Zack de la Rocha does not say much in public any more, which is part of why this is worth reading. Asked about Turnstile during a brief conversation with the Spanish outlet Binaural, he placed them very precisely.
"There are a lot of kids discovering it for the first time. And they do so through their first experience with bands like Turnstile," he said. "Then they start discovering Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Negative Approach, The Clash. So these bands occupy a really interesting place, like a kind of bridge. I hope that through them, people will turn their attention back to the original groups."
That is a generous reading of a band who get accused from inside hardcore of having left it. De la Rocha turns the argument around: the point of the size is the doorway it opens, and the names on the other side of it are the ones he lists.
He is not shy about the debt running the other way either. "Personally, I don't think a band like Turnstile could exist without something like Bad Brains."
The conversation happened at Glen E. Friedman's Burning Flags exhibition in Barcelona, which is a fitting room for it. Friedman photographed most of the bands in that list before anybody outside their cities had heard them, and de la Rocha credits him with having made it his mission to give them visibility.