the Los Angeles scene from 1981 to 1984, and it included show reviews and band interviews with groups including D.O.A., the Misfits, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies and the Circle Jerks.

San Francisco

Shortly after Black Flag debuted in Los Angeles, Dead Kennedys were formed in San Francisco. While the band's early releases were played in a style closer to traditional punk rock, In God We Trust, Inc. (1981) marked a shift into hardcore. Similar to Black Flag and Youth Brigade, Dead Kennedys released their albums on their own label, which in DK's case was Alternative Tentacles. The scene was helped in particular by the San Francisco club Mabuhay Gardens, whose promoter, Dirk Dirksen, became known as "The Pope of Punk". Another important local institution was Tim Yohannan's Maximumrocknroll, which started as a radio show in 1977, but branched out into a fanzine in 1982.

While not as large as the scene in Los Angeles, the hardcore scene of the early 1980s included a number of noteworthy bands originating from the San Francisco Bay Area, including Bl'ast, Crucifix, the Faction, Fang, Flipper, and Whipping Boy. Additionally, during this time, seminal Texas-based bands Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, the Dicks, MDC, Rhythm Pigs, and Verbal Abuse all relocated to San Francisco. Further out of the Bay Area, Sacramento's Tales of Terror were cited by many, including Mark Arm, as a key inspiration for the grunge movement.

Washington, D.C.

The first hardcore punk band to form on the east coast of the United States was Washington, D.C.'s Bad Brains. Initially formed in 1977 as a jazz fusion ensemble called Mind Power, and consisting of all African-American members, their early foray into hardcore featured some of the fastest tempos in rock music. The band released its debut single, "Pay to Cum", in 1980, and were influential in establishing the D.C. hardcore scene. Hardcore historian Steven Blush calls the single the first East coast hardcore record.

Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson, influenced by Bad Brains, formed the band Teen Idles in 1979. The group broke up in 1980, and MacKaye and Nelson went on to form Minor Threat, a band which, apart from Bad Brains, has arguably had the biggest influence on the hardcore punk genre, and whose contributions to the music, ethics, aesthetic, and ethos are still widely acknowledged by hardcore bands of the 2020s. The band used faster rhythms and more aggressive, less melodic riffs than was common at the time. Minor Threat popularized the straight edge movement with its song "Straight Edge", which spoke out against alcohol, drugs and promiscuity. MacKaye and Nelson ran their own record label, Dischord Records, which released records by D.C. hardcore bands including: the Faith, Iron Cross, Scream, State of Alert, Government Issue, Void, and DC's Youth Brigade. The Flex Your Head compilation was a seminal document of the early 1980s DC hardcore scene. The record label was run out of the Dischord House, a Washington, D.C. punk house. Henry Rollins, who would come to prominence as the lead singer of the California-based Black Flag, as well as his own later Rollins Band, grew up in Washington D.C., singing for the State of Alert, and was influenced by the music of Bad Brains and the bands of his childhood friend Ian MacKaye.

The tradition of holding all ages shows at small D.I.Y. spaces, has roots in the early Washington, DC straight edge movement. It emerged from the idea that people of all ages should have access to music, regardless of if they're old enough to drink alcohol.

Boston
Seminal Boston area hardcore bands included the F.U.'s, the Freeze, Gang Green, Jerry's Kids, Siege, DYS, Negative FX, and SS Decontrol. Members of the latter three bands were influenced by D.C.'s straight edge scene, and were part of "the Boston Crew", a mostly straight edge group of friends known to physically fight people who used alcohol or drugs. Members of the Boston Crew would later go on to form the band Slapshot, and also included future Mighty Mighty Bosstones singer Dicky Barrett, who was then a member of the band Impact Unit, and drew the artwork for the DYS album Brotherhood.

In 1982, Modern Method Records released This Is Boston, Not L.A., a compilation album of the Boston hardcore scene. In addition to Modern Method was Taang! Records, who released material by a number of the aforementioned Boston hardcore bands.

Further outside of Boston were Western Massachusetts bands Deep Wound (which featured future Dinosaur Jr. members J Mascis and Lou Barlow) and the Outpatients, both of whom would come to Boston to play shows. From nearby Manchester, New Hampshire was G.G. Allin, a solo singer who contrary to straight edge used large amounts of drugs and alcohol, eventually dying of a heroin overdose. Allin's stage show included defecating on stage and then throwing his feces at the audience.

New York

The New York City hardcore scene emerged in 1981 when Bad Brains moved to the city from Washington, D.C. Starting in 1981, there was an influx of new hardcore bands in the city including Agnostic Front, Beastie Boys, Cro-Mags, Cause for Alarm, the Mob, Murphy's Law, Reagan Youth, and Warzone. A number of other bands associated with New York hardcore scene came from New Jersey, including the Misfits, Adrenalin OD and Hogan's Heroes. Steven Blush calls the Misfits "crucial to the rise of hardcore." New York hardcore had more emphasis on rhythm, in part due to the use of palm-muted guitar chords, an approach called the NY hardcore "chug". The New York scene was known for its tough ethos, its "thuggery", and club shows that were a chaotic "proving ground" or even a "battleground".

