Listen Up, Nerds 23: What's Killing Hardcore
For a culprit worse than poseurs and merch flippers, we have to look inward
The internet is quick to say that a lot of things are causing the downfall of Guitar-Based Subculture Music as we know it. “Posers are ruining hardcore.” “Gatekeeping is ruining hardcore.” “Political Correctness is ruining hardcore.” “Violence at shows is ruining hardcore.” Sure, all of those things could have something to do with it. Hardcore seems more healthy than it’s been in 30 years, but I think that’s a surface-level assessment of the situation. I might be fully checked out of the scene by the time it finally dies, cashing in on a lucrative podcast deal with Spotify to talk about what’s new in hypercrunk or some other made-up genre. But I think we could see a New Dark Age in hardcore within the next few years, and that’s because hardcore isn’t standing on anything. That’s right. The call is coming from inside the house:
Apolitical hardcore is ruining hardcore.
I put the thesis of this whole thing at the top because if you’re not going to read the whole thing and you want to get mad about something, then you might as well come away with the bottom line.
If there’s one piece of canned hardcore band stage banter I hate, it’s “Everybody in this room is here for the same reasons.” It’s usually followed up with an example of one of those reasons, something pithy like, “We’re all fucked-up kids and need an outlet,” or something resembling that. “We are outcasts and we found each other.” “We like beating each other up!” Regardless, it sucks. I wasn’t a fucked-up kid and I don’t love beating people up. I wasn’t much of an outcast, either. I was a kid who heard “In My Eyes” by Minor Threat when I was 15 and I said, “That’s for me.” I identified with the lyrics and the emotions I later saw on stage. I liked the music because I liked the music, and it made sense to me that if you like the music, you show up to the rock concert and show the band that they reached someone. That’s not the same reason as everyone else! In the same vein, some people are just there to let some aggression out and don’t give a shit about the politics that formed the genre.
A couple of weeks back, a video circulated where the guy from Mindforce was said to “Have the right take on gatekeeping.” I’m not sure what that means, but in the video, he says, “I know there’s a lot of new people here, so I want to lay out some ideals: This is for people who go to shows. Sitting at home on the internet and talking about hardcore isn’t being hardcore. Going to shows is being hardcore. This is for people who are here right now.” I would agree on that at the most basic level. Sitting at home on the internet and talking about hardcore is not being hardcore. I go to shows all of the time. I would guess I go to shows, on average, once a week every year. It’s not always a hardcore show or The hardcore show that night (I went to the Bib show instead of the High Vis show on Saturday), but it’s a big city. Anyway, there have definitely been a lot of new faces at shows, and bands who played a small DIY space last year are playing big stages this year. The audience for hardcore is bigger than it’s ever been.
Part of that is due to the newer, less-offensive face of hardcore. If you take a look at the biggest name in the genre right now, they sound hardcore but the content leans more hippie. Turnstile’s approach is that love and self-expression is a radical idea, a novel concept to outsiders in a post-pandemic landscape. Punk and hardcore have been this vehicle of anger, a ball of fists and middle fingers and sweat and blood and puke that has sustained itself for almost 50 years. There’s always something to be mad about, so why doesn’t someone sing about being happy? Isn’t this also a political stance?
Sure, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. One band isn’t the problem, it’s that there are more and more bands who have followed this inoffensive lead. The biggest bands in hardcore right now are not exactly bands who take a stand. This isn’t a demand that they make a political record or anything, but some self-awareness could go a long way here. I’m not saying, “There aren’t any politics in hardcore so I need the guy from No Pressure to read Howard Zinn and make an album about it.” I’m saying that literally any political stance from any of these bands would do.
The apolitical nature of pop-punk only serves to water down and regurgitate only the safest of punk aesthetics into milquetoast suburban rebellion, and that’s the course that hardcore is on. By remaining apolitical, it’s not only inviting the newer, flippant trendhoppers in, but pushing more politically-minded artists into different genres where they might have a more receptive audience. It’s a disservice to the genre and a disservice to the audience we’re trying to include in hardcore if we stay away from the harsh reality of life. This music isn’t an escape from politics, it’s a matter of coping with them. Refusing to acknowledge the struggles of the people in the scene who aren’t straight white men makes the scene less diverse, less interesting, and frankly, less threatening. The problems you see with the current state of hardcore can all be traced back to a refusal to believe in anything.
The most off-putting commonly-held political opinion in the scene right now is that cops are bad. This isn’t even that offensive of an opinion. Trust in policing is at an all-time low and continues to dive year after year. I’m guessing that this is a result of the unending bullshit we dealt with in America from 2016-2021. It’s not over and it never is, but every band felt like they had a unique voice to lend to the conversation and they really didn’t. It wasn’t an aberration from the usual hardcore lockstep, however. Most hardcore bands have at least one “political song” on their records, or at least they did. It wasn’t always the most nuanced opinion on the issues you’ve ever heard, but it usually rocked. Even Mindforce, who I mentioned earlier, touched on mass shootings with the back-to-back blows of “Senseless Act” and “Nightmare,” on their first full-length, the latter of those two becoming a crowd favorite. The political song may not have been everyone’s favorite, but it was a way to keep the room full of people who were truly there for the same reason.
So what is everyone singing about? I guess it’s just a mixture of self-loathing and vague lashing out at perceived enemies. It’s not the most captivating thing in the world. We can all agree upon it, to a degree, but it’s not saying anything. It’s music for the fucked-up kids, the kids who want to beat each other up, but it doesn’t move beyond one person. It’s not a movement, it’s not an ideal, it’s just a feeling. I get it, though! Today’s youth have way more eyes on them than I ever had. I didn’t get facebook until high school and the one time someone said something mean to me on the internet, a classmate of mine printed off SIX FULL PAGES of me going back and forth with a dude who tried to bully me in a facebook group and handed it to a teacher to get the other guy in trouble at our school. Nowadays, kids are contending with bullying and drama that doesn’t leave them alone. We see pictures of people with more money and more time on their hands than most of us will ever have jammed into our instagram feeds next to our friends and we think it’s normal. Of course the kids love music about hating themselves and punching someone in the face.
Of course, there are bands who still uphold the political tradition of the genre. The scene couldn’t thrive without it, but it seems fewer and further between than ever. The bands who are still pushing the scene politically are cherished for it, namely Soul Glo and Zulu, but they’re the only bands with a viewpoint on most of their tour bills. Why is it the job of bands with POC members to be vocally anti-racist? It shouldn’t be. In the past, bands showed solidarity and endorsed causes like black liberation and gay liberation to remind everyone that we’re not free until we’re all free. Now when Zulu prints up a shirt that says “Abolish White Hardcore,” it becomes Twitter discourse fodder for months.
The fact of the matter is that at this point, we might not all be in that room for the same reasons. Sure, we all probably like the music, but hardcore’s politics are no longer the selling point. You don’t have to be mad about the people in charge to be mad at yourself, even if that misguided anger is a product of people in charge and their ineptitude. Getting mad is apolitical, targeting that anger isn’t. No matter what you get out of punk rock, its roots are in reactionary art. It’s a product of a knee-jerk and kick back at society hitting your knee with a hammer. It’s a reflex. Being punk or being hardcore isn’t about buying Doc Martens, it’s about the feeling you get when someone’s breathing down your back and you don’t like it. It’s about the need to swing back at a dogshit world that has punched you in the face, and feeling like you should have the right to do it. It’s not about being mad at the dude next to you or below you, hardcore is about spitting back at the people above you when they spit down on you. Maybe we’re not all in the room for the same reasons, but we should make sure that we have some things in common before we assume that we are.