RADIO SILENCE

authors:
NATHAN NEDOROSTEK
and ANTHONY PAPPALARDO

Photography
224 pages
MTV Press

Radio Silence, and its highfalutin subtitle, A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music, features a leather jacket on its cover with a number of hardcore band names and logos etched into it. Back in the day, as it’s said, this is how members of the hardcore scene communicated with one another. The underground music scene in the eighties was so strong that friendships could be formed and allegiances sworn by writing a band’s name on your jacket.

The cover is fitting. It’s a call: “Hey, modern-day hardcore kid, this book is for you.” In its pages, readers will find various photos, some from the shows in the eighties and some from today, which, bluntly, are pictures taken in a fancy studio of the clothing that kids wore to the shows in the eighties.

For what it’s worth (a much-used hardcore phrase, by the way) this book is the first of its kind, in that it focuses on the art as opposed to the violence that the scene is commonly associated with. T-shirts, vinyl sleeves, demo-tape covers, and countless flyers were all made by kids who did it because they didn’t know they couldn’t. It left an indelible mark on subcultures worldwide, and it’s pleasing to know that these scruffy, angry kids are finally being explored as artists, which, of course, they were.

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