Permanent head flex

Listening to free car, harDCore and the shape of D.C. music to come

I was born in a city that’s better at creating music scenes than music stars, and I like to practice my gratitude by pulling two records from the shelf: Flex Your Head, the paradigmatic hardcore compilation from Dischord Records circa 1982, and Go-Go Crankin’, the self-proclaimed “D.C. sound attack” released through Max Kidd’s T.T.E.D./D.E.T.T. Records in 1985. Back then, these compilation albums helped make D.C. subculture audible to the outside world. Today at home, they embody the idea that music is something our city makes together. For me, subsequent D.C. comps have only deepened that sense of presence and belonging — Echos From the Nation’s Capital, Gimmie Dat Beat, Vibe 1, many more. Now here come two more.

All Roads Lead to Rome, a new album by the DMV producer Yoyo, offers a sweeping scene portrait by assembling more than two-dozen practitioners of the DMV flow, a style of phrasing that involves racing ahead of the beat in a three-legged gallop until you hit the wall (the wall being the rhyme at the end of each line). This flow has been tightening up across the region for years, but the beats and the taxonomies around it have changed. “Free car” is the term used to describe the music; distinguished by its clangy, metallurgical swing, its timbres seem to descend from the ding-ding-ding in early go-go (“Congas and timbales, cowbells and triangles — the instruments that hypnotise,” per the back cover of Go-Go Crankin’, italics mine). I also like to imagine Yoyo and his kindred free car producers in their childhoods, listening to WHUR in the backseats of their grandparents’ cars, noticing the clattersome printing press sounds from the Sunday Washington Post commercials that aired between gusts of Jill Scott and Sade.

Either way, the collective commitment to both styles only seems to keep intensifying, evoking the awesome beauty of an entire metropolitan area bearing down on a single idea. For Yoyo, that means deploying clanking pipes, slamming doors, patterned gunfire and an assortment of concussion sources of unknowable provenance throughout “News Flash” with Pdub Ant, then inviting Skino to rap over the sound of rare ores being smelted on “Homicide.” The heaviness starts to loosen from there. “I considered it half FreeCar / half SoundCloud R&B music,” Yoyo told me in a DM, explaining how he approached All Roads with an A-side/B-side mindset. The late Lil Xelly draws demarcation lines around the album’s breezier back half, rhyming on the keystone and final cuts with a vitality that should make your heart clench.

The cover of All Roads Lead to Rome is a photograph of Yoyo traipsing in the streets, his back turned, inviting us to follow him into the night. The cover of Future Left Behind, a searing new harDCore compilation from Second Street Records, looks equally striking. It features a tiled image of engineers building the city’s Metro system in subterranean darkness. Perfect metaphor. Mutilated by commercial development, marred by the literal erasure of Black Lives Matter Plaza, clogged with National Guard officers marching in pointless circles, the D.C. we once knew has become difficult to recognize. But if you float down any Metro escalator, you’ll eventually find friendly Brutalist concrete waffles arching overhead. The underground remains unchanged.

“This compilation serves as a survey of DCHC today,” writes Gene Melkisethian — who helped record each of these songs — in the record’s insert. “Many different outlooks, experiences and approaches but a common thread of devotion to the underground, which is no mistake as this record was literally recorded underground, beneath the floor of a certain record store in the NW quadrant of the district, the same block where members of half the bands work and interact on a daily basis.”

So a scene inside a neighborhood, on a block, into a basement, onto a vinyl record. Through that framing, it becomes easier to hear the commonalities between such scalding groups — Brain Tourniquet, Deliriant Nerve, Expiration Date, Grand Scheme, Inversion, Laughing Corpse, Posición Unida, Pray to Be Saved, Protestor, Reason Why, Retain, Seclusion, Sluggo, White Horses; they each deserve to be shouted out — than the differences.

On January 18, nearly all of these bands performed a Sunday matinee celebrating the arrival of Future Left Behind in the basement of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in Columbia Heights. Only eleven days had passed since ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good in the streets of Minneapolis. At the show, an “ABOLISH ICE” banner was draped onstage for every set. Between bursts of song-shaped noise, the hundreds gathered repeatedly pledged to protect our neighbors and each other. Heart full, head flexed, I eventually exited the church and walked up 16th Street in Yoyo-like strides, through a pre-dusk pinkness that had fallen over the city, trying to steer my steps toward the peaceful world our volatile music imagines.