When punk rock emerged, mainly in New York City and London, in the mid- to late 1970s, it was generally seen as a reaction to the bloat and pomposity of 1970s rock and pop music. Punk was stripped down, harsher, faster, more aggro, and more negative and despairing – the Sex Pistols’ “No Future” serving as the genre’s unofficial anthem. But punk was more than just a reaction; it also exploded existing boundaries of musical decorum, and by doing so it opened the floodgates to a wide variety of new genres that owed a debt to punk but were not at all the same thing.
One inevitable expression of this new freedom was the emergence of what came to be called “hardcore” punk, a largely American phenomenon that took punk rock’s aggression and speed and intensified them – while, at the same time, complicating first-generation punk’s tendency towards nihilism (sometimes amplifying and sometimes explicitly rejecting it) and sometimes creating new sets of restrictive rules and expectations that seemed quite at odds with punk’ ethos of freedom and experimentation, particularly in the form of the notorious “straight edge” movement. Hardcore was a seething mass of contradictions, and a thrilling moment in rock history. There was no way it could last forever, but it has also never fully gone away.