Black Flag

Black Flag invented American hardcore punk and, through their SST Records label, built the infrastructure that made the American underground possible. Greg Ginn's guitar playing was unlike anything in punk: angular, dissonant, and influenced as much by free jazz as by the Ramones, his tone — a Hamer Standard or Dan Armstrong through Peavey amplifiers — was deliberately ugly, a buzzing, atonal assault that rejected punk's own emerging orthodoxies. The band's relentless touring schedule, often playing for hostile audiences in cities with no punk scene, literally created the American underground touring circuit. Damaged, with Henry Rollins's confrontational vocals and Ginn's grinding riffs, is the foundational hardcore album — its songs Nervous Breakdown, Rise Above, and TV Party became anthems. My War's B-side slowed to a Black Sabbath crawl, anticipating sludge metal by a decade and alienating purists in the process. SST went on to release landmark albums by Hüsker Dü, Minutemen, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr., making Ginn not just hardcore's most important guitarist but one of independent music's most consequential figures.