HarDCore Videos

December 29, 2021 9:49 AM

As a teenager, Sohrab Habibion made videos of dozens of shows by bands in the late-80s DC hardcore scene. Now, with the help of Roswell Films and the DC Public Library, he has digitized them and uploaded them to YouTube. Bands include Fugazi, The Lemonheads, Dag Nasty, GWAR, Beefeater, Shudder to Think, and more. [h/t Brooklyn Vegan]
posted by Cash4Lead (11 comments total)

Holy cow, thanks Cash4Lead! Mr. gudrun's friend was at a bunch of those shows. Passing this on.
posted by gudrun at 10:05 AM on December 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Oh, this is terrific. I didn't live in DC then, but was into punk. A girlfriend took me to a DC punk show in 1986 and these videos brought back so many memories.
Thank you, Cash4Lead.
posted by doctornemo at 10:09 AM on December 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Even short-and-shaky, the footage of "Rainbow Person"-era United Mutation at the Lake Braddock Community Center is jaw-dropping^*.

* at least to this suburban DC hardcore obsessive.
posted by ryanshepard at 10:14 AM on December 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I am really not into hardcore music but I LOVE archives and archiving projects, and I am so happy to know about this!

The info about the DC Punk Archive is great - very cool to read a bit of the history of the collection, and thoughtful notes on things like preservation and access - and ALSO, I now know about The People's Archive, and The Go-Go Archive - I had never heard of go-go music before and I am delighted to know (a) that it exists and (b) that the DC Library is doing such a stellar job of documenting it and archiving important materials.

I am not really the audience for this, but I am still thrilled to learn about it. Thank you so much for posting this, Cash4Lead!
posted by kristi at 10:24 AM on December 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

I saw GWAR live twice (in Northern CA, not DC, but I am posting anyway)! I was not sprayed by the... fluids. I tell people this and they are always surprised, as I was much more a New Wave sort. However, as one sometimes does, I went with a boyfriend who had a great appreciation for them. I did not enjoy the Pantera-Anthrax show much more (possibly less). The Misfits, on the other hand, were pretty great.
posted by Glinn at 10:40 AM on December 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

The info about the DC Punk Archive is great

My partner and I grew up in the DC scene and we're punk hoarders - we gave them a bunch of stuff early on, and it was both a relief to let it go and great to see it being used again (e.g. some of the records and flyers we donated are now incorporated into the big new DC music exhibit outside the People's Archive space at the MLK Library.)

Vastly better than sitting in boxes in our closets, and I know its existence has prompted a lot of aging harDCore folks to go through their stuff to pass it on.
posted by ryanshepard at 10:45 AM on December 29, 2021 [10 favorites]

Habibion was in a D.C. punk bank himself, Edsel, and he would later go on to work with Rick Froberg of Drive Like Jehu in one of my favorite "punk supergroup" incarnations, the Obits. Love his guitarwork on the album Moody, Standard, and Poor. Also love that it's his same YouTube channel that I used to watch all the Obits music videos on.

If Habibion talks of rock’n’roll with reverence, it’s because he still remembers how it saved him from an unhappy childhood. Born in the US to an Iranian father and an American mother, Habibion’s early years were split between New York and Iran, before the 1979 Iranian revolution lead them to permanently settle in Washington, DC. With the Iranian hostage crisis spanning the next two years, they were dark days for the family. “The racism was very direct: my dad had a PhD in economics and he couldn’t get a job – he literally had to work selling carpets,” Habibion explains. “My mom wasn’t even an Iranian, but she’d taken my father’s name, so even she encountered this blatant prejudice. I remember seeing T-shirts with Mickey Mouse on them, flipping the bird, saying, ‘Fuck Iran’. It was a hostile climate, and it definitely cemented my love of the outsider, anyone who feels like they don’t belong in mainstream culture.”

Anyway, it's really cool that he gets to share these little pieces of history with us. To this day still turning that pain into things that are beautiful. These things would otherwise be lost to history. Rock on, and thanks so much, Sohrab Habibion!
posted by deadaluspark at 11:12 AM on December 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

I love these projects. I'm of such an age that they document the lives of many of my friends who grew up in the DC area. I'm also a transplant who was into new wave at the time, so aside from being able to say "I probably know people now who were in that crowd then" it's still like a whole other world to me.
posted by fedward at 11:31 AM on December 29, 2021

This is incredible.

Also, Habibion is also in the post-rock band SAVAK.
posted by gwint at 12:35 PM on December 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

it was both a relief to let it go and great to see it being used again

I know that feel, so many archiving projects are just "Give us your stuff and we'll make it available when we have the time/energy/money" (and all those things are in short supply, I get it). It's been inspiring to see DC Public just continuing to help make this stuff available in ways that are accessible to the most people even when it's not bringing people into DCPL or their website necessarily. And the CARE of this archive, all the videos have title cards, lists of band members, links for more information. It's just the best. Thanks for this post.
posted by jessamyn at 1:00 PM on December 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

Despite being a DC native of roughly the right age, I had virtually no exposure the hardcore scene -- I was the nerdy kid into prog rock, though at least I knew where d.c. space was. Summer of '88, though, I scooped ice cream with Ivor Hanson (SOA, the Faith, etc.) at Bob's Famous Homemade Ice Cream in Cleveland Park and we spent way too many shifts talking about music. Somewhere I still have a cassette of Manifesto demos he gave me when that band was getting off the ground.

These links led me down a wonderful rabbit hole of memory.
posted by jburka at 12:21 PM on January 2, 2022 [3 favorites]