Agnostic Front Vs. Cro-Mags

"Cro-Mags and Agnostic Front both released at least one classic, intense L.P."

OK, name 'em. (I'm a limey, both bands are just characters from the MRR soap opera to me - couldn't afford the imports!)

I still have the Cro-Mags' debut album, Age Of Quarrel, in my iPod, one of very few 80s NYHC albums to make the cut (Judge's Bringin' It Down and the Breakdown 1987 demo are the only other two). I never liked Agnostic Front; preferred Sick Of It All, Gorilla Biscuits and the bands I already mentioned.

i always pretty much hated any NYHC i've heard

but this episode of donahue is pretty funny!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igfoVyTnz0g&feature=related

age of quarrel was the cro-mags' good record, i think. i forget what the agnostic front one was called. cro-mags were a better story - harley's such a nutty character - and the whole krishna thing was baffling and freaky to me at the time. agnostic front seemed marginally less rabidly nuts to me, and therefore less interesting. haven't listened to either in many years. murphy's law and warzone were always more fun than the two biggies anyway, as far as nyc skinhead/hc shit went.

and the concept of warzone being "more fun" than anything gives you an idea how deeply un-fun HC was

donahue seems pretty chill

The good Agnostic Front album is Victim In Pain, although I like their 1st EP United Blood and 2nd album Cause For Alarm a lot as well. Their 3rd was rubbish.

I'm not a big NYHC fan either, although oddly I don't mind what's usually held to be the most generic of them all - Youth Of Today. Gorilla Biscuits and Judge are OK too. Most of the good hardcore from NYC is from earlier in the 80s, before the whole NYHC thing started, IMO - Nihilistics, Urban Waste etc.

Age of Quarrel beats anything/everything AF ever came up with.

Still, KRAUT were better than all of them.

Oh yeah, I did see Agnostic Front in Cremaster 3, along with Murphy's Law.

Like Matt, no fan of NYHC. Do like Age of Quarrel, though - so Cro-Mags.

A lot of that post mid eighties, macho, NYHC seemed as boringly stupid as some of the Brit stuff that I was trying to avoid. Some of the crossover stuff was hilariously bad.

"The good Agnostic Front album is Victim In Pain, although I like their 1st EP United Blood and 2nd album Cause For Alarm a lot as well. Their 3rd was rubbish."

ditto!

arggh! that was me.

cause for alarm was great crossover stuff if you ask me.

Their 3rd was rubbish.

the one with 'crucified'? u mad!

Long, interesting piece on John "Bloodclot" Joseph of the Cro Mags and his autobiography in Village Voice recently. Again, I don't know the music and I wasn't around.

the one with 'crucified'? u mad!

Cro-Mags are totally "better"--more talented and a little more unique. However, Agnostic Front make me feel like folk fans in the 60s must have felt when they first heard Bascom Lamar Lunsford or something. (...a really imperfect analogy--be kind!)

I'm old enough to know how ridiculous the NYHC scene was (with a little first-hand and second-hand experience from back then), but with the distance of time, I can fool myself into feeling like I'm listening to some sort of "real deal." Meaning it transports me to being a witness to some sort of ultra-authentic state of being that doesn't exist anymore. A ridiculous suburban fantasy of the ultimate plebian tough-guy music, I guess.

Part of my point is how laughable, yet enjoyable, listening to this sort of music can be.

Fritz's comment that "the concept of warzone being "more fun" than anything gives you an idea how deeply un-fun HC was" runs totally contrary to my own experience (and that of most of the fans in the CT area in that time). That music was a blast, and the fans I was most opposed to/fearful of were, I must admit, having a blast, too.

By the way: Go to the following link to hear Walter Schreifels' excellent acoustic eulogy to Warzone's Raybeez ("Open Letter"), as well as his acoustic cover of Agnostic Front's "Society Suckers"!

http://www.myspace.com/walterschreifelsmusic

I listened to "Age of Quarrel" a lot in highschool, that album totally rules. I remember watching that Donahue hardcore episode at the time; doesn't he try to imply that some Youth of Today t-shirt has some awfully classy production values, smirk smirk, etc.

Cro Mags eat AF for lunch. Even Best Wishes is decent.

Anyone read John Joseph's book??

"Malfunction" was my jam. Never listened to Agnostic Front, so i can't compare the two. Come to think of it, Harley from Cro-Mags was kinda hot, wasn't he?

Not in person he's not. He looks like a predatory lizard

as far as the original post goes, i never thought there was anything reprehensible about either band. they had a lot of idiot fans who were violent. harley was an idiot. i dunno. there are worse out there. as far as AF and skinhead nation goes, well, it's kind of hard to be regarded as a racist skin band when your lead singer has a tattoo that says 100% Latino on his neck.

I've seen video footage from around 1984 where Roger Miret talks about wearing swastikas and being friends with NF skins in the UK, although he then goes onto say the swastika to him represents chaos, not racism. So it's not surprising they attracted that element really.

John Joseph has a new memoir out, by the way.

Fritz's comment that "the concept of warzone being "more fun" than anything gives you an idea how deeply un-fun HC was" runs totally contrary to my own experience (and that of most of the fans in the CT area in that time). That music was a blast, and the fans I was most opposed to/fearful of were, I must admit, having a blast, too.

you know, i think you're right actually... it's just a bit hard to remember what was fun about it sometimes from my cranky old man p.o.v., but those all-ages HC matinee shows (all local bands in my experience, not the dudes in question)were indeed a blast.

