Citing its “unique mix of breakneck-paced hardcore punk and dubby reggae,” the Hall included the band Tuesday on a list that also proposes Tupac Shakur, Pearl Jam, Jane’s Addiction and Depeche Mode among first-time nominees. Bad Brains not only set a standard for speed and fury, but it also had an all-African-American lineup in a genre generally dominated by white musicians. (Above: Live At CBGB 1982, featuring the band in its prime.)

Often imitated, never duplicated: the cover of Bad Brains from 1982.

A nomination is just the start of the process — actual induction comes via a vote by more than 600 historians, artists and music industry figures. If Bad Brains is inducted this year, it would be the first D.C. hardcore band to make the Hall, although one product of D.C.’s hardcore scene, Dave Grohl, was inducted in 2014 as a member of Nirvana. (Another legendary underground rock band, the MC5, is back on the list this year after receiving an unsuccessful nomination in 2003.)

Bad Brains was in the news earlier this year as family and friends launched a campaign to help fund medical care for frontman H.R., who was diagnosed in late 2015 with a rare and painful disorder called SUNCT.

The 2012 documentary Bad Brains: A Band In D.C. traced the band’s complicated history, from its roaring appearance on the D.C. punk scene in the late 1970s, through its move to New York in the 1980s, and into a phase in the ’90s and ’00s that included disagreements among members. (H.R. and two of the filmmakers appeared on WAMU 88.5’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show in 2012.)

Beyond Bad Brains’ musical influence on bands such as Minor Threat (and by extension, Fugazi) and the Beastie Boys, the cover art for the group’s 1982 self-titled album — with its image of a jagged lightning bolt striking the U.S. Capitol — has inspired countless homages.

Astronaut Jones – Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas
Jonathan Parker – Jacqui
Three Man Soul Machine – Rastaman Chant
Redline Graffiti – Two Face
Joy Buttons – Other
East Ghost – Clouds and Their Shape
Golden Looks – Rooftop
Justin Jones – My Father’s Gun
Griefloss – łłł
Lands – Sometimes
Olivia Neutron-John – 16 BEAT
Sligo Creek Stompers – Cuckoo’s Nest
Astra Via – Fast Forward
Young Master Sunshine Photogenic 1982 – West Georgia
Bad Brains – Ragga Dub
Peyote Pilgrim – District City
Cigarbox Planetarium – Oh! Tinnitus
Philip Lassiter – Set You Free
Wale – Love Hate Thing (Tone P Instrumental)
Bossalingo – Manha de Carnaval

Buildings – Water In Water
Drop Electric – Church of Glass
ZOMES – Equinox
Girls Love Distortion – Psychic Raygun
Jonathan Parker – East Lorain
Fort Knox Five – Reach (Instrumental)
Marian McLaughlin – Will-o-the-wisp
The Petticoat Tearoom – Love Isn’t Gone
Iritis – Gates of Dawn
GroundScore – My Perfect Spot
Cartoon Weapons – WTLFO
Feedel Band – Girl From Ethiopia (Live At WAMU)
Bad Brains – Cowboy
Paperhaus – Cairo
Matt Chaconas – baby bear obliquity
Baby Bry Bry – Is It Anything Or Is It Everything
Protect-U – Dit Floss
Troy and Paula Haag – Lies & Cries
Speedwell – Two Conquests
Lower Dens – Stem

According to H.R.’s wife, Lori Carns Hudson, the veteran performer (aka Paul Hudson) was diagnosed in December with a rare and painful condition called SUNCT, which stands for short-lasting, unilateral neuralgiform headache attacks with conjunctival injection and tearing.

“He’s been getting headaches for about 10 years,” says Hudson, who lives with H.R. in Philadelphia. “He used to think they were migraines but it’s been very, very strange. They’ve progressively gotten worse until they culminated in November [to the point] where he’s just constantly in pain.”

The couple’s friend, Brian Marsh, started a GoFundMe campaign Monday to help Hudson cover her husband’s medical treatment and other expenses. The campaign aims to raise $30,000.

Hudson says H.R., who has struggled with physical and mental issues for years, is unable to work.

“He goes out and takes a very brief walk every day,” she says, “but he mostly just relaxes and watches TV.”

Hudson supports him with income from her retail job, and she’s begun selling H.R. artwork (like the above) for extra money. Meanwhile, her insurance covers some of her husband’s medical expenses. But conventional treatment has only helped so much.

“We’ve been through a lot of doctors … [and] the medical community does not understand this specific type of headache,” she says. She would like to try herbal remedies — Hudson herself is an herbalist — but those aren’t covered by health insurance.

