A Time We'll Remember

The "New York City Hardcore: The Way It Is" compilation is one of greatest records in hardcore history—but it's not perfect. Neither was the scene it documented. We can learn something from that.

The original photo used for the cover of New York City Hardcore: The Way It Is. Gorilla Biscuits, live at the Anthrax. Norwalk, CT. Photo by BJ Papas.

I.

I sold my original punk and hardcore record collection to Venus Records on St. Mark’s Place in 1991. I started collecting records in late 1986, when hardcore was something like six years old— depending on who you ask—which is to say that, for those of us who were serious, it was possible for someone to own literally all the records. And I did. But the financial reality of entering adulthood in Manhattan was ultimately stronger than my desire to carry several boxes of vinyl around with me every time I moved, so I let go of all but five of my most cherished titles. I still remember the records I spared from elimination: The New York City Hardcore: Together 7-inch on yellow vinyl, the Negative Approach EP, Cause For Alarm’s self-titled EP, Antidote’s Thou Shalt Not Kill 7-inch, and the first pressing of the New York City Hardcore: The Way It Is compilation. Over the next several years, those five records came with me everywhere I went. But eventually, in 1998, the financial reality of becoming a young adult in Manhattan caught up with me, too, and I was forced to make a deal to sell all four 7-inch records to a Japanese collector for $400 each. Sadly, those records weren’t going to pay my rent from a box in my bedroom.

I kept The Way It Is album, though, and deliberately so. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not nostalgic for material objects; I get rid of things almost as quickly as I acquire them, and the feeling of holding onto items that serve no practical purpose gives me anxiety. But everything about that record is a sensual memory to me: I remember carefully opening the plastic as soon as I got home with it in 1988. I remember the first time I put the platter on my turntable and the way I felt when I heard the first three suspended chords of “Wise Up.” I remember poring over the 12-inch booklet, filled with lyrics and photos and graphics and the kind of endlessly interesting thank-you lists that delighted amateur hardcore scholars everywhere. As a rule, I hold onto things with value, and those sensual memories are still valuable to me.

In the 36 years since, I’ve listened to this album countless times. I don’t view it as a record from my youth so much as a living document of that era’s hardcore idealism—a place where our victories brushes shoulders with our many flaws, where our youthful utopianism clashes with the inherent realities of the comp itself. It’s a study of what hardcore once looked like (and sounded like), but it’s also a reminder of some of the ways of being that we’ve lost to time (and a couple of other things that we could probably lose forever). The hardcore of 1988 looks different from the hardcore of 2024, but there’s still a lot that we can learn from this record. Because even when history doesn’t repeat, we know for a fact that it rhymes.

II.

As the lore goes, The Way It Is was first conceived by Ray Cappo and Jordan Cooper—the owners-slash-operators of Revelation Records in the 1980s—upon hearing that Warzone were breaking up. The desire to document what might have been Warzone’s final recordings expanded to include a desire to document the full-blown renaissance that was happening in New York City hardcore at that time. As our community began to grow, however, Cappo noticed the scene starting to splinter.

“There was a hardcore scene, but then when straight-edge got popularized, the fans would just go to straight-edge shows,” he explained for an episode of the Where It Went podcast about the album. “They were not interested in anything outside that bubble. But what I liked about the hardcore scene was that there was mainstream music, and then there were freaks. And basically, we were all freaks… That’s what we had in common.”

This is the first of several things we can still learn from this important album:

• The Way It Is wanted to reestablish hardcore as a unifying principle for freaks.

The iconic cover photo may look “cool,” sure. But if you were a hardcore kid in 1987 or 1988, then by definition, you were not cool. That’s just a fact. We all came to the shows with stories about being bullied at school, at home, or on the street. We turned to hardcore because it was a place where being different felt like a celebrated fact, not a social liability. The splintering of straight-edge into its own isolated subculture, then, was an unintended consequence that Cappo was trying to ameliorate. Including songs on the comp with titles like “As One” and “Together” made his intentions literal; when Gel released their Hardcore for the Freaks promo in 2019—and covered SSD’s quintessential unity song, “Glue” for it—they perhaps inadvertently grabbed the torch for a new generation.

Sergio Vega (Collapse, Absolution, Quicksand) with Vic Venom of Nausea, outside of CBGB. New York, NY. 1988. Photo by Andrea Elston.

• The Way It Is renounced hardcore musical “purity.”

If you went to a CBGB Sunday matinee in 1987 or 1988, you were guaranteed to find mohawked punks in plaid bondage pants, freshly shorn skinheads in oxblood Doc Martens, and bleached-blond straight-edgers in high-top Nikes. There were “longhairs” there too, in Venom shirts and white sneakers, but the full “crossover” wave had yet to take effect. For every strand of hardcore kid, there was a different strand of hardcore, and we listened to all of it quite liberally and without self-consciousness. In that same spirit, The Way It Is doesn’t attempt to make distinctions between subgenres; even in its liner notes, written by Cappo, it emphasized hardcore as a “movement” and not as a strict style of music. There was straight-edge hardcore like Bold, Gorilla Biscuits, and Youth of Today, of course. But there was also Nausea (who many of us would have called “crust” or “peace punk” back then), Breakdown (whose “Sick People” arguably became the template for what we now call beatdown hardcore), Youth Defense League (who leaned towards street punk and Oi!, and who we’ll deal with in a minute), and most notably, Supertouch, whose “Searching For The Light” sounded like nothing else on the record—and, I’d argue, like nothing else in the scene at that time. In some ways, Supertouch were probably the first post-hardcore band ever.

