Bad Brains

Bad Brains came out of Washington, D.C., having started life as a jazz fusion outfit called Mind Power before they plugged into punk and went off like a grenade. The classic lineup was Dr. Know on guitar, Darryl Jenifer on bass and the Hudson brothers, Earl on drums and Paul, better known as H.R., on vocals, and they played faster and tighter than anybody in the room.

The self-titled 1982 album is a blur of velocity and precision: "Pay to Cum" and "Sailin' On" hit like a boxer's jab, and then the band drops into deep, rolling reggae as if it were the most natural thing in the world. For them it was; they are Rastafarians, and reggae is as much their music as punk. They get called pioneers of hardcore, a label the members themselves have pushed back against. I Against I, in 1986, bent the sound again toward metal and funk.

They have broken up and reformed several times, sometimes with other singers such as Chuck Mosley and Israel Joseph I, or with Mackie Jayson on drums, across nine studio albums. Their fingerprints are all over hardcore, thrash, alternative metal and funk metal, and plenty of notable bands cite them as an influence.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.