Post-hardcore’s point of conception is as vague and debatable as that of post-punk, but a strong case can be made for placing the former's genesis at “Sound on Sound,” a remarkable track from Big Boys’ 1983 album Lullabies Help the Brain Grow. The title is a tipoff: “Sound on Sound” is built on a stratum of radio-degraded voice samples and static, and over all of that, a lopsided rhythm of minimal drums and wiry bass limps along, stretching empty space over its own rickety skeleton. Guitar harmonics ping like sonar, and no riffs are brought to bear. Guitarist Tim Kerr takes the mic from the band’s buoyant, bellicose frontman Randy “Biscuit” Turner, and instead of bellowing, he speaks simply yet cryptically, his voice both intimate and distant. It’s spacious, but that space screams. Contemporaries like Mission of Burma sound metal by comparison. The subtle stasis of tension and release is enough to pluck nerves.
Lullabies, along with Big Boys’ swansong, 1985’s No Matter How Long the Line at the Cafeteria, There’s Always a Seat, are being reissued as discrete entities after spending two decades shoehorned together on the Touch and Go anthology The Fat Elvis. Post-hardcore is not what either album is best known as; while the band’s fellow pioneers of the Austin punk scene—most notably MDC, the Dicks, and Offenders—each nailed down its own consistent vision of punk rock, Big Boys loved funk. Granted, they weren’t the first to do so, as Gang of Four and Minutemen will attest. Lullabies is particularly beholden to the latter, as gleefully evident on jerky, syncopated songs like “Jump the Fence” and, well, “Funk Off”.
But Big Boys had much more going on in their sound than simply providing a bridge between Minutemen and Red Hot Chili Peppers. “We Got Your Money” sports a shout-along, garage-rock populism that openly mocks the frat boys who loved them. More convolutedly satirical is the funk-fired, horn-injected “White Nigger”, especially in light of the Big Boys’ legendary feud with Bad Brains over homophobic taunts (the late Turner was openly gay). Musically and lyrically, the song is only a hair away from being a parody of Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music”, one that acknowledges its creators’ whiteness in a far more confrontational and problematic way. It’s so far from “Sound on Sound”, it’s hard to believe it’s the same band. At a time when hardcore brooked little ambition or experimentation, that’s ultimately a good thing.
The horns—but thankfully not the racial commentary—reappear on No Matter. The two years between the two albums sheared off some of Big Boys’ loose ends*,* as No Matter is more cohesive, settling into a punk-funk groove that closes the gap between circle pit and campus kegger. Turner's ragged howl had taken on a soulful melancholy as he grew less sure of hardcore—and less sure of his place in it—and that battle-scarred maturity is best heard on “Which Way to Go”. Sung in tandem by Turner and Kerr, it’s a cousin to the ringing, melodic, introspective mutation of hardcore that Rites of Spring was playing at the same time in Washington, D.C.—one that Hüsker Dü had helped instigate, too. Big Boys didn’t invent emo, but with a singular, heart-piercing song, they helped shape it.
In the same way that punk was nowhere near finished when post-punk rose in the late ’70s, hardcore still raged in 1983 as Big Boys set the pace for what was to come—and still, hardcore rages on during both Lullabies and No Matter, records that boast far more restlessness and recklessness than almost any of its contemporary influences. The former's “Brickwall” is a 40-second dry-heave of asphyxiated punk that doesn’t even provide enough processing time for panic to set in, and No Matter’s opening song, “No”, is a sneer-and-squeal spasm of angst that imagines Jello Biafra seizing control of Black Flag.
Still, Big Boys were never a self-styled street-gang perpetrating Reagan-era nihilism. A bleak sense of humor and a desperate underbelly lurked beneath their alternately derivative and innovative stream of anthems—but they lit and lifted that darkness with a surplus of savage joy. Post-hardcore would ultimately take a more dour route; heard as a whole, though, Lullabies and No Matter comprise a pastel-smeared, bursting-with-life reminder that things could have gone another way.
