It's been a long time since hardcore felt like home to me, but today I'm nostalgic for something that was never mine. That's on account of the rush-of-memory documentary American Hardcore 1980-1986. Oh God. Black Flag, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, SS Decontrol... Many years later -- say 1996 --a Michigan band called Jihad once sang, "I can see you, but you can't see me." That was how I felt: marked as part of an invisible tribe, reinforced but not stifled by people who felt like I did. You were on the lookout for the tell-tale signs of your brethren: Does she have a patch on her hoodie? Does he have a couple pins on his bookbag? Are those tattoos peeking out from under those sleeves? Didn't I see you at ABC last Saturday?

I guess that's my only problem with an otherwise-perfect movie: it's invested in suggesting that it all dies after 1986, when Greg quits Black Flag and Ian MacKaye decides he's sick of the violence. That makes sense. The story told is about a specific era. But we need to make a new film, one about what happens when Ian makes that decision. What happens is Revolution Summer 1985, when Embrace and Rites of Spring emerge and change everything. Then Maximumrocknroll decides to open Gilman Street in Berkeley. Krishnas meld with a new generation of straight edge kids in New York City, who decide that they can play a new style of hardcore and call it old. A bunch of women in Silver Spring and Olympia decide punk rock is theirs, and they can play it like they live it and it'll be better than what the boys play. A bunch of kids in Richmond decide that someone needs to make a stand for community. A bunch of zines like No Answers and Anti-Matter and Bikini Kill and HeartattaCk and Inside Front and Icarus Was Right and Rumpshaker and Slave decide that they have something they need to tell you.

But that's our movie, and it's something else entirely. In the meantime, two quick stories.

1) Derya Golpinar in March of 1995 opts to make me a trade. She's going to make me a tape of Minor Threat. In return, I dub a bunch of Slant 6 and Run-DMC songs. I was 14 and that tape changed my life. You know it's hardcore when it sounds better on a fourth-generation dubbed cassette than on its master reel. About a month later, my mother and I drive to see Leslie's first sermon as an ordained rabbi in Connecticut and she asks me what I'm listening to on my walkman. I put the tape in the car's tape deck and excitedly ask her what she thinks. As un-PR as it is, I want mom to like Minor Threat because I love both of them. She says, "But, to me, it just sounds like BLAH-BLAHBLAH-BLAH! BLAH-BLAHBLAH-BLAH!" And I reply, "No, there's more there."

2) It's September of 1996, the first day of junior year of high school. Miraculously, MDC is playing that afternoon at ABC No Rio, their first show in New York in probably a decade or more. Colin, Michael, Eibhy and myself decide there's no way we're missing that. But the first day of school is a half day, and so we have a lot of time to kill. We go to the Hudson River, probably half a mile north of Canal Street. And we see the boats bobbing along from here to New Jersey. Colin gets an idea. We're going to hijack a dingy. From the dingy, we find a schooner. We hijack the schooner. Then we find a tugboat. From the schooner, we hijack the tugboat -- and so on, and so on, with larger ships, ripping our shirts so we can fly the black flag, and sail out to international waters, free on our little anarchist pirate ship. If we run afoul of a Navy Destroyer, we're taking that motherfucker by force. The MDC show was good, but nothing could be better than that afternoon daydream.

When you see the telltale signs of the HC tribe, you can rest assured that you can walk into their insect colony and scream, You tell me that I make no difference, and they'll all yell back, At least! I'm! Fucking! Trying! What the fuck have YOU done? And if hardcore is about anything, it's about finding your way to answer that question.