Hardcore Fanzines

(These aren’t from fanzines, they’re posters for shows. But I think they illustrate pretty well the aesthetic of the fanzine. There was a lot of cut and paste, photocopying and ‘silly’, sometimes offensive drawings. I got both of these posters from the Flipside memorial website -http://flipsidefanzine.com/Framespage.html)

Okay, one last post before time is up. In the early 80s, fan activity such as organizing shows and creating fanzines and artwork to accompany the bands and their music was an integral part of the Hardcore scene. This do-it-yourself ethic was another way to rage against the fabric of commercial and conservative society.

Jack Rabid, editor of The Big Takeover has this to say about the philosophy that informed the fanzine culture in Hardcore:

“I was expected to get involved… everybody I met was doing something. Not all of it was music, a point that is often missed. Even those who were somewhat talentless were inspired to develop one. I hadn’t written a scrap… It wasn’t like I was a pioneer, I just had the same idea everybody else had – to find a Xerox machine in my town, write up things, and give it away at gigs” (in Blush 275)

Fanzines were so important to the subculture in the 80s that it’s only natural that the phenomenon has now gone online. I think that this is an important development in Hardcore because the DIY ethic and reliance on fans to spread the word meant that often scenes remained localized. Local unity and loyalty were important aspects of Hardcore punk. Now that fanzines can easily be global via the internet, issues of authenticity are raised and the unity of the global scene always seems to be up for debate on the sites I’ve visited.

Speaking of a global scene, I found a fanzine called Distort that is written by a guy living in Victoria. You can see that the photocopied, tough look of the art and layout remains a key component of modern Hardcore zines:

(Covers of issues #7 & #13 from http://culthardcore.org/distort/back-issues.php)

His foray into publishing began as “shitty one / two page fliers I'd put together with a print run of 20 to send with mixtapes to friends isolated in shitholes like Canberra”. Which is Hardcore values to a T. His website is set up with a news section, a forum and a contact page. To get an actual copy of the zine, you have to email him and get a subscription. This seems pretty typical content for stuff about Hardcore online.

There are some zines that exist solely online. There seems to be a lot of Hardcore fans dedicated enough to make net content in France and Germany. Straight edge communities seem to be particularly tight online. Most zines I’ve come across have a community forum you have to become a member of to comment on, and lots of links to photos of bands and feature articles and interviews.

Just as it was in the beginnings of Hardcore, it is important to the culture for everyone to get involved and demonstrate their dedication to the scene. You can write, take photos, draw shitty comic strips, whatever you can think of that contributes something to the music and mates you love, and transfers legitimacy through loyalty to your lifestyle choices.

Blush, Steven. American Hardcore: A Tribal History. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001.

http://flipsidefanzine.com/Framespage.html accessed 28 May 2009.

http://culthardcore.org/distort/back-issues.php accessed 28 May 2009.

More stuff about women in Hardcore and a female orientated ‘straight edge’ website.

I was doing a Google search, trying to find some other blogs on Hardcore, when I stumbled across the book Pretty in Punk: Girls Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture by Lauraine LeBlanc. Researching Hardcore I’ve been absolutely inundated with images of snarling, sweaty and very often bleeding young men. Being a woman, and knowing that women generally have interests beyond those that are stereotypically laid before them, I’m pretty curious about a book that’s going to shed some light on how girls get down with Hardcore, a subculture that seems monolithically masculine.

LeBlanc got involved in the punk scene in high school. Before she became a punk she describes being victimised for being a smart, dorky girl who wasn’t yet sexually active (LeBlanc 3). Of her decision to go punk, and the empowerment she felt accompanied the change, Leblanc says:


“I would have told you how I had gone from being a social outcast to being a core member of a marginal group, that it was no longer the case that the world was against me, but rather that I was against the world” (3).


My feeling is that this really sums up the inclusive appeal of punk music. The basic ideal of ‘us against them’ doesn’t (or shouldn’t) discriminate on the basis of gender. However, just as LeBlanc notes, just because the subculture maintains it is egalitarian as a whole, doesn’t mean that certain individuals aren’t happy to see women forced to the edge of the scene (6). I’ve talked on this blog before about how an oppositional front can reinforce the ideals of the dominant culture, and I think the seepage of mainstream stereotypes about sexuality into the Hardcore scene betrays this tendency.