Money raised from the GoFundMe campaign would help pay for alternative treatment and other expenses, like traveling to see medical specialists.

Friends have suggested that H.R. try psychoactive drugs like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, but Hudson rejects the idea.

“He would never do any kind of psychoactive drugs,” Hudson says. “So it’s not something that we will be trying.” But she adds that they are looking into CBD oil, a common medical marijuana treatment.

Hudson says despite H.R.’s chronic pain, he maintains a positive outlook. “He really does live that PMA,” she says, referring to Bad Brains’ philosophy of a positive mental attitude. “He still has a smile on his face every day — even though he’s spending most of the night sobbing and crying out because the pain is just so much.”

So far, the campaign for H.R. has raised nearly $6,000.

There is also an ongoing GoFundMe campaign to raise money for Dr. Know, the Bad Brains guitarist who suffered a heart attack and organ failure last year. That campaign has raised more than $40,000 since it launched last week.

That became clear early in our conversation last week, when I asked the longtime counterculture photographer if he had any new work to promote since his 2014 collection of essays and photography, My Rules.

Glen E. Friedman (by Brett Ratner)

“F**k that,” Friedman said. “Unless you’ve read every word in the book already, don’t come to me and ask me what’s next.”

Now 53, with a photography career spanning almost 40 years, Friedman has spent most of his life embedded in subculture, and he’s just as uncompromising as many of the people he shoots.

Friedman photographed the SoCal skateboarders who inspired the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. Working with Def Jam’s Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin, he shot now-famous images of Run-DMC, Ice-T, Public Enemy and The Beastie Boys in their early years. He’s published a book of Fugazi images, and he was around during the peak years of D.C.’s hardcore scene.

Ex-Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins — one of Friedman’s favorite subjects — has said the photographer “was there at the beginning of so much cool stuff in so many different areas, it’s not funny.”

Sunday, Friedman returns to D.C. for a conversation with punk-rock veteran Alec MacKaye at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, organized by Highway magazine. In advance of their talk, Friedman chatted with me about his frustration with the music industry, his loyalty to radicalism and a subject that seemed to put him on the defensive: the lack of women in his photographs.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

Bandwidth: Do people pressure you to be more prolific?

Glen E. Friedman: I couldn’t imagine being more prolific than I am.

Run-DMC (by Glen E. Friedman)

But do people — like, say, an agent or manager — pressure you to put out more work?

No, no, no. I’ve never had an agent or a manager in my life. I’ve been doing this since I was 14. I learned all the business myself. So people might want to see more, but I don’t want to water down the archive. I feel like I’ve been able to do some pretty incredible stuff and, why ruin the credibility by shooting s**t?

Are you still out there shooting actively?

No, not at all.

When did you stop?

I didn’t stop. But it sounds like you mean someone who’s going to shows in a fairly regularly way, and I don’t do that. I still shoot pictures. I have an 8-year-old and I shoot pictures of him with film every couple of months. If something inspires me, I’ll shoot, but there are so many people shooting so much nowadays. It seems as though they all miss the correct moments, and I just kind of sit back and laugh and say “whatever,” you know?

“I’m not loyal to any overall scene. What I am loyal to is radical behavior and people wanting to change the world and make it a better place.”

What bands have inspired you recently?

I’m mostly just inspired by all the old music that I listen to. In the last year or two, I really liked seeing that Flag reunion — that was great. I love those guys. I like The Evens, of course. I call The Evens adult punk rock. I like Chain & the Gang. The usual suspects of old punks. There’s hip-hop records out there that I like, too. If I was super inspired, I would remember [their names], and then I would maybe see if they’ve got good imagery, and if they don’t, maybe give someone a call.

But everyone nowadays is into having managers and people who handle them, and no one just deals with stuff on their own. I’m really turned off by all that. I’ve never really done work with an artist if it wasn’t the artist who came directly to me. All that f*****g other middle level — I mean, some people need it, but I don’t f**k with that.

“My Rules,” the 2014 photography collection by Glen E. Friedman

You seem pretty loyal to the punk scene. I was reading an interview with you where you’re like, “Yup, still listening to Fugazi.”

Look, I mean, I’m 53 now, and I’m not out there digging in the crates like when I was a kid, looking for the hottest, newest stuff. And nowadays everything’s just f*****g spoonfed to everyone on a website.

