Hardcore for Nerds

» STREET CARNAGE » KATY PERRY VS. FUCKED UP

This is the denouement of the convo about the actual F’ed Up/Perry beef. Pink Eye, as usual, seems nice enuff. And the angry tweets from the Perry army are guffaw-adorable.

You know what’s unique about that generation? For them. the Internet is more than a second life. It IS their life. For us (well, you’re a lot older than me) the Internet is a place where we goof off and maybe read something but as soon as we close our computers, it’s gone. For them, the computer never really shuts off.

I never thought of that. Maybe that’s why that gay kid killed himself after the blow job video came out. We’d go, “Yikes, that’s embarrassing” and avoid going online but for him, it was like having to wear a sandwich board that said, “I blow dudes.”

It’s also why nobody got the FEAR reference. Old hardcore quotes are not going to click with Katy Perry fans.

You know Ian Mackaye says DOA invented the word hardcore?

I know, but they weren’t the first hardcore band.

Who was?

The Rude Kids from Sweden. They were doing fast punk back in the late 70s and it is the dictionary definition of hardcore.

Given that the FEAR line he’s referencing was “let’s have a war so you can die!” with ‘you’ as implicitly plural, fuck-society-kind-of-thing, and what he said was “Seeing Katy Perry as a soldier in ‘Part of Me’ really makes me think that we need to start a war so she can go die”, makes it seem more personal and offensive. Like, a lot closer to “die in a fire” rather than an actual-ironic social critique. And duh, Katy Perry fans who are young and haven’t heard “old hardcore quotes” are obviously going to be offended - if only personally because of the cult of celebrity and the Kulturkampf that is waged between popular and alternative music. Which I don’t think Fucked Up are all that good at rising above, although he does admit to and defend listening to pop music (against joke-homophobic questions, which, um, ok?). But that last part is pretty close to indie snobbishness - is it about giving genuine historical credit to some obscure Swedes, or establishing that the “dictionary definition” of hardcore begins in obscurity and progresses to Fucked Up?

In other “the kids are/aren’t alright” news, it was somewhat entertaining to read this account of the appearance of Odd Future on BBC Newsnight (in an interview segment that is, British TV doesn’t really go in for the chat show + musical performance combination as much as the US) which accentuates the Sex Pistols comparisons:

“In an age when all generations are supposedly cool enough for rock’n’roll and every media outlet has young reporters, there’s something wonderfully anachronistic about the whole affair […]

Smith starts off relentlessly negative – “Is this the future of rock’n’roll? Teenagers queueing politely for a shop?” – and keeps up the digs throughout with references to the band’s “puerile” lyrics and an implication they’re ripping off fans with overpriced “merch”. But in the great tradition of Bill Grundy, Smith’s mocking tone suggests he’s genuinely terrified by the band and out of his depth.

When he asks what the band are trying to say, Tyler, the Creator just sneers: “Nothing. Shit to piss old white people off like you.”

“Is that right?” comes the response, before Tyler cracks up laughing. It’s undoubtedly an awkward and intimidating situation for Smith, but by heading out to belittle the band, he ensures your sympathies are never going to be with him.”

punk odd future sex pistols fucked up pop

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“ And there you have a slice of music today: the magazine that enshrined what American alternative was in the ’90s is now touting two acts sprung from hardcore, one making earnest, proggy rock, the other frantic club bangers. The difference, of course, is in the obvious goodness of Fucked Up as espousers of politically progressive language, where Skrillex took other part of the hardcore ethos: rupture, tastelessness, discord.

—

Why the loved and hated ‘now-noise’ of Skrillex is really kind of punk - Capital New York

I really like this argument, even if I find it amusing because I don’t think much of either artist musically, because why not? Though I might quibble with the dichotomy between ‘fun’ and ‘art’, or medium and message, as seen in this quote and from the follow-on to the above:

“What his music “says” isn’t as important as what it does, and at Pacha on Wednesday night, it rendered a room made for professionalized fun into a steaming, nasty jumble of amateurish, awkward kids unsure if they should dance, mosh, cry, kiss, or sing along. As Skrillex’s Mothership keeps floating through the year, surely some of this will settle down, become genre, loose its ugliness. For now, it’s not a scene; it’s the best kind of hot mess.”

