Hardcore for Nerds

“ Screaming is not the most popular thing. I run a risk doing it because I know, as well as you do, that not everyone likes to hear a person scream, especially a woman. It’s different when a woman screams. I wish it weren’t, but it is. I’ve been told my whole life to sit down, shut up, be quiet, stop being a whore, whatever. There comes a time in your adult life when you realize you do not have to listen those ridiculous demands. You can reject the archaic stereotypes of your gender.

— Mish Way of White Lung on screaming at The Talkhouse

screamo punk feminism

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Jawbreaker - ‘Save Your Generation’ from Dear You

I bought this album on vinyl this week, along with Mclusky Do Dallas, for an even €40 - comfort purchases for memories of younger days wallowing in the emotional and impotent rage of punk rock. I.e., still current.

Here’s my Zen interpretation of the full lyrics of the song from May 2011.

28 plays

jawbreaker dear you punk

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» Drew Daniel > Trash Talk - The Talkhouse

This is the best, or most interesting, writing I’ve read about hardcore in a long while, which I think is worth quoting at some length:

But even as the tempos and textures stay mostly fast and mostly hard, there’s an emotional valence from up to down that gives 119 range without costing it any sheer force. The titular declaration “Fuck Nostalgia” sounds like a case of protesting too much, insofar as this record triggers for this fortysomething ex-punk some fond memories of the midtempo crunch of Black Flag, the ragged weltschmerz of Dystopia, or, to reach outside of California’s hardcore heritage, the throat-burning screech of Die Kreuzen. Yes, at its best it’s that good. The simmering mosh of the final third of “Uncivil Disobedience” sets you up for “Blossom & Burn,” a track on which the band slows down to a Cro-Mags-ish grind and fellow Angelenos Hodgy Beats and Tyler the Creator sit in and go off. They’re mixed a bit too loud, but their rapped flows sound entirely at home on top of this lurching, manic chassis, and the result is a free-associative tangle of malevolence and non-sequiturs designed to wrongfoot the listener. “Did he just mention Portishead?” my boyfriend asked over the breakfast table. Yes, I think he did. It’s the funniest moment on the record, but not the best moment— for me that’s embodied in the strength-to-weight ratios of catchiness multiplying heaviness in “Reasons” and “Bad Habits,” two songs that will make you bang your head and start a circle pit in your open-plan digital workplace.

Neither funniest nor best, the most telling moment of this record — its symptom, if you wanna be high-falutin’ about it — is a nakedly emotional declaration that ends the very first song, “Eat the Cycle” when the band grinds down to a smear of feedback and we hear Lee Spielman deliver a phrase that teeters between an adolescent posture of hateful malediction and a soberingly adult stance of depressive realism. The phrase is: “Everybody’s gotta eat.”

Ending a song with this declaration on this record at this point in this band’s career is particularly galling and particularly brave. It hangs the economics out to dry for anyone to investigate; as the cameo indicates, this staunchly independent hardcore band has inked a deal with Tyler the Creator of hip-hop crew Odd Future, and with it, the Sony BMG Music Group-distributed Odd Future LLC label. It’s a step up to the big-time, with iTunes prices and promotional pushes to match. But Spielman’s announcement that “everybody’s gotta eat” also conveys the Hobbesian “bellum omnium contra omnes” (war of all against all) of a national economy of scarcity, when access to baseline subsistence is hardly a given, and working people increasingly run aground on hard times.

Census information puts about 15% of Americans below the poverty line, but 58% of Americans live in poverty for at least one year of their lives. Faced with the pressurizing fact that “everybody’s gotta eat,” people can push against each other or they can pull together. The fraternity (or, increasingly, sorority) of the punk rock mosh pit can be a place to therapeutically act out that pushing and shoving, but the unwritten rules say: pick somebody up off the floor when they fall. In this gesture, hardcore community reveals itself to be an ethical alternative to the wolfish predation that supposedly lurks outside the safe space of the mosh pit, and it defines itself as a space in which other values (co-operation, togetherness, assistance) might proliferate.

