Tony Rettman – Why Be Something That You're Not: Detroit Hardcore 1979-1985

REVELATION RECORDS 2010

Foreword by Tesco Vee
239 pages, paperback

In the early seventies, Detroit was the musical hub of America. Everything from the chart topping sounds of Motown records to the vicious proto-punk of The Stooges was being brewed out there and it seemed like there was no end in sight. But by the early eighties, the city was both a physical and cultural wasteland due to major label buyouts of the artists as well as the crippling drug habits of some of the others. Detroit's most known musical export at the time was the vapid sounds of New Wave heart-throbs The Romantics; this wasn't good. It took a gaggle of suburban skateboarders, a grade school teacher and a census bureau clerk to wake this city up from it's slumber and start one of the first hardcore punk scenes in America.
Why Be Something That You're Not chronicles the first wave of Detroit hardcore from it's origins in the late seventies to it's demise in the mid-eighties. Through a combination of oral history and extensive imagery, the book proves that even though the southern California beach towns might have created the look and style of hardcore punk, it was the Detroit scene - along with a handful of other cities across the country - that cultivated the music's grassroots aesthetic before most cultural hot spots around the globe even knew what the music was about.

"The Michigan hardcore scene was a crazy mixture of DC-style teen-thug-purists and debauched elders with a taste for the newest in high energy freedom. Tony Rettman has done a great service to Western Culture by interviewing the prime knuckleheads involved in this scene and reporting what he finds." -Byron Coley, Co-Author of No Wave: New York 1976-1980