Sergio Vega is better known as the bassist for Quicksand now, but as a part of the scene in the ‘80s, he might have been a perfect model for this style of cultural thinking. Back then, Sergio played in boundary-crossing bands like Trauma (with members of Nausea), Irate (with Tommy Carroll from Straight Ahead), and Collapse (with members of Life’s Blood). He never slid into any of the hardcore archetypes of the time, nor was there ever a feeling that he needed to.

“I think because of [my Bronx] upbringing, I never really bought into the idea that you had to be orthodox or copy this thing,” he tells me, in a conversation that will be published in full this Thursday. “We still had this thing from being uptown about ‘being fresh’ and putting your own twist on things, and the idea of just bringing something different to the party, like: What’s your contribution? What’s your thing? So my style evolved. I was definitely on the punk end of hardcore, but I also wanted to push the boundaries and try to add something different. It was kind of baked into us that you have to add something and not just copy something. We understood that the parameters could be strict, but we wanted to see what was possible within the structure of what it is and where you can take it.”

The Way It Is showed that hardcore music lives inside of a far bigger tent than many people want to admit.

• Sadly, The Way It Is, like the hardcore scene both then and now, can be problematic.

Whenever you hold anything up to the light, you’re bound to see how poorly some things have aged, and that’s also the case with this record. Its glaring lack of diversity, for one, is particularly egregious: Aside from the Latin and Asian members of Nausea, you’d be hard pressed to find any sense of the multiculturalism that pervaded New York City in 1988 on this record—and despite admittedly having a predominantly white hardcore scene, as anyone with eyes could have told you, there were still certainly other voices. And outside of Nausea’s Amy Keim, who ironically doesn’t actually sing on the track her band contributed, the only female presence on the album comes from the Warzone Women, who sing backup vocals on “As One,” and that legendary cover photo, taken by the inestimable BJ Papas.

But yes, also, we have to talk about that song. To be perfectly honest, I’m glad that Youth Defense League’s “Blue Pride” made the comp—not because it’s a particularly great song (it’s not), but because its presence is both evidence and a reminder of the way that hardcore in general once granted a certain level of permissibility to people with shady politics at the time. In 1987, when the band was likely approached for inclusion on the record, YDL appeared to be your average patriotic skinhead band, not unlike, say, Warzone or even Agnostic Front, both of whom they played shows with. But by the time the band delivered the artwork for their part of the lyric booklet, the red flags should have been everywhere—from the Rock Against Communism logo to including Skrewdriver and Brutal Attack on their thank-you list. Again, this would seem unthinkable today, but back then, many of us really tried to give each other the benefit of the doubt. In retrospect, that wasn’t always the smartest thing. But then again, these are lessons. And in this case, Revelation seems to have learned one, too: “Blue Pride” is conspicuously missing from the album on all of the major subscription streaming services.

• The Way It Is exists today because “do-it-yourself” is not only a means of production, but a way of thinking.

Revelation’s legacy began with a small operation of hand-folded inserts and trading records with fans for G.I. Joe collectibles, and they’ve continued to champion independent hardcore ever since—principally with Rev Distribution, who has exclusive partnerships with premier labels like Flatspot and Bridge Nine. Revelation’s almost 40-year history of DIY was ostensibly made possible because of The Way It Is, and if you hear Cappo tell the story, he’d tell you that The Way It Is was made possible because of DIY.

“That was the overall beauty of this music scene,” he told the Where It Went podcast. “If you wanted something done, you figured out how to create it.”

III.

It’s not exactly a lesson, but there’s one more thing about The Way It Is that has made it the only album I’ve held onto for 36 years, and it’s something that I think gets grossly overlooked: There is as much “New York in the 1980s” on this record as there is “hardcore.”

What The Way It Is lacked in demographic diversity, it certainly made up for in geographic specificity: Like the way Krakdown’s “Ignorance” is an anti-racist song directly inspired by the 1986 racial attack in Howard Beach, Queens. Or how Supertouch inexplicably chooses to list both the New York Knicks and the Yankees on their personal thank-you list. But there is perhaps no greater example of this comp’s New Yorkness than on the skit that precedes Warzone’s “Escape From Your Society”—a bizarre, but authentically downtown conversation about a guy who has been “illin’ on some serious fucking drugs,” ending with Raybeez’s now-famous proclamation: “I can’t take it no more! I’m buggin’ out!”

Listening to that song again reminded me of a short Warzone movie that was unearthed on YouTube several years ago, where Raybeez drives around New York City in a van, picking up the members of Warzone before playing the Super Bowl of Hardcore at the Ritz. (The van driver, Raybeez said, “may have smoked angel dust” before they left.) It’s an incredible portrait of one of New York hardcore’s most charismatic figures, but it’s also a very real portrait of what hardcore felt like in 1988: A time when you could randomly walk into someone’s apartment and find Tommy Carroll hanging out with Neil Robinson from Nausea. When you could go to a show and see Porcell crowd surfing while screaming along to the “Skinhead!” refrain in “We’re the Crew,” despite never having been a skinhead. When you could see Raybeez on stage wearing a Project X t-shirt, shorts, and Doc Marten boots, as if to defiantly say, “Yes. You actually can embody multiple punk identities at once.” Everything was still just a little bit looser, fuzzier, less defined. And sometimes, that could be a lot of fun. Everybody also fucked up sometimes, and we said and did some stupid shit. But like the album says, that’s just the way it was.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Sergio Vega of Quicksand.

---

Anti-Matter is reader-supported. If you’ve valued reading this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and backing independent, ad-free hardcore media. Your support is crucial to Anti-Matter’s continuation and growth. Thank you, friends. ✨