I guess what I was trying to get at was that the stance of the bands - the righteous anger, all the quasimilitaristic calls for loyalty to the tribe, the anti-beer lobbyists etc. - feel pretty un-fun in retrospect, but I guess I have to remember that none of that was taken all that seriously by most

It's crazy, though--any remembrance of the era which discounts either the fun side or the super-grim side totally misses the boat.

A glance through a fanzine or two of the ear might make someone think they were perusing the tedious minutes of The Worst Town Meeting In the World.

("era" not "ear")

the tedious minutes of The Worst Town Meeting In the World

that's so dead on. this should have been MRR tagline.

I have a copy of John Joseph's book sitting on the floor under my desk. It's about 8000 pages long and doesn't deal with the Cro-Mags until page 753 or so.

Honestly, fuck else would he have to talk about?

A glance through a fanzine or two of the ear might make someone think they were perusing the tedious minutes of The Worst Town Meeting In the World.

ILM LOL moment of 2008 so far

I dunno, MRR earnest and dull? That's a pretty controversial viewpoint. For 1983.

Maybe you should write Tim a letter about it.

i'm torn as well. i like a lot of the music and yet i kinda hate what that music did to american punk. so, it was fun, but there was definite damage done. at the time, i dug new york and ct hardcore cuz i dug metal riffs and i got off on endless breakdowns as much as anyone. i always wanted to make a cd that was just the intros to straightedge songs. what i didn't like was how nobody in those scenes wanted to know ANYTHING about anything else punk-wise. or even music-wise. the rigidity bugged me. and being a druggie/drunk, i, of course, had no time for the extra-musical messages of universal brotherhood thru prohibition. my friends in that scene were good guys and they tolerated me, but they were sooooo squeaky clean and normal. i wasn't used to that either. i liked my punks smelly and fucked up. like me. when adolescents came to the anthrax in 86 i wanted to kill everyone in the crowd that just stood there waiting for them to leave the stage. which was, like, everyone except me. i wanted to scream at them, THIS IS THE ADOLESCENTS YOU SILLY MOTHERFUCKERS! THEY WERE PLAYING SCARY VIOLENT HARDCORE SHOWS WHEN YOU WERE IN DIAPERS!!! THEY CREATED THIS THING! but that was the point. they were old dudes who looked like they had habits. they weren't short or wiry enough. they didn't even speak the same language. and then it just got worse! then i stopped paying attention. and now i'm going back and listening to all the cool bands i missed out on in the 90's. the ones that didn't sound like earth crisis.

scott--You're so right. Even as I turned my nose up at this stuff as closed-minded, the scenes I approved of (again, Lookout, Dischord, Vermiform, Gravity, etc.) were just as closed off. It took years and years for me to start to explore and value other music. ALL music had to be punk.

I must admit, I think that some developments on the tougher end of the NYHC spectrum (Burn, Quicksand) had some compelling aspects. Particularly the bizarre dancing. "Style-moshing" was a term we used to endlessly make fun of. But it has to be said--kids adopted hip-hop style and started to move their bodies in a way that rock music hadn't seen, and hasn't since. (Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Dancing with one hand on the floor and one in the air, or clapping and spinning?) I used to ridicule it, but I think it was a relatively local and unique phenomenon, which has its value historically.

Another thing--am I crazy to think that the classic NYHC move of pulling out all instruments except guitar mid-song, and then everything crashing back in at the same time, was a performance trick lifted from the dub reggae studio trick? I've long figured that it was established by Bad Brains and then adopted by the Cro-Mags, and then tons of other bands.

By the way scott, which bands did you miss out on in the 90s? Born Against was truly something to behold.

Sorry to crash in .
I was miles away from any of this in my quaint English castle, but Born Against, albeit late 80s/ early90s(?) were to me way more appealing than the two bands in the thread.
I mean, just look at the song titles...

i like born against. i did come to them late. um, as far as 90's stuff goes, i guess the whole powerviolence thing went right by me. except for discordance axis. i didn't start listening to converge until jane doe. so that whole group of bands i missed when they were doing some of their best stuff. botch/cavity/cave-in/etc. all that stuff that the younger writers at decibel magazine like to go on and on about now. i like that they do though, cuz i totally wasn't listening to it at the time. i was mostly listening to metal and psych/garage records.

wait, is cavity who i'm thinking of?

at any rate, i missed a lot. the 90's were weird and all over the place for me. i definitely listened to more old music than current music though. and i was no longer as interested in what hardcore had become for the most part. but i did miss a lot because of that.

Usual Channels, you are mostly right, but you gotta give the Gravity crew credit at least for their ahead-of-their-time interest in free jazz

best powerviolence band that isn't Charles Bronson: Black Army Jacket

And, FWIW, growing up with HeartattaCk as my bible, it was always the Dischord stuff that seemed boring to me. I mean, Fugazi, Lungfish, great, but Bluetip? Rain Like The Sound of Trains? Snore. After a while, Dischord = self righteous, pompous, boring, or all three. I started avoiding it. Maybe it's my age, though...I mean, I saw Chokehold FIVE TIMES. Hahahaaaa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKpIYUEI-ps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oluNddBecM