I’ve heard a fair bit about Trash Talk before, though if I actually did heard them I can’t say they really stuck (probably because I’m not-so-secretly not much a fan of purer, unadulterated hardcore). But on first listen this does sound pretty interesting - varied enough in its propulsiveness to retain my attention, at least.

My eye was drawn to the “fortysomething ex-punk” line as well. I have been developing a prejudice that the problem with discussions of punk in indie circles is often that the (thoughtful, intelligent, articulate) writers who get paid to do so are, by their own personal critical journey, themselves former punks - with the emphasis on former - and thus write with a tendency to project their past outgrowth and disillusionment onto what should be the living experience of a genre today. Drew Daniels, however - and perhaps because he is an artist? - actually engages (I was going to say “grabs by the balls”) the subject in a way that is unfortunately I think unusual.

Lastly, I saw Matmos perform live once, on my 21st birthday (I actually went to see the Irish support, Si Schroeder) and it was a wonderful experience. It was also almost five years ago, which is starting to make me feel old…

punk hardcore matmos trash talk

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Husker Du - ‘Dead Set On Destruction’ from Candy Apple Grey (1986)

Poptimism/punktimism [delete as appropriate] means to me: preferring Husker Du’s Warner Brothers albums Candy Apple Grey and Warehouse: Songs and Stories to New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig (Metal Circus and Zen Arcade are still gold, though). Their last two records are the best examples of Husker Du’s ‘pop’ sound, and the earlier two of the punk/post-hardcore sound. The middle two seem, well, transitional, and I’ve never really gotten into them. I don’t begrudge anyone else who has, of course.

This is interesting (if not surprising), though:

“Hüsker Dü was not expected to sell a large amount of records. Rather, Warner Bros. valued the group for its grassroots fanbase and its “hip” status, and by keeping the overhead low the label anticipated the band would turn a profit.”

I should probably read Michael Azerrad’s book (from which the above is sourced) sometime, but as a non-musician and frankly someone who isn’t active in any kind of physical scene, it’s never particularly interested me; and more broadly, I don’t have much interest in the micro ‘process’ side of cultural production. I think it’s good if people recognise that art isn’t produced in a vacuum, and question the way in which artistic creation interacts with broader social and economic contexts; but at the same time I do tend to subscribe to the view of not particularly caring about artists’ personal or even professional lives as a lens through which to view their work. It is a creation, after all, which implies something distinct. On the other hand, it’s hard not be aware of such things if you’re historically sensitive: I wrote a thesis which substantially involved researching the unsavoury life of a man who wrote some intellectually valuable books in response to his time, but containing flaws both internal and external to himself. We love stories, to know the deeper meaning to things, which is a good instinct; but often it changes, and perhaps distorts, our appreciation of whatever meaning excited us about that book or album in the first place.

Then again, nothing lasts forever, which is kind of the point.

(Source: Spotify)

husker du punk pop 80s NO PAST

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Wounds, ‘Dead Dead Fucking Dead’ video

I wanted to write something comparing this to their earlier video for ‘No Future’, from the same album, but it appears that it has been made private. Which is a pity because it inspired a very entertaining rant that is still public - the video was pretty ridiculous and over-the-top, from what I remember, though not much that wouldn’t fit in an E4 Skins promo - but I can respect whatever decision the band decided to make or felt they had to do. Plenty of things from 1970s punk could have benefited from a ‘make private’ option, assuming they were consensual. Anyway, the point I wanted to make was that the ostensibly more ‘serious’, somewhat arty mood of this video isn’t I think really in contradiction with the baiting hedonism of the ‘No Future’ video: the obsession with mortality is their death drive, the flipside to their life (or party) instinct.