I don’t think it’s [loyalty] — I’m loyal to my friends, but I’m not loyal to any subcultures, necessarily, unless they deserve that loyalty. What I’m inspired by, I like to share with other people. It’s not blind loyalty. There are plenty of s****y bands and plenty of s****y everything, and I’m not loyal to any overall scene. What I am loyal to is radical behavior and people wanting to change the world and make it a better place.

So is that what you saw in D.C.’s punk scene, and in Fugazi? People who were trying to improve the world?

I first started coming to D.C. in 1982. I’d been there before, skateboarding, many years before, but I came down to see Minor Threat. I became very close friends with a lot of guys down there. It was a very unique scene, it was very intense. But they also had a sense of humor.

But really, it was the music that inspired me. It wasn’t all the social s**t necessarily that was going on within the scene, it was just the music was inspiring. It was f*****g great, and kicked my ass. As a young kid, those things are vital to your life.

Fugazi, the level of integrity that they exhibited was totally inspiring and something that I lived by, myself. And the emotion that was pouring out of what they were doing was phenomenal… So I started taking pictures of them every so often. I didn’t bring my camera every time. But there came a point of seeing Fugazi shows where it was like, “F**k! I should have had my camera tonight. F**k! I missed some great moments.” Even though there was really no place to get those photographs published, because no one was interested in putting out pictures of Fugazi [at the time].

Have you always stuck to subjects you identify with? Have you ever taken a photo of someone you had absolutely no interest in shooting?

I always identify with my subjects. There are subjects that I’ve shot that I have not so much interest in. But they’re associated with someone who I do respect. Like, if Rick Rubin asked me to photograph a particular band for him, and he was able to express to me why it meant so much to him that I did it, [I’d do it]… Other than [for] the financial reward, because that’s usually the last thing that comes into play. It’s really about what we’re all feeling when we get together and talk about the artist and their art.

But I have to say those are my least favorite things to do. When I’m into it, the work is usually better.

Tony Alva (by Glen E. Friedman)

You’ve taken a lot of photos of young, tough dudes. Do you ever find that they’re pretending to be someone else in front of the camera?

Very often they aren’t as rough and tough or as rebellious as they appear. But to be honest, that’s how I see them, and how their music portrays them, and how I idealize them before I know them. So even if someone isn’t the toughest guy in real life, if that’s how he’s portrayed in his own work… that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t consider myself a documentarian. I’m trying to inspire people. I’m not just trying to show people what’s there. I’m trying to f*****g wake them up.

“I don’t think the word ‘integrity’ is even in the vernacular anymore. People don’t get it. They consider it a success if someone comes to them to sponsor their tour or if they have some brand behind them.”

What female counterculture icons have you photographed? I know that you recently shot Pussy Riot. Anyone else?

I’d say there’s only a few. And it’s not by any choice. I’m not sexist at all in that way, or in any way, I would hope. But they weren’t around. There were no — at the time I was shooting skateboarding, there were no female skateboarders that were of the stature, as far as how they were riding, like the guys that I was shooting.

At punk-rock shows, there were a few women involved, and I shot pictures of some of them, but the numbers were not there. And they were not the ones inspiring me and generally not inspiring many people in the scene. Certainly they were inspiring women in the scene, even if they weren’t in a great band, [by] just the fact that they were up there on the stage. But again, I’m not a documentarian on that level, just taking pictures of everyone. I was taking pictures of things that were overwhelmingly, fantastically inspiring.

The most important bands that I shot, and the ones that inspired me the most, unfortunately there weren’t too many women in them. And that’s just a sign of the times. It’s not sexist in any way. It’s just that — what am I gonna say, that I love listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees? I don’t. Do I like The Fall? No, I don’t like them either. One has a male singer, one has a female singer. It has nothing to do with the sex. If they f*****g kick my ass and inspire me, I’m going to shoot pictures of them.

But recently, those women from Pussy Riot and what they’ve done, I mean, jeez. They f*****g ended up in the Gulag. They’re f*****g badass women. And they were very inspirational to me. That’s probably one of the most recent pictures of someone who’s involved with music that I ever shot. Although their music isn’t even very good, it’s just their f*****g attitudes and what they’ve done. They’re incredible.

You’ve said that when you were younger, shooting the skateboarding, punk and hip-hop scenes, that you lived for those things. What do you live for now?

I live to still inspire people in the best way that I can through a lot of my old pictures. It’s really amazing that I took most of the pictures that I’m known for half of my life ago, practically. But they still inspire to this day. And I didn’t realize when I was taking them that they would have a shelf life at all.

