When John Joseph returned to New York, in 1981, punk rock was almost dead, and he was determined to help kill it. He had grown up hard in Queens, abandoned by his father and then by his mother. (Eventually, he stopped using his last name, which was McGowan.) He wound up living in a Catholic boys’ home in the Rockaways, which in time came to seem less appealing than a life on the streets. Among the many things he found on the streets was punk, in the form of a wild concert at Max’s Kansas City, the night club on Park Avenue South where such heroes as Sid Vicious and Johnny Thunders liked to debauch themselves. John Joseph had visited Max’s under the influence of a sedative called Placidyl, which may explain why he can’t remember what band was playing, and why he fared so poorly in the fistfight that followed the show. But he liked the mayhem, and he liked the punk-obsessed woman he met a few weeks later, who had a fake English accent and a real heroin addiction.

In his autobiography, “The Evolution of a Cro-Magnon,” John Joseph remembers that he fled New York to join the Navy, then fled the Navy for Washington, D.C. There he discovered something even better than punk. Washington was one of the first cities to embrace a faster, meaner genre called hardcore—an offshoot of punk that was also, in its way, a stern refutation of it. To hardcore kids like John Joseph, early-eighties New York, with its glamorous junkies and its flamboyant icons, seemed stuck in the past. “We’d get in the fucking cars, go to New York, and wreak havoc,” he told Steven Blush, a historian of hardcore. “People didn’t even know how to stage-dive.” Instead of flinging themselves off the stage and forming violent “pits,” New Yorkers pogoed, springing around the dance floor in a punk-rock ritual that he now found contemptibly quaint.

Hardcore was born as a double-negative genre: a rebellion against a rebellion. The early punks were convinced that rock and roll had gone wrong and were resolved to put it right, deflating arena-rock pretension with crude songs and rude attitudes. Legs McNeil, the New York fanzine editor who helped coin the term “punk,” saw the movement as a rejection of “lame hippie stuff” and other symptoms of cultural exhaustion. But when punk, too, came to seem lame, the hardcore kids arrived, eager to show up their elders. The idea was to out-punk the punks, thereby recapturing the wild promise of the genre, with its tantalizing suggestion that rock music should be something more than mere entertainment—that it should, somehow, pose a threat to mainstream culture.

In those early years, hardcore had a few flagship cities, none of which were New York. Los Angeles was home to a scabrous and squally band called Black Flag, whose concerts were frequently raided by riot police. And, in Washington, John Joseph and his peers were electrified by a group of Rastafarians called Bad Brains, who played with such eerie conviction that they seemed to be vibrating. Bad Brains crystallized the movement with a 1980 single called “Pay to Cum,” which buzzed along for ninety seconds at about three hundred beats per minute—nearly twice the tempo of an average song by the New York punk band the Ramones, who had previously been considered plenty fast.

Unlike punk, with its half-spurious British accent, hardcore was American from the beginning, which may be one reason that it was slower to conquer a territory as un-American as New York. But by 1981, when John Joseph ran out of couches to sleep on in Washington, the city was coming around. Bad Brains had recently settled there, arriving in time to play at the last-ever Max’s Kansas City concert; the opening act was an upstart local group called the Beastie Boys. John Joseph served for a time as a Bad Brains roadie and eventually became the lead singer of a fearsome band called Cro-Mags, which helped transform New York hardcore from a sideshow to the main event. By the end of the decade, the city had the most fertile scene in the country, and probably the most loathed.

Now comes a book that seeks to document how, exactly, this transformation came to pass. “NYHC: New York Hardcore 1980-1990” (Bazillion Points) is an oral history of the movement, compiled by Tony Rettman, a journalist who eagerly followed its development from across the Hudson River, in New Jersey. It is a fittingly bare-bones book, with fifty-two short chapters and no editorializing from the author. But the story it tells is not a simple one: this was, to quote the title of Cro-Mags’ first album, an “age of quarrel,” which means that any celebration of those not wholly good old days will necessarily involve a certain amount of argument. New York hardcore was regularly (and, often, fairly) criticized for its thuggery, its bigotry, its idiocy. Yet the scene also produced some singularly incandescent music. Its tough-guy ethos found expression in a correspondingly tough sound, one that expanded the musical possibilities of punk by emphasizing rhythm over noise. The lyrics tended to be pithy and declarative, like rallying cries, but vague enough so that fans could adapt them to their own struggles, real or imagined. The best New York hardcore records sound as urgent as any rock music ever made.

The music was well matched to a city defined by its conflicts. And for the bands and the fans the willingness to fight took on an almost mystical importance: it was proof, in a circular way, that they were doing something worth fighting for. As one musician remembers, a concert was a “proving ground,” even if the only thing being proved was that the locals wouldn’t let out-of-towners push them around in the pit. For most of the people who loved hardcore, the music was inseparable from the scene that created it, and from the turbulent shows that brought participants together. As a consequence, Rettman’s sources have strikingly little to say about music. Palm-muting, the guitar technique used to create the distinctive New York hardcore chug, is mentioned only once, and by an outsider—a member of the metal band Anthrax. Dito Montiel, a guitarist for the band Major Conflict (and now a film director), tells Rettman that he didn’t think of himself as a musician. “In all honesty, I didn’t really like playing music,” he says. “I just liked the chaos. I just loved being there.”

By the time Max’s closed, the New York hardcore scene had moved farther downtown, to the East Village, which was full of dilapidated buildings that could be claimed by whoever had the nerve. There were two storefronts on Avenue A where band members could hang out and play shows. Some of the hardcore kids squatted in abandoned apartments nearby, and virtually all of them cultivated a streetwise sensibility. A number of them shaved their scalps as a show of kinship with skinheads, the working-class British hell-raisers who considered themselves braver and brawnier than punks.

In 1983, a seven-inch vinyl record appeared called “United Blood E.P.,” by Agnostic Front, which was gaining a reputation as the fiercest band in the city. On the cover, four skinheads played to about twice as many people; on the back, there was a drawing of a skinhead carrying a “New York Hardcore” flag, alongside a list of ten songs, which were over in about six minutes. The startling power of the music derived partly from its inelegance: poky, sullen introductions led to off-kilter paroxysms, as the drummer frantically tried to keep pace with the hoarse singer, Roger Miret. By stripping all the glamour and the sex from what was, nominally, rock and roll, the record made even other hardcore bands sound fussy and tame. The songs had the single-minded urgency of political protest, but with the politics scooped out. While some New York bands railed against President Reagan, Agnostic Front expressed frustration and menace through lyrics that were as gnomic as its name: