Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
This series has spent five chapters travelling, from the Bay Area to New York and Los Angeles, on to Germany, and in the previous chapter as far as Sao Paulo, Vancouver and Tokyo. This one goes back to a car park outside a small venue in about 1982, where a boy in a denim jacket with a Venom back patch and a boy with a shaved head and a Discharge shirt are trying to hit each other. Neither of them can quite explain why. Four years later they are at the same shows, in each other's t-shirts, buying records made by bands that could not tell you which side they were supposed to be on.
That is crossover, and it is the least tidy chapter in the whole thing. It is also the one most often mistold, usually as a warm handshake between two scenes that had always secretly liked each other. They had not. The peace was made by economics, geography and a small number of records, in that order, and it took most of a decade.
Two crowds, one car park
The hostility was real and it was mutual. British and American hardcore of 1980 to 1982 had defined itself against exactly the thing metal was: long songs, long hair, guitar solos, mysticism, arenas, money. Metal fans returned the compliment by treating hardcore as noise made by people who could not play. Both were partly right, which is why it hurt.
What ended it was not tolerance. It was rent. In most towns there was one room that would book a loud band on a Tuesday, one shop that stocked import seven-inches, one photocopier at the local print place that would run a fanzine cheap, and one distribution network, which was the post office. Punk and metal kids stood in the same queues. They ordered from the same mail-order lists in the back of the same magazines. When a promoter needed a support act at short notice he took whoever answered the phone, and the result was mixed bills all over America and Britain from about 1983 onward, at first entirely by accident.
Then the music moved. Hardcore got slower and heavier, because playing at two hundred beats per minute for four years is boring for the people doing it. Thrash got faster and shorter, because that is where the excitement was. They met in the middle of the tempo range, and by the time they arrived there the argument in the car park had nothing left to be about.
Crossover is not a halfway house. It is what happens when two audiences discover they already own the same records.
Discharge and the beat that ate everything
If you want one band that made crossover inevitable, it is Discharge from Stoke-on-Trent, and one record, Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, released by Clay Records in 1982. Discharge did something no other punk band had done. They threw away the verse, the chorus, the tune and most of the words, and built songs out of one riff and one drum pattern repeated until it stopped being a rhythm and became a physical fact. The pattern is a galloping snare and kick figure with the ride left open, and the rest of the world named it after the band. The D-beat.
Every thrash drummer in this series is playing a version of it. Metallica's "Whiplash", Slayer's "Evil Has No Boundaries", Sepultura's entire first decade, the first two Anthrax albums: all of them are the Discharge beat with a heavier guitar sound over the top. That is not a metaphor, it is the same pattern played by people who had bought the record. Discharge also had a guitarist, Anthony "Bones" Roberts, whose tone on that record was closer to Motorhead than to any punk band. He left Discharge in 1982, and in 1983 he started Broken Bones with his twin brother Terence "Tezz" Roberts, another former Discharge man, on bass. The "Decapitated" single followed in January 1984 and the album Dem Bones on Fall Out later that year, and both push the same trick further into metal.
The Swedes turned the beat into a genre of its own. Anti-Cimex from Gothenburg, Mob 47 from Stockholm and the bands around them treated it as a style rather than a rhythm, and their descendants ended up inside Swedish death metal a decade later, which is why Entombed's guitar sound has a punk record hidden in it. This is the point in the wider chronicle where you notice the ancestry runs in both directions at once.
The Bad Brains effect and Black Flag's slow turn
American hardcore's own drift toward metal came from two bands with no stated interest in metal at all. Bad Brains, four Black musicians from Washington who had started as a jazz fusion group and could out-play anybody in either camp, put out a cassette on the ROIR label in 1982 that ran at speeds nobody else could match and then dropped into dub reggae halfway through. What metal players took from it was not the reggae. It was the discovery that hardcore could be virtuoso music, played precisely, with dynamics, and still be violent.
Black Flag made the other half of the argument on My War, released by SST in 1984, whose second side is three slow, ugly, dragging songs that sound like a hardcore band being held under water. Punk audiences were furious. Greg Ginn had grown his hair, was playing Black Sabbath tempos in public, and had recorded the bass parts himself under a false name. Every sludge and doom band of the next twenty years took notes, and so did the hardcore kids who worked out that the rule against sounding heavy had just been broken by the most respected band in the country.
D.R.I., the band that named it
Crossover has a namesake record, and the band that made it started about as far from metal as it is possible to get. D.R.I., the Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, formed in Houston in 1982 around the singer Kurt Brecht and the guitarist Spike Cassidy, and their first release is still the most extreme object in this chapter. The Dirty Rotten EP contains twenty-two songs. It runs sixteen minutes and forty-one seconds. Most of them are under forty seconds and several are under twenty.
D.R.I. moved to San Francisco in 1983, which put them in the room described four chapters ago, in front of an audience that had just worked out what a pit was for. The change in their music from that point is audible on every record. Dealing With It! in 1985 has real riffs in it. Crossover, released by Metal Blade in 1987, has a guitar sound Slayer would not have been embarrassed by, songs that last two and a half minutes, and a title that a whole genre promptly stole.
It is worth saying that Crossover is not D.R.I.'s best album, and that the band appear to have known what they were documenting. The title is descriptive, almost sociological. By Thrash Zone in 1989 they had gone the whole way, and the punk kids who carried them out of Texas had largely stopped coming. That is the price of the ticket, and this chapter is not going to pretend otherwise.
Venice, Suicidal, and the southern flank
Los Angeles produced the crossover band everybody's mother had heard of. Suicidal Tendencies came out of Venice in 1981, signed to the small punk label Frontier, and released their first album in 1983. It sounds like a hardcore record made by people with a sense of humour and a grudge. Then MTV put the video for "Institutionalized" into rotation, and a song about a teenager being sectioned over a missing Pepsi became the first hardcore song most American suburbs ever heard.
Mike Muir's band then did the thing the punk press never forgave. They hired Rocky George, a guitarist who could play lead, and turned into a metal band in stages: Join the Army in 1987, How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can't Even Smile Today for Epic in 1988, and by 1990 a full major-label thrash record with Robert Trujillo on bass. Around them the Venice scene produced Beowulf, No Mercy, which was Muir's own side project, and Excel, whose Split Image in 1987 is the best pure crossover album Los Angeles made and sold a fraction of what it deserved. The gang reputation had real consequences. After a 1984 show at Perkins Palace in Pasadena, where the crowd pulled out ten rows of seats and promoters afterwards could not get the insurance to book the band, Suicidal Tendencies spent most of the rest of the decade unable to play a club in Los Angeles, and the ban was not lifted until the early nineties. Muir told Spin in 1986 that the stories about a violent gang had sounded good and were not true.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
North Carolina had the other band that counted. Corrosion of Conformity formed in Raleigh in 1982 and put out Eye for an Eye in April 1984 on the local No Core label, shared with Toxic Shock, a record of appalling sound quality and total conviction. Then came Animosity in October 1985, on Metal Blade's Death Records imprint, which is where the southern half of crossover begins. The tempos drop into a swing, the riffs thicken, Mike Dean sings like a man winning an argument, and there is a straight line from it to the whole Louisiana sludge scene of the following decade. C.O.C. kept changing until they were something else entirely, but Animosity is the one that matters here.
Underneath the names everybody knows sits a second tier that did most of the actual work. Cryptic Slaughter, teenagers from Santa Monica, made Convicted in 1986, an album so fast and so badly recorded that half the riffs are guesswork, and it is still thrilling. Attitude Adjustment from the Bay Area made American Paranoia in 1986 for Pusmort, the label run by the artist Pushead. Verbal Abuse, Gang Green and Ludichrist belong in the same paragraph. None of them sold anything worth counting. All of them are on the mixtapes.
New York, and the joke that stuck
New York hardcore had its own metal moment, and it was heavier than anybody's. The Sunday matinees at CBGB produced Agnostic Front, whose Cause for Alarm in 1986 is openly a thrash record, and Cro-Mags, whose The Age of Quarrel came out on Profile the same year and is, to these ears, the best album in this chapter. It is hardcore in structure and metal in weight, played by a band who had lived the lyrics, and it has not aged a day.
What the metal side sent back was a joke. In 1985, during downtime around the sessions for Anthrax's Spreading the Disease, the guitarist Scott Ian, the drummer Charlie Benante and the bassist Dan Lilker recruited a singer named Billy Milano and recorded an album in a few days as Stormtroopers of Death. Speak English or Die came out on Megaforce on 30 August 1985, twenty-one songs in under twenty-nine minutes, cut in four days at Pyramid Sound in Ithaca, and it set the template for two-riff hardcore played with metal precision. It has also aged badly in one specific way. The title and several of the lyrics are xenophobic jokes that the band have always insisted were satire. Some of them are funny. Some of them are the thing they claim to parody. Both are true at once, and the musical importance of the record does not cancel the other half of it.
Lilker had already left Anthrax by then and started Nuclear Assault with John Connelly, which is the most underrated band in this chapter and possibly in the series. Game Over in 1986 does the crossover trick better than almost anyone: proper thrash arrangements, hardcore economy, a singer who sounds like he is being strangled, and a thirty-second joke song dropped in to break the tension. Handle with Care in 1989 is the one to start with if you have never heard them.
