BOTTLED UP FOR YEARS

Nirvana’s Live and Loud broadcast on MTV in 1993 was crucial to hardcore punks of a certain age. It was the television debut of guitarist Pat Smear, the legendary member of L.A.’s the Germs, and maybe less important to some but hugely important to me, bassist Krist Novoselic wore a black T-shirt with a big “SSD” across the chest. As a young suburban “punk” with no older siblings, it was hard to find music unless I did all the digging myself, but it usually happened one of a few ways: trial and error of buying records with hard-saved lunch money, word of mouth, watching who toured with who, or seeing what band wore what other band’s merch. I hadn’t heard of SSD at the time, but the giant block-lettering font gave a bit of a nod to high school athletics, which in itself was also a nod to youth-crew-style hardcore, so I felt determined to find the record.

Years passed, and I never managed to track down any SSD records, which were long out of print by then. Finally I stumbled across a copy—a bootleg, of course— of the band’s classic The Kids Will Have Their Say at an out-of-town record store. The cover featured a gang of kids rushing up the Massachusetts State House steps with varsity jackets emblazoned with “The Straight Edge.” It spoke to me immediately—SSD had to be militant, hard-line, and furious, something I was always in search of. I was right, and the record didn’t leave my turntable for a while—that is, until I got a copy of SSD’s Get It Away LP. Between the two, SSD had to be one of the greatest hardcore bands of all time. Punk was an arms race, and the fastest was proclaimed the fiercest, but SSD took their time and came off as terrifying. Their riffs felt so unique, fierce, and urgent, while their lyrics touched on alienation, religion, politics, and standing tall (“We’ll be a force/And they will pay/As we will have our fuckin’ say”). In a genre that quietly rewards conformity while championing freedom of expression, SSD were the real deal.