Oh, man, I'm having literal pains from nostalgia right now.
This is the soundtrack of my favorite period of my teenage life. There was a time when I had a buddy named William Zeman, this bizarre dude who could barely speak, but when he did, he was devastatingly smart and funny. It's just that no one really got him. He just looked like an alien who landed in this jerkwater Florida high school.
That's why I dug hanging out with him. He'd given up on trying to fit in, so he was determined to just figure out his own scene. He experimented fearlessly, and without any apparent parental supervision. He was allowed to run as wild as he needed to, as long as he came home eventually. So I loved going to hang out with him and running just as wild, knowing that his parents were our bulletproof vest if my parents ever found out.
The main thing we did was go to see punk shows. Any and every punk show that came to Tampa. We couldn't really drive anywhere else to see bands, but that was okay. We got more than our fair share. There were at least two shows a week we could go to, and some weeks, it felt like we could find something worthwhile to do every single night if we wanted to. The shows were five dollars or six dollars or maybe occasionally as much as eleven dollars, but in exchange, you'd get six or nine or fourteen bands in a night, and they would come out and play LOUD AS FUCK and FASTASFUCK, and the bands would blur into each other sometimes, and the crowds were basically just giant angry moshpits every night, but that's why you were there...
... and it fucking ruled.
It really did. It was the best fucking time. I was fifteen years old, and it felt like the music I was listening to was going to BURN THE FUCKING WORLD DOWN, and it was amazing that there was that much energy in us all, and it was release to get together and just fucking flip out for a few hours. I don't think I ever drank or smoked anything around William Zeman or with him. I think we still existed in a sort of pre-intoxicants wild boy limbo, and it didn't matter. We didn't need anything else. We were blasted every night on punk rock.
AMERICAN HARDCORE gets it right.
That's the best thing I can say about the film. If you want to know what punk looked and sounded like... real grass-roots ground-floor punk in America... this is it. The film chronicles the natural rise of the scene and the inevitable implosion later, but it does so with affection and respect, and a deep, deep knowledge of the subject. Paul Rachman, the film's director, was one of the big-name Propaganda guys doing commercial and videos like Spike Jonze or David Fincher. But before Propaganda, he was there in the early days of punk, and much of the archival footage used in this movie was shot by Rachman at the time. Is it any wonder he gets it all so right?
I could listen to this movie all day. Seriously. This is a beautiful montage of an entire scene, and its amazing how comprehensive it feels in a mere 100 minutes. I'm wondering why Rachman includes pretty much no mention of Dead Kennedys at all considering how big they were, but it's simply one question. I recommend the film completely, and if Toshi ever asks me about the particular punk that I grew up on, this is the primer I'll offer him.
