Previously. (no seriously read the previous edition if you haven't I'm not doing any recapping here we're 100% full steam ahead)
Everything metaphorical worth saying about Washington, D.C., has already been said. It’s a planned federal city built on top of a swamp, basically no different than a Life game board — a collection of plastic white buildings held together by a tacit agreement to play by the rules.
During the 1980s, that code between the state and its people broke down in ways that we still see the ripple effects of today. A new wave of punk rose in response to the realities of life under the Ronald Reagan administration: hardcore.
Hardcore punk and Reagan’s political career were both launched out of the sun-drenched California suburbs that symbolized the American dream and postwar teen culture. In the mid-20th century, teens growing up in middle-class suburban families had ample money and free time, and the capitalist machine embraced teens’ desire to establish identity through a consumer lifestyle.
As government policy redirected money away from social services, widening the wealth gap between the upper and middle classes, hardcore kids took punk’s rebuke of the system and pushed it even further. In Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad wrote about the independent music scene of the ‘80s, which included hardcore punk, saying, “The indie underground made a modest way of life not just attractive but a downright moral imperative” in the face of a nationwide shift toward conservatism.
In that light, I’m a little more sympathetic to the elitist, insular, anti-selling out attitude that permeates the world of punk/post-punk/hardcore music. But the hardcore scene’s nihilism about politics and popular culture in the ‘80s kind of backfired, and the scene ended up fostering a conservative attitude about what music should and could sound like.
One band, known for their guitar-smashing live performances, tried something new.
Truly, needy, deeply
Rites of Spring was a hardcore band named for the Igor Stravinsky ballet that inspired a riot at its premiere in 1913 (ongoing political disruption in Paris was also a bigger part of that story than most people realize). Stravinsky claimed that he wrote the ballet in a trance without considering music theory, in order to access something primal and unadulterated.
“It was such a daring piece of music,” Rites of Spring singer and guitarist Guy Picciotto told Flipside magazine. “It just fucked with everybody, and I thought that was kinda cool.”
Despite emo’s dour reputation, the music itself has always been fun, often based around bouncy, rippling guitar riffs. For the most part, Rites of Spring put together simple, repetitive songs, but those songs are poppier and more memorable than a lot of ‘80s hardcore, as pointed out in an interview with the band by Truly Needy magazine. At the time, the appeal of Rites of Spring wasn’t necessarily the music itself, but the band’s destructive, almost hypnotic antics during their handful of live shows.
“If Rites of Spring are just another rock band, with traditional rock instrumentation, why is every one of their shows an emotional drill that riles the guts and stuns the body?” Truly Needy writer Barbara Rice asked. “Even they don’t know the entire answer.”
The band’s lyrics also set them apart as an evolution of hardcore. Unlike a lot of their peers, Rites of Spring chose to focus on existential and introspective themes, rather than make political statements in their lyrics. The songs “For Want Of” and “Theme” stand out as bops — in the weeks since I first heard it, I’ve been walking around with the chorus of “Theme” stuck in my head (“And if I started crying / Would you start crying? / Now I started crying / Why are you not crying?”). If the one true definition of emo is that you know it when you hear it, boy howdy. That’s it.
Rites of Spring brought a new sense of vulnerability to hardcore music, but the band also showed a willingness to experiment. See “End on End,” a 7-minute epic about the feeling of drowning in unbreakable cycles, paired with some unholy (but still catchy) guitar yowling, that they often used to end live shows. The song closes with a description of the ballet that gave the band its name:
“To write a piece about a solemn pagan rite, wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.”
Rites of Spring, who spent a little less than two years as a band, didn’t end in an explosive clash of personalities like the Sex Pistols. It didn’t end with a tragic whimper like Joy Division or Nirvana. It wasn’t like other short-lived, genre-defining bands. Its members simply had other shit to do.
“My name is Ian, and I’m from Minor Threat.”
