Rather Let This Die than Bleed

I've been thinking about hardcore (yes, in the vague and wide-ranging way that is implied by that phrase) more than usual lately because I've been listening to the Axe to Grind podcast more than usual. A recent episode that focused on Comeback Kid's second album Wake the Dead had me thinking about both about my experience liking Comeback Kid when I was younger, and getting into hardcore as a genre, as both the two are intertwined.

I feel like my transition into liking hardcore happened over a little more than a year. I saw Set Your Goals open for Less Than Jake in 2006 touring on Mutiny! and there was enough pop-punk in the band for me to like it.* Shortly after that I started to listen to Strike Anywhere and Lifetime, both whom seemed to have enough "punk" in them that their versions of hardcore was still palatable to me. By the end of my first year at university I had accepted that I like hardcore, something I would have never imagined as a ska kid, and I was ready to get invested in some bands.

*In hindsight, they are much more of a pop-punk band than hardcore, but it seemed like the opposite to me at the time, because hardcore as a genre was so foreign to me. That being said, I still like to think of Reset and Mutiny! as cool things happening in hardcore, rather than cool things happening in pop-punk. Make sense? Probably not. Also, the two singer thing sure hasn't great, eh?

My friend Chris' first recommendation was Comeback Kid's second album Wake the Dead which was a huge thing in Ontario after its release. The band Canadianess made them more accessible to me and I had a bit of local pride in them, despite the fact that they were from Winnipeg. The album is definitely a "hardcore" album, but it's recorded in probably the most presentable way that they genre possibly can be for new listeners (re: The Blasting Room). I was one of those and took to it immediately. Breakdowns! Apparently they were great along!

After getting in Comeback Kid, I figured that the next thing to do would be to go to a real hardcore show, which seemed scary and violent to me as some who spent their high school years skanking. Shortly after I started listening, the band announced the Through the Noise Tour in Canada, a super bill featuring them headlining with Misery Signals, Shai Hulud, Bane, Grave Maker, and Outbreak as support, and a date in Guelph, where I was going to university. I had heard of Misery Signals and Bane, but everything was new to me and I was excited to take all of it in.

I only knew one person going to the show and she spent most of the show hanging out with other friends, so I spent most of the night on my own. I was nervous about what shirt to wear to the show because I didn't really have any hardcore merch, so I wore a plaid shirt over an Aggrolites shirt to hide my ska-ness. In hindsight, why didn't I just wear my Strike Anywhere shirt? I felt like an outsider at the show and found myself watching the bands and people there closely to learn what being a hardcore kid was like. 

The show was such a different experience from what I was used to a ska and bigger punk shows. It felt more tribal and it seemed like most of the people there knew each other and this was the main thing that they did. There was also more posturing and ego than any other show I had been to. People clearly had a particular aesthetic that they stuck to, which was something I hadn't really experienced before. There was an air of silent judgement in the room and that was both scary and alluring to me. I equally wanted to fit in and keep doing my own thing. As much as I did, and still do, hate that judgement, it also felt related to the fact that everyone went absolutely crazy when the bands played, yelling, moshing, and stage-diving.

Though I was intrigued by the first two bands, neither of them made a huge impact on me in the moment, though I came to really like Grave Maker's album after the fact. Before the show, I was most intrigued by Bane, whose shirts and hoodies I had seen everywhere and whose name I thought was extremely cool. Though I had checked out a few songs, I found that I really wanted to get into the band more than I liked their songs.

Once the band had finished setting their gear up, frontman Aaron Bedard got onstage looking completely different from everyone else in the venue, grabbed the mic, and said:

"You know sometimes touring can get a little boring when you're as old we are. But then you roll into some small college town you've never heard of and there's 300 kids ready to get buck-ass wild. This song is called 'COUNT ME OUUUUTTTTT' "

The kids did indeed buck-ass wild and though I had a huge mix of feelings up to that point in the night, the negatives were immediately erased, I became a hardcore kid instantly, and knew I had found something I would love for life. Bane became the first hardcore that felt like "my thing" and that feeling still lingers today. When I think back on my experience with the genre, Bedard immediately capturing the entire room like that is "hardcore" to me, because that's what brought me in.

