On the opposite side of the looking glass from the hair metal headbangers were the hardcore punks -- virulently anti-establishment characters whose sound and culture grew from punk rock building blocks during the 1980s. Beginning with Black Flag in Los Angeles, the Misfits in New Jersey, and Bad Brains in Washington, D.C., a surging, angry wall of sound moved inward from the coasts through a string of regional teenage bands, meeting halfway in the American Midwest. Michigan was the heart of hardcore country and birthplace in 1967 of punk's founding fathers, the Stooges. There, Die Kreuzen, Negative Approach, and the Necros from neighboring Dayton, Ohio, tore apart church basements, VFW halls, and any place an unsuspecting landlord could be convinced to allow a show.

Early-1980s do-it-yourself releases like Black Flag's Damaged and Die Kreuzen's Cows & Beer featured cheap, distorted guitars tearing over frantic rock drumming, and they expressed extreme dissatisfaction with adolescent norms in Middle America. These records were vinyl nonconformist manifestos‹sold cheaply for gas money as bands toured an ever-shifting circuit of small college towns and fledgling urban punk scenes. The best records by the Misfits and Negative Approach were out of print by the time word of the groups could spread nationally. The meager yet vast infrastructure of hardcore simply demanded a constant wave of very similar-sounding bands coughing out intensely personal anthems about schoolyard betrayal, mental confusion, and antigovernment rebellion.