Black N' Blue Bowl Live Review

Black N’ Blue Bowl Live Review & Photos | Webster Hall, NYC | May 14, 2016

by • June 7, 2016

For those of you who were worried that hardcore and punk died when Newark Liberty Airport opened the CBGBs restaurant — you are wrong. Well, you are mostly wrong, depending on what you define as hardcore. I had always thought of the hardcore scene as bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat. And I would be wrong.  Where I thought The Ramones to be punk, I also thought that hardcore was more KRAUT or Agnostic Front.

Black N' Blue Bowl Live Review

I thought hardcore (growing out of the punk movement) was a direct result of the Reagan / Ed Koch years. Back then New York City was just plain filthy. Filthy and dangerous. Filthy and dangerous, and did I say filthy? Hardcore was angry because the scene was angry. The hardcore kids in front of CBGBs were angry. They were fiercely political to the extent of their blind hatred of the Reagan presidency. To be 16 in 1980 meant that just a few years earlier you had watched the end of the Vietnam War on a black and white television rolled into the living room on a shaky metal cart. You had a vague notion of Armstrong’s moon walk, and possibly some memory of people claiming to have been at Woodstock. You also watched the live action horror of the 1972 Olympics and feared that the arms race would never end. By the mid-1980s, Reagan was able to divide the entire world into two camps of good and evil, and everyone in New York was either coked out or strung out or both. The clubs where the music was played never had air conditioning and the entire decade seemed like it was sweating through its own t-shirt.

NYHC

NYHC

So the kids were mad. Thier parents were mad. Their teachers were mad and the world seemed to be a maddening place. And the music they liked was angry music.

Pause here.

We pause here to remember that lots of kids were not into hardcore. The 1980s was really more like listening to a never ending Phil Collins drum fill as your older brother lamented the Peter Gabriel years. The hardcore kids thought they were more honest anyway. They weren’t filled to the brim of the crapper with Enima TV and hardcore didn’t give a shit about who killed the radio star as long as he was incapable of yelling either Stairway to Heaven or Freebird.

Unpause here.

So — Black N’ Blue Bowl is an annual hardcore event that features bands from what must then be the second generation of hardcore and some new bands on the scene.  Here was the lineup:

American Nightmare
Adolescents
Madball
Billy Club Sandwich
Hazen Street
Leeway
Rykers
Regulate
Blind Justice
Rhythm of Fear

Yes, the music was hardcore. There was lots of metal and some hip hop as well. And some of the bands seemed a little older, but were enjoying their reunion. And some of the crowd seemed older, but were enjoying their reunion as well. You could almost hear two tattooed and Doc Marten booted moms laugh about how weird it was that their kids were now playing together, and how back in the day, “Who could have ever thought such things could happen?”

I suppose that I should have written more about the bands — but there were a lot of bands. Some were more interesting than others, some more energetic than others. 

NYHC

NYHC

And the crowd yelled along, and they moshed, and they crowd killed. The subject of crowd killing is perhaps for another posting but in my opinion, it is a real drag. Used to be that you could stand on the side of the pit and safely watch the show. But very large men come crashing into you with flailing fists and steel tipped boots.

But the music was sincere and the crowd enjoyed both the mosh down memory lane as well as some of the new kids in the scene.

Here is my question though — what is everyone still so angry about?  The singer of American Nightmare seemed so very angry that I could not understand a word he was screaming, although the audience seemed to know. What I do know is that the world is still a difficult and terrible place. Our politics are a joke and most of our politicians are jokers. We are still arguing over state rights versus federal laws and we are still trying to figure out how a nation steeped in such racism could have actually elected a man of color. We have three 24 hour channels of blathering news and live in a collective cognitive dissonance of stress, Wall Street corruption, and people telling us that fracking is safe.

So — I have just answered my question. We have a right to be angry. Either there is a resurgence of hardcore that is growing out of our disapproval of the broken promises we believed when we all got trophies for just showing up, or hardcore was always there. It was just waiting for people to come back to the fold.

Long live hardcore and the angry bands who shout it.

Here are some photos.  In keeping with the spirit of hardcore, I don’t care if you like them or not…
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Black N’ Blue Bowl Review & Photos by Doug “Doug Igoto” Dresher, review edited by Matthew Weller.

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