An Eighth Grade Promise Made to Myself

 I sort of feel like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon when the first wave of warm weather comes around each March. Each winter I retreat inside, speak to people rarely, and spend more time inside my head. Once there's a day that's sunny my energy returns and being social is once again something I can do.

Skateboarding back from a park while listening to !ATTENTION!, during a dry 15 degree night, having just smoked a joint is the meaning of life. I can recognize that sounds dramatic and dumb after the fact, but please know that it was something I wholeheartedly believed in the moment.

Gripping Your Pillow Tight

 A fun thing that happened to me today was the band En Garde posting their EP Debtors.

I saw En Garde in Cleveland in November 2012 at some rehearsal/recording space with Signals Midwest, Worship This!, and Ma Jolie. I was in town to see my sister at Cleveland State University and visit a few friends and they took me to this place. All of those bands were, I believe, Cleveland-based at the time and it was fun to see how they did DIY there. Being in a different city, going to a cool venue, and seeing a bunch of good bands from that city was "cool".

I checked out records from the rest of the bands, and obviously Signals Midwest went on to get bigger, but I never really heard more from En Garde, at least until they seemingly became active again and put out this music. And it's recordings from 2012 to boot!

I can't really describe why, but it's sort of comforting to have something like this circle back to me. Like things that you like or matter won't slip away and will find you eventually. 

That or I've had a headache all fucking day and this is cool.

I Don't Have to Realize

 I recently had a student reach out to me because they were thinking of applying to grad school and they wanted to learn about the process and hear what my experience had been so far. These types of moments are always exciting to me, because I love school so much and I’m always willing to try to bring someone else into the fold. Since she hadn’t had tonnes of experience in speaking with faculty members, this was one of the main processes she had questions about. Who should I talk to? How do I start? How do I get a letter of reference? What if they don’t want to do something for me? This made me think about the following:

I think that an integral part of the university experience is having a professor that you have a personal conflict with. It’s unfortunate that it’s true, but you form weirdly personal relationships with professors when you’ve been taking their classes for four years and by the end of your program, you know them on a first name basis, and they have a weirdly intimate knowledge of you as a person through reading the work that you submit to them. When you get to know people that well, it’s natural that there will be a few who you don’t vibe with and vice-versa. 

I had a professor multiple times in my undergrad who seemed to just not get me at all. Most of my peers didn’t have as much of a problem as I did, but my learning and writing style just didn’t fit with her teaching style at all. I did badly in her classes and there were times where it was hard for me to not believe she wasn’t being vindictive. I had multiple interactions with her that I, now someone with university teaching experience, think were handled badly and borderline unprofessionally. Maybe our conflict wasn’t as bad as it seemed at the time, but I think that you should learn to be compassionate when you are the one who has all the power in a relationship.

One of the things that other students and I loved to laugh about was that she had an accent that would sometimes disappear while she was lecturing. I don’t know specifics about her story, but I do know that a lot of it came off as phony and that I wasn’t the only who thought so. In particular, my Salvadoran classmate found her accent pretty silly.

At the end of my first semester as a master’s student, the Art History department had a party at the house of one of the professors. The hosts rented a karaoke machine and we all had a few drinky-poos over the course of the night, blurring the lines of professional decorum. Everyone’s karaoke performances got more and more ridiculous as the night went on and it was fun.

At one point, one of the students chose Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca” and put my arch nemesis on the spot to perform it. She was a quiet person in groups but couldn’t back down because of how many people were there, and instead got up and did it. Her performance of the song was a train wreck and it was clear that she didn’t know a lot of the words that were in it. As she butchered the song and struggled through the Spanish lyrics, I had to leave the room because I was beginning to laugh really hard. 

