Does This System Work?
"Being poor" has never been a prerequisite of "being hardcore." But economic hardship played a crucial role in the style and substance of hardcore's earliest innovations, whether we realize it or not.
I.
I’ve often described my personal socioeconomic awakening as the difference between my experience with being poor and my experience with being conscious of being poor. “Being poor,” in itself, can feel like a set of circumstances that you adapt to. It’s like navigating the weather: You do your best to protect yourself from the harsher elements until the weather changes or you can find shelter, whichever comes first—but there is always hope that conditions will change. Or at least there has to be, if you’re going to survive. My father knew that we didn’t have much, but he still woke up every day and worked three jobs with the intention of finding better weather for us. Until then, we were taught to persevere.
“Being conscious of being poor” is different. My parents were immigrants, and throughout my childhood, they openly struggled to make ends meet—in some ways, perhaps, too openly. They made it so that money became an ambient presence in almost every facet of our home. I was conscious of being a family of four living in a small two-bedroom apartment in Queens. I was conscious of the economic reasons for wearing my brother’s hand-me-downs. I was conscious of the reasons I ate King Vitamin instead of Cap’n Crunch. I was conscious of the fact that our family vacations to Connecticut were decided by how far we could afford to go. I do believe my parents tried their best to keep us from feeling like we were going without, but as a child, it was impossible to ignore the fact that, more often than not, they spent what little time my father had at home fighting about money. That’s how class consciousness is created.
When I was in junior high school, my parents moved us to Long Island where, for the first time ever, my family lived in a house and not an apartment. It was a rental, but a “real” house nonetheless. My brother and I each had our own bedrooms. We had a relatively new, but used family car. My father still worked three jobs, and although I was acutely aware that we were not as affluent as the families of my peers, the idea of “living under an economic hardship” was no longer at the forefront of my consciousness. It felt as if the weather had finally changed.
That is, until one day when my brother and I were home alone, in our living room watching TV. The curtains had been drawn, but we heard a noise coming from the driveway. My brother peeked through the curtain and saw a man trying to break into our car. He told me to call the police, to grab a weapon, and to meet him outside. I ran to the kitchen phone and called 911, and as soon as I knew the police were coming, I went into a utility closet and grabbed a hammer. When I walked out onto the front lawn I saw my brother holding the thief down by his throat. The man gasped for air, trying to say something, but my brother was fixated on keeping him down until backup arrived. For someone to steal from a family with so little felt beyond the pale to us. It ignited a rage inside of my brother, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of him at that moment.
When the police finally came, they held the thief for a few minutes until he could breathe well enough to explain what it was he was doing in our driveway. As it turns out, the man was not there to steal our car; he was there to repossess it. My parents had fallen behind on their car payments, and they had forfeited their right to ownership. Once the man was free to go, he asked an officer how he might go about pressing assault charges against my brother. The officer chided him. “You came onto his property,” he said. “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you.”
A couple of weeks later, in a parking lot somewhere, the Repo Man finally got what he came for—and with it, my class consciousness immediately, and perhaps irrevocably, returned.
II.
Race and ethnicity were always ever-present topics in my home, but our tendency to overlook class most likely came from the fact that our society clearly attaches shame to socioeconomic status. Having less is often unjustly viewed as an indictment of our intelligence, our talents, and our work ethic. The very term “social mobility” implies movement, but the fact remains that it is incredibly difficult to be truly upwardly mobile without family resources, social advantages, or access to capital. Indeed, despite my father having worked multiple jobs simultaneously well past the point of retirement age, my parents eventually died without owning anything.
My first exposure to class politics derived largely from early British punk. I suspect this is because class consciousness had always held a stronger presence in English culture than it did here, and a lot of our nascent ideas of class came from English records like the Clash’s “White Riot” (“All the power’s in the hands of the people rich enough to buy it / While we walk the streets too chicken to even try it”), Sham 69’s “Rip Off” (“It’s just a fake, make no mistake / A rip-off for me, but a Rolls for them!”), or Crass’s “Do They Owe Us a Living?” (“Living that is owed to me / I’m never going to get / They’ve buggered this old world up / Up to their necks in debt”). It was only a matter of time, then, before American bands started taking up the rallying cries of the working class in our own country—from “I Hate the Rich” by the Dils to the Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor” to D.R.I.’s “Reaganomics,” whose only lyrics are essentially: “Reaganomics killing me / Reaganomics killing you.” I held onto these records as proof that I wasn’t alone, even when our personal histories differed.
