Hardcore

This post was submitted by "Robert", one of our frequent guest contributors.

In 1993, I was a sophomore in a Catholic high school, located in a crime-ridden, dying rust belt city in the Midwest. In 1993, I first heard Fugazi via a dubbed copy of “Repeater” given to me by one of my closest friends. In 1993, I failed my driver’s license exam twice, and then shortly after drove to Pittsburgh to see my first hardcore punk show (Avail at Carnegie Mellon University). In 1993, I purchased my first pair of olive green old school style Vans. I owned those shoes for six years before they gave out while I was mowing the lawn. It was also in 1993 that I came to terms internally with my attraction to guys. These moments were interrelated, if not inseparable parts of my adolescence. While many of my gay contemporaries were embracing Madonna, George Michael, rave DJs, and other entertainment icons as cultural crutches for dealing with their sexuality, I never felt their music or lives resonated with how I felt about being gay, or even on a simpler level, being a teenager. Not only was I struggling with being gay, I was also struggling with trying to find how I fit into the gay community, which at the time felt both out of reach and out of touch.

The hardcore punk scene (hardcore for short) became my community, my surrogate family. I started going to shows on a weekly basis, ordering records directly from bands and distributors, and making friends within the Midwest DIY scene that was simmering to a boil at the time. The music felt alive, both in the literal and figurative sense. The raw energy at shows, and how it flowed back and forth in a cathartic and chaotic frenzy between the audience and the band members, was unlike anything else I had experienced. You could feel the music as opposed to merely watching it. In contrast to the MTV-bastardized version of hip hop and the Lollapalooza “college rock” that was being force-fed to our generation at the time, hardcore spoke directly to us, to the inner-struggles and self-reflection that were at the heart of what we were experiencing as we grew up: wrestling with our political and religious beliefs, establishing independence from our parents, nurturing relationships, questioning the traditions and expectations of those around us, and often times feeling lonely throughout the process. By embracing hardcore music, and the ethos in which it was embedded, I was able to emotionally handle embracing my sexuality as well. Put simply, hardcore was the crutch that helped me come out. Throughout the years since then, my relationship with hardcore has ebbed and flowed as I graduated from college and went on to do more adult-things. However, there is no doubt that this form of music, and the community that supported it, had a powerful influence on how I currently view the world and my place in it.

That said, I was ecstatic that to find out that Norm Brannon (of Shelter and Texas is the Reason fame) was compiling a series of interviews he did with prominent hardcore bands into a book. In the early 1990s, Brannon (Norm Arenas at the time) produced a hardcore zine called Anti-Matter. Though short lived, Anti-Matter was well known (with a circulation unheard of at the time for a DIY zine) mostly because the people and bands he interviewed – either accidental or calculated – became giants of the era. His interviews, much like the music it sought to understand, reflected both the unrest of growing up as well as the simplicity (read: pre-internet, pre-blog, pre-myspace-pitchfork-buzz) of the era. The questions read more like conversations with friends, tapping at typical industry issues such as dealing with record labels from a DIY approach one minute to more intimate issues like crying or attempting suicide the next.

Fortunate for us, Brannon re-released these interviews from his zine this past fall in “The Anti-Matter Anthology: A 1990s Post-Punk & Hardcore Reader” from Revelation Publishing. It contains interviews with people and bands that in many ways changed my life: Alan Cage of Quicksand, J. Robbins of Jawbox, Chaka Malik of Orange 9mm, and Ian MacKaye of Fugazi. More casual music fans might find interest in his interviews with Zack de la Roca of Rage Against the Machine (who had previously fronted the arguably more poignant band, “Inside Out”) and singer-songwriter Elliott Smith (who had previously fronted the arguably less poignant band “Heatmiser”) – both conducted before they became household names.

Though not explicit in the content of the interviews themselves, Brannon was a prominent figure of the hardcore scene who would later come out as a gay man. Some of the very personal issues that resonate in his banter with his subjects, undoubtedly reflect some of the inner struggles that are universal in the coming out process. Though I cannot speak for him directly, I imagine that he, much like myself, found that his attachment to hardcore and his sexual orientation were (are) intertwined aspects of who he is and needn’t be explicitly invoked in a way that would either unnecessarily amplify them or marginalize them. Brannon had once said of Anti-Matter “I was basically trying to get (my interview subjects) to say the things I was thinking in my head – partially because I just wanted to know that I wasn’t a freak, and partially because I wanted other people to know they weren’t freaks, either.”

For more information on the book, check out its myspace page.

Contributed by Robert, a local sociologist and adult who still wears Vans (black ones).