Robyn Writes

Dear hardcore – we can do better.

Dear hardcore,

There’s a few things we need to talk about. A couple of months ago, when Kate and I went to the Emmure show, the age difference between us and the average hardcore fan hit us harder than ever before. I had to keep double checking that I was admiring dudes with facial hair as that seemed to be a surefire guarantee that they were above the age of 18. There was something that struck us far more though. As Chelsea Grin hit the stage, I glanced over at the moshpit. Around the edge stood three girls who were wearing lace bandeaus and nothing else on top. Now, if those girls were just feeling super confident about themselves and thinking ‘fuck yeah, I’m rocking this joint’, then I’ve got no beef with that. Their body language suggested something rather different. I watched them for a few minutes, maybe. They spent most of that time consciously pulling up the little bits of lace, staring nervously around the room. When they weren’t doing that, they were tentatively moving closer into the pit before moving back out again, unable to keep up with the furious slam dancing. Later in that evening, we went to the merch stand. On the way back up to the front, Kate had a slight wardrobe malfunction. Nothing major, just a little bit of bra showing, but the amount of disparaging glares from male members of the audience was shocking. The truth is, there’s not a lot of respect among young hardcore fans today. Misogyny and general disrespect runs rampant through a genre that was once a community of anger. Sure, you hated everyone else in the world, but all of the people in that room were your family for a few hours. That’s not the case any more, not by a long shot.

Lyrically speaking, there’s a few instances in today’s hardcore/deathcore/metalcore/insert-your-favourite-core that make my stomach turn. It’s funny when we’re driving along in my car and Kate yells “I want to watch you suck his dick!” in my face, but when Palmeri is snarling it out to a crowd, it takes on something a bit more sinister. The first Chelsea Grin EP is laden with violent fantasies about revenge on an unnamed woman. One song about a cheating ex-girlfriend makes sense, but the entire record is jam packed with references to diseased vaginas and choking on dick. Admittedly, it’s a trend that drops off very quickly in their career – the band start to delve into Biblical metaphors and general feelings of discontent in their later record. That first EP is a product of the follies of youth; rough and raw around the edges. Is that the only kind of anger the youth can possess though? There’s been plenty of young bands that I’ve seen around the scene at tiny shows, screaming out against bitches and sluts. Skinny, pale boys barely past school age looking wildly around a room, desperately trying to find camaraderie in the other guys in the audience, cry out that this song is dedicated to anyone that’s ever been slept around on before launching into their diatribe. These are kids that are stuck in suburbia, faced with a profound boredom that only comes from sleepy little towns where everybody knows everybody. If they’re angry about anything else, they don’t yet know how to express it past those initial feelings of being wronged, and it breeds a certain contempt. Some of this is general fuck-the-world kind of stuff. The rest is a disturbing hatred for the women who have wronged them in some way or another. And if it’s not violent, it projects the message that women are nothing more than sex objects. Although Fight Paris’ Paradise Found is a scuzzy blend of southern rock and hardcore that sounds incredible played loud, the opening line goes “Damn right that slut’s my bitch, she fucking sucked my goddamn dick”. And it pretty much goes on from there.

Yet, this is the kind of music that I love, and hardcore has been a ‘boys club’ for a long, long time. There are more female vocalists than ever before, and there’s a good number of ladies that play other instruments, but it’s still an overwhelming minority. Magazines still do polls on the ‘sexiest women in rock’. Merchandise is overwhelmingly sexist. Drop Dead Clothing’s collection is far less visceral than it used to be, but they used to have sweaters featuring dismembered girls and the phrase ‘sluts get cuts’ plastered on the back. Alternative club nights end up with guys being hailed as heroes because they get a blowjob on stage. But we get used to it. We nod and smile and go along with it all, because it’s just music, right? It’s ironic to wear the shirts plastered with ‘ask your girl what my dick tastes like’. This in itself creates a community of acceptance with no tempered awareness that actually, maybe, this isn’t that cool. I believe that we should celebrate the differences in gender, but we shouldn’t put one or the other down, or perceive that the other is weaker or lesser. We shouldn’t use women as vehicles for anger and aggression. We shouldn’t project our anxieties and our fears onto them, not when there so much else out there to be angry about. The worst part? Women are then conditioned to put each other down in these scenes. Not every girl that enters the moshpit has an agenda, but there’ll always be one who feels that she has to prove herself, to show that she’s better than all of the other women. There’s the scene queens who stand at the bar and scoff at the girls in oversize shirts and Vans. I do my best to be polite and pleasant because I just can’t stand the frostiness and the bitchiness that shouldn’t even exist in the first place. Instead of dragging each other down, we should be building each other up.