In the early 1980s, the New York hardcore scene centered around squats and clubhouses. After these were closed down, the scene was emanating in a small after-hours bar, A7, on the lower east side of Manhattan, and later around the famous bar CBGB. For several years, CBGB held weekly hardcore matinees on Sundays, but they stopped in 1990 when violence led Kristal to ban hardcore shows at the club.

Early radio support in New York's surrounding tri-state area came from Pat Duncan, who had hosted live punk and hardcore bands weekly on WFMU since 1979. Bridgeport, Connecticut's WPKN had a radio show featuring hardcore called Capital Radio, hosted by Brad Morrison, beginning in February 1979 and continuing weekly until late 1983. In New York City, Tim Sommer hosted Noise The Show on WNYU.

By 1984, the Ramones, one of the original New York punk bands, were experimenting with hardcore, with two songs, "Wart Hog" and "Endless Vacation" on their album Too Tough To Die.

Other American regions
Minneapolis hardcore consisted of bands such as Hüsker Dü and the Replacements, while Chicago had Articles of Faith, Big Black and Naked Raygun. The Detroit area was home to Crucifucks, Degenerates, the Meatmen, Negative Approach, Spite and Violent Apathy. From Ohio was Maumee's Necros and Dayton's Toxic Reasons. The zine Touch and Go covered this Midwest hardcore scene from 1979 to 1983.

JFA and Meat Puppets were both from Phoenix, Arizona; 7 Seconds were from Reno, Nevada; and Butthole Surfers, Big Boys, the Dicks, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles (D.R.I.), Really Red, Verbal Abuse and MDC were from Texas. Portland, Oregon hardcore punk bands included Poison Idea and Final Warning, while north of there, Washington state included the Accüsed, Melvins, the Fartz, and 10 Minute Warning (the latter two included future Guns N' Roses member Duff McKagan). Other prominent hardcore bands from this time that came from areas without large scenes include Raleigh, North Carolina's Corrosion of Conformity.

Canada

D.O.A. formed in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1978 and were one of the first bands to refer to its style as "hardcore", with the release of their album Hardcore '81. Other early hardcore bands from British Columbia included Dayglo Abortions who formed in 1979, the Subhumans and the Skulls.

Nomeansno is a hardcore band originally from Victoria, British Columbia and now located in Vancouver. SNFU formed in Edmonton in 1981 and also later relocated to Vancouver. Bunchofuckingoofs, from the Kensington Market neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario, formed in November 1983 as a response to "a local war with glue huffing Nazi skinheads". In Montreal, The Asexuals helped fertilize a scene that became a necessary tour stop for punk and hardcore bands headed to the Northeast.

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom a fertile hardcore scene took root early on. Referred to under a number of names including "U.K. Hardcore", "UK 82", "second wave punk", "real punk", and "No Future punk", it took the previous punk sound and added the incessant, heavy drumbeats and heavily distorted guitar sound of new wave of British heavy metal bands, especially Motörhead. Formed in 1977 in Stoke-on-Trent, Discharge played a large role in influencing other European hardcore bands. AllMusic calls the band's sound a "high-speed noise overload" characterized by "ferocious noise blasts." Their style of hardcore punk was coined as D-beat, a term referring to a distinctive drum beat that a number of 1980s imitators of Discharge are associated with.

Another UK band, the Varukers, were one of the original D-beat bands, Scottish band the Exploited were also influential, with the term "UK 82" (used to refer to UK hardcore in the early 1980s) being taken from one of their songs. They contrasted with early American hardcore bands by placing an emphasis on appearance. Frontman Walter "Wattie" Buchan had a giant red mohawk and the band continued to wear swastikas, an approach influenced by the wearing of this symbol by 1970s punks such as Sid Vicious. Because of this, the Exploited were labeled by others in the scene as "cartoon punks". Other influential UK hardcore bands from this period included GBH, Anti-Establishment, Antisect, Broken Bones, Chaos UK, Conflict, Dogsflesh, English Dogs, and grindcore innovators Napalm Death.

Other countries
There was an Italian hardcore punk scene in the 1980s, that included groups like Wretched, Raw Power, and Negazione. Sweden developed several influential hardcore bands, including Anti Cimex, Disfear, and Mob 47. Finland produced some influential hardcore bands, including Terveet Kädet, one of the first hardcore groups to emerge in the country. In Eastern Europe notable hardcore bands included Hungary's Galloping Coroners from 1975, Yugoslavia's 1980s-era Niet from Ljubljana, and KBO!

A Japanese hardcore scene arose to protest the social and economic changes sweeping the country in the late 1970s and during the 1980s. The band SS is regarded as the first, forming in 1977. Bands such as the Stalin and GISM soon followed, both forming in 1980. Other notable Japanese hardcore bands include: Balzac, Disclose (a D-beat band), Garlic Boys, Gauze, SOB, and the Star Club.