LeBlanc also states that there was an unapproachable masculinity to the sound, sub-cultural activities and style of dress of Hardcore that was different to punk before it. The music was sped up, and lyrics were always aggressively shouted. Pogo dancing became slam dancing, a stylized expression of violence, and “girls were discouraged from entering the pit” (LeBlanc 51). LeBlanc also states that she thinks the “variety and play apparent in the early punk style of dress was lost” (52) during the ascendency of Hardcore because the style of participants was “decidedly harder-edged, masculine, creating a look that was basically “unisex” (male) as opposed to androgynous (a mix of male and female)” (52).

While I think that LeBlanc’s views are a result of her personal identification with earlier forms of punk culture than Hardcore, what she says about the look becoming masculine instead of androgynous is really interesting. Styles of dress are amongst the first indicators of gender in our social culture. That women in Hardcore had to conform to outwardly ‘masculine’ clothing and mannerisms to participate is a comment on the ‘with us, or against us’ mentality that, to me anyway, seems to pervade most aspects of the Hardcore scene.

After reading LeBlanc’s thoughts, I had to do some internet searching to find some perspectives from different women. I have to say that a lot of the stuff I found on the web was specifically related to a subculture within a subculture, straight edge. I guess that what straight edgers are all about is best summed up by Minor Threat, the band that first popularised the term and the philosophy:


(I)Don't smoke
Don't drink
Don't fuck
At least I can fucking think (“Out of Step” track 8)


Stay straight and use your head, basically. You can mark yourself as straight edge by wearing the mark ‘X’ on your person or clothing. I think it’s interesting that there seemed to be a lot of women involved in the straight edge scene online. Maybe taking the focus away from sex, and participant’s behaviour not being driven by drugs and alcohol, is appealing to women who loved the music and the oppositional nature of Hardcore but not the particular aggression that was focused towards differences between the sexes.

Anyway, I stumbled across xsisterhoodx.com – a straight edge and hardcore community. The site claims its mission is to create a balance and eliminate biases “which exist in today’s global scene”. The community also stands against “violence and elitism” and doesn’t “tolerate bigotry, racism, sexism, or discrimination in any form”. Which I reckon sounds like pretty good stuff. The site also admits in its mission statement that “too few hardcore/straight edge sites empower females let alone accept them as equals”. I found that a lot of the information and interviews on the site focused on men, which is unavoidable because more men are involved in making the music. But I think the featured musicians and scenesters have been chosen because their music and philosophies gel with the mission of the site, not because of their gender. The site had a lot of articles on it, under headings like straight edge, hardcore, feminism and politics.

I read Women in Hardcore…according to Miles Away, Sovereign Strength and Blood Stands Still on the site and some of the ideas about women expressed in the article were infuriatingly simplistic and judgemental. Apparently “no clit in the pit” is common to hear if you are female at a Hardcore show (Mendoza 1). One particular charmer is Danny Banura from the band “Blood Stands Still”, who is described as having “mixed feelings” (Mendoza 1) about girls in the scene:


“I think it’s good as long as they are not causing stupid drama. You come to a show for the music. Don’t come and start shit with your ex at the show. If you are standing close to the pit, don’t fucking cry when you get hit. And don’t go get your boyfriend to do something. That’s just drama. And the less of that at shows the better” (1)


He’s simply stated his problem (with bitches!) and he’s being direct, which reflects the musical and lyrical style of Hardcore. He’s maintaining the requisite tough attitude too… Or he could just be a bit simple. Girls cry and have boy-troubles, men have ‘real’ issues and no-one understands except other sweaty dudes in a pit. It’s too much like Fight Club (for dummies). After reading about women in the scene it’s hard for me to understand their persistence because I’m not absolutely enamoured with the music (although I definitely don’t mind some of it). I personally can’t imagine putting up with a scene where really bullshit attitudes are pervasive. Well, each to their own I guess.


Kelly. “About xsisterhoodx”. xsisterhoodx.com. 7 February 2007. 25 May 2009 http://www.xsisterhoodx.com/about/about-xsisterhoodx.html

LeBlanc, Lauraine. Pretty in Punk: Girls Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. 25 May 2009 http://books.google.com.au/books?id=m8Lz1S9v4d8C&pg=PA52&lpg=PA52&dq=hardcore+punk+lauraine+leblanc&source=bl&ots=kUohhHHPey&sig=YECDMUXFNHWaac-bkaq1zW7wPxc&hl=en&ei=qiEaSrLoO5iGkQWn7dj4DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4

MacKaye, Ian. “Out of Step.” Minor Threat. CD. Dischord, B000000JNK, 1984.

