When does something cease to be cool? That’s a loaded question, both in its inherent subjectivity and superficiality. It’s also a question director Scott Crawford asks in Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC (1980-1990). The documentary on the Washington DC punk scene, which hits the High Noon Saloon on Monday, Mar 30, doesn’t outright put a stamp on punk’s waxing and waning hipness — and to its credit, that’s precisely the point.
Born out of the “DIY” music philosophy first instigated by the likes of the Sex Pistols, Black Flag and DC’s own Bad Brains, punk music began to swell in the District of Columbia in the early 1980s through the area youth, many of whom felt disconnected with high school extracurriculars or were simply looking for something to do. The democratization of picking up an instrument and just playing it was a freeing experience for teens like Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson, who formed Teen Idles and later the vastly influential Minor Threat. Musical virtuosity wasn’t a requirement; or to conflate many of the talking heads in Salad Days, “You didn’t have to be Jaco Pastorius.” A lack of musical skill is instantly apparent in the grainy concert tapes Crawford pulls from, yet even the grimy condition of the footage can’t hide the self-empowering philosophy in early DC punk.
Crawford relies a little too heavily on archival video, especially when footage of underground shows are merely used as reference points. What does work, remarkably, is one of the oldest crutches in the documentary filmmaking playbook. From the aforementioned MacKaye, who touches on the sketchy origins of the straight edge movement and slamdancing, to the ubiquitous (and occasionally misguided) Henry Rollins, to Dave Grohl reminiscing on his days drumming for DC staple Scream, the surfeit of talking heads offer up varying opinions on when DC punk “died.” There’s the scene’s ugly decay from friend-based circles to out-of-towners and skinheads looking for cheap drugs and pit quarrels. There’s misogyny, racism, political activism and the ever-ominous threat of becoming “too commercial.” Even grunge gets a backhanded compliment from MacKaye and his later project Fugazi, as he nabs partial credit for ushering a post-punk sound into the 1990s.
Crawford doesn’t nail down a definite end to the era. Instead, Salad Days distills a music scene’s ever-revolving door; some hop in during DC punk’s embrace of political activism and then hop out when things get too violent. There’s lip service to the U.S. capitol’s corruption in the 1980s and compelling notes on the contradictions between musicians’ white collar upbringings mutating punk’s blue collar message into “fuck it all” nihilism. Salad Days is at its strongest though, when it hazily recollects the birth and subsequent “deaths” of the genre, complicating an outwardly simple topic to various ends.
- WORT FM and MadCity Music present Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC (1980-1990) on Monday Mar 30 at the High Noon Saloon at 7:00p. Tickets are $8 in advance, $10 day of. Featuring complementary sets from WORT’s DJ el Serpentine.