“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (unknown author)

This saying of unknown origin puts, in a nutshell, the difficulty – some might argue impossibility – of rendering in words what music in its various manifestations actually means, what it feels like. Writing about hardcore punk (hereafter, “hardcore”) might be even more challenging, as the music is fast and abrasive, the lyrics hard to decipher, and the bodily interaction in the form of slam dancing or pogoing highly physical, at times violent. For the mainstream, then, hardcore is not music but noise.

In her monograph Politics as Sound: the Washington, DC, Hardcore Scene, 1978–1983, Shayna L. Maskell meets this challenge brilliantly and reconstructs what it might have felt like to be a frustrated, bored, and privileged (white) teenager in Washington, DC, helping to give birth to this type of music at the end of the 1970s. For a taste of her writing style: “Minor Threat’s 1980 show at d.c. space is a muddled melee of MacKaye shrieking his songs as he wrings the neck of his microphone stand and the fans – all men – thrusting elbows, hips, heads, and the full force of their bodies against one another in orgiastic dance.” (p. 193) When describing how the white male scene members performed difference from mainstream society through hair, clothes, and dance in Chapter 7 (pp. 178–198), the author here – and throughout the book – manages to encapsulate the actual experience of living the DC hardcore scene in its energy, excitement, and excess. While the book features a discography, bibliographical and valuable additional notes, as well as an index, it would have been a great asset to find detailed information on the performances to directly see what Maskell so vividly puts into words. But this is only a minor threat to the study’s many qualities.

The structure of the book is clear and accessible with an introduction that briefly outlines hardcore before highlighting six crucial bands, which “are the most prominent, powerful, and persuasive people, sounds, and representations of DC hardcore” (p. 3), namely Bad Brains, Teen Idles, the above-mentioned Minor Threat, State of Alert (S.O.A.), Government Issue (GI), and Faith. The first three bands are household names in the hardcore scene, and the significance of the latter three justifies Maskell’s overall approach to exploring both the music and the wider scene based on these influential bands. The breadth and depth of the author’s primary sources are impressive, ranging from interviews she conducted to lyrics, flyers, fanzine discourses, album covers, and actual performances. Maskell aims to “consider the way music communicates, its structure – facets like timbre, melody, rhythm, pitch, volume, dissonance” in order to “simultaneously dissect how these features communicate messages of social and cultural politics, expressly representations of race, class, and gender” (p. 2) – and she delivers.

Demonstrating the historical scope of Maskell’s perspective by providing an overview of the sonic, spatial, and sociopolitical history of DC, the first chapter (pp. 15–42) sheds light on the significance of musical genres like jazz, bluegrass, go-go, and first-wave punk and delineates how a history of white supremacy materialized in the spatial developments of the city itself. By putting emphasis on the significance of particular places and spaces in the formation of (sub-)cultural phenomena, the author invalidates possible criticism pertaining to her exclusive focus on the DC actors and scene. She convincingly argues that what matters (most) in the formation of hardcore in DC are the participants’ actual living conditions and external circumstances. Nevertheless, Maskell also points to similar developments in the other major hardcore scenes in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and beyond.1 This chapter, and the entire book, are theory-informed – the author has clearly read her Gramsci and Foucault – but it is not overladen with and self-indulgent in theoretical discussions. Instead, Maskell expertly breaks down abstract theory and applies it to actual spaces, places, and people.

The remainder of the study comprises two sections, first delving into the music of DC hardcore (pp. 45–130) and second, the DC hardcore scene (pp. 133–235). The third and fourth chapters of the first section insightfully analyze, respectively, Teen Idles’ and Minor Threat’s “class-based sound aesthetics and choices” (p. 12) and the sonic reinforcement of “socially formed understandings of masculinity” (p. 98) as materializing in the sound and lyrics of S.O.A., GI, and Faith. The centerpiece of the first section, however, is its opening chapter (pp. 45–69), in which Maskell explores Bad Brains and their eponymous 1982 debut album to illustrate the “complicated and often conflicting ways in which race is (de/re) constructed in DC hardcore” (p. 45). As an all-Black combo in a scene dominated by white middle- and upper-class males, Bad Brains were outsiders and in-between who nonetheless – or as the author argues just because of that – pioneered the sound due to their technical prowess and exceptional speed, which provided the blueprint for the shape of hardcore to come. One of the many strengths of this chapter is Maskell’s musicological expertise, which allows her to describe, situate, and interpret Bad Brains’ actual sound – the singing, the instrument playing and the performing – in the context of the complex racial history of African American musical genres like blues and jazz.2

The second section broadens the perspective by exploring particular social practices defining the DC hardcore as well as the overall scene in the United States, namely, the Do-It-Yourself culture as pioneered by Ian MacKaye’s label Dischord (chapter 5); the Straight Edge movement, which consciously refrained from what was perceived as self-destructive behavior: smoking, drinking, taking drugs, and engaging in promiscuous sex (chapter 6); and the scene’s stripped-down aesthetics and fashion choices, as well as the phenomenon of slam dancing (chapter 7). Eventually, the section and the entire book are rounded off by Maskell’s discussion of “The Transformation of Hardcore: DC Post-Hardcore, after 1983” (pp. 199–235). All the chapters thrive on the author’s in-depth knowledge of the phenomena under scrutiny, and equally importantly, on her holistic and unbiased interpretation thereof. For instance, she evaluates the young white male straight edgers as, on the one hand, resisting hegemonic masculinity by refusing to “prove to be a real man” through the means of drinking excessively and engaging in casual sex. “Being a (straightedge) male” on the other hand “meant not drinking, which aligned with the traditional masculine directive of doing your own thing, being an “inner-directed male” instead of the less manly “other-directed” approval-seeking male” (p. 163; emphasis in original). Accordingly, one manifestation of hegemonic masculinity would merely be replaced by another.

What emerges in this book is a fascinating exploration of the diverse sound and social practices of an apparently marginal music scene that simultaneously reaffirmed and subverted the dominant social, cultural, political, and economic frame of the nation’s capital at the dawn of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Shayna L. Maskell’s Politics as Sound: the Washington, DC, Hardcore Scene, 1978–1983 is state-of-the-art writing about music in general and hardcore in particular: It combines a musicological perspective with critical approaches not to completely deconstruct the phenomena under scrutiny, but captures its liveliness holistically and analyze its broader significance and contexts succinctly. The book is a must-read not only for hardcore aficionados but for anyone only slightly interested in the intersection of race, class, gender, and sound in post-war American culture.

Notes:
1 Putting (more) emphasis on broader national discourses – for example around so-called color blindness or a perceived crisis of white masculinity – is nonetheless vital to complement Maskell’s perspective for a holistic understanding of the particular racialized and gendered identity constructions in the contemporary American hardcore scene. See: Robert A. Winkler, Generation Reagan Youth. Representing and Resisting White Neoliberal Forms of Life in the U.S. Hardcore Punk Scene (1979–1999), Trier 2021.
2 Maskell’s musicological analyses of hardcore tie in with recent innovative work on the various meanings of the actual sound of hardcore. See, for instance: David Pearson, Rebel Music in the Triumphant Empire. Punk Rock in the 1990s United States, Oxford 2021; Evan Rapport, Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk, Jackson 2020.