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elcome to the Digital Meltd0wn Music Blog. The aim of this blog is to introduce the readers to music that is out of print, commercially unavailable, released under a creative commons license, or with approval by the featured artist. The majority of the music posted here would be considered underground. Don't let that fool you into thinking that the music featured here might be any less enjoyable than that of the mainstream artists you hear on the radio, as this couldn't be further from the truth. Please keep in mind that the majority of the artists that appear on this blog, along with their respective record labels, are not wealthy and need your support. If you enjoy the material that you find here, please support the artists/labels by purchasing their material afterwards. If you are an artist/label that would prefer to have your material removed from this blog, simply leave me a comment, and I would be more than happy to promptly remove the offending post. In addition to running this blog, I also work on a few other projects during my spare time. You can find links to those, as well as a few other important links associated with Digital Meltd0wn in the menu bar above.

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Black Flag - Damaged



Year of Release: 1981
Label: SST
Genre: Hardcore

1. Rise Above
2. Spray Paint
3. Six Pack
4. What I See
5. TV Party
6. Thirsty and Miserable
7. Police Story
8. Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie
9. Depression
10. Room 13
11. Damaged II
12. No More
13. Padded Cell
14. Life of Pain
15. Damaged I

While my previous post, "Just West Coast", was a collection of microtonal compositions performed on guitar and harp, This west coast harcore band also made interesting use of microtonal intervals and odd tempo changes. Greg Ginn, the guitarist and only constant in the band throughout the years, was a fan of freeform jazz and made heavy use of microtonal structures in his guitar solos. This, their debut studio album, was simply astounding. The raw, heavy, garage sound pumped out by the band, accompanied by Henry Rollins howling vocal assault cut straight to the bone. Essentially, this seems an album of protest songs aimed at the lazy, disaffected youth of the day...songs about misery, pain, desperation and self-destruction. The band toured relentlessly during the eighties, put out several independently released albums and inspiring local bands to never give up. There influence seems to continually spread. I have asked myself, over the years, why Black Flag? What does it mean to fly a black flag? I believe the following quote sums it up nicely.

"Why is our flag black? Black is a shade of negation. The black flag is the negation of all flags. It is a negation of nationhood which puts the human race against itself and denies the unity of all humankind. Black is a mood of anger and outrage at all the hideous crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of allegiance to one state or another. It is anger and outrage at the insult to human intelligence implied in the pretenses, hypocrisies, and cheap chicaneries of governments.

Black is also a color of mourning; the black flag which cancels out the nation also mourns its victims the countless millions murdered in wars, external and internal, to the greater glory and stability of some bloody state. It mourns for those whose labo r is robbed (taxed) to pay for the slaughter and oppression of other human beings. It mourns not only the death of the body but the crippling of the spirit under authoritarian and hierarchic systems; it mourns the millions of brain cells blacked out with never a chance to light up the world. It is a color of inconsolable grief.

But black is also beautiful. It is a color of determination, of resolve, of strength, a color by which all others are clarified and defined. Black is the mysterious surrounding of germination, of fertility, the breeding ground of new life which always evolves, renews, refreshes, and reproduces itself in darkness. The seed hidden in the earth, the strange journey of the sperm, the secret growth of the embryo in the womb all these the blackness surrounds and protects.

So black is negation, is anger, is outrage, is mourning, is beauty, is hope, is the fostering and sheltering of new forms of human life and relationship on and with this earth. The black flag means all these things. We are proud to carry it, sorry we hav e to, and look forward to the day when such a symbol will no longer be necessary."
~Howard Ehrlich

Download: Black Flag - Damaged
Download size: 31 MB zip file

3 comments:

Unknown said...

AWESOME!

The Loud and Shouty Show said...

The Loud and Shouty Show is highly indebted to your webpage. Thanks very very much for all the great music!

funkyaeroplane said...

Thanks heaps. I Will enjoy this!