Book Review : American Hardcore A Tribal History - Steven Blush*** It's not porn, for those that don't know, Hardcore is the simple but fast musical style that evolved after the first explosion of punk. In America it was stripped down punk played fast, as fast as possible. The scene was small but important, although many of the HC bands did not make any sort of wider ranging musical impact, a few bands (Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, Suicidal Tendencies, The Misfits) did go on to bigger things, and the HC scene influenced a lot of punk-metal crossover acts and gave birth to the thrash metal scene which produced such giants as Anthrax, Slayer and of course Metallica. I really wanted to enjoy this book, it's the sort of music I like, the HC scene has often been political punk and I love music with a message, but, Blush's writing is rather difficult to get along with. I have no doubt that the author has catalogued every well known hardcore band, and a swathe of minor bands that even scene aficionados might not remember, but the book simply isn't all that well written. Blush seems to have interviewed pretty much all of the important musicians, promoters and record company people involved in HC, but he presents their views as clunky quotes on every page, you often get various band members saying much the same thing over and over and it must be said, some of these people are not the sharpest knives in the drawer and their thoughts don't always make for interesting reading. Blush also puts over his own views and opinions constantly, it's quite obvious that he hates heavy metal, he also has a strange/varying attitude towards homosexuals, seems mostly anti-women and is vastly enamoured of the violence that seemed to go along with the early HC scene in the US. I didn't realise that the American HC scene was so violent, punk over here wasn't half as bad as Blush portrays the brutality that went hand in hand with the music in the States. It seems to me that a lot of the early HC scenesters would have been football hooligans if they were over here, the music was just an excuse for violence and the tribalism mentioned in the book's title. Blush also puts forward his own view that the hardcore scene existed just from '80-'86, thus many bands who made it big, or continued their careers into '87 and beyond have their discography and history stopped at the end of '86. This is a shame, the discography would make far more sense if it had been compiled to show the more current output of the bands that survived longer. Blush is also wrong to state that the scene just died in '86, there are still HC bands playing today, new HC bands appear all the same, sure the scene isn't the same, eventually the record companies got onboard and realised there was money to be made and this destroyed the early DIY work ethic of HC, but the scene goes on. American Hardcore ought to be fascinating for the punk junkie, but it is poorly put together, what it really needs is a writer to collate all of Blush's obvious passion and inside knowledge of the scene to re-write it with a better narrative feel.