History Music / BlackFlag

* UnintentionalPeriodPiece: ''Series/SaturdayNightLive'' and ''Series/MondayNightFootball'' are the only shows mentioned in "TV Party" that are still on the air.
** And AGAIN on the redo of the song Henry did for the West Memphis 3 record. Only ''Monday Night Football'' survived that one!

* TheEighties

* HardcorePunk

* EpicRocking - "Nothing Left Inside", "Scream" and "Three Nights" from ''My War'' are all about 6 minutes in length. "Armageddon Man" from ''Family Man'' clocks at 9 minutes. "Your Last Affront" and the title song of ''The Process of Weeding Out'' are both just under 10 minutes.

* ExecutiveMeddling: ''Damaged'' was going to be released nationwide, under an MCA imprint. But the label would have lost money on the record, so they not only wouldn't release it, they filed a legal injunction that prevented Black Flag from releasing ''any'' material on another label for several years. This all but killed the band's chances of making it big.

* TakeThat: "You Bet We've Got Something Personal Against You!" was a blatant one against Keith Morris after he'd left the band.

* DisproportionateRetribution: The narrator of "Police Story" is beaten "across my head with a billy club", arrested, fined, and is looking at a potential sentence to jail...for ''flipping off a group of policemen and yelling at them to go "get fucked"''.

-->"This pain in my heart\\
It just means I'm not very smart\\

* PromotedFanboy - When the band was performing at a bar, an audience member requested that they play "Clocked In". The band suggested that he sing it himself. He did, and he was good. The current vocalist was looking to switch to guitar to avoid damaging his voice, so the band hired the fan, Music/HenryRollins, as their official vocalist.
** Not quite as "face out of the crowd" as it seems. Rollins had established a friendship with the band prior to this. He talks about it in full in his book Get In The Van.
* ProtestSong - Well, they ''are'' a punk band.

* EpicRocking - "Nothing Left Inside", "Scream" and "Three Nights" from My War are all about 6 minutes in length. "Armageddon Man" from Family Man clocks at 9 minutes. "Your Last Affront" and the title song of The Process of Weeding Out are both just under 10 minutes.
* ExecutiveMeddling: ''Damaged'' was going to be released nationwide, under an MCA imprint. But the label would have lost money on the record, so they not only wouldn't release it, they filed a legal injunction that prevented Black Flag from releasing ''any'' material on another label for several years. This all but killed the band's chances of making it big.

** And AGAIN on the redo of the song Henry did for the West Memphis 3 record. Only Monday Night Football survived that one!

* HistoryMarchesOn: ''Series/SaturdayNightLive'' and ''Series/MondayNightFootball'' are the only shows mentioned in "TV Party" that are still on the air.

!!! "Trope party tonight! Trope party tonight!":

* DarkerAndEdgier - Ginn said that after Rollins joined, "We couldn't do songs with a sense of humour anymore [[hottip:*:he was talking about "TV Party" specifically]]; he got into the [[BuffySpeak serious way-out poet thing]]."

Black Flag forged a unique sound early on that mixed the raw simplicity of the Ramones with atonal guitar solos and frequent tempo shifts. The band was also known for the intense and evocative lyrics found in their songs, most of which were penned by Ginn. Like other punk bands of this era, Black Flag gave voice to an anti-authoritarian, non-conformist message, featuring songs punctuated with descriptions of isolation, neurosis, poverty, and paranoia, themes that would be explored further when HenryRollins joined the group as lead singer in 1981. Most of the band's material was released on Ginn's independent label, SST Records.

!!Tropes that apply to Black Flag:

* AscendedFanboy - When the band was performing at a bar, an audience member requested that they play "Clocked In". The band suggested that he sing it himself. He did, and he was good. The current vocalist was looking to switch to guitar to avoid damaging his voice, so the band hired the fan, Music/HenryRollins, as their official vocalist.
** Not quite as "face out of the crowd" as it seems. Rollins had established a friendship with the band prior to this. He talks about it in full in his book Get In The Van.

* [=Jerkass=]- Rollins once said to Ginn "Why don't we make a record that was like the last one so people won't always be trying to catch up with what we're doing?". As revenge, Ginn buried his vocals in the mix of their last album ''In My Head''.

* JerkAss - Rollins once said to Ginn "Why don't we make a record that was like the last one so people won't always be trying to catch up with what we're doing?". As revenge, Ginn buried his vocals in the mix of their last album ''In My Head''.

** Not quite as "face out of the crowd" as it seems. Rollins had established a friendship with the band prior to this. He talks about it in full in his book '''Get In The Van'''

* SignatureSong - "Rise Above".

* SelfDeprecation - Henry Rollins has said numerous times he thought Black Flag's best work was before he joined the band.

* StageNames - Two notable examples: their first bass player used the name "Chuck Dukowski" as a protest against the then-prevalent anti-Polish prejudice (and "Polish jokes"), and after several falling outs Ron Reyes was credited as "Chavo Pederast" for the ''Jealous Again'' EP, to which he retaliated by hitting his replacement Dez Cadena with a brick and smashing the windshield of the band's touring van.
** HenryRollins changed his name upon joining the band (his last name is actually Garfield), which he claims was to avoid trouble with the police.

* EpicRocking - "Nothing Left Inside", "Scream" and "Three Nights".

Over the course of the 1980s, Black Flag's sound, as well as their notoriety, evolved in ways that alienated much of their early punk audience. As well as being central to the creation of hardcore, they were part of the first wave of American West Coast punk rock and are considered a key influence on the punk subculture. Along with being among the earliest punk rock groups to incorporate elements and the influence of heavy metal melodies and rhythm (particularly in their later records), there were often overt freestyles, free jazz, breakbeat and contemporary classical elements in their sound, especially in Ginn's guitar playing, and the band interspersed records and performances with instrumentals throughout their career. They also played longer, slower, and more complex songs at a time when many bands in their milieu stuck to a raw, fast, three-chord format. As a result, their extensive discography is more stylistically varied than many of their punk rock contemporaries.