EVERYTHING WENT BLACK

Black Flag, the Unfinished Sentence, and the Beauty of Hearing the Walls Come Down

By Dax Silver
CREASE Magazine

I celebrate the entire Black Flag catalog.

There. Necessary disclosure. Put it in the court record.

I will take the nervous-system sabotage of Damaged, the scorched-earth crawl of My War, the strange hardening angles of Slip It In, the almost hostile refusal of Loose Nut, the late records where the band increasingly sounds less interested in satisfying punk rock than in discovering whether punk rock can survive being dismantled with industrial equipment.

All of it.

But if the building is burning and I am allowed to grab one Black Flag record before the roof gives way, I am taking Everything Went Black.

Which is ridiculous.

Perfectly, gloriously ridiculous.

Because Everything Went Black is not the grand official statement. It does not arrive dressed for the museum. It does not knock politely, identify itself as a Masterpiece, and wait for the docent to illuminate it properly.

It is debris.

Versions.

Sessions.

Different singers inhabiting the same songs like actors wandering through an abandoned theatrical production after somebody forgot to cancel the electricity.

It feels less like an album than discovering a cardboard box underneath a workbench marked:

BLACK FLAG
DO NOT THROW AWAY

Naturally, that is the one I want.

Because Black Flag were never more Black Flag than when they were becoming Black Flag.

The completed object is magnificent.

The mutation is better.

---

The conventional way to listen to rock music is to admire architecture.

Here is the album.

Here is the lineup.

Here is the canonical recording.

Here is the photograph we have all agreed belongs beside the historical plaque.

Everything Went Black throws you behind the building.

Now you are standing beside the dumpsters hearing the band through a wall.

Somebody is changing singers.

Somebody has rewritten the emotional geometry of the song without changing the song.

Greg Ginn’s guitar is already behaving improperly.

The rhythm section is turning Southern California sunshine into a municipal hazard.

And scattered across all of it is the developing realization that Black Flag had stumbled onto something much larger than hardcore before anybody had developed convenient terminology for what they were doing.

This is not just aggression.

Aggression is easy.

Every fool with an amplifier can be aggressive.

Black Flag discovered pressure.

Pressure is different.

Pressure accumulates.

Pressure changes materials.

Pressure creates fault lines.

Listen long enough and you can hear punk rock being forced out of its original shape.

That is the thrill of Everything Went Black.

You are not hearing history after somebody cleaned it.

You are hearing history with the fingerprints still on the switchblade.

---

There is something beautifully wrong with hearing multiple vocalists pass through this music.

Usually bands try desperately to convince audiences that history moves in clean lines.

Singer A.

Then Singer B.

Then Singer C.

New promotional photograph.

Continue.

But bands do not actually evolve like corporate logos.

They molt.

They hemorrhage.

They leave skin everywhere.

On Everything Went Black, the Black Flag identity becomes larger than whichever throat happens to be delivering it.

That matters.

Because the central character is eventually revealed not to be any individual member.

The central character is Black Flag itself.

A machine.

A circumstance.

A weather system.

Different singers enter it and the machine responds differently each time.

Keith Morris brings one chemistry.

Ron Reyes another.

Dez Cadena another.

Each voice bends the material slightly, and suddenly you realize something crucial about songs that punk orthodoxy occasionally forgets:

A song is not a monument.

A song is an experiment.

You can run it again.

Change one variable.

Listen.

Run it again.

Change another.

Listen.

That is where Everything Went Black becomes almost accidentally psychedelic.

Not psychedelic in the paisley-shirt sense.

Psychedelic as repetition with mutation.

A phrase returns.

A riff returns.

A structure returns.

But the angle has changed.

The light is different.

The room has moved three inches while you were not looking.

Outer Order territory.

Absolutely.

---

Because the great Outer Order principle, whether applied to music, movies, television, literature, radio, cheap electronics, damaged videotape or whatever else has crawled into the laboratory this week, is simple:

The alternate version is not supplementary evidence.

Sometimes it is the evidence.

The official release tells you what survived.

The outtake tells you what was possible.

The remix tells you what somebody later discovered had been hiding inside the recording.

The rehearsal tape tells you what the musicians thought the song was before history informed them what it became.

And Everything Went Black is basically an entire record built out of that philosophy.

It is music presented not as a marble statue but as a crime scene.

Do not clean anything.

Leave the chair overturned.

Leave the cigarette burning.

