Mutations

The Many Strange Faces of Hardcore Punk

Sam McPheeters

• Publisher: Rare Bird Books, A Barnacle Book
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781644281338
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

How can so many people pledge allegiance to punk, something with no fixed identity? Depending on who and where you are, punk can be an outlet, excuse, lifestyle, escapism, conversation, community, ideology, sales category, social movement, punishable offense, badge of authenticity, reason to drink beer forever, or an aesthetic of belligerent incompetence. And if someone has a strong belief about what punk is, odds are they have even stronger feelings about what punk is not.Sam McPheeters championed many different versions. Over the course of two decades, he fronted Born Against, released dozens of records and fanzines, and toured seventeen times across the northern hemisphere. In this collection of essays, profiles, criticism, and personal history, he examines the diverse realms he intersected—New York hardcore, Riot Grrrl, Gilman street, the hidden enclaves of Olympia, and New England, and downtown Los Angeles—and the forces of mental illness and creative inspiration that drove him, and others, in the first place.

Endnotes

1 This whole thing started with the creation of a new market. Punk, and all its offshoots—“alternative,” “indie,” “underground,” and most important, “hardcore”—began as a correction for the lost promises of the sixties. This market was an emotional one before it was a financial one. It popped into being as a nameless yearning, a collective reaction to the gap decade when the sixties counterculture stalled on its promises.

2 These different meanings could directly contradict each other. One suspiciously perfect story nails it. Sometime in the mid-1990s, musician Richard Hell and author Legs McNeil found themselves walking near Tompkins Square Park in lower Manhattan. The park’s fringe had become a hub for grubby street punks, and when neither man offered up any spare change, one punk loudly dismissed them as yuppies. Hell had directly inspired the Sex Pistols and McNeil had literally coined the word “punk.” A pal of both men stopped and yelled back, “Are you kidding?” He pointed to McNeil. “That guy invented you.” But the chasm was too wide for anything but shouts. Both sides saw the other as ludicrous fakes.

3 ISIS pulled this same trick. Before gelling in 2014, its members toiled in unaffiliated terror groups—Baathist, Sunni insurgent, Al Qaeda—with mixed results. ISIS took the barbaric energy of past organizations, both stateless and official, and made the “hardcore” version of terrorist groups. The repackaging worked; only three years after launching, ISIS edged out climate change as “top threat to the world” in a Pew global survey.

4 This usage of “scene” is a holdover from beatnik times. It’s a slippery word, since the thing it refers to, a “milieu,” can be any size; a small enclave, an entire city, or the entirety of a genre (national or international). The rock scene. The Montreal jazzmetal scene. The bloodmosh scene. The freaky forest people scene.

5 There’s another way to look at this, that these were the final years of a system that had served humanity for millennia, a system of written communication with no viable competition. The pre-Internet communications between cities and the scenes of cities were not that far off from Lewis and Clark days. You waited for correspondence. Travelers pollinated. But instead of tobaccy twists and beaver pelts, it was dances, fashions, fanzines, tapes.

6 In the mid-eighties Albany hardcore scene, “punk” was considered passé and foolish. We, the hardcore kids, relentlessly mocked The Sex Punks, a much smaller and utterly benign rival scene who dressed in spikes and leather. When a girl from my high school arrived at a show with eyeliner lightning bolts on her face—a look I now understand is awesome—I joined pals in laughing her off the dance floor. Those distinctions were real, and had lasting psychic power. I used to call Born Against a “punk band” as a joke.

7 Although if America can take credit for this industriousness, it also shares the blame for hardcore’s chronic amnesia, and ravenous consumerism, and casual cruelty. Not to mention its epidemic of self-congratulation. Bands that performed in the very recent past are “classic,” “old school,” “legendary,” “seminal.” Books and documentaries breathlessly recall glory days within recent living memory. Bands reform and re-reform like drunken high school football stars cornering strangers to share tales of touchdowns past. In a few short decades, this thing has devolved into a tradition, one with elaborate codes and expensive relics.

Even discussing punk and hardcore has become a semantic slog, a carsick-icky, molasses-sticky swamp of placebo words, demeaning in their lack of meaning. Anyone who once fronted a visible hardcore and/or punk band is, forever and for all time, a “punker,” always running from or returning to their “roots.” It’s the schmaltz and self-congratulations of The Road Not Taken, except the road less travelled has been utterly trampled by now, clogged with generations of would-be iconoclasts, everyone high-fiving each other for their dinky deeds of daring-do. It’s infantilizing.

