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

Abstract

Introduction[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.

"Guitar Thinking" and "Genre Thinking" among an Online Community of Guitarists

“…Koozin (2011) outlines how common chord shapes, such as barre chords, and their location on the fretboard can help delineate large-scale harmonic progressions and segment form in songs by The Kinks, Jimi Hendrix, and The Grateful Dead. Easley (2015) similarly demonstrates that American hardcore punk guitarists generate the style's harmonic and formal paradigms through variation and repetition of four types of two-part left-hand lateral gestures. A motion-capture study by Shea (2022) further clarifies the relationship between form and gesture, where practicing popular-music guitarists are shown to prefer to situate the largest lateral gestures at hypermetric and formal boundaries when improvising.…”

Harmonic structures in twenty-first-century metal music: A harmonic analysis of five major metal genres

“…Metalcore adhered relatively strictly to Aeolian chord progressions, with 95% of all chords being from this scale. This limited harmonic spectrum reflects metalcore's fusion of heavy metal and hardcore punk (Kennedy 2018), with hardcore punk's harmonic nature being more heavily focused on riffs than emotive chord structures (Easley 2015).…”

The Logic of Six-Based Minor for Harmonic Analyses of Popular Music

“…Harmonic function categories (e.g., T, S, D) are sometimes useful to highlight general pa erns in chord behavior, and I will discuss the interaction of these function categories with six-based minor (especially in [2.6]). Additionally, we could explain chord behavior in popular music through neo-Riemannian transformations (Capuzzo 2004;Forrest 2017) or the idiomatic actions of guitar playing (Easley 2015;Koozin 2011). These analytical frameworks are not mutually exclusive.…”