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Uncompromising and innovative, hardcore punk in Washington, DC, birthed a new sound and nurtured a vibrant subculture aimed at a specific segment of the city's youth. Shayna L. Maskell explores DC's hardcore scene during its short but storied peak. Led by bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat, hardcore in the nation's capital unleashed music as angry and loud as it was fast and minimalistic. Maskell examines the music's aesthetics and the unique impact of DC's sociopolitical realities on the sound and the scene that emerged. As she shows, aspects of the music's structure merged with how bands performed it to put across distinctive representations of race, class, and gender. But those representations could be as complicated and contradictory as they were explicit. A fascinating analysis of a punk rock hotbed, Politics as Sound tells the story of how a generation created music that produced--and resisted--politics and power.

There is a distinctive relationship between music and the city from which it comes. Detroit and Motown, Nashville and country, New York and hiphop—music and the places from which they emerge interact, influence, and transform one another. Cities are contested spaces where elites and formidable interest groups struggle to shape representation, manipulate images, and wrestle for the financial and cultural power that comes with such control. And contained within these spaces are particular places, a built environment that, in part, creates, limits, and complicates opportunities for individuals economically, socially, politically, and—important for the purposes of this chapter—culturally.

During the creative and influential years between 1979 and 1983, hardcore punk was not only born—a mutated sonic stepchild of rock n' roll, British and American punk—but also evolved into a uncompromising and resounding paradigm of and for DC youth. Through the revelatory music of DC hardcore bands like Bad Brains, Teen Idles, Minor Threat, State of Alert, Government Issue and Faith a new formulation of sound, and a new articulation of youth, arose: one that was angry, loud, fast, and minimalistic. With a total of only ten albums between all five bands in a mere five years, DC hardcore cemented a small yet significant subculture and scene. This project considers two major components of this music: aesthetics and the social politics that stem from those aesthetics. By examining the way music communicates—facets like timbre, melody, rhythm, pitch, volume and dissonance—while simultaneously incorporating an analysis of hardcore's social context—including the history of music's cultural canons, as well as the specific socioeconomic, racial and gendered milieu in which music is generated, communicated and responded to—this dissertation attempts to understand how hardcore punk conveys messages of social and cultural politics, expressly representations of race, class and gender. In doing so, this project looks at how DC hardcore (re)contextualizes and (re)imagines the social and political meanings created by and from sound.

No exploration of DC hardcore can be complete without a discussion of straightedge, an individual philosophy that eschews drinking, drugs, and unrestrained sex, which became not only an emblem of the city’s hardcore scene but also a national movement. The origins of straightedge are unvaryingly tied to Minor Threat, whose 1981 song “Straight Edge” declared the clean living ideology that rebelled against the youthbased and music-centric culture grounded in the consumption of drugs and alcohol, where sexual conquests were badges of honor and getting wasted was a nightly occurrence. Much academic and popular literature has been devoted to understanding straightedge,¹

In the 1980 US Census, 15.3 percent of civilian DC families were living under the poverty line, 1,007 of them white families and 18,992 black. The DC poverty rate contrasts with that in the greater DC metropolitan area, including Maryland and Virginia, where only 6.2 percent of families were living under the poverty line. Of those employed in DC, nearly 44,000 were private or salaried-waged, and approximately 40,000 were federal workers. The census also showed that nearly 39,000 students were enrolled in high school in the District in 1980, 35,000 in public school and 3,600 in private school. Smack in

The last show S.O.A. performed was opening for Black Flag in South Philly in 1981, with about thirty DC hardcore kids in the crowd, including Ian MacKaye. As Henry Garfield recalled, “We really didn’t come up to beat up Philly punks, but I guess we came up to fight for something.”¹ The fight came to them. As John Stabb from Government Issue recalled in the punk zine Now What, “When everyone was inside the club, that’s when the Philly freak show began,” first in the form of fights on the dance floor, followed by a free-for-all melee on the streets

The collapse of the original DC hardcore scene was the outcome of a number of interrelated personal, sociopolitical, media-induced, and cultural changes. Some band members grew out of adolescence and went to college and others moved to other states or joined other bands. At the same time, the local and national media coverage of punk had reached a boiling point; no longer was punk seen as a threatening act of deviance by an underground few. Punk’s representation in the public eye, primarily as a function of style, neutered the revolutionary foundations it had been built on. To still others, hardcore