Led by SST Records founder Greg Ginn and including future muscle-bound poet-slash-actor Henry Rollins, Black Flag exerted a profound influence on the formation and endurance of hardcore punk. They and their southern California peers transformed punk from the pop-based genre of the Sex Pistols and Ramones to a malevolent, driving, almost arrhythmic caterwauling that better expressed the anger of America's dispossessed suburban adolescent male. One can argue that's not a good thing, giving rise as it did to the thuggery embodied by the Skinheads, but Black Flag never stood for that. They represented a D.I.Y. ethic that allowed art and commerce to be placed back into the hands of the people. And, that's a good thing....

On SST and other labels, Black Flag were some prolific motherfuckers, recording eight albums (two of them live) plus a host of singles and EP's - all in less than a decade. Wasted Again is a thrilling (though brief) career retrospective, and Who's Got The 10 1/2? is the definitive live document. Beyond those discs, all of their original albums (especially the full-length debut Damaged and In My Head) will delight the faithful. And, if collecting Black Flag's catalog, bear in mind that The First Four Years is essential - it compiles the pre-Rollins recordings - all of them non-LP. Henry Rollins himself later recorded about a jillion albums encompassing music and spoken word, both under his own name and as the Rollins Band.