YouTube Rodeo: American Hardcore trailers

Last fall we were asked to make a 10-song mix CD that epitomized our conception of "Rock." Later we were asked to select one of those songs as representative of that same conception. We chose Bad Brains' "Pay To Cum." It seems somehow meaningful -- we'll let you draw your own conclusions -- that the same song is used as the soundtrack for one of the two trailers we found for the documentary American Hardcore while scouring the Internets this evening. It's the one with the YouTube link below.

The second trailer is substantially more polished and is posted here at the MySpace page set up to promote the movie, which in case you didn't know is based on the dubiously edited but wholly awesome book of the same name. We consider it a must-read, if only because it burst a lot of myths and misconceptions for us when we read it. Until we read the book, hardcore in our minds was based primarily on ideas we'd formed about second and third-wave straightedge hardcore, despite our knowledge of the SST and DC scenes that preceded it. Anyway, the book gives a much more rounded and critical view of the youth movement. It's a detailed, firsthand, warts-and-all account of what in retrospect sadly seems a pretty narrow and tragically misguided phenomenon. That doesn't make the romanticized recollections much less enticing. We're looking forward to finally seeing the movie. In the meantime dig on these trailers.