Feeling Older Faster
If it feels like there are more records being made about mortality and aging these days, that's no accident. Getting older means getting real about life's only certainties. Hardcore is not exempt.
I.
I was on tour—in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, of all places—when I heard the news. It was later in the morning of August 22, and I was still on our tour bus scrolling through Instagram when I came across that post: “It is with deep sadness that The Four Horsemen announces the passing of our friend and founding partner Justin Chearno.” I read it and then I read it again, at least four or five times, before I finally looked up at Geoff Rickly and said it out loud, consciously using the words of someone who didn’t really believe it.
“I think my friend just died,” I told him.
In his later life, Justin Chearno became a star in the food and wine industries—the co-founder and wine director of a Michelin-starred restaurant and someone whose influence is widely credited with breaking open the natural-wine movement in America. But 32 years ago, when we first met, Justin had only just begun to make his mark as the guitarist for a wildly innovative post-punk band in Washington D.C. called Pitchblende. From there, he’d go on to form Turing Machine (whose debut came out on Jade Tree) and Panthers (a collaboration with members of Orchid that one critic described as “groundbreaking dissonant hardcore with Rolling Stones swagger”), and eventually, he’d also be known for playing the exquisitely fuzzy guitar solo that provides the climax for LCD Soundsystem’s “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down.” Through it all, he was always that same down-to-earth, ebullient kindred spirit to me—fiercely independent, sometimes irreverent, passionately empathetic. One of the last texts he ever sent me was just to say, “I’m so happy for you, Norm. Even just watching [you playing with Thursday] via social media has been inspiring. Enjoy the shows!” He loved it when his friends became successful.
I read that text in the middle of a Jimmy John’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when I started crying over a veggie sandwich. Only grief decides when it’s time to grieve, and grief is quite often sudden, complex, and attached to more than one thing. Which is to say that while I was grieving for Justin, I was also grieving for the circumstances surrounding his death. Justin was 54 years old—only four years older than me—and he simply died in his sleep. He had a wife and a son. He had the validation of the food and music communities. He had the love and admiration of his friends. In the lottery of living a rich life, Justin hit the jackpot. I cried because I never thought to text him, out of the blue, to tell him how much he inspired me.
II.
I am, perhaps, among one of the first generations of hardcore kids to make it to our fifties and even sixties. We are among the first hardcore kids to have children who are now grown-ups. (My oldest godchild turns 27 next month.) We are among the first to make it to retirement age. (One of my best friends, who came from the earliest days of New York hardcore, is currently plotting his professional exit.) We have also been among the first to die naturally, as is the way that many people of a certain age eventually go. If it feels like there are more records being made about mortality and fiscal insecurity and family and regret these days, I can assure you, this is no accident. At 50 years old, these issues arguably make up much of what I think about, too.
For a culture like ours, a culture that once largely thrived on assertions of our fearlessness and survival skills, the incoming class of (let’s call us) “post-youth”participants are in a particularly vulnerable position. We are asking questions we’ve never had to ask before, and we are submitting ourselves for scrutiny: Are we less hardcore because getting older often means second-guessing some of the decisions we made when we were young? Are we less hardcore because “survival” is no longer a question of outside enemies breaking in and more of a question of our own bodies acting out? Are we less hardcore because death has become less of an abstract motif from a Misfits song and more of a question of estate planning? I don’t believe we are. In fact, I’d argue that we’re only adding new dimensions to the paradigms we adopted when we were young. We are gathering perspectives that would have been impossible for us to contribute without the passage of time. And we are sharing that experience for the benefit of others.
For the last 30 years, Tim Kasher and his band, Cursive, have been chronicling such life developments with a singular, and sometimes discomfiting candor. And with the release of their tenth studio album, Devourer, this week, there seems to be more of an acute interest in life, death, and the existential tension between them. The very first lyric on the record, for one thing, goes: “This is the end of your life / It’s shocking how long you fought to survive / Botch job, you fumbled the ball / Never quite got self-actualized.” For Kasher, having just turned 50 in August himself, writing about these ideas feels only natural.
