Bad Brains in 2012: Close Enough

Bad Brains have been playing semi-reunion shows for the past 15 years, and judged in the light of actual, real Bad Brains shows, they’ve all been incredibly bad.

For anyone who was paying attention the first time, this isn’t at all surprising. In the 80s, of course, Bad Brains were 1) Playing the world’s finest music 2) In the finest, most immediate way and 3) Looked incredibly, incredibly cool doing so.

While they remained incredibly sick and quite cool past 86, the unalloyed consensus is that early 80s New York golden-era Bad Brains shows—full disclosure, of which I didn’t attend, since I was then a baby—were their peak. The live shows they played then look like insane Fresco paintings, warzones, or something in between to us now. Show photos and video evidence prove it; so do their live records; the band has earned broad acclaim beyond the confines of the genre, and deservedly so. Hardcore or otherwise, there is no peer, precedent, or antecedent to that era of Bad Brains. There’s no discussion.

Still, it’s best not to dwell on it. Focusing too much on how awesome Bad Brains were makes the post-1985 musical landscape look like The Zone from “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Listen to too many Bad Brains records and look at too many photos, and young life becomes but a vague search for near-thrills, with adventure and diversions, but vague regret. When you come out of the Bad Brains K-hole, all you find is a party that’s over, and the rest of the room sweeping up.

It’s a bit unfair to hold the rest of the genre to Bad Brains’ standard: ‘80s hardcore is basically music by young heads, the best examples of which involve either some sort of musical fuck-up or miscommunication or simple amateurism. While every band on the New Breed comp is better than the Beatles, it’s not the kind of music that works in far-removed reunions. Who wants to see a 50-year-old try and fuck up a song?

Despite that, plenty of hardcore groups have been reuniting lately. They have been good—Bold, who in a way never really broke up, were outstanding in a small February gig at Lit Lounge—and terrible—c.f. Refused, the world’s worst band. Bad Brains, on the other hand, have been reuniting off and on since 1999—despite only breaking up in ’95—and are, in a way, built for the practice.

Unlike most (good) hardcore bands, they’ve always been proficient musicians, so playing a big stage with good equipment, thirty years after the fact is not an issue. Always revered, they’re now newly popular: A documentary is coming out, “PMA,” the 1930s self-help phrase they re-appropriated on their first few records, is a corny Twitter topic; even professional retiree Mos Def is into them. Hell, they even played a VICE party. Why not dust off the tour van?

Still, as is the case with reunited bands, they’re older, and to many paying attention to the genre full-time, the shows are bad: “HR doesn’t sing,” is one criticism; “He’s holding a birdcage,” is another. Both are valid. Wednesday’s show had him playing a hollowbody guitar that may or may not have been plugged in, and the vocals were lower in the mix than an average 4AD band. (The rest of the band was pitch-perfect).

Bad Brains’ vocals have been an issue since after Quickness—they had a guy from Faith No More sing, for Christ’s sake—and it’s not the reunions’ fault. It’s a losing game to expect Bad Brains in 2012 to be anything close to what they used to be: Flames simply don’t burn that bright for 30 years. People grow older and lose their ability to backflip; a flighty HR is still better than Israel Joseph I.

There are times when Bad Brains, reunited for much longer than they’ve been away, offer hints of what they used to be, though there wasn’t really much of that on Wednesday. HR wasn’t on key, and it was too hard to hear what he was singing. He did it once though, at a show in Vermont in 2002 to about 50 people. There’s a chance he can do it again, and stay on key for a bar, and it’ll feel, if you close your eyes, like Bad Brains are playing. While that’s not enough for some people, it’s enough for me. But it’s best not to think about it.

@SamReiss_