Black Flag "Damaged" [1981]

Back in England around this time, family night at the pub had already gone completely to hell with the onset of prole-centric punk rock, turning places Grannie used to feel welcome in into noisy, aggressive shitholes. Southern California has never had any such tradition of "pub night," so when Black Flag brutalized their way onto the scene, they just turned everywhere they went into their own noisy, aggressive shithole -- the world became their personal disgusting toilet. About the only redeeming quality about their seminal (yes, semin-al as in "jizz") hardcore album "Damaged" is that it's recorded so poorly neither Greg Ginn's scratchy, shitass guitar nor Henry Rollins' scratchy, shitass vocals make anywhere near a deep impression. It's a good thing for everyone who's never had the displeasure of this third-rate assault, but also fortunate for Black Flag themselves: their lunkheaded attempts at satire might have been taken at face value by the immune-to-irony U.S. crowd and turned into "hip" new slogans for prime-time network TV, Budweiser and major Wall Street banking firms, had any of their tunes been the least bit palatable. To say these guys were a cut-rate Motorhead is to insult how quickly Lemmy would be able to dispense of these idiots with his facial warts alone.