Black Flag

Black Flag, American rock band whose extensive touring and prolific recording helped to popularize hardcore punk, the genre that arose in California in the early 1980s in response to the punk movement of the 1970s. The original members were guitarist Greg Ginn, bassist Chuck Dukowski, lead singer Keith Morris, and drummer Brian Migdol. The band went through numerous personnel changes, and various members launched reboots decades after the group dissolved in 1986. Later members included Henry Rollins, Ron Reyes, Dez Cadena, Kira Roessler, and Anthony Martinez.

Founded in 1976 in Hermosa Beach, a suburb of Los Angeles, Black Flag focused on themes such as boredom and the banality of suburban life and accelerated punk’s blistering tempo to an even more breakneck pace, helping to establish many of the conventions of hardcore. Appealing to a largely white male audience that made slam dancing (the purposeful collision of bodies) in the mosh pit (the clump of audience members in front of the bandstand) a ritual at live performances, Black Flag brought a fury and aggression to its music and performance seldom equaled by other hardcore bands.

In 1978 Ginn and Dukowski founded SST Records to distribute the band’s music, and the label’s first release was the EP Nervous Breakdown. Along with Slash Records, SST became the avatar of the West Coast punk scene, and its early roster included seminal hardcore acts the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, and Hüsker Dü. After settling on Rollins as its vocalist, Black Flag released Damaged (1981), its first full-length album, which spawned the group’s best-known single, “Rise Above.” Later recordings flirted with heavy metal, and the band also provided musical accompaniment to Rollins’s spoken-word poetry before breaking up in 1986.

(Read Britannica’s essay “Are Song Lyrics Poetry?”)

With the demise of Black Flag, Ginn and Dukowski devoted their time to the management of SST, and they signed such acts as the punk reggae combo Bad Brains and the New York art rock band Sonic Youth. As the focus of the American independent music scene shifted to the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s, SST lost much of its cachet. Rollins continued performing as the lead singer of the Rollins Band, but he later turned his attention to acting and spent much of his time delivering spoken-word monologues and managing his publishing house, 21361. Ginn performed with more than a dozen different bands over the next 25 years. Black Flag briefly reunited for three concerts in 2003, and in 2013 Ginn announced that the band was getting back together, with Reyes as vocalist and Gregory Moore on drums. The reconstituted Black Flag issued the album What The… in late 2013. During the reunion tour, however, Reyes was replaced by Mike Vallely. The following year a settlement was reached in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Ginn against several former band members, including Morris and Dukowski, who were performing together under the name FLAG.

Another lineup of Black Flag, consisting of Ginn and Vallely plus bassist Tyler Smith and drummer Isaias Gil, began touring in 2019. Yet another reboot occurred in 2025, with Ginn recruiting three considerably younger musicians—Bryce Weston, Max Zanelly, and David Rodriguez—in his new home base in Texas.