Mid–to–late 1980s

The mid-1980s were a time of transition for the hardcore scene, with a number of influential bands from earlier in the decade changing their sound or breaking up. For instance, Black Flag's 1984 album My War, which coincided with the band members growing their hair long, were criticized for having "gone heavy metal". The album's second side was called a road map for sludge metal, as well as being influenced by doom metal bands. Black Flag's eventual breakup in 1986, would coincide with the breakup of one of the other most influential hardcore bands, the Dead Kennedys.

By 1985, Boston bands SS Decontrol and DYS became metal bands, while the F.U.'s did the same, but changed their name to "Straw Dogs". By the end of the year, both SSD and DYS had broken up. Other bands in the mid-80s that went from being strictly hardcore to adding more metal riffs, developed an even heavier sound, with Corrosion of Conformity, Cro-Mags and D.R.I., becoming known as crossover thrash bands. Bands like Cro-Mags looked to early Bad Brains songs such as Supertouch/Shitfit as inspiration for heavy breakdowns in hardcore punk music.

Bad Religion briefly broke up in 1984, after making the progressive rock album Into the Unknown. They returned to their roots on the 1985 Back to the Known EP, and then began their embrace of more melodic straightforward punk rock, starting with 1988's Suffer. In 1986, Los Angeles's Youth Brigade changed their name to "The Brigade", and changed their sound to a style that The Los Angeles Times compared to mainstream bands like U2, R.E.M., and Big Country. They would breakup the next year.

Bands such as Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü and the Replacements, changed their style becoming alternative rock. Around the same time, a social movement within the influential hardcore punk scene of Washington, D.C. occurred during the summer of 1985, dubbed Revolution Summer. The movement challenged the initial wave of hardcore music, the attitudes of fans and bands before them and also the image mainstream media portrayed of punks. The bands that spawned out of Revolution Summer often took a stand against violence, especially at shows in the form of slamdancing, as well as standing up against the sexism of the scene. Bands associated with the movement, such as Rites of Spring, Embrace, and Dag Nasty, are notable for having inspired the emotional hardcore and the original emo genre of the late 1980s and 1990s. The subsequent post-hardcore music genre, spearheaded by bands like Fugazi, is an evolution of hardcore which was created by participants of the Revolution Summer movement. T.S.O.L., who had already embraced goth rock, became a hard rock band with 1986's Revenge, being compared to Poison and Faster Pussycat, and touring with Guns N' Roses. Red Kross's second album, 1987's Neurotica, was described as a blend of pop rock and art rock. The Beastie Boys gained fame by playing hip hop, and Bad Brains incorporated more reggae into their music, such as in their 1989 album Quickness.

Starting in 1986, the youth crew movement, became prominent in New York hardcore. Inspired by early hardcore bands such as 7 Seconds, Minor Threat and SSD, whose members were all straight edge and lyrical concerns included brotherhood and community values, youth crew was a reaction against the prevailing metal influence in hardcore at the time. The movement was based around Youth of Today, and fleshed out by bands signed to Youth of Today vocalist Ray Cappo's record label Revelation Records, including Gorilla Biscuits, Bold and Side by Side. Following the release of their second album Break Down the Walls (1986), Youth of Today toured extensively across the United States and internationally, leading to youth crew ideals spreading and the formation of many subsequent bands. Youth crew took a particular hold in southern California, where Chain of Strength became one of the style's premier bands. As the style progressed it too became influenced by the metal it originally opposed itself to, seen in the musical style of Judge.

In the late 1980s, a more militant subculture of straight edge called hardline emerged through members of the anarcho punk scene and embraced veganism and radical environmentalism. Vegan Reich began as a crew of Animal Liberationists before becoming a band in order to promote their views in 1986, however the group split from the wider US anarchist movement in 1988 due to backlash from the community for their anti-carnist views. Vegan Reich vocalist Sean Muttaqi and Raid vocalist Steve Lovett created hardline philosophy and pioneered its musical movement alongside the English band Statement. Although hardline was overtly a political, anarchist school of thought rather than a hardcore subculture, hardline activists began to push their views specifically towards those in the mid-to-late 1980s straight edge scene due to the scene's wider appeal. The movement quickly gained popularity in Memphis and Indianapolis, before then spreading to Salt Lake City and Syracuse.

1990s

The early 1990s saw the pioneering of metalcore. One of the earliest metalcore scene was that of Cleveland, Ohio, fronted by Integrity and Ringworm. Integrity's debut album Those Who Fear Tomorrow  (1991) merged hardcore with apocalyptic lyrics ad metal's guitar solos and chugging riffs to create one of the primeval albums in the genre. Revolver magazine writer Elis Enis stated that the album "influenced practically every breakdown that's been recorded since". Philadelphia's Starkweather and New Jersey's Rorschach were also early bands in the genre. In 1993, Earth Crisis released "Firestorm", one of the most influential songs in the genre. which ultimately popularised the militant vegan straight edge ethic and chug riffs. Soon after, the sound spread to Boston with Overcast and Converge and New York City with All Out War and Merauder.