8 Is it common knowledge that “show” means “concert”? I once had a Who’s On First type conversation with my dad about a show I was driving to in Manhattan. He’d thought I had tickets to a Broadway play. Well, why wouldn’t he?

9 In our second zine collaboration, Plain Truth, my pal Jason O’Toole drew a comic called “Paper Blowing Around.” It was just four panels of paper blowing around. In a fanzine devoted almost exclusively to interviews with tough-guy NY hardcore bands, the comic’s wordless weirdness was its own punchline. It was this cartoon that got the attention of Adam Nathanson and Neil Burke, who later became his bandmates in Lifesblood and then my bandmates in Born Against. Those four panels determined the direction of my adult life.

10 I bought a cheap board at Woolworths, covered it in quality band stickers, and went for one harrowing thirty-foot ride that ended in blood. I think I left the board at the Salvation Army. Skateboarding heads a list of things (drumming, learning Arabic, becoming a voiceover actor, getting a pilot’s license) I threw myself into and immediately bailed on.

11 In 2017, issue 1 of The Archies—yet another reboot for the septuagenarian comic series—showed Archie in a hardcore band. In one panel, he’s wearing a Born Against shirt. The shirt was real but a bootleg; actual BA shirts were NSFW in the worst possible ways.

12 In the mid-1980s, consumer laser printers and scalable fonts were still the stuff of science fiction. This meant a clear and dramatic difference between the official look of typeset text (things cut out of newspapers or magazines) and the amateur look of every other type of text (handwriting, typewriter, Letraset). Snippets of text from the real world looked more official than blocks of text in the fanzine world. Which meant that amateur text could look more authentic when placed on the same page of a snippet of newspaper text.

Example: In 1985, if you cut the plastic label off a two-liter bottle of soda and copied the part that read WARNING: CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE, you could collage this into the cover of your zine and it would read as ironic appropriation. If you did this in 1995, it wouldn’t be clear to the reader if you’d appropriated this or made this yourself on a laser printer, and if it was the latter, what exactly were you trying to convey? It’s the emotional difference between what’s printed in a Hallmark card and what you write by hand.

13 In hindsight, this seems like an odd problem, as I was already a published author. When I was twelve, in 1981, I and my best friend Mark cowrote Travelers Tales: Rumors and Legends of the Albany-Saratoga Region, a collection of folklore, ghost stories, and tall tales from the five counties surrounding Albany. My parents put up the cash for two print runs. Although it was not a kids’ book, we’d leveraged my youth into press in all the local papers, and a spot on PM Magazine (which was sort of a TV news show for people who hated news). We spoke to an elementary school class about writing, marking my very first experience addressing an audience of bewildered young people.

There’s far more to the story (Mark was nineteen and I was twelve, we met in a hippie school run like a cult, Mark later married my mom), and this book is not the place for any of it. This thing’s complicated enough already.

14 Not much to work with here. I see “blazing” is in quotes, since the album is not literally on fire. So kudos to me there. Initializing “NYHC” assumes that all my readers were familiar with New York Hardcore, which seems off for an artzine. I make “apocalyptic lyrics” sound like a real genre, although I guess it kind of was in my limited musical sphere (’80s hardcore had a lot of songs about the end of the world). My underlining the word “ever” hints of frustration with not having the right verbal tools to make the sale. It reads like the distress of a fourth grader who “really, really, really tried” to write a book report (in this case, on Ulysses). Weirdly, this is still my favorite album.

15 And I have written some stone-cold dogshit in my day. Forget those feeble music previews for various weeklies (’09-’15), or my unintentionally comedic Angry Young ...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• Networking Under the ESP Station
• Frozen Pits
• The Heist
• A Conversation with Aaron Cometbus
• The Troublemaker
• Germs Film Review
• The Casual Dots
• Die Kreuzen
• Discharge
• The Flying Lizards
• Fort Thunder
• The Gossip
• Green Day
• Missing Foundation
• No Trend
• 7 Seconds
• SSD
• Thrones
• Youth of Today
• The Debate
• Alberti Records, RIP
• Please Don’t Stop the Muzak
• Backgrounding for the Smell
• Uncle!
• Touchable Sound Interview
• A Booting
• Endnotes
• Thanks
• Special Thanks