Anthrax themselves were the Big Four band with hardcore in the wiring. Scott Ian wore Cro-Mags and Agnostic Front shirts on stage when that was still a statement rather than a fashion. "Caught in a Mosh" on Among the Living in 1987 put a hardcore dance move into the vocabulary of every metal fan on earth, and the I'm the Man EP the same year took the joke as far as rapping over a thrash riff, several years before most people worked out that this was possible.
Skateboards, photocopiers and the end of the fight
None of this would have joined up without a culture to carry it, and that culture was skateboarding. Thrasher started in San Francisco in January 1981 and did more for this music than most record labels. It reviewed hardcore and metal side by side without comment, as though the distinction were obviously silly, and its Skate Rock compilation tapes put both on the same cassette. Its most useful contributor was Brian Schroeder, who wrote as Pushead, ran Pusmort, sang in Septic Death, and drew record sleeves for half the bands here and eventually for Metallica.
The skater did not care about the argument in the car park. A skater needed music that was fast, short, loud and available on a cassette that would survive being sat on. Metal and hardcore both qualified. So did the fanzines, made by the same people on the same photocopiers, reviewing the same demos and printing the same mail-order addresses, which is why a kid in a small town could hear a band from Houston and a band from Stoke in the same fortnight.
| Album | Band | Year | Label | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing | Discharge | 1982 | Clay | The D-beat, and thrash's rhythmic engine |
| Dirty Rotten EP | D.R.I. | 1983 | Dirty Rotten | Twenty-two songs in under seventeen minutes |
| Suicidal Tendencies | Suicidal Tendencies | 1983 | Frontier | Hardcore on daytime MTV |
| My War | Black Flag | 1984 | SST | Hardcore slows down and grows its hair |
| Animosity | Corrosion of Conformity | 1985 | Death / Metal Blade | The southern route out of hardcore |
| Speak English or Die | S.O.D. | 1985 | Megaforce | Thrash players write the crossover rulebook |
| The Age of Quarrel | Cro-Mags | 1986 | Profile | Hardcore makes its own heavy record |
| Game Over | Nuclear Assault | 1986 | Combat | The best-balanced record of the two styles |
| Crossover | D.R.I. | 1987 | Metal Blade | Names the genre and marks its limit |
By 1987 the fight was over in most towns. The evidence is on the tickets: hardcore bands opening for thrash bands on package tours, thrash bands covering hardcore songs, and an audience that had stopped asking which side it belonged to. The people who kept the argument going after that were mostly writers, which is a thing writers do.
Where crossover ends and thrash begins
This chapter has to take a position, because almost everyone else hedges. Here is mine, and it has nothing to do with speed, haircuts, or which label put the record out.
If the song is arranged, it is thrash. If the song is aimed, it is crossover.
Thrash metal is composed music. A thrash song has parts that arrive in an order chosen for effect: an intro that sets a mood, a verse riff, a bridge that changes key or metre, a lead break that counts as an event, and usually a return to something from the first minute so the ending means something. It is built to be listened to, and it pays off more on the tenth play than the first. That is why Master of Puppets and Reign in Blood are both thrash albums, even though one is slow in places and the other is under half an hour.
Crossover is functional music. A crossover song has a riff, a shouted refrain the room can join in on, a stop, and an ending, and it is over in ninety seconds because its job is finished. It is built to be experienced in a room full of other people, and on record it is a souvenir of that room. Judge Crossover or Convicted by thrash standards and they sound thin. Judge them by what they were for and they are close to perfect.
The rule settles the awkward cases quickly. The Age of Quarrel is crossover: as heavy as anything Metal Blade released that year, but assembled out of chants. Game Over is thrash, because Connelly writes songs with second halves. Speak English or Die is crossover made by thrash musicians, which is precisely why it works. Animosity sits on the line, and that is what makes it interesting rather than what makes it a problem.
The style did not die when the eighties ended, it went quiet while everyone chased groove and then grunge. Slayer paid the debt back in 1996 with an album of hardcore covers, which a portion of their audience treated as a betrayal and which was probably the most honest record that band ever made. Then Richmond, Virginia produced Municipal Waste, whose Hazardous Mutation in 2005 and The Art of Partying in 2007 rebuilt the whole thing with better engineering and no interest in pretending it was still 1986, and around them came Iron Reagan, Toxic Holocaust and eventually Power Trip, who took the hardcore half seriously enough to make it frightening again.
What crossover gave thrash metal, in the end, was permission to be short. The bands who reached their peak in the years 1986 to 1990 had all learned from the punks that you can say a thing once, loudly, and then stop. It is the only lesson in this chapter that every band involved actually kept.