This wasn’t the end of our relationship and there was much bigger conflicts that happened down the line, and even some cordial interactions to go with them. It felt so good to be vindicated that night. In general, I get along with people easily and am a non-confrontational person, so whenever I do conflict with people, it seems all the more intense to me. Might seem shitty, but boy does it rock to your enemies lose.

You're All a Bunch of Little Wieners

In 2008, New Found Glory released an EP called Tip of the Iceberg that featured three original songs on the A side where they tried to do “back to their roots” thing, playing more aggressive and nominally “hardcore” pop-punk music, and three covers by Lifetime, Shelter, and Gorilla Biscuits* on the B side to prove their scene cred. This release followed their uber-soft album Coming Home that saw them at their most mainstream-oriented pop-rock, and I think the EP was them trying to right the ship. Basing this on nothing other than my own experience and view of punk/emo/rock at the time, Coming Home seemed like a big swing to try to fix themselves in the radio rock circuit and see if they could get a song on a WB show. That didn’t work, so they decided to return to pop-punk, their bread and butter, and attached themselves to the pop-punk/hardcore (or popcore, or easycore) thing that was just starting to really take off with Set Your Goals, Four Year Strong, and A Day to Remember. I was heavy into that scene of music at the time (ADTR not so much) and this EP is actually what turned me into a fan of the band. I was obsessed with Lifetime at the time and New Found Glory covering them was interesting to me.

*I hadn’t listened to GB in ages and recently revisited Start Today. I was shocked at how much I still really fucked with it.

What stood out to most people about Tip of the Iceberg though was that it was accompanied by another EP called Takin’ it Ova! by the fictional band the International Superheroes of Hardcore, which was New Found Glory under pseudonyms with guitarist Chad Gilbert singing. The EP was all joke songs about being super heroes in a world bound to the rules and scene politics of hardcore music and it was pretty funny. There was lots of references to both the history of hardcore music and world of comic books and it was light-hearted enough that it was easy to laugh. It was obvious that New Found Glory was keenly aware of their status as a wimpy pop-punk band and that made the joke a lot better. It also helped that the Comeback Kid/Ten Yard Fight/Youth Crew Revival style of the songs was played surprisingly capably. 

After a decade of the band being the easiest punch line about how much pop-punk sucked, I think that Takin’ it Ova! did a lot to win the band a bit of respect. It was less fun to make fun of them when they were in on the joke. At some shows, New Found Glory would do short sets as the ISHC in silly costumes and everyone seemed to enjoy it. They even got bookings on a few of the marquee pop-punk festivals of the time, like the Bamboozle, and released another EP, the Harry Potter-themed HPxHC, that also pretty funny.

In an interview that must have been 2009 or 10, Gilbert, who was the member that spearheaded the whole thing, was asked about the future of the ISHC and if there were plans to do another record and responded that he was planning to do a “serious” ISHC record. The ISHC making “serious” hardcore music sounded like the dumbest thing ever and made it clear that maybe he wasn’t as in on the joke as everyone else. This immediately spelled the death of the ISHC, as an earnest hardcore record from them seemed like the most embarrassing thing in the world.

All Your Artists Are Just Servants of the Status Quo

I was recently thinking about a particular moment in punk music, as a result of the album exchange with Duff. in late 00s, it seemed to me like the identity of "used to be (or be in) a hardcore" carried a huge amount of cultural cache, and was a primary talking point album reviews and music news. This came up because we were talking about Crime in Stereo, specifically the album The Troubled Stateside, and how they seemed to benefit from moving from playing melodic hardcore, or popcore as Duff erroneously labelled them, to a more experimental and moodier emo sound.*

*I remember people saying that Crime in Stereo is Dead was their Deja Entendu at the time, as I guess that album became shorthand for a band making a leap in "seriousness" in their music and the two records aren't far off sonically. TBH, I always liked ...Is Dead more than that record to begin with and that opinion sure has aged well now.

