Can I Say

Nineties hardcore gave us the peak of punk ideological movements and "the big message." But for some, admitting you hadn't figured things out yet was a far more radical—and meaningful—stance to take.

I.

At some point in 1986, my brother got into hardcore in a manner that I often describe as “for, like, a week.” We both discovered it independently—me primarily through an impulse purchase of a Crumbsuckers record and an issue of Maximum Rock’n’Roll; him through a new group of friends—but as is predictably the case with people who share my nature, I was the one to take that curiosity and turn it into an obsession. He went to CBGB once and then lost interest.

One of my brother’s new but short-lived friends was a kid named Tom, who went to SUNY Purchase and looked more like a math nerd than an ‘80s hardcore kid to me. As I remember him, Tom had a wiry frame and stringy hair. He spoke in hushed tones and walked with an unflagging slouch that seemed to expose a lack in self-confidence. But he also loved music, and I never saw him light up more than the way he would whenever I’d ask him about hardcore. Tom always kept two shoeboxes of cassette tapes in the front seat of his car, so one day I asked him if I could take those boxes inside to make some dubs of his record collection. He agreed, and I’d still point to that day as the moment I was truly introduced to the wide range of music that we call “hardcore.”

Whenever you try to understand a new genre, most would agree that identifying the various points of cohesiveness is the only thing that can tell you what it is. Even as a twelve-year-old, I thought I already knew: Hardcore is fast! Hardcore is angry! Hardcore is politically-charged! Hardcore is serious! But those two shoeboxes—along with my next few years of search and discovery—threw these initial assumptions into disarray. Zen Arcade isn’t really fast! Can I Say doesn’t sound that angry! Walk Among Us isn’t politically-charged! “Sit Home and Rot” isn’t all that serious! So what the hell was it that I was actually getting into?

At first, it didn’t matter to me. I listened to everything in Tom’s tape collection with love and reverence: Blitz, Minor Threat, Stiff Little Fingers, Big Boys, Bad Brains, Discharge, Suicidal Tendencies, and 7 Seconds were the most memorable for me. But eventually, as I started going to shows and discovering the local bands—beginning with Youth Of Today—my vision of hardcore unexpectedly began to narrow. Young people love being reductive, and I was very young. So in spite of the fact that I was still very much into hardcore party bands like Murphy’s Law and Gang Green, I realize now that I also created a cognitive dissonance between what they were doing and what I thought hardcore “should be.” I decided that the thing that made a band “hardcore” was whether or not they had something to say. I believed that “Take A Stand” was the anthem for hardcore’s unifying principle. And who could possibly know more about the world than a high school freshman with a new musical passion? I was ready to pick a fight.

Strife, circa 1994. Photo uncredited in the Anti-Matter archive.

II.

There was a moment in the early ‘90s when it felt like everyone who survived ‘80s hardcore was forced to take a side. In retrospect, I can see why: The music of that era had already begun straying from hardcore’s early blueprint, so clinging to a “big message” seemed like the best way to stay connected to our history. Of course, hardcore has never been known for its subtlety. So straight-edge went extremely straight-edge, and that kind of binary thinking inspired cringeworthy t-shirt slogans like, “If you’re not now, you never were.” Vegetarians went vegan and some of those vegans upped their ante through Hardline—a militant movement that claimed to represent “a natural order” that extolled the virtues of straight-edge, animal rights, pro-life rhetoric, and homophobia under the banner of two M16 rifles in the shape of an X. Political hardcore kids rejected all that and went deeper underground, starting a new wave of venues (like ABC No Rio and Epicenter) and labels (like Ebullition and Vermiform) while developing a new shape of lyrical norms that actively centered meaning—so much so that it became conventional for many ‘90s lyric sheets to also feature “explainers” about the social or political intent of each song. Similarly, it was not uncommon for a singer to take upwards of three to five minutes in stage time to explain what a song was about at one point; it was also not uncommon for an opposing side to fight back in the middle of that show.

Bands who didn’t “take a stand” never went away, of course, but hardcore kids who held that narrowing vision created new subcategories to differentiate this work: Quicksand and Orange 9mm became “post-hardcore”; Falling Forward and Ashes were “emo.” For several years, then, most of the biggest hardcore bands were also the ones who waved the heaviest flags: Strife were straight-edge and proclaimed there was “only one truth.” 108 were Hare Krishnas and asserted that they would “serve the truth and defy the lie.” Earth Crisis were vegan and declared that “if you refuse to change, then you’re guilty and must be destroyed.” Refused were, well, Refused. It felt as if hardcore had run out of room for personal experience. Ideology had become our reigning concern.

