Music is a vast ocean, but building walls won't help make sense of it (deep dive into hardcore punk)

One of the challenges of writing about music, even when you're delimiting yourself to a subtopic such as "playing bass", is that the topic is so vast that it's hard to know where to start. What's more, once you've picked a point at which to jump in, it's difficult to keep focused.

If "playing bass" is a cove or a bay within the wider musical world, you can't explain how this bay "works" without talking about the wider ocean, whose tides and currents bring new ocean water into the bay (and new ships, passengers, and, as Sting's song from the Police's 1979 Reggatta de Blanc album reminds us, messages floating in bottles), or without talking about the vast freshwater watershed on land that flows down into the bay, bringing other influences into the bay from the wetlands and smaller rivers.

It's hard to talk about bass playing without talking about the broader sphere of music-making, by which I mean the way bass playing and bassline creation is part of composition, songwriting, music production (recording and mixing), music technology (amplifiers, effects, instrument innovations), live shows, and sales and marketing of recordings. This means that when you try to talk about bass playing, you're often going to start talking about how these basslines or bass playing styles fit into a broader music scene or style.

One way to deal with the vastness of the musical ocean is to set out a limitation, and focus in on one style of bass playing, or one bass player. Of course, to explain even one style of bass playing, you'll need to talk about other genres and influences to explain cross-influences, but at least you have a clear sense of the end goal, which makes the side excursions make sense. For this blog post, I'll focus on Roy "Rainy" Wainwright's early 1980s bass playing in the UK hardcore punk band Discharge on the band's influential 1982 LP Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing (HNSNSN).

HNSNSN had such an intense, heavy sound and unrelentingly aggressive tone that even metal bands were impressed, as can be seen in the thrash metal and black metal bands that later covered songs from the album or praised Discharge's sound. Discharge's instrumental intensity was matched by the tone of vocalist Kelvin "Cal" Morris' shouted vocal lines and the uncompromising lyrics, which were warnings about the horrors of nuclear war and criticism of the rapacious, crushing impacts of global capitalism.

The mix is very dense, but if you turn it up loud, you can hear that Roy's electric bass is heavily overdriven. This aggressive bass tone increases the overall intensity of the sound and it adds cohesion, as it becomes one with the buzzsaw grind of the rhythm guitarist's distorted power chords. The other thing that stands out is the rapidly picked bass passages, which you can hear most clearly at times when the rhythm guitar part is less prominent (for example, when the guitarist launches into an atonal solo in "Hell on Earth", starting at 0:55 seconds). The rapid bass picking boosts the energy and intensity, which supports the song's passionate warning about the horrors of nuclear war. The overall musical effect is crushing and overwhelming, which underlines the menace of the world's arsenal of nuclear missiles.

Here is our first side excursion. You can't talk about the history of overdriven bass in 1980s hardcore punk without talking about the history of distortion and overdrive in blues and rock, which means you're talking about music history in multiple styles. Since overdrive is created by various techniques involving amplifier settings, amplifier preamplifiers and, since the 1960s, the use of effects pedals such as the FuzzFace, this means you start talking about technology and sound engineering. The earliest history of overdrive in the blues likely was a combination of a desire for musical expression and intensity, and the technologies available at the time, which were subject to constraints.

With expression, when we sing or play all sorts of instruments, there's a tendency to add intensity to notes when the music gets passionate, which sometimes distorts the purity of the tone in an intentional way. Think of a baritone sax player "growling" on a low note at the climax of a song, or a tenor sax player "wailing" on a high note at the most exciting part of their solo. In both cases, the note is not going to be clear and pure; the player will push the note to the point that it gets a bit distorted and buzzy. The listener feels this excitement and derives pleasure from it, whether a shiver down their spine or the urge to let out a cheer.

With electric guitar and blues harmonica ("harp"), the blues musicians in the early 20th century didn't have fancy amplifiers and speakers. Guitar players and used small vacuum tube amplifiers. To be heard, the tube amps had to be turned up loud, which causes a natural "breaking up" effect, in which warm, natural overdrive is created. Harp players used microphones from taxi dispatchers, which weren't high-fidelity, so these mics also added a bit of distortion to the sound. The Hammond B-3 organ, which was originally marketed as an instrument for church services, took on a whole new sound when used in blues. With the Leslie rotating speaker cabinet's horn rotating to create a swirling chorus effect and its tube amplifier pushed hard, the Hammond also created a rich overdriven sound.