A hot mess is cool! But there’s also no reason it can’t be found in progressive (in musical and lyrical terms), abrasive hardcore - whether that includes Fucked Up I’ll leave up to you - and aside from being a pro-Skrillex point, I think making the distinction too sharply actually undercuts the author’s argument. “…brave as such a stance might sound, Skrillex is not doing it for art. As he’s often said, he’s doing it for fun. And for that reason, Skrillex is pretty punk” does not really compute with me. Were Drive Like Jehu doing it for the fun or for the art? And actually, how fucked up is current popular/indie music if ‘art’ is not considered ‘fun’?

Or really, are we talking about ‘fun’ as something distinct from enjoyment, more brainless - with all the cultural and intellectual baggage that statement brings, defining itself by its opposite? Regardless of whether there’s a difference between tens of people sweating their guts out in a basement show or hundreds doing the same at a rave, I’m afraid the idea of separating even un-professionalised ‘fun’ out from punk as a distinct entity seems too close to a Hebdige-style commodification of rebellion to be even ‘kind of’ punk. I don’t think that’s an authenticity argument, I’m just saying punk has to come with some kind of message - beyond hedonism, but it could be in something as fundamental as its recombination of musical ideas or a challenge to the idea of ‘fun’; but not just in the fun itself.

The strength of this article is the connection in makes between the two musical styles, not just in terms of attitude (anyone can make a claim for some mildly unusual artist having a “punk attitude”) but in terms of familiarity the genres of both dance music and hardcore punk:

“It’s been remarked (on pretty much every D.J. message board in the world) that Skrillex is a decent producer and a shit D.J., and indeed the sort of dynamics and drama one expects from a club superstar were in short supply while the pace moved a short space from frenetic to extremely frenetic. His propensity to make the intros and outros of each of his tracks as wildly weird as possible, and to thunk in half-time dub drops right in the middle, made it seem less like he was using the traditional art of transitions as much as finding the oddest combinations of tracks to continually snap his audience between groove and noise. There went the industrial distortion of “Kyoto,” here comes the hip-hop funk of “Bangarang,” next, next, next.

The same sort of attitude toward pacing can be experienced in another scene: hardcore shows. At these, two-minute song blasts, with stops only for the four-counts between, are deployed in such unrelenting progression in order to whip the (already primed) audience from the first second until the sweat-drenched end. It’s certainly something Skrillex took from his years playing on the hardcore, punk, and emo circuits. Only, in the case of Skrillex and his audience today, the aggression that spreads around the hardcore moshpit in the form of kicks and windmills, in the now-noise club experience escapes up and out in his gigantic bass drops.”

This was the point at which I realised the article wasn’t just another attempt to dress up popular music in punk’s clothing (aside from the criticisms made above) but the genuine act of cross-genre translation and recognition that seems to be missing from much of critical discourse. Pitchfork, for example, does an uneven job of talking about some past and present niche punk/hardcore acts but then falls down when it comes to translating them into the world of indie, that it still holds a pretty big power to curate. On the other side, there are a few poptimists in the punk community - andrewtsks, for one - but sometimes the gap they try to bridge seems too large and forced to me. Either way, there’s absolutely no reason why dance music can’t be ‘punk’, given the right intentions and efforts - ironically the original, UK dubstep which Skrillex has, um, adapted had its roots in the same thing, dub, which influenced the original post-punk of the late 70s/early 80s - and with all the caveats about attitudes, this is pretty positive:

““This guy with a computer can do anything he wants,” Skrillex told Spin in his October cover-story interview. “Electronic music isn’t a fucking genre, it’s a platform.””

Question is, what do you do with that platform?

fucked up skrillex punk

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nevermind the sex pistols, it’s f**ked up

that I liked the opening two seconds of the new Earth track(s) way more than an attempt to listen to at least 15 seconds of the new Fucked Up (even skipping past the tortuously slow opening). just saying (that Fucked Up are such a bland, formulaic - like a clock that chimes punk riffs - rehash of melodic hardcore that I think it’s insane that they’re so popular, even if Andrew’s excellent end-of-year piece* on David Comes To Life actually made me feel sympathetic towards the idea of liking them**).

