When someone mentions Minneapolis, Minnesota, the name Hüsker Dü probably does not spring to mind. The home town of my favourite band is more famous for having given the world Prince, a man so diametrically opposed to the Hüskers, it is almost unbelievable that they are from the same place. But then (talented as Prince is), sometimes it is hard to believe that the flamboyant superstar is not a kind of shared, perverse fantasy. Therein lies his most vital difference to the Dü.

The actual phrase ‘Hüsker Dü’ means ‘Do You Remember?’ in Norwegian. Sadly I do not; the band broke up just after I was born. As I listen to Bob Mould’s molten guitars spilling beautifully from my cd player, I get the sense that you don’t have to remember. Because they created it, and lived it purely on their own terms, the music remains more alive and ten times fresher than anything around today.

The DIY approach to music wasn’t new, even then. The Stooges, Ramones, and punk in general left an epitaph that complex or commercial music was certainly not necessarily better. However, in the 1980s this ethos spread across the US, not just in terms confined to music; fanzines and independent labels sprung up everywhere too. The difference to punk was that punk tried to break the system; the new ‘hardcore’ crowd simply created their own system. From pockets all over the country came bands willing to work together. When one toured the West Coast, the Minutemen would give up their beds and food for you; when they came to Minneapolis, you returned the favour. It was all about spreading the music, turning the entire country into a local music scene. Actually listening to the music of these bands, it is as if the instruments are not there; the music is emanating from the very people themselves. Take Sonic Youth’s Teen Age Riot – it is almost as if you are watching them walk down the street, composing the song in their heads. Or listen to Mark Arm of Mudhoney squeal ‘touch me I’m sick’ over a sleazy gutter-guitar riff; you can see him as a social leper daring the toffee-nosed musical elite to descend to his glorious level. They might even like it.

There seemed to be a place for everyone: the college types (Hüsker Dü), the slackers (Dinosaur Jr), the nerdy (Steve Albini of Big Black) and the plain insane (Butthole Surfers). And yet all of these resonated with a very male tone, a search for a distinctly masculine identity. Only two women were really noted in the movement. One was Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. Sonic Youth were in many ways the anomaly in the program, identifiable as the intelligentsia of the movement. The antithesis was Kathleen Lynch, whose claim to fame was dancing naked on stage for Butthole Surfers. It is important to note that the majority of the bands were wrapped within the music, rather than a sexist agenda; J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr would lyrically express a desire to improve his spiritual connection with the opposite sex. Nevertheless, hardcore was primitive, brutal, instinctive. It was also full of people like Steve Albini, who liked to emphasise his difference from the majority by intentionally offending their idea of decency. All this added together to form a tumultuous but eerily melodic rage, distilled into three minute bursts. It was as if they had chained the American Psycho protagonist Patrick Bateman to a guitar and watched him play. Ferocious, but sharp, smooth and catchy.

Rebuking the ethic of the white yuppie exec brings us to another group of disaffected citizens – the black community. Here we find that, despite the vast differences in style and colour clash, the articulations found were not always distant from those of the underground. 1988 saw the split of Hüsker Dü. It also saw a riot of words spent over NWA’s Fuck Tha Police, a prosecution of police racism. NWA would later claim that because of this, Detroit police chased them off the stage at a gig. If anything, this should show the huge gulf between the separate disciplines of hip hop and underground. Many of the white hardcore kids were busy flouting every drug law in the book and being lauded for it; had they been black they would have been thrown into jail. It was exactly this kind of white hypocrisy that the more politically charged Public Enemy despised; their seminal release It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back dealt extensively with white society’s dismissal and simultaneously paradoxical suspicion and censorship of black culture. “Soul control/beat is the father of your rock ‘n’ roll” observes Chuck D on Bring The Noise, and with such maxims did the shared identity of black artists start to demand acceptance and space within the stratosphere. After all, at the same time that black culture was being downplayed, legendary coloured artists such as Fats Domino, Little Richard and Chuck Berry were becoming some of the first inductees of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall Of Fame.

And yet there are spiritual connections. The independence – NWA only came into being through Eazy E forming his own label Ruthless Records, mirroring indie musicians such as Greg Ginn of Black Flag. The masculinity – again some, though by no means all, hip hop exhibited serious misogynist tendencies, and that which did not often retained a confrontational masculine edge. Most obviously, there were parallels in both communities’ quests to find an identity outside that which society prescribed to them, symbolizing a cross-cultural male anti-Reaganite reaction. Tragically, there would be parallels in the self-defeating downfalls as well; the underground would be swallowed into Nirvana’s success, and many in the black community would resent the way hip hop became stereotype parlance for what was “black”. But in the process, music was created which lives on like a paean to the revelation of identity, trophies of personal victory won the hard way. Music that breathes the lives, power and rebellion of its masters. If you don’t like what society says you are, don’t bitch – form a band.