run amok

in defence of my history

a while back, someone posted on the forums a topic called 'hardcore 101', an instant guide to how to 'be' hardcore, covering a lot of the various stereotypes and patterns of dress and behaviour. the reason that these things get about and last as long as they do is obviously because they do play up the stereotypes, and i mean, let's face it, we all know people like that. i remember a guy once who wanted to seriously fight me because he thought i was disrespecting hardcore and straight edge. he thought better of it in the end, but needless to say, we never really spoke again. so we end up with this two-way adversity between 'punk' and 'hardcore'. but where do you draw the line between those two? if you follow them both back far enough we all come from the same scene, and i hate to sound like one of those "can't we all just love each other?" kind of froots, but seriously, we all need to cut the crap.

imho, the hardcore scene is very confronting and intimidating because it's trying to stay different. it's almost a self-defence mechanism of the culture they've created. and, for the most part, it's worked. punk kept just enough melodies and major keys to break into the mainstream and 12 years later, we've got poppunk, busted, and avril, whereas hardcore, whilst gaining popularity in the 'underground' so to speak, has remained largely outside of pop culture. so really, you can laugh all you want at windmills, spin kicks, screaming and floor punches, but they didn't have their style usurped into oblivion by mass media, so they must be doing something right.

i started going to hardcore shows because there wasn't much punk on, and after i got over the obvious differences in our social graces, i really began to enjoy it. in much the same way that a lot of people hate dance music because it's too much doof, not enough singing and nearly no meaning, i was just listening to it wrong, trying to weigh it up by my standards of what i expected music to be and what i was trying to get out of a song. and yeah, fair enough there are some really bad, cliched hardcore bands out there, but there's also some really bad cliched punk bands. hell, there's really bad cliched [blank] bands everywhere, so it's not particularly fair to just go 'yeah hardcore is fucked because shit band x are bad'.

if you follow back our roots far enough, we're all coming from the same place, and whether you like it or not, hardcore is a very large and prominent genre of music in brisbane. if we want to put on shows, get exposure, make a name for ourselves, we are going to have to work with the people who put on the hardcore shows, we're going to have to play with hardcore bands and we're going to have to realise that an 'us vs them' mentality about our own little subgenres of this machine we call punk is totally counterproductive and the intrinsic opposite of everything we're supposed to stand for.