Foundations: Built To Last

For the second week of Anti-Matter's anniversary month, we celebrate a legend and ask the hard question: Must our lives in hardcore be fated for planned obsolescence? Or is this truly built to last?

Sick of it All, live at Saint Andrew’s Hall. Detroit, MI. March 24, 1995. Photo by John Mockus.

---

Programming Note: Don’t forget that the Anti-Matter merch presale is only live until July 19. Once the storefront closes, these designs will be gone. Check it out now, and please support this work if you can. (Details for a paid-subscriber exclusive design and discount code can be found here.) Thank you, friends.

---

I.

There’s always a pause before I say it out loud. Ultimately, it’s a silly pause. I have been a “public figure” of some sort since at least 1991, so of course I must be a man of a particular age. Do the math: I’ve played a role in multiple 20-year anniversary album-play tours. I’m two years away from seeing the most popular record I’ve ever played on turn 30. Even this fanzine—which began in print, but celebrates its first digital anniversary this month—was founded in 1993. (My first fanzine, for the completists, came out in 1989.) If anything, telling you that I am about to celebrate my 50th birthday this week is more likely to elicit the response that you thought I was older, not younger.

Nevertheless, I am turning 50 years old this week.

No one was 50 when I first started going to hardcore shows. I’m not even sure anyone was 30, to be honest. Hardcore was a youth movement, and we let it be known. We championed bands with names like Youth of Today and Youth Brigade and DYS—the Department of Youth Services!—because we saw a hard demarcation between youth and adulthood, and band names seemed like a good place to emphasize our differences. We maintained that one side of that dichotomy represented the future and its potential for change, while the other side was nothing more than a cold hand, clutching onto its past failures. The kids will have their say! we insisted, even as we ourselves began creeping out of our teens and into our twenties, and then again out of our twenties and into our thirties. Lionizing youth is baked into our culture, so despite our best intentions, growing up has always been a challenge.

Relaunching Anti-Matter at the age of 49, then, surprised me. Exploring the ways in which a historically youth-centered community learns to adapt with our slow march into adulthood—and increasingly, middle-age—has been perhaps the most surprising recurring theme throughout this past year; it’s a topic that has proven to be more of a universal concern than I could have ever predicted, and yet, it makes perfect sense. Because at some point, we all come to experience that pause before we talk about our birthdays. At some point, we are all overtaken by the self-awareness that comes with maturity. Sometimes, it’s simply because we feel “too old” or “too young.” But lately, it seems, it’s just as likely because hardcore itself has finally entered its own middle-age, and no matter how young you think you are, we are all being forced to reckon with the realities of getting old together. Indeed, that’s what families do.

Sick of it All. L-R: Craig Setari, Armand Majidi, Lou Koller, and Pete Koller. New York, NY. 1994. Photo by Chris Toliver.

II.

When I first began plotting out this three-week arc for Anti-Matter’s anniversary, I only knew that Foundations Week needed to belong to an artist with both historical significance and ongoing relevance. It was also preferable to me that this artist be someone who has a shared history with Anti-Matter—someone whose influence and support affected this zine personally. Finally, I wanted it to be someone whose name is etched into the heart of what we do in the hardcore scene. Sick of it All’s legendary vocalist Lou Koller quite singularly checked every box.

I reached out to Lou about an interview at the end of May, and he quickly accepted my invitation. Even though we don’t see each other much these days, I count Lou among my friends and I was looking forward to reconnecting with him as much as anything else. We got together on June 6th to do our “reunion interview”—roughly 29 years after our first conversation for Anti-Matter—and afterwards, we spoke for another hour, off the record, just to catch up. At that point, I filed the interview away, to be published this week, and moved on. But then, on June 28, like most of you, I woke up to the horrible news on Instagram: Doctors had discovered a tumor in Lou’s esophagus, and—as his brother Pete later confirmed in a post for a GoFundMe that was set up in the aftermath—they gave him a confirmed diagnosis of adenocarcinoma cancer.

