Power Violence & Grindcore

I’ve been meaning to write something for a while — out of character for this particular blog for sure, I know, but not for me myself — on the history of various subgenres of hardcore. I was leafing through the internet today and I found this really funny but really informative history of power violence, which in my day we always just kind of lumped in with grindcore. However, the guy who wrote the article takes great pains to show the extent to which there is, at a certain moment, a break within the genre when it got more popular with a different sub-demographic in the scene, what the dude calls “PC emo/punk kids” or just “suburban kids,” around 1997 thanks to Spazz and Charles Bronson. This is kind of an interesting claim, since on the most general level it totally describes me in highschool, although his causal claim is that it is because Spazz and CB wrote more fun and accessible stuff than the earlier bands, and were must less scumbags. This does make sense, but I always thought of my own interest in this stuff as kind of a predictable aesthetic development–and I should add that with my friends at about this time (96-97), it was Anal Cunt that served as our introduction to the genre. I was always into hardcore, the music and the scene in general (I never liked metal until very recently — I was definitely one of those hardcore kids), but I was also just as into or more into various early forms of what I see as the precursors of harsh noise, or at least bands who made harsh fucking noises, above all that early Butthole Surfers stuff, which still can’t be beat for my money. Anyway, being into hardcore, being into fucked up noises, and generally appreciating anything fast and brutal (and fun, this stuff was the best to dance to), it kind of only made sense we’d come to this material. However, the guy may still be right, since these are the bands I think of first (and I still call them Grind(core) before I called them PV), but then again, it’s this stuff that then lead me (and kind of prepped me aesthetically) for the other earlier bands. And, whatever, the article has a whole section on Spazz anyway.

Anyway, here’s the dumb Wikipedia article on PV. Again, my own instincts on this stuff are slightly different than this article’s too, but close enough for it really not to matter. The best way to actually learn about any of this would be to go through the Slap A Ham discography and listen less than selectively to whatever happens to strike you as potentially interesting.