During this era in mainstream music, punk rock became a success in 1994 with popular bands like Green Day, the Offspring, and Rancid. While typically playing pop punk, Green Day's 1997 album Nimrod contained two songs ("Platypus [I Hate You]" and "Take Back") that were described as hardcore, meanwhile, Rancid would record a hardcore album with 2000's Rancid. The same year punk became popular again in 1994, Sick of It All released the major label album Scratch the Surface. According to lead singer Lou Koller, people were thinking they would go from a hardcore band to sounding like Green Day, so they intentionally made an album heavier than anything they'd done before. The album became a surprise success, with the single "Step Down" becoming a staple on MTV, thanks to a tongue-in-cheek music video featuring a roving reporter "exposing" the world of hardcore, and showing how to do various hardcore dance moves. The decade also saw a rise in pop-punk bands like New Found Glory and Saves the Day, who garnered attention from fans of hardcore due to band member connections to the contemporary hardcore scene.

As a reaction against the dominance of metal-influenced hardcore amongst straight edge bands, around 1996 a revival of the sound of the youth crew bands began. Bands including In My Eyes, Bane, Ten Yard Fight and Floorpunch, used the key aspects of late-1980s bands such as the gang vocals, high tempos and lyrical themes of straight edge, unity and vegetarianism. Additionally, at this time Youth of Today's Ray Cappo formed Better Than a Thousand with Ken Olden and Graham Land of early-1990s straight edge band Battery, creating a sound too harkening back to this era. Further bands meshed straight edge with additional causes, such as Christian hardcore bands Call to Preserve, the Red Baron, xLooking Forwardx, Jewish band Sons of Abraham,
queercore band Limp Wrist, right-wing anti-immigrant band One Life Crew, and anti-capitalism bands Manliftingbanner and Refused.

In the late-1990s, there was a number of movements that attempted to rebel against the hyper-masculinity that hardcore had come to embrace. One of these was fashioncore, which originated from Orange County, California metalcore bands, particularly Eighteen Visions. The movement placed emphasis on the fashion style of the musicians, and saw many in hardcore begin to wear skinny jeans, collared shirts and white belts and adopting dyed, straightened and swooping fringed hairstyles. Sass music began with this same intention, doing so by incorporated elements such as homoerotic lyrics, lisped vocals, dance parts and sometimes synths.

As the 1990s drew to a close, a wave of metalcore bands began incorporating elements of melodic death metal into their sound. This formed an early version of what would become the melodic metalcore genre, with Shadows Fall's Somber Eyes to the Sky (1997), Undying's This Day All Gods Die (1999), Darkest Hour's The Prophecy Fulfilled (1999), Unearth's Above the Fall of Man (1999), Prayer for Cleansing's Rain in Endless Fall (1999) being some of the style's earliest releases. CMJ writer Anthony Delia also credited Florida's Poison the Well and their first two releases The Opposite of December... A Season of Separation (1999) and Tear from the Red (2002) as "design[ing] the template for most of" the melodic metalcore bands to come.

2000s

By 1999 and 2000, the youth crew revival was in decline, with Ten Yard Fight, In My Eyes and Floorpunch all disbanding. As a reaction against the homogeneity and simplicity that scene had developed, Ten Yard Fight guitarist Tim Cossar and the band's roadie Wesley Eisold formed American Nightmare. Although still musically rooted in the youth crew revival, the band's negative, poetic lyrics of self-loathing were inspired by groups like the Smiths. American Nightmare's influence was apparent promptly in their home of Boston, then expanded nationally with the release of their 2001 debut album Background Music, being followed by a wave bands including Ceremony, Ruiner, Modern Life Is War, the Hope Conspiracy and Killing the Dream. A reaction against this movement also took place, which began with Mental, who were quickly followed by Have Heart. Have Heart's success led to the rise in popularity of other positive hardcore groups like Champion, Verse and Sinking Ships, and the rise in prominence of Bridge 9 Records. In an AllMusic review, Greg Prato wrote about the label's band Energy that "While you wouldn't go quite as far as calling Energy "a hardcore boy band," the group's leanings toward the mainstream are undeniable throughout Invasions of the Mind. In the late 1990s, Elgin James, a musician involved in the militant faction of the Boston straight edge scene, helped found the organization Friends Stand United. By the early 2000s, there were FSU chapters in Philadelphia, Chicago, Arizona, Los Angeles, Seattle, upstate New York and New Jersey, and they were considered to have about 200 members. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, eventually classified FSU as a street gang, which used violent methods and repeatedly assault people at hardcore shows and on Boston streets. In conjunction with the gang activities, James eventually did time in jail for extortion.