But then there was Snapcase. From 1992 to 1994, they were a well-liked, but vaguely defined hardcore band from Buffalo. They never belonged to a scene faction—despite being straight-edge and vegetarian in their personal lives—and perhaps because of that, they were frequently misunderstood. When I first met them to do an interview for Anti-Matter in January of 1995, I was only going on a hunch that there was actually some depth to what was then their introspective, but still somewhat blurry lyrics. Snapcase proved that hunch correct, though, and between the zine’s publication date and the release of their breakthrough album, Progression Through Unlearning, they went on to become both irrefutably one of the biggest hardcore bands of their era, and arguably, the least pedantic. And as it turned out, refusing to pick a side—and accepting who you are now in order to find the person you might become—was an accidental message that our message-inundated community needed to hear.

“I kind of envied Earth Crisis when we were touring with them because it was so concrete,” explains singer Daryl Taberski for our first interview together in 29 years, which will be published in full on Thursday. “They knew what they were about. They had a mission. They had a statement. And mine was like, well, ‘I’m kind of figuring myself out. My lyrics are about figuring myself out.’” He laughs, then adds, “But that’s OK. You don’t have to join forces with something that’s concrete and established, or join forces with something bigger than yourself. Just be yourself. Use this to build yourself. Back in the days of getting handwritten letters, we used to get so many letters that were like, ‘I felt alienated by straight-edge bands, and somehow I needed to get my act in gear, and you guys are part of why I did that—because I need to focus on me, not on me trying to become something else.’ That’s when I started to realize the value of my lyrics, the value of what we were doing or what we were stumbling into. But there was no intent to get there.”

In other words, the contrast that Snapcase offered was a reprieve from the battery of lyrics that were telling us how to live, who to be, and what to think. They celebrated our differences, and encouraged us to judge less and empathize more. The opening lyric to Progression Through Unlearning, from “Caboose,” lays it all out with succinct impact: “Do you know yourself? Do you know the others? Can you pull the weight that rides on another’s shoulders?” Not every ‘90s hardcore lyric holds up as well as this one.

III.

My personally active take-a-stand era began by playing with Ressurection before leading into my stints with 108 and Shelter, but by 1994, I was exhausted. It didn’t take long for me to realize that, like Daryl, I was still figuring myself out—and that any advice I had already given out to my hardcore peers was, at best, premature wisdom. If anything, choosing to believe that I’d already cracked the codes of living before my 21st birthday only held me back from finding myself sooner. I was too young to realize that while hardcore can and should provide an incredible starting point for discussion, debate, and future learning, you don’t need to become a prophet for a cause—and more importantly, that it’s not a weakness to simply say, “This is what I think I know—so far.” Our music is far better off when it’s opening conversations, not closing minds.

Frankly, when I think back to that first box of cassette tapes that I listened to as a preteen, I am struck by the diversity of music and lyrics and messages that influenced my early life. I needed to hear Minor Threat’s message-driven “Out of Step,” of course. But that doesn’t diminish the way that “Look Back and Laugh” helped me process being hurt in temperamental adolescent relationships. I needed to hear that, too. I don’t consider one song to be more important—or more meaningful—than the other. And I certainly don’t consider one to be more hardcore than the other, regardless of whether or not one of them spawned a movement. Sometimes, saying how you really feel can be infinitely harder than “taking a stand.”

When we started Texas is the Reason, I used to joke that I just wanted to start “a band about nothing.” But I was being facetious. I believe we chose to write songs about our experience as human beings in the middle of our self-discovery, and that we “took a stand” in other ways—holding actionable positions about playing only all-ages shows, having accessible door prices, making affordable merchandise, and advocating for an inclusive environment at our shows where no one felt like they had to be pushed to the back of the room for any reason. The purists still called us “emo” after we broke up, and that’s OK. I’ve learned to live with that. But as I was writing this, I noticed that if you go on Snapcase’s Spotify page today, an All Music Guide-generated bio of the band begins its description by calling them a “progressive emocore quintet”—and that, quite frankly, is one of the worst lexical sleights of hand I’ve ever seen. It’s bullshit, even. Because Snapcase is still very much one of the greatest hardcore bands of all time, and one of the reasons their work has persisted for this long is because they gave us hardcore meaning in the way that it ultimately counts most: They showed us instead of telling us.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Daryl Taberski of Snapcase.

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