“All my friends

Dead dead fucking dead

Heart attack at 25

Fuck it I don’t want to be alive”

The other thing about the video is that it’s, well, Dublin, but in a darkened, anonymised form such that it could stand in for any city, certainly in Ireland or Britain. Drinking cans in alleyways, being chased by impending doom, etc. - standard stuff really. But on the other hand, it has a familiar texture. I have a thing for sodium lighting (although it’s gradually disappearing now in favour of a colder, more daylight-imitating white) but it’s also the mix of concrete, stone and pebbledashed walls. The dark beauty of the night is something I’ll always love, although here its shot through with fear and fluorescent hallucinations.

wounds dublin punk

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Punktimism v. Poptimism

Very thoughtful discussion going on here which I was tending to avoid adding anything to, because I’ve been around in circles on the topic too many times before (although I agree with the last riposte here), but this point caught my eye:

“This isn’t to say that there isn’t still some good within “punktimism,” which is elitist but isn’t just elitist. For all its rigidity, punktimism is Media Criticism 101, and it’s hard to imagine a balanced critical viewpoint that doesn’t incorporate a basic understanding of cultural products as, well, products, whose place in our lives is complicated to various extents by the fact that they exist to make someone (or, in most cases, several someones, many of whom have very little to do with making art) money. Ultimately, I believe — and here I’m softening my initial stance — that poptimism and punktimism are lenses we should always be looking through simultaneously, because they cover each other’s blind spots. The problem is, punktimism tends to refuse to coexist in this way. It simplistically conflates a certain prescribed musical style and/or underground status and/or way of living your life or making a community with political righteousness, and that’s why I say it narrows the conversation while poptimism widens it.”

I think the question is whether ‘poptimism’ and ‘punktimism’ are really that different from each other (and the latter, much more even than the former, is a thing constructed primarily for the purposes of this discussion): if they’re not, they should naturally overlap; but if they are, and oppose each other, then the proper response is not to triangulate between them as if they were two equally valid but different viewpoints (a process that usually means the more culturally powerful side decides the point of compromise) but to form a new synthesis that replaces them both. Hegelian Dialectics 101.

What I’ve always had a block about understanding in the concept of poptimism is that while supposedly about upholding the genuine quality of music, freed from snobbery and ‘elitism’, by its nature it revolves around whatever music is ‘popular’. So assuming one agrees that artistic merit isn’t actually decided by democracy, or that the commercial process by which that is supposed to happen (VOTE NOW! BUY!) is definitely flawed, what it really ought to be about is critically appreciating the communal experience of music. Which is what punk - or ‘punktimism’ - is about as well, only its communal experience is focused on a particular movement in the political arts (of course there is apolitical punk as well as political pop, but each movement has its general directed oriented in a certain way).

Punks follow the crowd too, although it is a smaller one and they at least tend to feel it has a different purpose. Pop (or mainstream, or mass) culture vs. counter-culture isn’t an entirely bad way of separating the two: despite the well-rehearsed arguments against a ‘counter-culture’ not having a valid existence, I at least think it’s a valuable concept to maintain so as it has a chance to make a more concrete impact. So that’s what I, and others, don’t want to give up about punk - that idea and inspiration of rebellion and rejection - and don’t want to see it subsumed into a pop-optimism that is inherently less confrontational about the culture industry and the various demands of capitalism on social life.*

However, I don’t think that critical side of punk has to be inevitably associated with rockism or elitism: punk has always been a movement that has consciously struggled with -isms both within and without, with varying degrees of success, but those particular descriptions probably apply the least to those creating at the margins of what is traditionally regarded as the ‘punk’ movement, who may not take the label but embody the principles the most (or, to be frank: is it elitist not to command a mass following?) There should be a way of combining counter-cultural principles with cultural openness, and indeed this is what made some of the most creative punk music after the initial anti-everything statements of ‘77. And today, self-identified punk fans embody some of the principles of poptimism within their own genre: the appropriation of the language of tough-guy hardcore for the semi-ironic, semi-sincere ‘Defend Pop-Punk’ slogan, or the burgeoning re-appreciation for 00s pop-punk and post-hardcore that the commercial machine spewed out and then rendered ‘uncool’ in the pursuit of pop novelty. I would call that ’punktimism’, rather than assuming the term refers to a reactionary foil of poptimism’s ostensibly unique progressiveness.