With the increased popularity of punk rock in the mid-1990s and the 2000s, additional hardcore bands signed with major record labels. In 2001, New York's H2O released the album Go on MCA, but it failed at bringing the band big success, and fell flat with longtime fans. In 2002, AFI signed to DreamWorks Records but changed their sound considerably for its successful major label debut Sing the Sorrow. Chicago's Rise Against were signed by Geffen Records, and three of its releases on the label were certified platinum by the RIAA. Like AFI, Rise Against gradually removed elements of hardcore from their music, culminating with 2008's Appeal to Reason, which lacked the intensity found in their earlier albums. United Kingdom band Gallows were signed to Warner Bros. Records for £1 million. Their major label debut Grey Britain was described as being even more aggressive than their previous material, and the band was subsequently dropped from the label. The success of the band led to other British hardcore acts of the time gain notability like the Ghost of a Thousand and Heights. Los Angeles band the Bronx briefly appeared on Island Def Jam Music Group for the release of their 2006 self-titled album, which was named one of the top 40 albums of the year by Spin magazine. They appeared in the Darby Crash biopic What We Do Is Secret, playing members of Black Flag. In 2007, Toronto's Fucked Up appeared on MTV Live Canada, where they were introduced as "Effed Up". During the performance of its song "Baiting the Public", the majority of the audience was moshing, which caused $2000 in damages to the set. Fucked Up went on to win the 2009 Polaris Music Prize for the album The Chemistry of Common Life.

Australian hardcore also took off during this time with bands like Miles Away, Break Even, 50 Lions (formed in 2005), and Iron Mind (formed in 2006). The genre was played on the national Triple J network on the short.fast.loud program. Australian labels that released hardcore music include Broken Hive Records, Resist Records and UNFD Records.

2010s

With many bands breaking up in the late 2000s, accompanied by a general sense of sonic homogeny in the hardcore genre, the 2010s became a decade of experimentation and fusion in hardcore music that was fueled by access to streaming. Drawing from and collaborating with elements of other eras and genres, hardcore grew as music styles intersected. For instance, bands like Trash Talk began collaborating with artists like Tyler, the Creator and his hip hop collective Odd Future. Meanwhile, bands like Fury, Fiddlehead, and Give  garnered a great deal of attention on an underground level for their lyricism and diverse sounds. Other prominent bands, like Title Fight and Basement brought elements of shoegaze and 90's noise rock into the hardcore genre.

Trapped Under Ice were one of the most prominent bands in hardcore in the early 2010s. The band's second album Big Kiss Goodnight (2011) changing the sonic landscape of hardcore at the time, with Stereogum writer Tom Breiham stating in a 2023 article that "it's been years since we've gotten a new Trapped Under Ice song, but that band's influence looms large over the entire hardcore landscape today." However, in 2013 the band suddenly disbanded, disheartened by the amount of interest in them by the music industry. In the meantime, its members focused on their other projects Angel Dust, Diamond Youth, Down to Nothing and Turnstile. Angel Dust's embrace of styles like indie pop, and Turnstile's of 1960s surf music and 1990s alternative rock led to them too becoming formidable in the follow decade.

In the early to mid–2010s, a number of British hardcore punk bands began being represented as members of a new musical movement dubbed the New Wave of British Hardcore, a term coined by Adam Malik from the Essence Records. Bands who are part of the movement generally take influence from '80s Boston and New York hardcore bands. Bands associated with the movement include Arms Race, Violent Reaction, Big Cheese, Higher Power, Perspex Flesh, Mob Rules, the Flex and Blind Authority. Some bands such as Rapture, Violent Reaction and Payday are straight edge.

During this time, Muslim hardcore bands have emerged in the US, Canada, Pakistan, and Indonesia. The development of Muslim hardcore has been traced to the impact of a 2010 film Taqwacore, a documentary about the Muslim hardcore scene. Bands include the Kominas from Boston, the all-girl Secret Trial Five from Toronto, Al Thawra (The Power) from Chicago "and even a few bands out in Pakistan and Indonesia." Partly due to developments in digital communications, there was a rise in interaction between hardcore scenes in different places and subgenres, particularly in Europe. In September 2017, Bandcamp Daily wrote that Fluff Fest, which has been held in the Czech Republic since 2000 and features an international lineup of independent bands ranging in style from crust punk to screamo, "has established itself as the main DIY hardcore punk event in Europe".

During the decade, many hardcore bands also had considerable chart recognition. Turnstile signed to Roadrunner Records in 2017 and released their sophomore album Time & Space in 2018, which reached number one on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. Gouge Away, formed in 2012 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, saw their record Burnt Sugar peak at 46 on Billboard Independent Albums. Code Orange, who formed in Pittsburgh in 2008, their 2014 sophomore album I Am King reached number 96 on the Billboard 200, and its follow up, 2017's Forever peaked and number 62.  Kentucky hardcore band Knocked Loose formed in 2013 and released their debut album Laugh Tracks in 2016, which peaked at number 163 on the Billboard 200. Its follow up A Different Shade of Blue was released in 2019 and peaked at number 26. Many of these bands were a part of wave of bands gaining recognition for harkening back to the metallic hardcore sound of bands from the 1990s, which included Vein.fm, Code Orange, Knocked Loose, Varials, Jesus Piece, Counterparts and Kublai Khan.

Hardcore in the late-2010s saw a significant growth of the scene, to involve bands taking influence from styles generally disassociated with it, such as industrial, heavy metal, post-punk and nu metal. Around this time, mainstream rappers began to associate themselves with the hardcore scene. Playboi Carti included a performance from a hardcore show as the front cover for his 2018 album Die Lit, Denzel Curry collaborated with Bad Brains and Fucked Up in 2019 and rap groups Suicideboys and City Morgue were joined on tour by hardcore bands Turnstile and Trash Talk. Rappers Wicca Phase Springs Eternal and Ghostemane even began playing music by performing in hardcore bands. In September 2019, rap group Injury Reserve released a collaborative track with Code Orange and JPEGMafia.