Beyond Crime in Stereo, and bands like Cold Cave, this cultural capital extended to other types of music too. When Frank Turner was exploding in the Fest scene, it felt like no one could go one second discussing him without mentioning the fact that he used to play in Million Dead. Thousand Dead? I'm not going to waste time looking up libertarian-ass Frank Turner's old band that probably sucked. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I did this very thing here on IMU. I guess it's sort of a way to claim cred? To make it sound like you know about their entire musical backstory and how it contributes to the current narrative around their music.

Duff thought it represented a reversal of opinion on selling out, and I guess that's true as well. It's no longer wack to stop playing hardcore (cool) and start playing butt rock (lame), like No Warning did, but is instead a sign that the butt rock you're playing is even better because you used to play in a hardcore band (always cool). 

And when you think of the biggest punk bands of the 00s, this opinion actually makes a lot of sense. Against Me! went from being about as anarcho as you can get to playing major label rock music (I like New Wave and White Crosses a lot) and this transition was the fulcrum of mainstream criticism of the record. I remember the review of New Wave in Vice saying "Against Me! went all Bruce Springsteen on us." Ditto for Rise Against, who similarly benefitted from their past in Chicago area hardcore and skatepunk bands in making their political message seem more legit.

For the record: Against Me! kicks ass and Rise Against has never been for me. At their best they are a way, way worse version of Strike Anywhere and at their worst they are punk Nickelback. Everyone loved them so much when I was in high school, but I never understood the appeal.

I think this is all a result of punk music working its way into mainstream culture in a major way between the mid 90s and mid 00s. On one hand it was great because seeing blink-182 on MuchMusic was exactly how I found out about punk, but it also meant that most people coming to bigger punk shows were not punks at all. They liked to mosh and thought the music was cool, but I don't think would have cared about selling out in a million years. 

It seems crazy to think about it now, but there were legitimate high school, popped American Eagle polo collar bros at screamo shows in Southern Ontario. I guess there were parts of the subculture that appealed to them, meaning they wanted to hook up with the girls, but there's no way they were really into any of the bigger political and social ideas informing the music. But you could say to them that X bass player was in a heavy band before this and they would think that was... something?

I remember talking to a kid at my high school about how bands make a living. He had gone to see the Dropkick Murphys the past weekend and couldn't believe how cheap the tickets were. I thought that $35 for a punk show was too expensive, but he thought the bands should be charging even more so that they could make more money. The next year, he went to Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario and I never saw him at a punk show ever again.

Trying Hard Not to Smile

A friend of Rebecca's recently sent them a video of a Youtube Guy (and I mean "Youtube Guy") doing a blink-182ified* version of "One Week" by the Barenaked Ladies. I found the guy's voice and demeanor irritating and had to then admit to myself that I just really like the song "One Week".

*You eve notice that the "What if blink-182 wrote _____" videos on Youtube always just sound like All Time Low?

"One Week" is one of those songs tied to a specific memory for me. In January 2009, Brian, Pat, and I drove to Toronto from Geulph so we could see Streetlight Manifesto, A Wilhelm Scream, The Swellers, and The Stich Up play at the Sound Academy. We had recently gotten Brian into Streetlight and were excited for him to see them with us. I also loved taking from friends from Guelph back to Toronto. Everyone at school was from the 519 area and loved to shit on Toronto, so I felt smug that usually anything sick happening required us to go back to my hometown.

In hindsight, I think this show was also a turning point for me in my music taste. This was the last time that I was excited to see Streetlight and I never sought out chances to see them after this. I was just starting to get into, for lack of a better term, "Fest music" and couldn't wait to see both Wilhelm and the Swellers. About 95% of the crowd didn't know those two bands and were pretty indifferent when they played,* so it felt cool and like I was part of a secret club who knew how good those bands were. When we walked in, The Stich Up were covering "Deeper" from Dan Potthast's other band Mu330, and that was an early point in my obsession with that band too. I had been looking forward to the chance to pick up the Swellers' My Everest at the show, and it turned out to be everything I expected.

*Streetlight Manifesto kind of have "Slayer Fan (or NoFX fan or Dropkick Murphys fan) syndrome where they draw a crowd that only cares about the headlining band and are openly hostile to openers. No one cares that you know all the words to "Would You Be Impressed" bro. They're a huge band.

