HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: Victim In Pain – Agnostic Front
“Victim In Pain wasn’t the first NYHC record but it was different, powerful and raw. It was [a] game-changer in 1984 for New York.” Roger Miret of AGNOSTIC FRONT put it more succinctly than we ever could when he spoke to No Echo back in 2019. The New York hardcore scene had certainly started to take decent shape by the time its most quintessential band released their debut full-length, but for all that the likes of KRAUT, THE UNDEAD, REAGAN YOUTH and even the earliest incarnation of the BEASTIE BOYS had to offer, no-one had yet produced anything that could rival the exports of the genre’s birthplaces of LA or DC, or even Boston for that matter. The Big Apple had some catching up to do, and AGNOSTIC FRONT were ready to lead the charge.
To be fair, most of the bands in the scene had more to worry about than releasing a classic full-length. By all accounts the Lower East Side of the early 80s was a hotbed of drugs, gangs, violence and poverty, with most of those involved living in squats like the infamous Apartment X – a windowless basement apartment where at least one version of the story (told in Steven Blush’s seminal American Hardcore) claims that AGNOSTIC FRONT were formed initially as THE ZOO CREW by the living legend that is Vinnie Stigma. It was a far cry from the suburban monotony that bands like BLACK FLAG and MINOR THREAT were railing against in other parts of the country, and this was reflected in the music.
NYHC was rough, raw and primitive even by the standards of the genre as a whole at the time, proof of this found clearly enough in AF’s first essential contribution to canon that came in the form of their 1983 debut EP United Blood. Running through ten tracks in a scant six-and-a-half minutes, with Stigma’s guitar making absolutely no attempt to stay in tune, the EP feels like a very natural predecessor or even companion piece to the full-length that followed it, but for the aforementioned Miret in particular – who was recruited after most of the songs and lyrics on United Blood had already been written – the two releases were worlds apart.
“We lived lifetimes between United Blood and Victim In Pain, but it was actually less than a year,” wrote Miret in his 2017 autobiography. “I had accumulated enough life experience to write a box set… I wanted to speak out against oppression. We had learned not to trust cops or any other authority figures. We believed that you didn’t have to follow other people’s orders to succeed. You could be successful on your own terms.”
And thus Victim In Pain was – here it comes – more mature than United Blood. Recorded for free with legendary NYHC producer Don Fury, the band’s line-up at this point completed by drummer Dave Jones and bassist Rob Kabula, it was no less scrappy or riotous than its predecessor, and clearly no-one had bought Stigma a tuner just yet, but the songwriting was definitely stronger. Some tracks even deigned to cross the 90-second or two-minute mark, with moments like the gleefully chaotic guitar solo on mid-album cut Power – a carryover from Stigma’s previous band THE ELIMINATORS – and the relative dirge of closer With Time offering the slightest expansion of form that in hindsight could well have been the earliest indicator that this might be a band capable of some longevity.
Miret’s lyrics were a step up too. As promised, tracks like Remind Them, Blind Justice and United And Strong carried timeless messages of rejecting authority and finding strength in unity, and while the likes of Last Warning and Your Mistake did lean a little more into the tough guy image AF have never quite been able to shake, others were perhaps surprisingly vulnerable. The aforementioned With Time was Miret’s version of a love song for his then girlfriend Amy, this track, Hiding Inside and Fascist Attitudes all taking stock of the violence he saw in himself and expressing a genuine desire to change. “It’s time to grow out of your Nazi hypocrism / When you really don’t want part of a fucked up system”, he sings in the latter – though clearly that wasn’t enough for some.
Tim Yohannan of the influential Maximum Rocknroll was convinced that AF were Nazi skinheads, his September 1984 review of the record alleging that “much of the narrow-mindedness, fanatical nationalism, and violence that has destroyed the New York punk scene seems to have revolved around AGNOSTIC FRONT.” The band’s use of the harrowing photograph known as The Last Jew In Vinnitsa for the album’s artwork didn’t particularly help matters either, though Miret has gone on record multiple times to explain that the intention was always to educate. “It was a pretty intense photo,” he acknowledged to Songfacts in 2015. “But that was the purpose of it. I wanted people to see that and know that that did happen, and it can happen again.”
Ultimately the band’s efforts and legacy should speak for themselves. They haven’t always nailed it – there’s a track on the album after this that really was a misstep, for example – but for over 40 years AGNOSTIC FRONT have always attempted to stand for what is right. It began, in earnest at least, with Victim In Pain, the album that will forever be regarded as their finest hour and the first true classic in a pantheon that now overflows with the works of the likes of the CRO-MAGS, LEEWAY, MADBALL, SICK OF IT ALL, BIOHAZARD and MERAUDER, to name just a few. New York may have had some catching up to do back in 1984, but the arrival of Victim In Pain marked the moment from which the hardcore scene would forever be trying to catch up with New York.
Victim In Pain was originally released in September 1984 via Rat Cage Records.
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