Leave three contradictory witness statements on the table.

We will decide what happened ourselves.

This explains why the record has never felt like some inferior annex to the “real” Black Flag albums.

Quite the opposite.

It feels like opening the service panel.

Damaged shows you the machine operating.

Everything Went Black lets you see the wiring.

And the wiring is terrifying.

---

Greg Ginn’s guitar deserves separate prosecution.

People occasionally describe punk guitar by discussing simplicity, which is approximately as useful as describing a car crash by discussing transportation.

Ginn’s playing is not interesting because it is technically complicated or technically uncomplicated.

It is interesting because it increasingly appears to consider normal musical behavior an administrative suggestion.

The guitar scratches.

It stabs.

It argues.

It seems frequently disgusted by the chord underneath it.

Even relatively straightforward passages contain this irritating little electrical intelligence trying to escape the framework.

You can hear the later Black Flag already gestating inside the early Black Flag.

The slowness.

The dissonance.

The jazz damage.

The ugly spaciousness.

The realization that hardcore velocity could eventually become a cage every bit as restrictive as the lumbering arena rock punk had supposedly rebelled against.

So Black Flag escaped again.

That is one reason their catalog remains alive.

They refused to become particularly good employees of their own revolution.

Once hardcore developed rules, Black Flag began violating hardcore.

Of course they did.

Otherwise what was the point?

---

And this is why Everything Went Black feels more revelatory with age.

It destroys the comfortable illusion that artistic development happens through clean replacement.

It does not.

Everything overlaps.

The thing you were remains audible inside the thing you are becoming.

Black Flag in these recordings sounds permanently caught between identities.

Hardcore band.

Art-damage unit.

Working-class touring apparatus.

Noise experiment.

Heavy rock mutation.

Psychological endurance test.

Garage band from an alternate America where surf music developed severe behavioral problems.

All simultaneously.

The categories are applied afterward because critics require shelving.

The music itself does not care.

The music is busy happening.

That distinction matters enormously.

Especially now, when streaming culture encourages an oddly tidy relationship with enormous discographies.

Artist page.

Essential album.

Popular tracks.

Chronology.

Algorithm.

Swipe.

Next.

Everything Went Black rewards the opposite behavior.

Excavation.

You stay.

You compare.

You notice.

Why does this version hit differently?

Why does the singer change the emotional temperature?

Why does that guitar phrase suddenly sound ten years ahead of the surrounding music?

Why does repetition intensify rather than diminish the songs?

The record turns listening into active investigation.

Which may be my favorite way to hear anything.

---

There is also the title.

Everything Went Black.

Perfect.

Not dramatic because Black Flag required no assistance in the drama department.

Perfect because it describes what happens when the institutional lights disappear.

The authorized story vanishes.

The chronology becomes muddy.

Personnel shifts.

Recordings circulate strangely.

Songs exist in several forms.

Suddenly you are operating by flashlight.

And flashlight culture is where some of the best art lives.

Bootlegs.

B-sides.

Compilation cuts.

Alternate mixes.

Regional television.

Unreleased pilots.

Paperback editions with the wrong covers.

Late-night radio broadcasts taped onto whatever cassette happened to be nearby.

The cultural world is always more interesting around the margins because the margins have not yet been completely disciplined into narrative.

Everything Went Black lives there.

Not hidden.

But sideways.

A major document masquerading as supplementary material.

My favorite category of object.

---

Maybe Damaged is the Black Flag album you put into the spacecraft so extraterrestrials understand what Black Flag accomplished.

Fine.

Excellent selection.

But if the extraterrestrials hang around afterward and say:

“We understand the official document. Show us how this organism developed.”

Then you hand them Everything Went Black.

Now the real trouble begins.

Because suddenly Black Flag stops being a band frozen inside a legendary photograph.

They become process.

Revision.

Instability.

Competing possibilities.

A set of songs being repeatedly hurled against different human nervous systems to see what breaks.

This is the Black Flag I return to most.

Not because it diminishes the canonical records.

Because it makes them stranger.

You hear where everything came from.

You hear roads not taken.

You hear the identity assembling itself while screws are still rolling around on the floor.

Most bands eventually become mythology.

Everything Went Black temporarily reverses the process.

It turns mythology back into people in rooms making noise.

That is infinitely more exciting.

The museum closes.

The workshop opens.

Someone plugs in an amplifier.

Something immediately sounds wrong.

Perfect.

Keep recording.

CREASE