Basically any reflection on the hardcore scene that sprouted Rites of Spring involves listing off other bands no one’s ever heard of who shared guitarists or record labels with each other. Dischord Records was an independent label run by Ian MacKaye, better known for founding the bands Minor Threat and Fugazi, incubated many bands who could be considered the first wave of emo — including one of MacKaye’s own bands, Embrace.
According to acclaimed music critic Jim DeRogatis (yeah, that Jim DeRogatis), Embrace was the very first band to be referred to as emo. Legend has it that someone at one of their shows, who I can only assume was Marty McFly trying to keep the timeline intact, shouted, “You guys are emo-core!” and it somehow stuck.
A lot of the charm of Embrace’s music comes from the personality of its impish frontman, MacKaye, who was a staple of the hardcore scene and organizer of the 1985 apartheid protest. Songs like “Building” dip into a vocal style that sounds a whole heck of a lot like Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, but for the most part, the other Ian bounces back and forth between two modes: cheekily tossing out spoken-word lines and screaming lyrics that fall off a cliff into an abject wail at the end.
You can hear both styles clearly on “Money,” a song that echoes the themes of “Cashing In” by Minor Threat, MacKaye’s previous band. Comparing the two exposes the early, subtle split between hardcore and emo-core. Where the Minor Threat song is snotty and sarcastic (“Well you know, I'm gonna be all right / With the money I'm making off of you tonight”), the Embrace song steps out from behind the humor, expressing the unease and alienation of life under capitalism (“There are no winners / We all lose / Thanks for nothing”).
For its contributions to the culture, Embrace probably deserves its 6,000 monthly Spotify listeners, but I’m not upset the band isn’t more well-known. It feels like a project born out of a specific moment of dissatisfaction with the hardcore scene in D.C.; at the band’s last show in 1986, MacKaye introduced “Building” with, “We can plan all we want to, we can project, we can fuck around, talk and talk — shut the fuck up. … Man, we have so much fuckin’ potential, everyone here does, and we should fuckin’ do something about it.”
Meanwhile, the scene was fracturing. This wasn’t a new thing; Guy Picciotto talked about forming Rites of Spring at a time when all the bands he cared about in the scene had broken up. Rites of Spring and Embrace both broke up in the first months of 1986, but Picciotto, MacKaye, and Rites of Spring drummer Brendan Canty ended up starting Fugazi together, because the incestuous slurry of ‘80s hardcore couldn’t stay dormant for long.
In the history of emo, none of these fiddly little details matter that much. Emo is a genre that paints with a broad brush — big feelings, big ideas, big egos. In a post-breakup interview with Greed magazine, Picciotto said that Rites of Spring felt different than the bands he’d been in previously: “This was the band, this was it, and it was going to take off forever and be the greatest thing on earth and everyone else was just going to shut up. … But then you break up and the first few days you’re staring at the ceiling saying, ‘what the fuck?’”
The hype here isn’t necessarily just hype. If it wasn’t for the independent music movement that these early emo bands participated in, alternative bands like Nirvana never would have exploded in the 1990s, changing the trajectory of music history. (Also, on a granular level, “hardcore” propagated the use of “-core” as a suffix to indicate a subculture or sub-genre’s defiance of the mainstream, as in “mumblecore,” etc.)
Rites of Spring and Embrace (as well as other Dischord Records bands that came a little later, like Drive Like Jehu) had a relatively limited footprint in the ‘80s, but they set patterns that became visible years later. In the meantime, the next phase of emo music development was brewing outside the D.C. metro area, in similar scenes to the west.
Next time: Anakin Skywalker’s favorite bands.
Offline sources
“American Punk: The Relations between Punk Rock, Hardcore, and American Culture” by Gerfried Ambrosch, from Amerikastudien
Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad
Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo by Andy Greenwald
Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis by Ryan Moore
Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds
“Hardcore: Subculture American Style” by Susan Willis, from Critical Inquiry
Header collage images from “The powers that be: Processes of control in crew scene hardcore” by Jeff Purchla and from Wikimedia Commons: sketch of a costume for the Rite of Spring (1912), Guy Picciotto playing with Fugazi, and the Dischord Records logo.