Pat drove us in Brian minivan, Mama Link, to the show because Brian was tired and wanted to just be high in the backseat instead. Whenever we did roadtrips like this night, I would make a playlist on my iPod that we could listen to on the drive into the city. I took making the playlist super seriously and was trying to prove how fuckin' sick my musical taste was, thinking that I would get a "yo, this sounds good" compliment each time a song they hadn't heard came on.

Obviously, that didn't happen. It's not like they disliked the music I put on, but mostly they were indifferent while we drove. The traffic into the city was bad and I was starting to get stressed about getting to the show on time, so that I could see all of those opening bands. The playlist ended as we got off the 401 near Scarborough Town Center and we debated about what to put on next. I turned around and looked at Brian, high as hell behind me and deadpanning, with the glow of his laptop screen light up his face:

"Iiiiittt's beeen"

Every time that I mention this song, I'm also required to mention the last line of the lyrics "Birchmount Stadium, Home of the Robbie" said instead of "It'll still be two days until we say we're sorry". BNL are from my neighborhood in Scarborough, and names and imagery from there are featured in a lot of their music. Shout out to the Real McCoy being in the "Lovers in a Dangerous Time" video. Birchmount is a high school/sports complex near my parents' house. I played house league baseball for the Birchmout Bulldogs and my first lifeguarding job was at Birchmount Pool. Each year, an big invitational soccer tournament is held at Birchmount Stadium called the Robbie. You always see this sign as you drive by on Kingston Road:

Not Going Down in this Town

I generally build posts off a small idea or memory I keep returning to. I had one the other in the shower, but didn't write it down after I got out and now it's gone forever. For some reason, I keep coming back to the idea that the post was going to be about the Crime in Stereo guy, but I've already written about that story. It was from that era of my life though, I think. Will it ever come back? Who knows.

I haven't gotten a haircut during the pandemic so far and my hair is now the longest it's been in 5 years or so. When I got a fade then, I was super worried about how long hair looked with my receding hairline and I conceded to myself that my glorious days of being a long hair were over. One of the times that I saw the Sidekicks, frontman Steve Ciolek's hair was doing similar things to mine and it felt a little like the Ghost of Christmas Future. I had seen a few unflattering pictures of myself where my forehead/hairline looked humongous and I didn't want to look like a washed up metal singer, still clinging to his long hair because it was integral to his identity, but looked like shit. I didn't want to be a huge forehead/long hair guy and even though I loved having long hair, I accepted that 1. I didn't need long hair to look cool. 2. Short hair cuts looked good too.

I got a fade the week that COVID hit, so I was good through March, but my hair quickly got to the point where I normally get a cut. I avoided the barbershop because getting a haircut seemed like a frivolous treat during the pandemic. I mean, it would have been totally fine, but I just never did it. I put off deciding what to do about my hair and then just accepted that it was long again. Some days I stressed about it, but some days I actually really like how I looked with shaggy hair again.

Now my hair is fully long again, in that's past my jaw, but not yet at my shoulders, and to my shock it is fine. All of my fears about looking stupid with long hair turned out to be dumb anxieties. I don't know if I'm going to commit to fully growing it out to the point that I used to be at in my early 20s, but at the same time I don't know that I'm going to go to the barber any time soon.

Some all of this long hair thinking has made me reflect on is how self-conscious I was about experimenting with my style when I was in university. When I started to wear skinny jeans, I felt the need to point out how tight my jeans were and make fun of myself for having girls jeans.* When I grew my hair out, I felt the need to say that I looked like a girl. I guess that in both cases I figured that if I said it first, then no one could say it to me. This urge died with time, and I stopped caring, but kinda weird that that was my first impulse, eh? Masculinity is a hell of a drug.

*TBH, I only ever had one pair of actual girls jeans and they were super uncomfortable because the crotch was super shallow and it hurt my balls, so I barely wore them. By the time I started with skinnys you could get guys ones everywhere.