* There’s a way to narrow the conversation when it comes to the type of music people listen to, but there’s also a way to narrow it when it comes to considering that music in a wider economic and political context. We should be avoiding the former, not the latter. Oh, and when it comes to types of music it’s probably best to admit that just as some people don’t like the ‘sound’ of (typical) punk, some don’t like the ‘sound’ of typical pop - and it doesn’t make them bad people, just people with particular backgrounds and tastes.

punk pop

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“ They can be viewed as a 12-song soundtrack to whatever is going on at a certain time in your life and I find comfort in this. Finally, I can make peace with thinking that Hybrid Theory was the most important album of all time when I was 14.

—

Prowlster meets… Wounds | Prowlster

Hell yeah, punktimism!

I was reminded of the existence of Hybrid Theory a couple of weeks ago when someone in my Twitter feed posted a link to the Record Store Day release of it on vinyl, then cued it up on Spotify and listened to it for the first time in the best part of a decade - I can’t even remember exactly but I think it may have been the very first CD I ever bought, at around that age. I was surprised at how basically emo the vocals sounded, while the music itself was exactly the mixture of post-hardcore, Refused-like punk and alternative rock one would expect from that time.

It makes sense that Wounds would share that reference, since they are I guess about the same age as me and thus grew up with the same exports of American bands. There’s something about the way Die Young pulls together various strands of contemporary punk and hardcore with a don’t-give-a-fuck artistic attitude that really resonates with the way I view the world and music currently. Their new video for ‘Dead Dead Fucking Dead’ is very good, you should really watch it - I intend writing something about it soon, but mainly it just reminds me of how cool the song sounds.

wounds dublin punk post-hardcore

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Still the best punk album of 2013 so far.

(words and complex reasons* here)

(*plus one more: the palpable hatred of the city, life, the world, everything, that feels so right currently while also maintaining an ironic distance. if anything is close to the essence of punk, I reckon that’s it.)

(Source: Spotify)

wounds punk dublin irish hardcore

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“ I’d love to see the development of a new umbrella term for this ethos that is less genre-specific and less endemic of what is now a long bygone era. I think the “punk” tag can be alienating to some, especially to a youth likely hungry for a revolution of their own …

—

Have ‘punk ideals’ become totally irrelevant for musicians? - The Talkhouse forum - Jenn Wasner

I could think up some kneejerk reasons to oppose this - historicity not necessarily being a bad thing, for one - but at a glance the idea kinda appeals to me. There are always new names for new genres and movements (I think “seapunk” was the latest) but it’d be cool to have a new banner for a ‘fuck you’ to societal conventions and expectations that don’t serve their useful, human purpose. The kind of things that rile up Grimes or The Knife, but that don’t have to be expressed through rock music or indeed any particular kind of music. Part of the problem is, I suppose, that we don’t know quite what ‘punk’ meant back then, or what that translates to now: if we’re opposed to, say, neoliberalism, what if the original punk attitude contained the germ of it? Words, and everything constructed from them, are always imperfect, however…

punk

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Leatherface - ‘Shipyards’ from The Last (1994)

“Throw the fisherman lines, close the shipyards and mines

Leaving only the water, we’ll still have old wives tales

about the old days, deep lonely waters…”

The thing about connecting Leatherface and Thatcher is, of course, that most of their output comes from the 1990s, so it’s talking about the legacy of Thatcher and Thatcherism as much as anything else . And in a vague but affecting lament of social destruction, speaking out against economic doctrines that are unfortunately still as relevant today (“play real-life monopoly, it has real people real lives”) but holding out hope for people and place (“the hills in our minds can’t be measured in miles”). Leatherface, in case you don’t know, come from Sunderland in the north of England, which was broadly affected by Thatcher’s campaign of de-industrialisation and is where the strongest opposition to her personal legacy remains. Not that Leatherface need a target to get their message across: I’ve seen this song described as mawkish or over-sentimental with its uncharacteristic piano line and acoustic quality, but I’ve always found it very powerful.

(and yes, I know the cover picture is terrifying. I’ve no idea what that’s about)

(Source: Spotify)

uk punk leatherface thatcher 90s

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