Consider Yourself Free

Everyone from Insted to the Casualties have written songs about the "no rules" credo of hardcore punk. Ironically, some restrictions may apply.

To be honest, I really just wanted a photo of André 3000 playing the flute at a hardcore show.

I.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, André 3000—the more elusive half of the Atlanta hip-hop duo Outkast—announced that he was releasing his first-ever solo album. His last “proper” studio album with Outkast came out almost 20 years ago, in 2006, so expectations were running high. But as more details were revealed, it became clear that this was not the new music his fans were asking for: New Blue Sun features 90 minutes of “experimental flute music” with an opening track called “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.”

This could have been as unsuccessful as that time DYS released a power ballad, but two weeks later, and I’d say this record has been anything but a failure. In fact, as far as “experimental flute” albums go, I’d argue it’s been a great success. New Blue Sun debuted at Number 30 on the Billboard 200. It outsold new releases from major hip-hop artists like Nas, Lil Wayne, and Kodak Black, all of which came out on the same day. That opening track with the 22-word title became the longest-ever song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100, clocking in at just over twelve minutes. It also, hilariously enough, hit number one on Billboard’s New Age Albums chart. Which is great. But it’s still not hip-hop.

Or is it? The Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA, as he is sometimes known to do, decided to go on the record last week to give it a more cultural take—and what he said is the reason I’m even talking about all this.

“That album is on repeat in my house,” he told TMZ. “André, congratulations… Hip-hop is going to show you that there’s no limits to what we do.”

I often think about hip-hop and hardcore as two styles of street music with similar trajectories. Both cultures emerged from urban centers in the late 1970s, when poor or lower middle-class young people used whatever they could get their hands on to create new music that reflected the raw experience of their lives. They also share many of the same aesthetics, and with those, many of the same paradoxes: You can choose to be “street” like Madball or Mobb Deep, or you can choose to be “in your feelings” like Jimmy Eat World or Juice WRLD, and you will still find yourself in the same ecosystem of your preferred genre. What RZA is saying here, though, is beyond that. By adding that “hip-hop is going to show you that there’s no limits to what we do,” he is calling for a version of hip-hop culture that encourages creative risk-taking at any cost—even if you “really wanted to make a ‘rap’ album,” but the wind blew you into a flute store.

Dennis Lyxzén of Refused and the sweet smile of redemption. The Studio at Webster Hall. New York, NY. August 5, 2015. Photo by Michael Dubin.

II.

For a culture that treasures its own autonomy the way it does, brushing up against hardcore’s “limits” is surprisingly easy to do. But it’s also fair to say that, in practice, these boundaries are arbitrarily enforced at best. We embraced Into Another’s twisted cyborg metalcore, for example, but we ran Dag Nasty out of town for making the marginally poppy Field Day. We allowed for Split Lip’s Americana-influenced metamorphosis into Chamberlain, but we viciously rejected Token Entry’s foray into funk-punk with 1990’s The Weight of the World. We happily explored shoegaze and dream-pop with Title Fight on Hyperview, but we punished Jawbreaker so aggressively when Dear You came out that their only option was to break up.

To be fair, much of our rejection comes down to quality control. That Token Entry record, hardcore or not, still feels tortured. Warzone’s self-titled third album took an inexplicable turn towards midtempo ‘80s rock and honestly deserves to stay buried. Uniform Choice probably didn’t warrant having someone literally throwing coins at them when they played City Gardens in 1989—“Screaming for Change,” get it?—but Staring into the Sun is nevertheless a mediocre rock record from a band who had just made one of the greatest straight-edge hardcore albums of all time. Even so, it’s still fair to ask: Did we alienate these bands solely for making “bad” music? Or were they actually being penalized for coloring too far outside the lines?