“This is kind of like a panic mode for the age that we’ve become,” he tells me, in a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “Sure, if I can make it to 70, I will look back to 2024 and I’m sure my attitude will be like, ‘Oh man, there was so much life left.’ There is so much life left. I can’t believe I’m worrying so much about it. But the thing is that right now, at 50, I can look back to 30 and I know I had those same concerns. It’s just that the anxiety of it is so much stronger now. Some of that anxiety is just, you know, if a doctor were to tell me, ‘Sorry, you have two more weeks,’ I don’t think I could look around and think, ‘OK! It was a good run. I did my thing.’ And that fills me with a kind of panic and a certain dread. Because I love life. I love it pretty intensely. I want to be alive and I don’t want to die, but my body is already sending me signals. It’s sending me signals that I can’t do what I used to do, that things aren’t the same, that I’m on a downward trajectory, and that’s scary. It’s scary for me to think about and feel that way. That’s why I write about it. It’s my little contribution to all of this—to say I’m having kind of a hard time with it and letting people know that. Maybe we can all feel a little solace in that.”
Lately, I’ve been having a hard time with it, too.
III.
A little over a week after hearing about Justin’s passing I was sitting around in a hotel room on a day off in Lubbock, Texas, when I felt my heart start to tighten. It came out of nowhere, and while I tried to play it down to my tourmates, whatever it was didn’t feel right. Whenever I breathed deeply, I felt pain. Whenever I laughed, I felt pain. When I finally laid down to sleep that night, it felt like my heart was writhing inside of my ribcage. I thought it would pass with some rest, but when I woke up the next morning in the same condition—nothing worse, but nothing better—I quietly panicked. Geoff asked me if I needed to go to Urgent Care, but I knew they’d just send me to the emergency room. No one wants to risk the chance of being sued for a dereliction of care, but I wasn’t quite sure it was an emergency yet.
“I’ll be fine,” I told him. “I’ll just get a hotel room and take it easy today.”
It was one of the most excruciating days of my life and I did anything but “take it easy.” I tried to watch TV, but I found myself clutching my heart frequently and spontaneously. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t find a position that didn’t make it somehow feel worse. I even decided to forgo eating altogether on the off-chance that it was just a really bad case of heartburn. Nothing felt good.
Worst of all, my mind was doom-spiraling. I was thinking about Justin, and I was thinking about how these kinds of things happen all the time to people our age. I was also thinking about all of the signals my body has sent me over the last couple of years—signals that I tend to brush off, if I’m being honest. Because more than any other birthday I’ve ever had, turning 50 actually fundamentally changed the way I look at my aging body. At this point, wrestling with getting older is no longer about the Minor Threat-inspired dichotomy of “feeling like a kid” versus “feeling like an adult.” It’s about deeply feeling my own mortality. It’s about knowing that anything could be something. This episode was most likely a false alarm—after two days, the pain around my heart eventually subsided and everything went back to normal—but it was still a signal.
These are the kinds of concerns that go beyond hardcore, the things that touch us all evenly. But that doesn’t mean that talking about aging or loss—or singing about these things on a record, for that matter—should be beyond our purview. This is why I’m telling you all this. Because sharing our struggles is literally what hardcore kids do.
IV.
One more thing. I wanted to share an absolutely uncanny thing about the language used in that aforementioned Cursive lyric. The day after Justin’s passing, Grub Street ran a remembrance of his life where Garrett Oliver—the brewmaster for Brooklyn Bowery—had this to say about my friend: “He was the most self-actualized person I knew. He literally dreamed himself into existence; he became exactly the man he’d wanted to be.”
We use the word so whimsically, but for real: That is a fucking legacy worth having. He did not fumble the ball; he did not botch the job. Even in his absence, Justin Chearno continues to inspire me.
Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Tim Kasher of Cursive.
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Staring at 50, next month. Both thrilled and panicked.
like gorilla biscuits said "getting older it is scary". Am 49 and in the last year and a half I have had two colonoscopies. The first one the doctor found several polyps that were concerning. But as shelter once said, "life or death it is just a matter of time."