The reggae rebels of punk rock

There is a moment in punk history that isn’t talked about enough.

- Sanjoy Narayan

It was 1979. At the legendary New York City music club CBGB, four young black men from Washington DC had just finished playing the fastest, most ferocious set. The kicker? Halfway through, they stopped the mayhem and played reggae. Beautiful, meditative, spiritually charged reggae. The crowd didn’t know what hit them. Neither did punk rock.

Bad Brains weren't just fast, they were revolutionary. And not in the overused way that term gets thrown around in music journalism. They literally rewrote the rules on what rebellion could sound like.

The core four who changed everything were HR (Paul Hudson) on vocals, his brother Earl Hudson on drums, Dr Know (Gary Miller) on guitar and Darryl Jenifer on bass. This classic lineup has remained remarkably stable since’79, a rarity in punk’s chaotic world.

Most people know Bad Brains as the godfathers of hardcore punk. What they don’t know is that the band started out as Mind Power, a jazz-fusion group obsessed with Chick Corea and Mahavishnu Orchestra. The switch to punk happened overnight, after they discovered Sex Pistols, but the real transformation came at a Bob Marley concert. Bassist Jenifer watched the Wailers perform and had what can only be described as a spiritual awakening.

“Twas taken in by the power of the music,” he tells Louder Sound in a 2020 interview. This wasn’t a mere musical excursion; it became Bad Brains’ north star.