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come—which might be one of the most unlikely “hit” records of all time. Up until its release in 1998, Refused were a great, but not particularly extraordinary Swedish hardcore band. They put out records on Equal Vision and Victory, and went on tour with bands like 108 and Snapcase. Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent, released in 1996, had done the most to raise their profile in America, but after making the effort of touring here, the band felt increasingly disconnected from the state of the hardcore scene at that time. Hardcore was going to undergo another sea change, and Refused singer Dennis Lyxzén felt it coming.

“There were a lot of bands that were definitely trying to break the patterns that were set in hardcore in the mid- to late-’90s. There were a lot of bands trying to break free of the constraints,” he recalls, in a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “For a lot of people who discover punk and hardcore, it can become this uniform. I jokingly say that, for some people, it can become this little closet that you lock yourself into and say, ‘This is my world now!’ But for me and a whole lot of other people, punk and hardcore was about the possibility of: We can do anything we want, and this is kind of the basic foundation that we’re going to use to do all these cool things.”

Those “cool things,” as far as The Shape of Punk to Come went, did not include flutes, but they did gleefully obliterate other limits. There is a jazz interval that breaks up “The Deadly Rhythm,” a significant diversion into jungle and breakbeat on tracks like “New Noise” and “Bruitist Pome #5,” and a Stravinsky-influenced neo-classical interlude called “Tannhäuser,” among other indiscretions. It was wild and it was free, as all great hardcore music should be. But in its first year of release, the album sold a meager 1,400 copies in America. The band’s final show, also in 1998, took place in a basement in front of less than a hundred people.

There were some people, of course, who thought Refused made a brilliant record when it came out. But by and large, upon its immediate release, the hardcore scene viewed The Shape of Punk to Come as a transgression. It wasn’t considered “bad” music by any stretch; this wasn’t SSD’s Break It Up or Bad Religion’s Into the Unknown. It just wasn’t the album that people wanted from them. But in the same way that Jawbreaker reunited 27 years later to perform a hugely redemptive sold-out tour of Dear You album plays, the creative risk-taking that Refused took in 1998 did eventually pay off in ways that no one could have ever predicted. To date, The Shape of Punk to Come has gone on to sell more than 250,000 copies in America and well over 300,000 copies around the world. It is now widely considered to be one of the most influential hardcore albums of all time.

III.

It’s only if you listen very, very closely to the opening verse of Texas is the Reason’s “A Jack With One Eye” that you’ll hear it. Somewhere in the background, weaving in and out of the guitars, is a single piano track played by Jawbox’s J. Robbins, who also produced the album. We all knew that we wanted a piano to accompany that part, but when it came time to mix, the fears creeped in: This album was already so different from the 7-inch we put out. There’s a three-minute clean guitar instrumental in the middle of the record. We wrote and recorded a six-minute song for the album, too. Could this piano part finally be the thing that really pushes us past the hardcore “limit?” In the end, we kept the piano, but buried it in the mix.

It may sound ridiculous to say these things almost 28 years later, but our fears were not unfounded. We’d seen how unforgiving the scene could be about certain creative decisions, and even if we believed that what we were making was in fact “good music,” we also knew that quality didn’t always matter. After all, Do You Know Who You Are? was recorded in December of 1995. Dear You had been released only three months earlier. The corpse was still fresh.

What the RZA is saying, then, is less “we need more flute albums” and more “we need to create an environment for artists to feel safe enough to expand the possibilities and language of hip-hop.” He views hip-hop much in the same way that I see hardcore, as a living organism that is constantly adapting and reasserting itself in a fast-changing world. He knows that if hip-hop, or hardcore for that matter, is going to survive in the longterm, we’re going to have to reward creative risk-taking when it’s earned—even when it’s not the music we want at the time. Limits are helpful as guidelines, but when they are used to obstruct authentic expression, we shouldn’t hesitate to set them aside long enough to make a point.

There will be moments of discomfort along the way. We won’t always get it right. But if you’re asking me to pick a side, then I’m with RZA: I believe that hardcore is going to show you that there’s no limits to what we do.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Dennis Lyxzén of Refused.

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