Not every band needs to be political. You need only look at Black Flag, Minor Threat or Gorilla Biscuits to know the cry of disaffected youth. Not all disappointment and upset comes from within your core. It’s okay to be angry, but we need to be responsible with it. We need to take that anger and make something better with it. And maybe use the dismembered girl metaphors a bit more sparingly.

xoxo – Robyn

Where did all the good comps go? – A lament for the CD compilation

The internet is brilliant, isn’t it? Almost everything is there at the touch of a button. Stores reside within programs, ready to cater to your every need. In this age, we are the media, and Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook tell you what to listen to. There’s sites like us, trying to do our best to showcase what we love! But sometimes, I don’t half miss a good Punk-o-Rama CD.

I grew up on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. We picked up the first game when I was ten and I dove into it with glee. And while it was extremely fun trying to get a mega high score in two minutes, the best part of the game was the soundtrack. Tunes from Goldfinger, The Suicide Machines, Rage Against The Machine and Powerman 5000 were unlike anything I’d ever heard before. Before then, I’d been a Steps fan, occasionally subjected to my dad playing The Offspring in the car. Combined with a certain AFI video hitting the airwaves in 2001, Tony Hawk’s provided the necessary impetus to throw me into the punk subculture. I haven’t ever looked back. Thanks to that carefully curated soundtrack, and further ones, kids like me found our way into a world unlike any other.

You might have forgotten that record stores exist. With the slow death of HMV (it’s clinging on but you know it won’t last) and more and more indies disappearing, some of you won’t truly know the thrill of going in and picking something up that you’ve never ever heard of before. Why would you go and buy it when you can download it (illegally) for free on the internet, or listen to it on Spotify? Throughout high school, I would save up my allowance and go into my local indie every month, choosing one record that I’d never heard of before. But being cheeky, that would inevitably turn into a compilation to maximise my chances of finding something good. I picked up plenty of label samplers, including Epitaph’s now legendary Punk-o-Rama comps. Label samplers still exist – but they’re online, and disappear as rapidly as they appear. Some labels are doing really sweet stuff to make sure you know their bands – Paper + Plastick, for one, offer a free digital subscription service in which they provide a few tracks from a release each week, and occasionally, a full release! But there was something about picking up those compilations, poring over the inserts to see which album each track originally appeared on and copying it for all your friends. Making a Spotify playlist just doesn’t quite cut it.

So now, we find out about bands in different ways. This can mean that our music tastes are far more eclectic – we’re exposed to so many different types of music online these days. This zine, which was strictly punk to begin with, has moved on to cover all kind of music in the alternative spectrum. Nevertheless, there was something magical at seeing what all those bands had in common. In Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, it was generally a disrespect for authority and a quick tempo that led to their inclusion. For Punk-o-Rama, especially in the latter comps, it was figuring out why From First To Last could be on the same record as Refused. In the few Drive-Thru comps I have knocking about, it was how each band could write songs about effectively the same things but in completely different ways. And I could always find something to relate to.

I suppose we curate our own soundtracks now. I’m really into NBC’s Hannibal at the moment, and I follow a few fan blogs on Tumblr. Every day, there’s at least one fan mix, based around a character’s emotional state, or the mood of a certain episode. I kept the mix CD tradition alive at university – as president of the punk society (yes, it was a real thing), I invited people to bring their own CDs and swap them with each other. But there’s no big communal influence any more, far less of a shared experience, or at least, so I’ve found. This isn’t something that I bemoan, but have learned to accept. Magazines like Rock Sound still put comps out every month and I still listen to them in my car, but now, word of mouth is more important than ever. So keep telling your friends about your favourite bands. We’ll keep telling you about our favourite newbies. And pray to the gaming deities that they release a new Tony Hawk game.