While some styles of music, such as dance pop try to avoid distortion, and get the instruments and vocals to sound crisp and clean, in blues, the natural overdrive on the guitars, harp, and Hammond organ became a key stylistic feature in blues. Now, before this blog post turns into a book, we'll go fast-forward to get from blues musicians in Chicago playing in a smoky bar to Roy "Rainy" Wainwright's overdriven bass on that 1982 recording session. Here's a short history:

• 1950s: blues guitar players and harp players use overdriven tube amps to add emotional intensity to lead lines and, for guitar players, to create a richer sound for chords. With Hammond organ, keyboard players were also seeking a more intense sound. By literally "pulling out all the stops" on the instrument's drawbars and setting the expression pedal on maximum, the Leslie speaker cabinet (a tube amplifier/cabinet with a rotating horn and a rotating baffle around the woofer speaker) produced a warm, overdriven growl that added intensity to solo lines and richness to chords.

• 1960s to late-1960s: rock guitar players use overdriven tube amps and later, effects pedals such as the Fuzz Face (invented in 1966) to get a powerful, stadium-filling sound on rhythm guitar and for lead guitarists, to add sustain and make new playing techniques possible, such as intentional feedback used creatively in solos (think of Jimi Hendrix).

• Late 1960s-1970s: a subgroup of rock players decide that mainstream commercial rock has gotten too clean and nice. They branch off into a several intense, less-commercially saleable genres over this period. Some branch into early heavy metal (for example, Black Sabbath's self-titled album in 1970 and the album Paranoid in that same year). Another branching off is punk rock (for example, the Sex Pistols' 1977 album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols). Black Sabbath's guitarist, Tony Iommi, had a heavy, massive sound that came from a mixture of his playing technique (he had lost the the tips of several fingers in an industrial accident, so he had to create a new style of playing) and his use of heavy distortion. The Sex Pistols guitarist, Steve Jones, got a heavy "chuggging" sound by a mix of his energetic playing style with Les Paul electric guitars and his use of an early 1970s Fender Twin with the preamp knob on set to 10.

  • As an aside, both early heavy metal and early punk rock developed a committed fanbase, while at the same time generating moral panics in the media. Columnists and commentators warned that the music, lyrics and onstage behaviour by these bands were a negative influence on young people.

• 1980s: Influenced by the intense political strife in the world (fears of nuclear war, wars such as the Iran-Iraq war, the IRA prisoners' hunger strike in the Maze Prison, protests and riots), in the 1980s, punks move away from the late-1970s-style punk, which still sounded like rock (albeit with more edge) and shifted towards a more intense, aggressive style: hardcore punk.

  • Late 1970s punk songs sound wholesome in comparison with hardcore punk. Punk vocals were still sung, albeit with a snarl; hardcore vocals tended to be screamed or shouted. Punk guitar was overdriven in a way that recognizably showed the heritage of 1970s hard rock; hardcore punk guitar sound was a brutal, grinding sludge of noise. Punk drumming was loud and filled with energy; hardcore drumming was a relentless smashing of cymbals and battering the drums, creating an aural assault.

  • Metal starts to splinter into subgenres as some metal musicians sought to create an even more intense sound, with genres launching such as thrash metal and black metal. Metal bands got increasingly influenced by hardcore punk's aggression. Even metal band bandleader Tom Warrior of the Swiss black metal/thrash metal band Celtic Frost) was impressed by the intensity of hardcore punk bands such as Discharge.

We don't have the full history of why Roy "Rainy" Wainwright chose to play with such a grinding, aggressive bass sound for that 1982 LP. Even the best histories of UK punk rock don't get down to that level of detail. The histories focus on the big picture of how Discharge was writing songs, playing gigs, and recording. A lot of what we do when we try to figure out what happened in music history is informed guesswork. You play musical detective and look for clues.

If you look at the context, though of 1982, the UK had been convulsed by riots, hunger strikes, and protests and there was a real terror of nuclear war. When I think of the band recording the album, I imagine them being influenced by these broader currents of menace and fear, which probably made the musicians, including Roy, seek out a more intense and powerful sound to express their emotions. By the way, Roy is still laying down heavy bass tone for Discharge.