I guess I live for just continuing to inspire people with things that I’ve learned. I have a particular lifestyle, I have a particular view of the world, and I would like to inspire more people to think for themselves — and maybe in the same direction that I do. Not to have copycats or something, but a way that I see we could all make the world a better place. Stop eating animals. Care about the environment. Do things from the heart, have some integrity. These are touchstones that I believe that people are lacking these days, unfortunately.

I don’t think the word “integrity” is even in the vernacular anymore. It’s like, people don’t get it. They consider it a success if someone comes to them to sponsor their tour or if they have some brand behind them. To me, that’s the antithesis of what we want.

For kids nowadays, that’s the goal, is to have corporate support. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the last resort.

Glen E. Friedman talks with Alec MacKaye 2 p.m. on Oct. 25 at the D.C. Public Library downtown.

Nationwide this week is called Banned Books Week. At the D.C. Public Library, it’s called “Uncensored.”

Banned Books Week was established in 1982 to raise awareness of books that people want off the shelves. It’s not an issue limited to the McCarthy era — even now, parents, leaders and various interest groups rally to censor or remove books from libraries for all kinds of reasons. But the D.C. Public Library widens the scope of Banned Books Week, looking at any form of expression that’s been challenged, including music.

That’s why the library has made a playlist for Banned Books Week two years in a row, says Maggie Gilmore, a librarian in DCPL’s adult information services division. This year, the D.C. Public Library Foundation asked her to compile a list of songs with a dual theme: censorship and D.C. music.

Gilmore consulted her fellow librarians for ideas and solicited input from attendees at August’s D.C. Record Fair at Penn Social. This is the resulting playlist, streamable via Spotify and YouTube, below:

Bad Brains, “Banned in DC”
Chain & the Gang, “Free Will”
Parliament, “Chocolate City”
Chuck Brown & the Soul Searchers, “Run Joe”
The Evens, “Wanted Criminals”
The Cornel West Theory, “DC Love Story”
Ice-T, “Freedom of Speech”
Coup Sauvage & the Snips, “Don’t Touch My Hair” (JD Samson Remix)
Minor Threat, “Straight Edge”
Bikini Kill, “Rebel Girl”
Unrest, “Malcolm X Park”
The Blackbyrds, “Rock Creek Park”
The Roots with Wale and Chrisette Michele, “Rising Up”
Diamond District, “March Off”
Marvin Gaye, “Got To Give It Up”

The playlist comes across as a celebration of outspoken music — not hard to find in this town, Gilmore says.

“[D.C.] is a natural environment for people to discuss political issues,” Gilmore says. Plus, she says, the city’s constantly shifting population can aggravate local tensions.

“With D.C. having so many people moving in and out of the city, there’s always been tension in the various groups that are represented in D.C.,” Gilmore says. She cites D.C.’s signature funk sound as an example. “Go-go has always been challenged by those who may feel it’s obtrusive — and maybe not even the music itself, but the social scene around go-go.”

The playlist debuted at last Friday’s opening party for “Uncensored: Information Antics,” the library’s new exhibit in honor of Banned Books Week. The show remains on view at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library through Oct. 22.

Gilmore says “Uncensored” and this playlist are part of the library’s larger efforts to document and support local expression in all forms. DCPL’s D.C. Punk Archive has been in the works for a year now. Gilmore coordinates the library’s series of punk-rock basement shows, meant to highlight its punk collection. After this, the library focuses on archiving go-go, then jazz, Gilmore says.

“Trying to highlight local music, [D.C.’s cultural] history and current artists — that’s one of the main goals of the basement shows, to provide a space for bands to play,” Gilmore says. “So this was an opportunity to continue on that.”

Related: WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show airs a segment on Banned Books Week Tuesday at 1:32 p.m. Can’t tune in? The segment will be archived on kojoshow.org.

Warning: Some songs contain explicit lyrics.

Via Spotify:

The last two years have brought a huge resurgence of interest in the scene’s bygone days, exemplified by the “Pump Me Up” exhibit at the Corcoran last year, Lucian Perkins’ Hard Art DC 1979 book, the fanzine archive at University of Maryland, two recently launched punk-rock archives at George Washington University and D.C. Public Library, the D.C.-themed episode of Dave Grohl’s Sonic Highways HBO series and a whopping five documentaries—one of them still in the works—related to D.C. punk music. (And I admit that Bandwidth has been a gushing faucet of D.C. punk coverage lately, so as the website’s editor, I play a role in this, too.)

But why is all of this reflection happening now?

