Four friends in DC liked fusion like Return To Forever, but they also liked the Damned. They started playing their own kind of punk and moved to New York. The Bad Brains blend was faster and thicker and stranger than any other punk or rock or jazz. To make things infinitely stranger, Bad Brains also played reggae. And they were Black, a fact that retained its strangeness, partly because they were never joined by anyone at their level. Bad Brains were a cohort of one. Their ROIR cassette, simply called Bad Brains, is as elevated as punk got. It’s also a perfectly sequenced album. “Sailin’ On” is like being thrown off a boat into the clearest bluest water, and maybe it’s a breakup song. It has backup vocals! “Pay To Cum” was the New York anthem for an entire year. The engineering (mild) and mastering (absent) of this cassette created a firehose of life that would only be ruined if it was “cleaned up.” This is what Bad Brains felt like live: being hit by a glowing ambulance doing donuts in front of the cops. Bad Brains forced a world of wide spiritual presence into the narrow audible crack of punk. There is lots of faster rock but no other rock feels this fast.

– Sasha Frere-Jones