In 2019, the highly influential 2000s Boston hardcore band Have Heart reunited for performances in four different locations after a ten-year breakup. One of these performances was outside the Worcester Palladium in Massachusetts, which drew around 10,000 attendees, making it the largest standalone hardcore show in history.

2020s

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has made the prospect of playing live music difficult. This brought about a heavy digital shift in independent music, where many bands have begun performing live-stream shows for fans until physical shows can occur. With social distancing limiting the availability of physical interactions, the hardcore community has relied on social media activity, podcasting, zines, and video content to stay connected virtually. During this period, a number of hardcore releases gained attention from the media and online that surpassed the genre's usual scope, namely Code Orange's Underneath (2020), Higher Power's 27 Miles Underwater (2021) and Turnstile's Glow On (2021). Underneath topped the UK Rock & Metal Albums, reached number two on the US Top Tastemaker Albums chart, and received universal critical acclaim. Higher Power were hailed by Metal Hammer as "the band redefining hardcore for a new generation", and voted the most likely UK band to break into the mainstream in a Revolver fan poll. However, it was Glow On that triggered an international explosion in popularity of the genre, and allowed for the subsequent success of bands including Zulu, High Vis and Speed. Glow On also received universal critical acclaim, peaked at number two on the UK Rock & Metal Albums, and number thirty on the mainline Billboard 200 chart. A podcast published the New York Times credited a number of viral videos of live performances by hardcore bands as contributing to the popularity, including Sunami's live debut in San Jose on October 26, 2019, Hate5six's July 03, 2021 video of Mindforce performing at Underground Arts in Philadelphia and Turnstile's performance in Oxnard on August 29, 2021.

One of the scenes that gained particular prevalence in the 2020s was the southern San Francisco Bay Area scene, based in Santa Cruz and San Jose. The first of these bands was Gulch, who formed in 2016, and were later followed by Scowl, Drain and Sunami. As lockdowns began to ease, many of the bands in this scene began to put on "guerilla shows", such as one that took place on June 19, 2021 in San Jose featuring Sunami, Gulch, Drain, Scowl, Xibalba and Maya Over Eyes, which had an attendance of around 2000. Gulch performed their final live performance at Sound and Fury Festival on July 31, 2022, at the peak of their popularity.

This period also saw a number of groups garner attention while experimenting with hardcore's sound. The Financial Times named London's Chubby and the Gang and Detroit's the Armed as two of the most commercially successful groups of this wave, while Spin magazine cited Militarie Gun, High Vis and Scowl as bands "help[ing] to breathe life back into both" alternative rock and hardcore.

Influence

Hardcore punk has spawned a number of subgenres, fusion genres and derivative forms. Key derivatives like , emo, and skate punk have had a major impact on alternative music. Other subgenres include D-beat, melodic hardcore, crust punk, and thrashcore. Fusion genres include crossover thrash, grindcore, and metalcore, all of which fuse hardcore punk with extreme metal.

Metallica and Slayer, pioneers of the heavy metal subgenre thrash metal, were influenced by a number of hardcore bands. Metallica's cover album Garage Inc. included covers of two Discharge and three Misfits songs, while Slayer's cover album Undisputed Attitude consisted of covers of predominately hardcore punk bands.

The Washington state band Melvins, aside from their influence on grunge, helped create what would be known as sludge metal, which is also a combination between Black Sabbath-style music and hardcore punk. This genre developed during the early 1990s, in the Southern United States (particularly in the New Orleans metal scene). Some of the pioneering bands of sludge metal were: Eyehategod, Crowbar, Down, Buzzov*en, Acid Bath and Corrosion of Conformity. Later, bands such as Isis and Neurosis, with similar influences, created a style that relies mostly on ambience and atmosphere that would eventually be named atmospheric sludge metal or post-metal.

Fusion and subgenres

D-beat

D-beat (also known as discore or kängpunk) is a hardcore punk subgenre, developed in the early 1980s by imitators of the band Discharge, after whom the genre is named, as well as a drum beat characteristic of this subgenre. The bands Discharge and the Varukers are pioneers of the D-beat genre. Robbie Mackey of Pitchfork Media described D-beat as "hardcore drumming set against breakneck riffage and unintelligible howls about anarchy, working-stiffs-as-rats, and banding together to, you know, fight."

Emo and post-hardcore
The 1980s saw the development of post-hardcore, which took the hardcore style in a more complex and dynamic direction, with a focus on singing rather than screaming. The post-hardcore style first took shape in Chicago, with bands such as Big Black, the Effigies and Naked Raygun. It later developed in Washington, DC within the community of bands on Ian MacKaye's Dischord Records, with bands such as Fugazi, the Nation of Ulysses, and Jawbox. The style extended until the late 2000s. The mid-80s Washington, D.C. Revolution Summer movement and post-hardcore scene would also see the birth of emo. Guy Picciotto formed Rites of Spring in 1984, breaking free of hardcore's self-imposed boundaries in favor of melodic guitars, varied rhythms, and deeply personal, impassioned lyrics dealing with nostalgia, romantic bitterness, and poetic desperation. Other D.C. bands such as Gray Matter, Beefeater, Fire Party, Dag Nasty, also became connected to this movement. The style was dubbed "emo", "emo-core", or "post-harDCore" (in reference to one of the names given to the Washington, D.C. hardcore scene).

