You can’t really call this an argument, I suppose, but in New Orleans we got to talking about what the hardest New York Hardcore record of all time is, and there are really only two contenders: the Live ‘89 Agnostic Front album and the Cro-Mags’ Age of Quarrel. (I was surprised to learn, via the internet, that the actual AF record is titled Live At CBGBs, since I have never heard anyone call it anything besides Live ‘89.) It’s kind of pointless to debate which record is harder. Both albums achieve an unmatchable, metaphysical density. That shit is just hard.

But a question remains: what’s the hardest NYHC song of all time? There I think you can actually crown a victor. The Cro-Mags’ "Street Justice." Here the hardness emerges not primarily from the music — which is really, really hard! — but from the message. "Street Justice" is John Joseph descending Moses-like from the mountain of the Lower East Side, stone tablet in either hand, delivering the Law. When all else has failed, thou shalt submit to street justice. Several times during the song, John dismisses objections by the invocations "it doesn’t matter…" and "no way out…" — all that remains is the unyielding code of street justice. Knowing that John Joseph was an AWOL Marine when he wrote this song and Harley Flanagan lived in a vacant tenement building with a pitbull for protection adds an additional element of realness: these men would not only dispense street justice, but they would also submit to it when the time came. This is probably the first time that punk rock got a terrifying glimpse of what the anarchy it churlishly toyed with would actually look like: not an art school rave-up, but the reconstituted authority of brutality emerging from the wreckage, with thousands of shaved-headed teenagers pledging allegiance to mob violence. The Age of Quarrel has an endpoint: street justice.

If you can make an argument for a harder hardcore song — New York or otherwise — I’d like to hear it.