Damaged [CASSETTE]

Yeah, bought this in '82, aged 14 - along with Dead Kennedys' Plastic Surgery Disasters, the other classic from that year. Nothing on the face of your earth prepares you for this sonic assault. Nothing. Heavy metal, eat my shorts, you lame losers, you fakes! Rise Above kicks off like they mean to go on, a spiralling, pummelling thrash of positive electricity that says 'you can kick me and beat me, but I will keep on getting up just to spite you goddamnit'. SPRAY PAINT THE WALLS - a 90 second slash across your ears. The feedback from Ginn's guitar before Rollins SCREAMS Depression, thrashing into a rolling thunder of pain and angst so real it hurts. The sound that launched a thousand boring imitations careers on through Life of Pain, Padded Cell, Room 13, all tempered and annealed in a white-hot, speed-of-light, grenade in the mouth and shit the pin's been pulled, NOISE that rips out to its 'de-facto' template with Thirsty and Miserable. Man, I felt like this. I lived it. Finally the record crawls, hobbles, spins out of control with the nightmare of working 9-5, living a lie and kissing your boss's butt just to get a slave wage as Rollins croaks and snarls his way through Damaged no.1. Damaged declares war on you - it'll leave you breathless, adrenalized and wanting to believe that the world cannot do anything to you more painful than you can inflict on yourself. You'll either find this LP a life-enhancing phenomenon or a crushing blow to all your sanitized pre-conceptions on what your trivial life is supposed to be. Nothing is louder, faster or harder. Believe me, I've heard it all. Accept no imitations. This is your brain through the mangle, into the mincer and fried in petrol. Lacerate yourself. Go on, you know you want to.

This album first surfaced in 1980 when punk wasn't cool anymore. People talk about the British punk music classic bands but there was absolutely nothing as vitriolic and full of genuine fury as this album at the time. Henry Rollins, sounding like a kid just going through puberty, screams and shouts his way through 35 minutes of brilliance. It's amusing when you hear people whinging about the rough production of this album or the shoddy musicianship. Isn't that what punk is supposed to be about? If you listen to this album in the spirit it was intended to be then you will see why, rightly so, this was one of the most important punk albums ever. Other punk bands might have better production and be better musicians but this album was a decade ahead of its time, along with the likes of Bad Brains and Suicidal Tendencies.

One of the previous reviewers suggested that if you like Black Flag then you must be in some way unable to appreciate music.

Let me see, what was the last music I paid for? Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martins in the Fields doing Bach's 'Art of Fugue' and 'Musical Offering'. The original 1943 recording of Benjamin Britten's 'Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings'. Mendlessohn's Hebrides Overture. The waltz from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, because my two-year-old girl likes it. Strauss's Blue Danube, because it's such a great old chestnut. Kim Kashkashian playing Hindemith's viola sonatas. Some Israeli surf-punk from Boom Pam and vintage Greek surf guitar from Aris San. Kenny Rogers singing 'Just Dropped In'. Oh yeah, and also Mike Watt's 'Ball-Hog or Tugboat', some free improv guitar by Davey Williams and Maurizio Pollini playing the Diabelli Variations. I think it's fair to say that I have no problem liking various kinds of music. I also like Black Flag. A lot. I like them so much that my only tattoo is of their logo.

I first listened to the Flag in the mid-80s when I was a fairly dumb teenager. In those days I was listening to SST bands, Cream, Hendrix and bebop. Oddly enough, Cream, Hendrix and jazz are all part of the mix when it comes to later Flag (it's well-documented how Greg Ginn - or was it Chuck Dukowski? - turned Henry Rollins onto Charles Mingus while on tour). But this, the first proper Black Flag album, is not only one of the best Black Flag albums, it's also one of the best punk albums ever, and arguably transcends punk by virtue of being relatively complex musically: for every hilarious clapalong rant like 'TV Party' there's something as rhythmically sophisticated as 'What I See' or 'Damaged II'. Black Flag were always a band capable of great musical eloquence, and if they mostly wanted to express anger, alienation, paranoia and contempt, so what? Those are perfectly legitimate emotions to want to get across musically, and these lads really got them across. It's not hard to see why they were so unpopular on their first visit to the UK. British punk bands were always more about fashion and posturing than about playing convincing music, but Black Flag were always single-mindedly about playing whatever they wanted. Maybe that's why they appeal to the muso in me. I can't listen to the Sex Pistols anymore because their stuff doesn't stand up to repeated plays in the way that the Flag's recordings do (and so does the music of their peers - bands like the Minutemen and Husker Du, to name just two).

Black Flag morphed into various different shapes over the years and were frequently stymied and ultimately strangled by Greg Ginn's personality problems, but at his peak he was a fiendishly expressive guitarist. Their records usually sound pretty bad, because nobody in SST really knew how to produce a record so that the band sounded like a band, but the genius still shines through. This is probably the best album, although there are pockets of sheer brilliance scattered over the rest of their output - Loose Nut is perhaps the most metallic, In My Head the weirdest, and The First Four Years is a vital document of the early Flag when they were more of a regular (if very good) hardcore punk band.

Listen to Damaged. It has, as we say in academia, considerable extra-musical interest, being a crucial document of the LA punk subculture. But it's also a great rock album, one of the best ever.