Like a true IMU post, this one has no ending, so I guess I'll just add that it's NYHC week in the Humongous Brain Album Exchange. Duff gave me Born Against and I gave him Burn. One day I will get him to love the chug like I do.

I Don't Want to Barge in on Your Secrecy

 Weird fact of the day:

In high school, I was obsessed with the bands Catch-22 and Streetlight Manifesto, as every teenaged ska fan was. In particular, I was absorbed by the bass playing on Keasbey Nights and Everything Goes Numb and spent hours upon hours practicing the songs to try and get up to the actual speed they were played at (I mostly accomplished that).*

*While I was in my first high school ska band, our trumpet player was weirdly obsessed with playing bass and trying to prove he was better than me. One time, we were talking about Streetlight and I mentioned how hard the bassline to "Everything Went Numb" was (it is very hard and crazy). He shrugged it off and was like "I dunno I just played along to it first try." I didn't really know what to say. No you didn't? It's clearly fast shredding for like four minutes? You definitely don't know how to play that song?

Those two albums featured significant overlap in players and one of them was Josh Ansley playing bass. He offered two drastically different styles on them, fretless sliding on one and frenetic 5-string walking on the other, and he consumed my imagination as a teen. His playing was the gold standard in my mind and accomplishing something similar was my primary goal. For a little bit, meaning until I bought Destruction by Definition, he also definitely got the "idol" label from me.

For more comments on early Streetlight, and a little bit on bass playing, consult my story on seeing Streetlight play the Kathedral in 2005, a revised version of which is in my 2018 zine on ska. ($5! Cheap!)

I tell you this because today I found out that he is now a new age spiritual bro vlogger:

I guess you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain, eh? I realize that the odds of someone else reading this and being as shocked as I am are in the thousandths of a percent range, but this discovery had to get somewhere, right?

Jeeze Tim, you write a post about hating how lean on nostalgia and then churn this shit out.

(•_•)
<) )╯I
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(•_•)
\( (> AM
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(•_•)
<) )╯DUMB
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Okay, now back to reading and listening to Animal Liberation Front hardcore.

Golden Love

I found myself thinking about earnesty in the shower yesterday.

I worry about being too earnest a lot. Whenever I try to do creative writing, I find that I inevitably return to super earnest nostalgia. On some level, I guess that is fine, because earnest narrative non-fiction is what I do and it's what I'm best at. It's good to be good at something, right?

On the other hand, I wish I could do more than that. Every time that I've tried to branch out into different types of writing, it doesn't really work out well. There's even been times where I try really hard to do something new, move into fiction, and it still just ends up being a mess of earnest nostalgia. I want to be more than that, you know? I want to be able to write an actual story out of nothing, rather than just churning out whiteboy feelings.

I think that earnesty is slippery slope for white guys. When you start with it, people applaud you for communicating your feelings, which requires bravery to some degree. That's important, I guess, and I suppose that talking about your feelings works against the shittier parts of masculinity to some degree, but the problem is that if you are earnestly talking about your feelings constantly, and people are constantly praising you for it, you start to believe that your feelings are the most important and you start to take up a lot of space. I don't ever want to be that person.

To illustrate what I'm saying, I don't think there's a better example than whiney pop-punk.

Like, it's not stupid for me to say that's too earnest, right?

Okay, here is a whole mess of mixed up metaphors: There is definitely is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Sugar is great and amazing and helps things taste good and adds to the other flavours when you're cooking, but something being too sweet fuckin' sucks. Earnesty is like that. Maybe that's why people always refer to pop-punk as "sugary".

This all being said, I fucking hate when art kids are ironic to the point of not meaning anything they say, so the other end of the spectrum fuckin' sucks too. It's hard to know what the right amount of earnesty for something is, and I think that depends on the circumstance too. Being earnest about things that have affected you? Seems to be mostly good, from my experience. Being earnest exclusively about how hurt you are by your ex-girlfriend? Mostly dumb.