And what they played was no longer the proto-punk of Johnny Rotten or Joe Strummer. Traditional punk was passé, supplanted by a bolder, faster and thoroughly American incarnation known colloquially as hardcore. If you've ever seen Penelope Spheeris' hilariously awful documentary "The Decline of Western Civilization," you've seen the overripe caricature that was old-school punk by the end of the '70s, and hardcore pushed the movement to the edge of sonic viability, with no limits to how noisy or obnoxious a group could be. Song structures were often brutally minimalist, clocking in at under 20 seconds in a furious, unwrought sub-style known as thrash.

On one hand, it was easy to brush off hardcore as a semi-musical novelty. After all, how much subtlety could be excavated from a half-minute, hundred-decibel onslaught? But lurking beneath, one could sometimes locate complexity and nuance. Hell, the Bad Brains were Rastafarians who broke up their sets with reggae and fusion. Talent could be a dirty word in the hardcore world, a slap against all its egalitarian impudence, but still you'd stumble on it. Listen to Scream's "Still Screaming," for instance, with its acoustic timeouts and cascading refrains, or the clever metaphorical songwriting of Jello Biafra, twitchy frontman of the Dead Kennedys.

For the most part, however, and as in-your-face innovations tend to go, the hardcore framework proved a fast-arcing artistic smother. Successes of the grass-roots ethos aside, it was all coming full circle, the heretofore cutting edge hemmed into a whole new typecast of post-adolescent screamers and I-can-play-it-faster guitarists.

But just as punk rock appeared doomed to a legacy of broken guitar strings and blown-out amps -- but not so entirely that a band with the right ideas couldn't make gold from the pile -- along came three weird guys from Minnesota.

Led by guitarist/vocalist Bob Mould and drummer/vocalist Grant Hart, ably assisted by bassist Greg Norton, Hüsker Dü took the volume and do-it-yourself credo of their contemporaries, swirled in a generous measure of melodic hooks and '60s-era psychedelia, and pushed the boundaries of punk into unprecedented territory.

Not that Mould, Hart or Norton acknowledged such confines to begin with, never exactly pleased with their classification as a punk outfit. For one thing, they just didn't look the part: These were big, sweaty, chain-smoking men who obviously hadn't shaved or showered in a while. Norton, trimmest and most dapper of the threesome, wore a handlebar mustache. Wrote Terry Katzman, the Hüskers' first sound engineer and friend still, "Hüsker Dü seemingly defined the punk ethos ... without necessarily embracing or endorsing it."

Sure, they'd been at it since '79, and the band's first LP had been a sweat-bucket thrash fest called "Land Speed Record," but even at breakneck velocity there was something ineffably refined and just, well, different about Hüsker Dü. If pressed to explain, one might break out 1982's "Everything Falls Apart." Amid Side 1's hypsersonic avalanche is planted a cover of Donovan's 1966 hit "Sunshine Superman." Trite, perhaps, on the face of it, until you hear how tellingly and astonishingly un-ironic is the remake, without so much as a note's worth of smirk or parody.

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