Today’s Kojo guests—Positive Force co-founder Mark Andersen, Priests singer Katie Alice Greer, the GWU music archive’s Tina Plottel and myself—grappled with that. Andersen rejected that nostalgia alone is driving the deluge. (Because punk isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about the present, he said.) But the activist couldn’t explain why the recent past has been such a fertile period for, well, the past. Cynthia Connolly—the Banned In D.C. co-creator who called into the show—didn’t seem to think this moment bears special significance. She said it seemed like a coincidence, because many of the aforementioned projects took shape years ago and happen to be wrapping up now.

But here’s a theory I neglected to bring up on the air today: In an interview back in July, Punk the Capital filmmaker James Schneider told me that folks should try to preserve the past now because redevelopment is erasing D.C.’s cultural history. “With the city changing so fast, on so many fronts, it’s more important than ever now to ensure that the city’s identity is firmly anchored before a remodeled city takes over,” he said. When these films, archives and other projects began coming together, was it because their creators saw gentrification beginning to erase history? Or is the barrage, like Connolly said, coincidental?

In the hourlong segment, Andersen also made key points about punk rock’s relationship with activism and gentrification’s impact on the very poor (versus the less-urgent effect it’s had on middle-class artists), and we mulled over whether D.C.’s current scene has maintained the sense of social responsibility that’s depicted in the forthcoming documentary Positive Force: More Than A Witness.

Ultimately, today’s show wasn’t all about nostalgia, even though that’s what we set out to discuss. But like many of the ideas revived in these allegedly nostalgic films and archives, we found that talking about the past brought up issues musicians and activists are still wrestling with today.

Listen to the segment over on the Kojo Nnamdi Show website.

Image by Flickr user rockcreek used under a Creative Commons license.

Sonic Highways is really about the process of recording the latest Foo Fighters album in eight American cities, and this episode (I haven’t seen the others) deals with Grohl’s own musical coming-of-age. But along the way, the show aims to trace at least a few decades of D.C. music history, and it does that well—though clearly within the parameters of Grohl’s own experience.

After a short discussion of the 1968 riots and class/race stratification in the District, Sonic Highways takes on go-go, leaning heavily on feedback from Trouble Funk’s “Big Tony” Fisher. Grohl pulls choice footage of Chuck Brown’s live shows, explores the go-go pocket and grabs a few soundbites from Pharrell Williams and D.C. Mayor Vince Gray. But Grohl discusses go-go mostly through a rock lens. Virginia hip-hop/rock band RDGLDGRN (Grohl collaborators), Black Cat co-owner Dante Ferrando and Dischord Records’ Ian MacKaye—among others—all have their say on go-go, then the show moves right into punk and parks itself there for the rest of the episode. Anyone looking for a thorough study of D.C.’s most distinctive African-American music won’t find it here.

The show’s brightest moments come from key footage of local shows, images by scene photographers like Lucian Perkins and—above all—the swath of big personalities Grohl roped into the episode. MacKaye and punk activist Mark Andersen get a lot of well-spent screen time, but the candid Trouble Funk leader, Bad Brains’ funny and direct bassist Darryl Jenifer and bearded superproducer Rick Rubin made some of the strongest—or at least funniest—contributions. (Though I suspect it was Rubin’s L.A. Buddha routine, not his quotes, that produced the laughs at last night’s screening.)

Toward the end of the episode, The Foo Fighters charge into “The Feast and the Famine,” a song it recorded at Arlington’s Inner Ear Studio and wrote based on elements of D.C. music discussed in the program. (Hear the song below.) The song’s title speaks to that commonly cited dichotomy so central to D.C.’s identity: that this is a city home to both the world’s greatest power and the starkest example of that power’s disastrous failure.

It’s obvious that Grohl doesn’t have deep ties to the underprivileged half of that dichotomy, and certainly doesn’t now—in the Q-and-A that followed last night’s screening, Grohl said he paid for the entire TV series by playing two stadium shows in Mexico City—but he gives it pride of place on an extremely visible platform. The show’s emphasis on activism is unexpected and commendable, considering that the local punk scene’s hard-left, DIY-or-don’t-bother attitude is what granted it staying power—even more than the sound of D.C. punk rock, which has taken so many forms over the decades.

Early in the episode, Mark Andersen summarizes one of the most valuable takeaways from Sonic Highways, though he can’t take full credit for it himself. “Charles Dickens I think once called Washington, D.C. ‘the city of magnificent intentions,'” Andersen says. “The gap between the dream and the reality is excruciatingly wide.”

The show airs tonight at 11 p.m. on HBO. Tonight’s screening and Foo Fighters show at Black Cat is sold out.