Once I spent a little time processing this, my first instinct was to try to set up some sort of follow-up conversation. Lou was initially amenable to the idea, but as the days went on—and more specifically, once I started the process of transcribing our conversation from last month—I began to second-guess that instinct. Before the diagnosis, when we were speaking as two old friends with more ordinary concerns, Lou and I had an honest conversation that touched on, among other things, the personal and professional challenges of playing in a hardcore band for almost 40 years. We talked about the guilt that we still have, as hardcore kids, over advocating for ourselves and being honest about what we actually need to continue this work at a later stage in our lives. Lou was incredibly candid with me, and even though I felt that pause almost every time he talked about his age, it also felt like he understood the importance of transparency in these conversations, and he was committed to that transparency—for the benefit of our individual and collective futures.

“There’s a physical toll to this, no matter how much you keep yourself in shape,” Lou told me in that conversation, which will be published in full on Thursday. “Before COVID, when we would go to Europe, we would always use a tour bus because we could afford it. We were more popular there. We could do it. But when COVID bans ended, every band in the world was trying to tour—especially in Europe, for some reason—and bus prices were five times what they were before. So now me, at 59 years old, I’m doing van tours in a country where I used to be able to get off a plane, get into a bunk, and sleep as long as I needed. I have to do van tours again. And sometimes I sit there and go, I can’t do this. You’re older. Your body is not what it used to be. I need a lot of sleep for my voice, and it doesn’t bounce back as quickly as it used to. How long can we keep going after this? I don’t know.”

When I asked what his non-negotiables are at this point, Lou relented: “The reality is we need to get paid. Like, I’ve been on a million songs as a guest, and it wasn’t until 2024 that I was like, ‘I can’t do this for free anymore.’ But I still feel guilty asking people for money to sing on their record because I’m like, who the fuck am I?”

I want you to think about these questions, because this is the first time we’ve ever really had to confront them as a community. When everyone was under 30, we created a system that “worked” for people under 30. (Even Ian MacKaye was only 27 when Fugazi started playing out.) No one can argue that we had the foresight to consider a hardcore scene where some of us would make it to 50 and 60 and even older, where some of us would actually take all these hardcore lyrics literally and eschew the outside world for a life inside this community, where some of us would live that life while having to think about raising families and retirement and healthcare and illness. We had a lack of imagination back then, and that’s understandable. That’s youth! But now that we see it—now that we know this path exists—how will we address it for future generations? Or are we really taking the position that our lives in hardcore have been fated for a planned obsolescence, where we must “age out” and get a “real job” and rejoin mainstream society after so many years of rejecting it? And if that’s actually your position, then what was the point of all of this?

Because for real: Who the fuck is Lou Koller? Lou Koller is someone whose life and work has changed people’s lives. He is someone whose dedication to hardcore has outlived almost everyone. He is someone whose band has both protected and innovated the direction of our music. And he is someone who continues to perform with more zeal and vibrancy than a lot of bands half his age. If Lou Koller doesn’t deserve our financial and moral support, quite literally no one does.

III.

For as long as I’ve been around, I’ve seen the way we valorize longevity in this space. Hardships are hardcore, and there will always be a certain amount of struggle associated with any major endeavor to participate in this community. There should be. Resilience, consistency, and dedication are hardcore character traits that are developed over time and through such hardships. We are a stronger community because of them. But hardships need not be self-inflicted in order for one’s longevity to be meaningful.

When I look at the trajectory of a band like Sick of it All, who are closing in on four decades together, I see a band whose longevity was sealed by their work ethic, their interpersonal relationships, their love for this scene, and quite often, their sheer stubbornness. (The 1997 album, Built to Last, was not named by coincidence.) But as I personally navigate hardcore’s middle-age—and, in fact, my own—I have increasingly become more interested in having a conversation about the sustainability of our community. That’s not the same as mere longevity. I want to open up the kinds of discussions that make up for the lack of imagination we once had, using what we know now in order to design a hardcore future where our greatest legends never have to feel guilty for asking to be compensated for their work and where “aging out” is an option, not a rule.

When I was young, I always thought that turning 50 would be more of an end-of-the-road milestone—and that’s certainly one way to look at it. But now that I’m here, I’m not sure I see it that way anymore. Now that I’m here, I’d like to think I’m only halfway to 100.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Lou Koller of Sick of it All.

---

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. ✨