RIOT RUN v2 - Running music.

What came first - the anger or the playlist that channeled it? I've been thinking about this while running the Lakefront Trail at six in the morning, wind coming off Lake Michigan like it's got a personal vendetta, and this playlist in my ears making everything sharper and more honest than I want it to be.

Here's the thing about hardcore punk: it's the most deceptively perfect running music ever created because it was never designed for fitness. It was designed for small rooms, bad decisions, and the kind of intensity that burns out fast and leaves scars. Songs that clock in under two minutes because who has time for a bridge when you're trying to explain why everything feels broken? You don't jog to Minor Threat. You survive it.

This playlist opens with that classic one-two punch - "Upside Down" into "Filler" - and already you're in that 1980s hardcore space where songs were faster than your warm-up should be. These aren't tempo-mapped BPM calculations. This is the sound of people who couldn't afford studio time learning to say everything in 90 seconds. The Dead Kennedys understood that precision and chaos aren't opposites. Jello Biafra's sneer over East Bay Hardcore's machine-gun drumming - it's the musical equivalent of that first mile where your body is screaming at you to stop and you don't because stopping means thinking.

By the time you hit "Circles" and "Big Lizard," you're deep in that Descendents/Black Flag corridor - South Bay hardcore that sounds like it was recorded in someone's garage because it probably was. The production is raw not because they wanted it that way but because that's what you got with whatever equipment you could borrow. And somehow that rawness makes it more honest. More useful. When you're at mile two and questioning every decision that led to you being awake this early, that honesty matters.

Then Bad Brains shows up with "Sailin' On" and suddenly you remember that hardcore punk was also capable of joy. That Rastafarian positivity bleeding through the distortion, HR's voice doing things that shouldn't be physically possible. I had a kid come into Championship Vinyl last month asking about Bad Brains, and I didn't know whether to be excited that someone under 25 cared or depressed that it required an explanation. Barry would've lectured him for twenty minutes. I just sold him the album.

"Minor Threat" at track ten is where this playlist stops being about running and starts being about everything else. Ian MacKaye screaming about what you won't put in your body while you're actively poisoning yourself with exercise and regret. The irony isn't lost on me. That straight-edge philosophy, that Dischord Records aesthetic - it's the sound of people drawing lines, making rules, trying to control something when everything felt out of control. I've never been straight edge. I've never been that certain about anything.

"Waiting Room" follows and it's Fugazi, which means it's Ian MacKaye post-Minor Threat, post-certainty, making something more complex and angular and honestly more interesting. That opening bassline is one of the great false promises in punk history - it sounds like it's going to resolve and it never quite does. Just keeps circling, keeps pushing. That's miles three through four. You're not getting faster. You're just continuing.

The back half gets uglier - Misfits, OFF!, more tracks that sound like arguments with the universe. "Where Eagles Dare" closes it out and it's the Misfits doing their horror-punk thing, Glenn Danzig before he became a meme, when it was all just theatrical rage and power chords. It's absurd and perfect and by the time it ends you're done running and you're not sure what you proved but you showed up.

Top 5 Reasons This Playlist Works When Nothing Else Does:

1. Every song is a contained explosion - nothing over three minutes, most under two, which matches how long you can sustain actual sprinting before your body calls you a liar.

2. The production is consistently raw across different bands and eras - Dischord, SST, whoever could afford studio time that week - creating this through-line of barely-controlled chaos that makes your own struggling feel appropriate.

3. Zero romantic ballads, zero nostalgia, zero sentimentality - just forward motion because backward is too painful to consider.

4. The genre stays hardcore but shifts subgenres enough - skate punk, melodic hardcore, post-hardcore, horror punk - that your brain doesn't tune out even when your legs want to quit.

5. It's music made by people who were furious about something specific and that specificity makes it universal - you can plug your own fury in and it works.

Here's what I keep coming back to: this playlist is old school for the young at heart, but what does that even mean? That these songs are thirty, forty years old and still feel immediate? That the kids who made this music were young and furious and now they're just older and hopefully less furious? Or that being young at heart means carrying around that same unresolved intensity, that same inability to settle, that same suspicion that comfort is just another word for giving up?

I think it means all of that. I think it means you're still running at six in the morning trying to outpace something you can't name while listening to music that was never designed to help you do that. The music doesn't offer solutions. It just confirms that the struggle is real and that other people felt it too, violently enough to plug in guitars and scream about it into cheap microphones.

Running to hardcore punk doesn't make anything better. It just makes it louder.