Mendoza, Brittany. “Women in Hardcore…according to Miles Away, Sovereign Strength, and Blood Stands Still”. xsisterhoodx.com. 24 November 2008. 28 May 2009 <>

Things that are oppositional for the sake of being oppositional annoy me!

I’ve been reading some journal articles and whatnot for my major assignment – not just on hardcore, but other stuff too – and have reached the conclusion that things that are oppositional generally annoy the hell out of me. This isn’t to say that I think there’s no value in sub-cultural activity or the music people make ‘underground’, or that ‘mainstream’ stuff is particularly great (there’s a lot shoved in my face that inspires violent thoughts, if not actions). Dismissing something because it’s a part of the dominant culture and you’ve definitively rejected following the cultural pied piper to your squirmy, festering death, means you could be missing out on some good stuff (in my opinion).

Watching the film American Hardcore, my idea about being oppositional because it makes you feel different and special being really quite juvenile was crystallised. Keith Morris (vocalist for Black Flag pre-Henry Rollins, vocalist for the Circle Jerks) was describing what being involved in the Hardcore scene meant for him:

“I’m working Monday through Friday and here come Friday night and I’m just going to go off. I hate my boss, I hate the people that I work with, I hate my parents, I hate all these authorative figures. I hate politicians, the people in government. I hate the police. You know, everybody’s kinda pointing the finger at me, everybody’s poking at me. And now I have a chance to be with a bunch of my own type of people, and I have a chance to go off. And that’s basically what it was. (Makes bomb dropping noise and gesture)”

EVERYBODY pisses this guy off. But it seems to me that there’s no willingness to change anything about the social and political structures that are making him so angry. The point is to rage, rage against anything that is restricting you. I think it becomes so that you need things to disagree with to cement your sense of personal identity. By solidifying opposition, you necessarily end up solidifying the dominant culture and its ideologies. The cultural paradigm remains un-shifted.

Henry Rollins has said that Hardcore is as American as “fake wars, apple pie and baseball” (in the film Punk: Attitude). Maybe initially this quote seems a little strange, given that Hardcore (and punk in general) prides itself on its sub-cultural status. Some academics interested in Hardcore scenes agree with what Rollins is saying. For example:

“Still, the most evident source for punk’s definition of individualism is classical liberalism’s defense of the sovereign individual: no person or institution has the right to determine what you can say, feel, or do as long as you do not inhibit another person’s freedom. This idea is one of the most prevalent threads running through American literature and culture” (Treber 39).

Even people (the clever ones, anyway) who are involved in Hardcore scenes can recognise that Hardcore directly relates to the dominant culture, rather than exists parallel to it. Hardcore “repeats the ideological patterns of the dominant culture by privileging the importance of the self and self-interest” (Treber 40). Not only are liberal ideologies reinforced, but the punk glorification of poverty, drug use, violence and sex reaffirms negative stereotypes that the ‘mainstream’ culture holds as a means of differentiating from it (Treber 31).

I’m getting the feeling that I’m looking way too far into what amounts to simply a good way to get messy, noisy and loose for a lot of people. That’s the cultural studies bag, I guess. Personally, I find it really interesting that people can ‘find themselves’ within a culture that seems, from the outside, to be obnoxiously simplistic and aggressive (yeah, Fuck Authority!). What I’m trying to get at with all this ideological/oppositional/paradigm talk is that punk or Hardcore doesn’t exist without the rest of us squares and our normal little lives.

Therefore, attempts at subversion are futile! Wake up – you are nothing but a product of your dominant culture!

American Hardcore. Dir. Paul Rachman. 2006. YouTube. Web. 15 April 2009.

Punk: Attitude. Dir. Don Letts. 200. YouTube. Web. 15 April 2009.

Traber, Daniel S. “LA’s “White Minority”: Punk and the Contradictions of Self-Marginalization.” Cultural Critique 48 (2001): 30-64. JSTOR. Web. 30 April 2009.

Meet Jack Grisham from T.S.O.L.

This is Jack Grisham from TSOL (True Sounds of Liberty), an American Hardcore band. If I seemed a little bit patronizing in the last blog post I wrote, it’s only because I had just viewed the 2006 documentary American Hardcore and had just watched this guy recall this conversation between himself and the bouncer at a hardcore gig in the early 80s:

Bouncer: Why should I let you in?

Jack Grisham: Well, cos I have a bomb. I’ve got two. You can have one if you let me in.

Bouncer: How do I even know it’s gonna work?

Jack Grisham: Okay, well, watch.

At which point Jack Grisham describes (with glee) the following:

“And I go down the street and took one them and put it against this garage door, and lit it, and just blew this fucking garage door off”.

