Perhaps because of my extreme dissatisfaction with the state of popular American music circa 2009, I have been going back a few decades to remind myself that it could be. Here's a great 1982 video clip from the band Bad Brains, which pretty much invented hardcore punk music in the late 1970s. It's probably accurate to say that bands like Metallica, Slayer, and even the Beastie Boys (which started out as a hardcore band) wouldn't be quite the same without the influence of Bad Brains.