*”more modern melodic punk bands like Husker Du, Leatherface, and maybe even Hot Water Music” = a trio of my favourite bands, and I can’t help but read his comparison as saying Fucked Up’s grand achievement is to approximate a sound that already existed.

the Undertones connection mentioned there as well is interesting, but it’s probably worth underlining just how much of their music, post-1979, was really kitschy too - and, much like the Ramones, a failure to keep up with developments of post-punk and hardcore. the Undertones’ 2003 album Get What You Need is really good example of classic punk and kitsch done well, and essentially a less - let’s face it - pretentious version of what Fucked Up are trying to do now.

**which is cool, I just wish I could find the space/words to articulate why people should be sympathetic towards the idea of not liking them, vis-a-vis their slightly-self-assumed mantle of ‘modern punk’, and/or separate from issues of authenticity, the relative lack of aesthetic quality compared to other contemporaries.

fucked up

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andrewtsks:

hardcorefornerds:

andrewtsks:

[…]

Isn’t this just a version of internalized oppression, though? The next paragraph in this interview is a long, idiosyncratic account of punk history, which does make some good points in a lamentable way, followed by the statement “The entire history of post modern youth culture has been one long turn against punk, and people wonder why we have to try so hard to be popular.” I have some sympathy for his viewpoint, and agree about the reactionary turn, but isn’t the lesson of the Ramones - and “lame-punk like Green Day (who were actually good)” - that popular success is a flawed goal? Not that obscurity is a necessity, that punk bands can’t gain some recognition for themselves - but this is tantamount to seeking co-option. I have a theory that Fucked Up can be best described - just kidding, kinda - as “kitsch-punk” because they appeal to the kind of interest in punk and hardcore sounds that doesn’t really see them as inherently valuable, rooted in either an organic tradition or a coherent attitude, taking them off the shelf when necessary: with the result that they become awkward appendages bearing little relation to the original wholly-formed aesthetics. Where it does seem at home, however, is in a genre largely based on separation and distance from, and even contempt for, punk - indie.

Actually, no, I don’t agree that the lesson of the Ramones, Green Day, etc. was that popular success was a flawed goal. I may be misinterpreting you here (which would make sense considering that I’m not that sure of what a couple of your sentences mean—the pronoun “it” in the last sentence, what noun is it referring back to?), but the meaning I’m getting from your comments is that a punk band that becomes too successful can’t retain their integrity in the face of the mainstream’s spotlight. I gotta say, I really don’t believe that. I could get really in depth on this but a lot of what I’d end up saying is in the thing I wrote about David Comes To Life (it’s done, as is my entire Top 20 of 2011 writeup—I just have to find the time to get it all posted). For now, let me just say that I think that Fucked Up avoided the two cardinal sins of supposedly-DIY punk bands who end up betraying their roots—they didn’t sign to a major label (Matador once had major label ties but don’t anymore), and they didn’t become just another mainstream rock band, instead sticking to what I firmly believe is an organic evolution of their original sound. So as far as I can see, Fucked Up are in a unique position to represent the true spirit of punk rock to a mainstream culture that is actually aware of them without being co-opted by that mainstream. Of course, they’ve reached nowhere near as many people as Green Day and Nirvana did, but they have the ability to, assuming they don’t break up, and they can, at least at their current point, do it without buying into a system that I feel like would inherently co-opt their values. Of course, if they sign to Capitol for their next album (or, alternately, break up), that won’t happen, but right now the possibility seems to me to still be there.

Again, more to come.

