Riff Schemes, Form, and the Genre of Early American Hardcore Punk (1978–83)

[1.1] American hardcore punk rock--or simply "hardcore"--is a subgenre of punk that first emerged in the late 1970s as a response to the "punk rock revolution" created by bands such as the Sex Pistols and the Ramones (Blush 2010, 14). Although hardcore began as a regional phenomenon, relegated to the West coast of the U.S., other scenes soon sprang up, most notably in Washington D.C. Bands like Bad Brains, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and Minor Threat drew upon the fast tempos and concise song forms of the Ramones and Wire and the dense textures and riff-driven songs of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple in the creation of a new genre. In addition to these musical features, many participants describe hardcore as reflecting intensity, energy, and aggression, particularly in the performance and reception of the music.(1) While hardcore has been the focus of studies in fields such as ethnomusicology, history, and philosophy, its musical features have yet to be examined with any amount of analytical depth.(2) This article is an attempt to fill this gap in knowledge, at least in part, by investigating the structures of guitar riffs.(3)[1.2] My investigation proceeds with the view that a guitar riff is a series of performative actions; I place the focus on the execution of gestures along a fretboard. Such an investigation is not wholly new in analytical studies of popular music. For example, Joti Rockwell (2009), Timothy Koozin (2011), and David Heetderks (2013) have investigated the importance of fretboard topography in their studies of rhythm, form, and pitch. Indeed, Koozin goes so far as to state that "guitar fretboard topography and the rhythmic actions of guitar playing are significant performative elements that have not been fully considered in studies of form, harmony, and rhythm in pop-rock music" ([1]). To address this need, Koozin discusses the role of guitar voicings--the particular harmonic "shapes" a guitarist uses in playing chord progressions and/or riffs--in creating form. Rockwell undertakes a similar task, as he describes picking patterns on the banjo in order to highlight aspects of rhythm and meter. Heetderks's study is most similar to the present article, as he uses my own earlier work on riff schemes (Easley 2011, 62-104) as a point of departure, as well as Harold Bloom's concept of revision, to discuss the role of such gestural patterns in Sonic Youth's readings and misreadings of hardcore. Thus, Koozin, Rockwell, and Heetderks seek to construct a performance-based type of analysis that addresses both sound and human action.(4) This closely parallels the type of analytical engagement described by Andrew Mead (1999) in his study of kinesthetic empathy. As he states, "the sound of the music was an embodiment of the making, and. . .hearing that making in the sound had much to do with my understanding of the music" (2).(5) My reactions to hardcore are similar: while I hear the pitches and rhythms of guitar riffs, I also feel the physical gestures with which they are performed. This reaction guides the present study, as I investigate how these gestures unfold over time as a series of repetitive, lateral motions along a fretboard. That is, this study is informed by an embodied understanding of these musical actions. I focus on how individual motions are introduced, repeated, and altered over the course of a riff.(6) As I shall demonstrate, these performative actions often reflect a structural basis in what I call "riff schemes": organizing patterns of physical repetition and physical change made by a guitarist's fretting hand.(7) In addition to their purely structural features, riff schemes play an important role in shaping hardcore as a genre.(8) When considered alongside other aspects of the music, these schemes serve to foster participants' understanding and descriptions of the music as exhibiting energy, intensity, and aggression, all of which are common tropes in oral histories of the genre. …