The ‘Teaser’ Trend And Why It Should Go To Hell

I spend a disproportionate amount of time on Facebook. I can’t help it, I’m a member of the internet generation. In between stalking random people that I’ve never met (to decide whether or not I would care to meet them) and raging at Candy Crush Saga, I like to flick through my news feed to see what all the different bands I’ve started following are up to. And you know what most of them are doing? Posting thirty second teaser trailers for four minute videos.

That’s what Parkway Drive did for their latest video. Parkway Drive are a successful metalcore band from Australia with a very attractive frontman and they sell out venues. For me, the teaser trailer is a pointless exercise. It didn’t showcase anything about the video at all, just showing a few performance shots. Here’s the video:

There’s nothing overly special about the video, really; it’s a performance video, where everyone is a bit dirty. At least Epitaph had the good sense to release the teaser just a few days before the actual video, therefore not losing any hype generated in the mean time. But see, this is where Parkway Drive and the vast majority of my timeline differ; Parkway Drive are well established and extremely popular. The other bands have barely got their first demos out of the stable. If you’ve never even released a song, don’t post up a trailer that’s comprised of twenty per cent of your first unknown music video! Trust me – nobody cares unless you’re yet another one of Trent Reznor’s projects. The same goes for posting snippets of songs online. The best way to preview one of your releases is to post up a complete song, rather than ten seconds of each, smooshed together to a montage of terrible press photos. Come on, bands of Facebook – you are better than this. I know you are, and I want to believe in you, but this is like when you go to a restaurant and they give you complimentary bread – in this scenario, the bread is stale and some kind of weird multigrain that you’d never normally consider eating, and you’d much rather be chowing down on the delicious meaty steak (or delicately balanced mushroom risotto, if that’s more your deal) that is your new song.

There’s a few bands out there doing it right. AFI, for example, if you’ll forgive my total and absolute bias. AFI are potentially releasing new material in September. It’s not even totally clear that’s what’s happening. So far, they’ve released three videos. One follows Davey walking down a corridor wearing the most badass jacket I’ve ever seen, accompanied by a voiceover of him speaking some potential lyrics which sound darker than anything he’s written since Sing The Sorrow, until he enters a practice room where the rest of the band are waiting. Davey takes the mic, the music’s about to kick in when it fades out and all we know is SEPTEMBER. Ohhh, baby. The other two are weirder than Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham’s little murder family in Hannibal right now. Numbers chanted over images of circles and girls and people with their heads wrapped in sheets. If you’re a fairly hardcore AFI fan, you might remember their short film Clandestine and the number of theories that then became attached to the lyrical concepts of Sing The Sorrow. (If you aren’t and you don’t, it’s worth listening the album from Bleed Black onwards, not ignoring the bonus track, which then puts The Leaving Songs in order and follows concepts about a cyclical nature of life and death. It’s kind of creepy. And awesome.) These videos are creating a total frenzy amongst AFI fans and a significant amount of WTF from everyone else, all of which is extremely useful publicity, and because AFI are a very well known band, it works.

This isn’t to say that an unknown band couldn’t pull of something like this, because it’s intriguing. It’s potentially a little bit pretentious and a little bit of an ego stroke, but you’re in a band. Take those self-indulgent teaser trailers, cram them where the sun doesn’t shine and play around with something a little more crazy. You owe it to yourself and your fans (or your potential ones, if you’re yet to have any) to stand out from the crowd and try something different. So before you click ‘upload’ on that thirty-second preview of your reasonably ordinary music video, think – the best of your act can’t be showcased in thirty seconds. Unless you’re Limp Wrist, and then your best songs can always be showcased in under thirty seconds because the whole thing usually is. But chances are, you’re not, so show us the whole fucking video.