I don’t really care about ‘integrity’ in this sense, and I mainly referred to it because it was brought up in the original quote. “It” refers to their kitschy sound - or what I hear as such - and that’s where I’d disagree with you on your second point (“an organic evolution of their original sound”). I just think Fucked Up are a boring band that perhaps hide behind issues of punk and bringing it to the mainstream, while definitely neglecting what makes that mainstream different from punk in the first place: generally, less interesting - and less creative in a certain rebellious sense - music.

fucked up punk

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andrewtsks:

“About when we were writing Hidden World, we made a pretty conscious decision that we didn’t want to be a big fish in a mostly small and stagnant hardcore world. We knew that almost every person who had ever done something important in indie rock (ie “the mainstream”) used to either be in a shitty punk band, or grew up going to punk shows in the 80s, which meant we knew we’d hit the soft spot for a lot of people in useful places, but also that all those people had made their successes after giving up punk and moving on to more palatable projects, and that we couldn’t really think of any hardcore punk band that had broken into the mainstream/indie world while they actually existed as a band. Punk has always been something that people love to name check, but also like to keep at a distance. A punk band can pretty much only be important if they’ve been broken up for 15 years. Either that, or they have to be punk in secret, like Husker Du. A broad faced punk band can only really expect a life of quarantine. Think about the defining tragedy of The Ramones, one of the most iconic and influencial American bands ever to exist. Even while a million people were wearing Ramones tshirts in every country on the planet, they existed under this constant sense of under achievement, because they just wanted to be legitimate rockstars, and all they were ever allowed to be was a popular punk band. This sense of failure of the Ramones project permeates like every interview they did. They were footnotes at their own last show, the bulk of the story about what famous guests they were able to conjure up, like Eddie Vedder or whatever. Can you imagine how frustrating that must have been? These guys that had watched on the sidelines for 20 years as their cultural output, that influenced everything that would become even remotely popular in music, was relegated and marginalized?”

—

Mike Haliechuk of Fucked Up. The research and mental preparation I’m doing for writing about David Comes To Life sometimes feels like it’s only making it harder to ever get anything down on paper that explains how I actually feel. But this quote fascinates me, and I’m sure the sentiment behind it is bound up in what I have to say, somewhere.

More to come.

Isn’t this just a version of internalized oppression, though? The next paragraph in this interview is a long, idiosyncratic account of punk history, which does make some good points in a lamentable way, followed by the statement “The entire history of post modern youth culture has been one long turn against punk, and people wonder why we have to try so hard to be popular.” I have some sympathy for his viewpoint, and agree about the reactionary turn, but isn’t the lesson of the Ramones - and “lame-punk like Green Day (who were actually good)” - that popular success is a flawed goal? Not that obscurity is a necessity, that punk bands can’t gain some recognition for themselves - but this is tantamount to seeking co-option. I have a theory that Fucked Up can be best described - just kidding, kinda - as “kitsch-punk” because they appeal to the kind of interest in punk and hardcore sounds that doesn’t really see them as inherently valuable, rooted in either an organic tradition or a coherent attitude, taking them off the shelf when necessary: with the result that they become awkward appendages bearing little relation to the original wholly-formed aesthetics. Where it does seem at home, however, is in a genre largely based on separation and distance from, and even contempt for, punk - indie.

fucked up punk hardcore

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Pennywise - ‘Fight Till You Die’ from Full Circle (1997)

The latest Fucked Up album isn’t as bad as I expected, but it’s still not a patch on the melodic hardcore we used to have.

irony pennywise punk fucked up

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HFN 2011 - 4: Raein - ‘Costellazione secondo le leggi del caso’, Sulla linea d’orizzonte tra questa mia vita e quella di tutti (released as free download)

Last year, when choosing Vampire Weekend’s Contra as my number one album, I wrote:

“I guess you could say I’m fairly disillusioned with the state of contemporary punk and hardcore, although there is some good stuff out there and it’s not all dead, so forgive me if I put an album by an interesting indie band ahead of something with more more obvious distortion.”