Thrashcore and powerviolence
Often confused with crossover thrash and sometimes thrash metal, is thrashcore. Thrashcore (also known as fastcore) is a subgenre of hardcore punk that emerged in the early 1980s. It is essentially sped-up hardcore punk, with bands often using blast beats. Just as hardcore punk groups distinguished themselves from their punk rock predecessors by their greater intensity and aggression, thrashcore groups (often identified simply as "thrash") sought to play at breakneck tempos that would radicalize the innovations of hardcore. Early American thrashcore groups included Cryptic Slaughter (Santa Monica), D.R.I. (Houston), Ludichrist, (Long Island), Septic Death (Boise) and Siege (Weymouth, Massachusetts). Thrashcore spun off into powerviolence, another raw and dissonant subgenre of hardcore punk. Other notable powerviolence bands include early Ceremony, Man is the Bastard and Spazz.

Grindcore
Grindcore is an extreme genre of music that began the early to mid-1980s. Grindcore music relies on heavy metal instrumentation and eventually changed into a genre similar to death metal. Grindcore vocals, according to AllMusic, range "from high-pitched shrieks to low, throat-shredding growls and barks". Grindcore also features blast beats; according to Adam MacGregor of Dusted, "the blast-beat generally comprises a repeated, sixteenth-note figure played at a very fast tempo, and divided uniformly among the kick drum, snare and ride, crash, or hi-hat cymbal." The band Napalm Death invented the grindcore genre; their debut album Scum was described by AllMusic as "perhaps the most representative example of" grindcore.

Beatdown hardcore

Beatdown hardcore (also known as heavy hardcore, brutal hardcore, toughguy, and moshcore) is a style of hardcore punk and heavy metal which has deep, hoarse vocals, down-tuned guitars, blast beats, and slow breakdowns. More heavy metal-influenced than traditional hardcore punk, Rotting Out, Strife, Shai Hulud, Madball and Hatebreed all are beatdown hardcore bands.

Metalcore
Metalcore is a fusion genre that merges hardcore punk with extreme metal. Metalcore has screaming, growling, heavy guitar riffs, breakdowns, and double bass drumming. Heavy metal-hardcore punk hybrids arose in the mid-1980s and would also radicalize the innovations of hardcore as the two genres and their ideologies intertwined noticeably. The term has been used to refer to bands that were not purely hardcore nor purely metal such as Earth Crisis, Integrity and Hogan's Heroes. During the 2000s there was a metalcore explosion and bands like Bullet for My Valentine, Killswitch Engage, Atreyu, Shadows Fall, and As I Lay Dying all had some popularity.

Grunge
In the mid-1980s, bands such as Melvins, Flipper and Green River developed a sludgy, "aggressive sound that melded the slower tempos of heavy metal with the intensity of hardcore," creating an alternative rock subgenre known as grunge. Grunge evolved from the local Seattle punk rock scene, and it was inspired by bands such as the Fartz, 10 Minute Warning and the Accüsed. Grunge fuses elements of hardcore and heavy metal, although some bands performed with more emphasis on one or the other. Grunge's key guitar influences included Black Flag and the Melvins. Black Flag's 1984 record My War, on which the band combined heavy metal with their traditional sound, made a strong impact in Seattle.

Nintendocore
Nintendocore, another musical style, fuses hardcore with video game music, chiptune, and 8-bit music.

Sludgecore
Eyehategod formed in Harvey, Louisiana in 1988 and is credited with originating a new style – New Orleans hardcore-edged sludge. Another point of view is that New Orleans was the birthplace of the sludgecore movement, with Eyehategod being given the most credit for it. Sludgecore combines sludge metal with hardcore punk, and possesses a slow pace, a low guitar tuning, and a grinding dirge-like feel. Bands regarded as sludgecore include Acid Bath, Eyehategod, and Soilent Green, and all three formed in Louisiana. Crowbar formed in 1991 and mixed "detuned, lethargic sludged-out metal with hardcore and southern elements". According to rock journalist Steve Huey writing in AllMusic, Eyehategod was a sludge metal band that became part of the "Southern sludgecore scene". This scene also included Crowbar and Down, with all three bands being influenced by Black Flag, Black Sabbath, and the Melvins. Some of these bands incorporated Southern rock influences.

See also
 List of hardcore punk bands
 List of hardcore punk genres

References

Bibliography

1980s neologisms
Culture of New York City
DIY culture

Musical subcultures
Punk rock genres
Reagan Era
Underground culture
Youth culture in the United Kingdom
Youth culture in the United States
Music of California
American rock music genres

Hardcore punk


A sailing ship is a big boat with sails attached to the mast, to catch the wind.  The wind pushes the boat along.  A sailing ship had a rig of at least three masts, square rigged.

