Access All Areas
From where you live to what you can afford to who you meet, how you experience hardcore is directly tied up with how much of it is accessible to you. Whether that's a feature or a bug is up to us.
I.
Shelter took me to Europe for the first time in the fall of 1993. I kept a journal on that tour, but I probably didn’t need one. Most of the shows, especially in the big cities, echoed the kinds of shows I was used to in America. Everyone had the same records and the same haircuts and the same reference points, more or less. But that wasn’t the case everywhere we went. Before the internet, there were more barriers to discovery in Europe, and this bore itself out in ways that were unpredictable at the time. It was the first time I’d ever really thought about access as it pertains to developing—or even reproducing—hardcore as a culture.
There was a show somewhere in Poland, for example, where bootleggers openly set up shop outside of the club to sell dubbed …