The effects on young people living below the poverty line cannot be understated. In my mind, one of the reasons I started playing in bands is because that validation I first received—from walking on stage and not just hearing, but feeling the applause—gave me a sense of self-worth that I had always felt on the periphery of as a young person. It was the kind of validation that I assumed all the kids in my high school felt when they drove up to class in whatever car their parents bought them for their sixteenth birthday, but better. Because I knew I had somehow earned it.
That impulse to find validation from other people as an emotional fix for poverty, whether positive or negative, is something that also rings true for Spiritual Cramp frontman Mike Bingham, who has frequently described his upbringing with only two words: “religious” and “poor.” (I’d be remiss not to mention that these two factors are often inextricably linked, but in a way I won’t explore here.) We spoke about these experiences for an interview that will be published in full on Thursday, where at one point in particular, Mike and I commiserate on growing up and seeking that fulfillment that we failed to find in our childhoods by any external means necessary.
“Let me back up a little bit and just preface this all by saying that my life is really, really amazing now. I’m married. I have a beautiful home. I’m sober. I’m content. I’m spiritual. I’m in good shape. My band is flourishing. I have everything that I have ever wanted,” he explains. “But as a six-year-old who was living in apartments, it was hard because all I really wanted was to live this life where I felt supported. I wanted to do things like play basketball on the school team. I wanted to skateboard and have cool clothing. But in order to do that, you have to have access to resources, and resources come from money and time—and my family didn’t really have either of those things to offer. We lacked an economic base. And that lack of a base kind of helped me develop into this character who ran around thinking I could fulfill myself and fulfill my own self-love with people, places, and things. I walked around like a bug for 26 years until I walked into a therapist’s office for the first time and we did some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.”
That’s another thing about poverty: It’s not simply an issue of economics, it’s a mental health crisis. Hardcore gave many of us, including Mike and me, a valve with which we might release some of the pressure of where we came from. But being poor still lives inside our heads, regardless of how well we’re doing now.
III.
While class remained a clear and present concern in punk throughout the ‘90s and beyond, hardcore’s interest in the topic has waned at different points over the last 30 years. Which is, perhaps, somewhat disappointing because poverty has played such a major part in the biographies of so many hardcore pioneers. (Kevin Seconds’ story, for one, is particularly insightful in this regard.) It’s even arguable that this lack of economic resources—specifically when it came to quality musical equipment or access to professional recording studios—cast a direct impact on the rough and raw sonic aesthetics of hardcore itself. We love these sounds, in part, because the story of hardcore has always been the story of taking what little we have and innovating something.
In that sense, I’m not ashamed of how I grew up or how little I had. Access to money would have meant buying other people’s visions of the world. Not having money meant that I was compelled to create my own vision. We only had eight channels because cable television was too expensive, so I chose to write my own stories. I didn’t have musical instruments that I could play for a long time, but I did have a dual-tape boombox that allowed me play two cassettes at the same time, and I created some of the most fucked up and occasionally brilliant pieces of music I’ve ever made by doing that. Even my first fanzine, in 1989, happened because I found a way to print it for free by going to a vocational school. This impulse has served me well.
As a kid, I swore that I’d never let things get as bad for me as it got for my father—and by mostly financial metrics, I’m doing OK with that. I have a modest, but healthy rainy-day fund. I operate my life and my business 100 percent debt-free. And while I stress about future income, much like anyone else, I don’t feel deprived or outstretched. I still haven’t made an attempt at ownership—of a house or a car or anything else—but I just take that to mean that, for now, I’ll never have to find myself tackling someone to the ground in front of my home and choking them until the police come. In my life, that’s a small, but significant comfort.
Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Mike Bingham of Spiritual Cramp.
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Another great piece, as usual.
Hell of a piece, man. Thanks for sharing. Been struggling with how to explain this aspect of "punk" to my students who love it.