Sailing ships have been used since prehistoric times. They were greatly improved around the 15th century, and were the main kind of ship until the middle 19th century. They were very important for trade and war. All large boats became known as "ships", so when steam power was invented people talked about "steam ships" to distinguish them from "sailing ships".

Small boats with sails are called "yachts" or sailboats.  They are used today for leisure activities.

Sailing ships

Sailing ship


Deadboy & the Elephantmen was an American indie rock band active from 2000 to 2007. Based in Houma, Louisiana, the band was fronted by Dax Riggs (formerly of Acid Bath and Agents of Oblivion).

After disputes with an independent label over the distribution of their debut album If This Is Hell, Then I'm Lucky, the band signed a three-record deal with Fat Possum. For the latter part of 2005, and most of 2006, they toured in support of their major label debut We Are Night Sky, playing from bars and smaller venues to Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits, and Bonnaroo. In early 2006, Riggs recruited his former Agents of Oblivion bandmate, Alex Bergeron, to play bass on tour. Later that year, the band was primarily a duo of Riggs and Tess Brunet. This lineup was often compared to The White Stripes in reviews, and their music is sometimes referred to as "swamp rock". By 2007, Brunet left the band and Riggs went on to a solo career. In 2015, their track "Stop, I'm Already Dead" became the theme song for The CW television series iZombie.

Background

Deadboy & the Elephantmen first appeared in late 2000, following in the wake of the breakup of Agents of Oblivion. The band was created by two former Agents of Oblivion members, Dax Riggs (Acid Bath, Agents Of Oblivion) and Chuck Pitre (Gawk Solie, Goggle Eye, Psycho Kitty, Agents of Oblivion). By early 2001, they had expanded to a full lineup. Members included Chuck Pitre Piano, Keyboards, Jason Dupre on the guitar, Christopher T. Gautreaux on the bass, and Jeff LeCompte on the drums, and Niki Rhodes Jr. on the guitar.

A rare, eight-song CD was released in late 2000 called "the 8 song demo". Shortly after, the two main composers Niki and Chuck (producer, composer and arranger) left the band.

Deadboy's first label-backed album, If This Is Hell, Then I'm Lucky was released in 2002. The album was discontinued and for a time was extremely hard to find. However, it has recently been re-released by Rotten Records and Fat Possum. Fat Possum's re-issue altered the artwork, spine and disc to say Dax Riggs instead of Deadboy and The Elephantmen. Rotten's re-issue kept the original art intact.

Following the first album, several band members quit, so Dax Riggs sought new musicians. The lineup for the first album consisted of Jason Dupre on the guitar, Christopher T. Gautreaux on the bass, and Jeff LeCompte on the drums. Niki Rhodes Jr. then rejoined the project and Christopher (saxophone and keyboard) began working with him on futuristic techno rock. Other musicians were then brought in after Christopher and Niki left the group, and New York City-based Nasty Little Man handled the band's live promotions. It was during this time that Brunet was recruited and the two began recording.

An EP, Song Mechanism, was released in late 2004. It was distributed by Riggs through Deadboy's website and various local Louisiana music stores. It too has been discontinued though all four tracks from the EP later appeared on We Are Night Sky.

We Are Night Sky was made available for purchase online in late 2005, but its official release date was February 7, 2006. While it is technically the second full-length album for Deadboy & The Elephantmen, it is the first featuring the simpler two-person lineup and is better distributed than previous efforts, and as such is often referred to as their 'debut' album.

Upon discovering We Are Night Sky, Henry Rollins began championing the band on his radio show Harmony in My Head and his TV show The Henry Rollins Show. He has since had the band on the latter to perform "Stop, I'm Already Dead".

In late 2006, Brunet left the band, but it has yet to be stated why and under what terms. In April 2007, it was announced that the band was no more, and further records will be released under Dax Riggs' own name.

Musical style and influences
Deadboy & the Elephantmen is most often described as indie rock, alternative rock and swamp rock, and incorporates elements of blues, psychedelic rock, stoner rock and metal. Their lyrics were often dark in nature, dealing with subjects such as death, blood and Armageddon.

Discography

Studio albums
 If This Is Hell, Then I'm Lucky (2002)
 We Are Night Sky (2006)

Singles
 "Stop, I'm Already Dead" (2006)

Covers
Songs covered by Deadboy & the Elephantmen.
Leonard Cohen – I'm Your Man
Leonard Cohen – Chelsea Hotel No. 2
Pixies – Wave of Mutilation
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – As I Sat Sadly By Her Side
Bonnie "Prince" Billy – Grand Dark Feeling of Emptiness
The Rolling Stones – Dead Flowers
Nick Drake – Been Smokin' Too Long
Bob Dylan – Death Is Not The End
The Beatles – Yesterday
Richard Thompson – Wall of Death

References

External links
Official website

Fat Possum Records artists
Rock music groups from Louisiana
American indie rock groups
American alternative rock groups
Swamp rock groups

Deadboy & the Elephantmen