I’m glad to be able to put a punk/hardcore album in my top 5 this year again (if Male Bonding counted last year, which I’m happy enough it did) but largely the same problem remains. There are lots of good small bands, but there don’t seem to be many releases in the genre that really stand out and compete with the more popular forms of ‘alternative’. Maybe this is entirely solipsism on my part, due to moving out of the niche of punk blogs/websites/labels into the mishmash of Tumblr (yeah, I’m blaming you, dear follower!) and the Pitchforkian tyranny of indie is merely a chosen illusion. Yet if it is an illusion, a particularly pernicious aspect of it is the re-labelling of ‘punk’ as a derivative and accessible form of what is in reality (and if you know where to look) not a tired repetition of substandard musicianship, but a vibrant and creative exploration of sonic and cultural limits. Can the same really be said of chillwave, or the pseudocreation of the same?

There’s just a dullness to what is considered acceptable punk these days, to the detriment of making the case for the genre as an ongoing challenge to, well, acceptability. Thus this song gladly makes me want to throw my Fucked Up and Titus Andronicus records out of the window (so, uh, that’s about four in total) as alternatingly tedious and musically insipid. Especially, dear god, Fucked Up: if that’s progressive hardcore, I give up on the idea of progress. By contrast, progress is exactly what this Raein album exemplifies: adapting from several previous solid albums of frenetic Italian screamo the basic percussive sound and layering on top of it a variety of well-produced but still relatively subtle guitar and vocal flourishes. Basically, it’s what Fucked Up would do if they had any style. Instead, it’s Euroscreamo that leads the pack.

The title of this song translates as ‘Constellation following the laws of chance’, that of the album as On the horizon line between my life and that of all, and it’s followed by the track ‘Raein: rumore. Tre’ which means simply ‘Raein: noise. Three’. The translated lyric sheet gives the end of this song as:

“I found you back in the brassware of the mountain, in the compulsiveness of this prayer I only hear “let’s get lost!”,

by digging deeper and deeper with voice, I forgot where I was and where I started from,

I remember, it was here I wanted to be.”

which is almost as impenetrable as the original, although not quite as odd as some of the translations from the Japanese in Envy’s albums. It’s pretty typical of screamo/emo even as sung by English speakers: but I guess, to take a rather blinkered cultural perspective, here its unintelligibility - which in the genre is as much aural as linguistic anyway, so one always has to at least glance at lyric sheets - gives it a quality similar to that of opera. The voice is another instrument, not just an information conduit, although even as such it primarily conveys feelings of anxiety and desperation, release and catharsis. Along with classical beauty, harmony, and the energy of several lungs shouting all at once. It is the theory and practice of punk mixed together.

europe fucked up punk raein screamo HFN 2011

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kecelakaanjalanraya:

raptoravatar:

symptoms:

douglasmartini:

Song: Fucked Up - “The Other Shoe”

[…]

@Sam - This single (that HFN also posted) is fun to listen to, but as far as being ‘moving’? They haven’t really embodied that word since Hidden World, and only in moments there. (Though that song they did with the singer from Zola Jesus was pretty neat to watch.)

@Everyone Else - I’m intentionally not reblogging Hardcore For Nerd’s commentary on this because I don’t want to erase his post from the text field. I guess I feel like linking back to it - because it is an interesting piece of writing about a good piece of music - justifies reblogging around the post because I don’t agree with him 100%, but still think it’s worth reading? Our differences probably come from the fact that I have been interested in Fucked Up in the past, and will probably continue to give them the benefit of the doubt for a little longer.

There are metrics by which this is good or possibly great, in some moments it even equals The Hold Steady at their least interesting! It’s just that there are armloads of way better bands. Also, I think almost all the lyrics are actually names of bands that were just popular enough to get a single T-shirt with a distressed skull print on it into Hot Topic in 2005 before half the band became indiefolk and half became ambient/dubstep. However, everyone should probably listen to the Lhasha song that HFN linked, just because it’s basically crack to Fucked Up’s lattefication of (presumably) a similar grade of angst.

First thing that comes to mind when I listen to this song is “feedback by numbers”, perhaps closely followed by “gruff vocals by numbers”.

Yeah ok it’s somewhat fun to listen to, but yeah, I am in total agreement about there being “armloads of way better bands.”

(I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about Fucked Up so yeah I might be biased.)

