I'm going with minor threat, and i love bad brains - i saw them live last year. Minor Threat is tighter.

Maybe I'm wrong about this, I wasn't there, I never saw either band in their heydey. While Bad Brains are furious and have great tunes, Minor Threat is the tightest thing next to the Jesus Lizard. It's like they took every wicked, dark riff and sped them up, but still kept the musical integrity intact.

bad brains: minor threat was guilty of being a bunch of arrhythmic white boys.

ha, kidding, i thought their timing was fine.

but seriously, bad brains. there's no use complaining about their later output when minor threat released a grand total of 14 or so songs in their career... so logically this is just a matter of "bad brains early stuff vs minor threat's early stuff [all their stuff]"

bad brains is the better band. more interesting arrangements, the musicianship was more volatile and unpredictable, and they had a versatility (the reggae angle) that played to their advantage really well -- those were good reggae tunes and somehow it made sense that they were on the same cd as hardcore songs.

the only way i could see someone voting for minor threat is if you really, really like to sing along to those songs. and i don't blame you, they were quite an anthemic, sing-along band with great lyrics and a great frontman. but thats the one thing they had that bad brains couldn't do - the anthemic quality.

pet fever detector wrote:the only hardcore band i would have a hard time picking bad brains over is void.

void is on a level with bad brains. but the following hardcore bands ain't no slouches either: amebix, black flag, antisect, discharge, doom, poison idea, nation of ulysses, doa, misery, early (hardcore) neurosis, deviated instinct, aus rotten, early napalm death, negative approach, and born against... a few of those bands have made songs that rival bad brains, void, or minor threat.

BClark wrote:
void is on a level with bad brains. but the following hardcore bands ain't no slouches either: amebix, black flag, antisect, discharge, doom, poison idea, nation of ulysses, doa, misery, early (hardcore) neurosis, deviated instinct, aus rotten, early napalm death, negative approach, and born against... a few of those bands have made songs that rival bad brains, void, or minor threat.

I'd take Born Against over just about any band.

Bad Brains never sounded as contrived as MT did at some points.

That whole 'guilty for being white' and 'I've got straight edge' has inspired more crap than any of the BB later bulshit could.

Bad Brains

Major waffles for the reggae crap and MT comes in a very close second.

jcamanei wrote:Bad Brains never sounded as contrived as MT did at some points.

That whole 'guilty for being white' and 'I've got straight edge' has inspired more crap than any of the BB later bulshit could.

… and they also inspired great things like a global DIY scene. That one more than balances out.

I loved that first ROIR tape when I first heard it. Amazing tunes on it- the intro to don’t need it- that segue between it and attitude- still fucks me up to this day. It’s so hard to hear the join. Like In God We Trust, Inc and Earth AD, it was a really formative album that I discovered at exactly the right age and shielded me from a lot of the dreadful rock and punk that came out in the mid-late 90s. But still, those solos piss me off. I can’t stand them at all. Also, the reggae on that album is fucking awful. It is. OK, they learned to play dub well in the end, but as far as the early days?

In many ways Minor Threat are a perfect band- hit the ground running (listen to their first show) and split up when the getting was good, when everything they needed to do was done, before they turned into a parody of themselves. Showed just about enough development to keep things fresh (Salad Days- probably my favourite song of theirs) and, damn, they could play dub well if they wanted to- listen to their version of Asshole on the 20 years box set.

Fucking tough one but it’s pretty clear where I’m going with this.

Minor Threat

Bad Brains-Original line-up. I would say that sheer musicianship makes them the winner.

Minor Threat wrote songs about the dynamics of high school after they were out of high school. They helped make and keep HC a primarily childish endeavor.

BB started with punk, helped transform it into an adult form of hardcore, and, moved onto a new worthwhile form just as the hardcore they created was getting horribly stale (I think that I against I was great). While I never cared for their reggae, their punkish takes on ska/rock steady were well done and refreshing interludes between their more straight forward punk pieces (Redbone in the City, say) and the blazingly fast numbers. When BB played fast it seemed arty, when Minor Threat did it it seemed much narrower, like youthful exuberance (not a bad thing or a source of inspiration to be discounted, but not as liberating as the artistic urge).

In the end, aside from issues of influence and politics, etc., I also simply find the BB songs to be better, more interesting.

I would list

Pay to Cum
Supertouch/Shitfit
Don't Need It
How Low Can a Punk Get
Black Dots

As more innovative and seizure inducing than anything that Minor Threat ever did.

The Bad Brains got the speed punk thing from the Dickies, as I remember from an interview I read a long time ago.