Jack Grisham also wanted to add one more point to wrap up this story:

“And me being a violent, robbing, gravedigging rapist was part of my world. And that was like, ‘well, this is what we do, man. Yeah that chick passed out and I pissed in her face. What? So what?’”

Thinking that Jack Grisham might well be the biggest tool in the US, I looked him up on Wikipedia. It said this:

“Known for his matinee idol looks, intelligent lyrics and wild comic antics onstage, Grisham transcended the genre of punk, becoming the unlikely musical progeny of Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious and Frank Sinatra.”

Which really made me hope that his wild comic antics extended to Wikipedia entries.

But what Jack Grisham really got me thinking about was the role of women in Hardcore. If raping and pissing on chicks makes you tough and cool, then what chance did women stand to make a dent on the scene? I’ve been reading a book called American Hardcore: A Tribal History by Steven Blush, in which he interviews a lot of ground zero participants in the scene. The book has a very interesting chapter on the presence (or lack thereof) of women in Hardcore:

“Most Hardcore chicks rejected femininity. Their ideal was the tomboy – in contrast to the big-haired bitches you’d find sucking dick backstage at Metal concerts. The truth is, few gorgeous women participated in Hardcore – most of them were nasty ugly trolls.” (page 35)

Jeez Louise. Way to talk about women, Mr Blush. The few women that Blush did interview generally agreed that Hardcore was a boys club. Most recognized serious homo-eroticism in the scene, especially with all the sweaty, half-naked slam dancing that went on. The violence of the mosh-pit was especially exclusionary to women. A few of the women that Blush interviewed recognized that sex played a huge part of how to get accepted if you were female:

“Women weren’t welcome in the mosh pit… The only thing you could really offer was sex. It pissed me off that I had to do it, but I was also grateful for it ‘cause I got in there in a good way” (Laura Albert NYHC scene page 34)

It’s all kind of a bit disappointing to me on a personal level, I guess. The skank/tomboy dichotomy is far too common, always restrictive and way too simplistic . But I guess simplicicity and directness was something that was valued by the confused, very often drug-addled kids involved in the scene. I want to be politically correct and say that women were involved in this or that aspect of the scene. But it wouldn’t be true. I guess their marked absence says even more about the macho nature of Hardcore.


American Hardcore is a documentary released in 2006 directed by Paul Rachman and written by Steven Blush. It details the history of American punk rock from 1980 – 1986.

American Hardcore: A Tribal History is a book written by Steven Blush and edited and designed by George Petros. It was published in 2001 by Feral House, LA.

I did some very serious research on Wikipedia.org where I got some quotes for this post and the photo of Jack Grisham.

Introduction

Well. This is my blog about Hardcore Punk. In ye grande olde tradition of sub-culutral studies, its very much looking from the outside in. To kick things off, a moment's contemplation about the nature of punk music:

"For performing rock & roll, or punk rock, or call it any damn thing you please, there's only one thing you need: NERVE. Rock & Roll is an attitude, and if you've got the attitude you can do it, no matter what anybody says. Believing that is one of the things punk rock is about. Rock is for everybody, it should be so implicitly anti-elitist that the question of whether somebody's qualified to perfom it should never even arise."

-Lester Bangs (the "Godfather of punk journalism")


Now, let us consider:

We've got that attitude hey,
we've got that attitude.
Don't care what they may say,
we got that attitude.
Don't care what they may do,
we got that attitude. Now.

- Bad Brains "Attitude"


So, I guess it's fairly well accepted that the term 'punk' these days can describe the intangible. Its a fairly hard term to nail down. But then you have to be fluid in what you hate. Spitting bile at Reagan and Thatcher can get old quick when you're young, pissed off and there's always new stuff to get your knickers in a knot about. Assuming of course your glorification of living rough has done sweet nothing to change anything that's making you furious.

Anyway, from here on in I'm all about the hardcore. No soft focus. No creative camera angles. Hardcore is special forces to punk's army reserves. Or at least that's what people in the American hardcore scene of the early 80s would have you believe...



Note: I got Lester Bangs' essay In Which Yet Another Pompous Blowhard Purports to Possess the True Meaning of Punk Rock from the The Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing edited by Clinton Heylin and published in 1992. Heylin labelled Bangs the "Godfather of punk journalism" in his notes on Bangs' essay on page 103.

Bad Brains' 1:19 second classic "Attitude" is track 3 on their self-titled first full length studio album, unveiled in 1982.