This is what I was saying about ambivalence though, it’s essentially the complete absence of bias - okay, so it’s not the same as objectivity or impartiality, but it is perhaps a prelude to that. I don’t know how far the ‘other punk bands are better/more interesting/more creative than Fucked Up’ argument can really go, and although I may not be benefit-giving from doubt, I am at least maintaining my doubt either way. It’s kinda good to have a band like them to be ambivalent about, I guess?

That said, this line in raptoravatar’s other post (although I’m not aware of the original saying), “There’s never a sense that the proverbial test tube might shatter” is pretty much the most succinct and accurate criticism of everything about the band, of late at least.

(also, @symptoms, thanks for the link. Tumblr’s rigidity of structure needs a bit of subverting now and again, and that’s the kind of back-to-basics discourse that works, sorta like what I was saying here)

fucked up punk post-hardcore

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it’s not really logically possible, but…

somehow, my ambivalence just increased:

“The follow-up to 2008’s great The Chemistry of Common Life is an honest-to-goodness rock opera, 18 songs and 78 minutes long, complete with companion records and a deeply confusing storyline. The album takes place in a fictional late-70s/early-80s British town, and they’re also planning to release a compilation album of fictitious bands from that fictitious town for Record Store Day. Up above, you can download the David Comes to Life track “The Other Shoe”, which features the juxtaposition of pretty female vocals with frontman Damian Abraham’s gravelly bark.

Pitchfork: Forkcast: Fucked Up: ‘The Other Shoe’

and yeah, the middle of the song does work quite well - despite still not being ‘structurally’ very interesting - when you listen to it at loud volume a couple of times…

… in order to find the part where he seems to invert that line from Jawbreaker’s ‘Oyster’ into something like “you like the smell but you can’t take the taste”. I’ve no idea what the lyrics are about in general - except Fucked Up have a tendency to indulge in humanist rhetoric that can get a bit tiresome, despite or rather because of its essential rightness - and it’s probably not that, but, you know, interesting all the same.

Anyway, Fucked Up are apparently either turning into (bad) Green Day or are attempting to steal Leatherface’s (the UK punk band, not the horror movie character) clothes in more ways than one. This is how you do gruff vocals well.

fucked up leatherface post-hardcore

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douglasmartini:

Song: Fucked Up - “The Other Shoe”

Oh man. Oh man. David Comes to Life is going to be fucking great, isn’t it?

***

In which Fucked Up, having taken modern hardcore to the indie kids, bring the dance punk revolution to post-hardcore. Every part of this is totally original and snowflake-unique, right?

(That’s meant to be self-deflating cynicism)

I’m ambivalent about Fucked Up: a new album from them could be really interesting and game-changing, or it could be overrated and disappointing - I guess it depends on what one’s legitimate expectations are, but honestly I suppose mine are that it’ll be okay and I’ll go on not caring that much about them either way - just as this song is quite interesting in parts but ultimately still a little dull and grating.

That drum beat at the start is a fantastic opening, and gives the sense that you could be listening something that is revitalising hardcore/punk rock (except a) that’s a pretty big thing to hear from one song and b) revitalisation of the genre, probably more so than any other, is already a played-out trope), and yeah, it mixes up things with some contrasting, airy, feminine tones (as a progressive hardcore band that has long had a female component, isn’t the overt play to softness a bit of a crass sellout? As well as not really a departure, but a continuation of the melodic shoehorning displayed all over Chemistry of Common Life?).

It’s interesting to a degree that’s limited by, well, not being that interesting structurally or matching up to what Q and not U were doing a decade ago. ‘Dying on the inside’ is a nice refrain, but the song still relies for a lot of its angst on the characteristic screaming, throaty vocals and high-pitched feedback that, really, are the main reasons I’ve never warmed to Fucked Up. Not because those things aren’t pleasant - in a warped, only somewhat perverse punk rock sense - to listen to, but on account of the opposite, that they can be used in so many powerful and affecting ways (e.g.) that Fucked Up’s tame and unchanging use of the sound becomes incredibly grating and undermines the argument that they are in fact anything new. Which, hey, maybe they don’t need to be, and I don’t want to end up too cynical, but this is the counter-argument to the hagiography.

fucked up post-hardcore punk

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