Futures: The Hard Way
In the final week of Anti-Matter's anniversary month: I ask: Is our rush to conflate hardcore’s “tough guy” aesthetic with the threat of real violence keeping us from realizing just how tough we are?
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I.
On December 14, 1992, just a little bit under a year before the first issue of Anti-Matter came out, hardcore made headlines when a mass shooting occurred at Bards College at Simon’s Rock in Barrington, Massachusetts. Two people were killed and another four were wounded in the attack. The perpetrator, a student named Wayne Lo, turned himself into authorities, and when his face made the nightly news, almost everyone in our scene knew what was coming next: Lo was wearing a Sick Of It All t-shirt. We knew they’d be coming for hardcore.
We knew this in part because of the way they came for heavy metal in the 1980s when a serial killer named Richard Ramirez, otherwise known as “The Night Stalker,” was taken into custody wearing an AC/DC t-shirt. The New York Times, for one, was quick to jump on a statement from one of the killer’s former classmates who said Ramirez was “obsessed with the Satanic themes in the 1979 rock album Highway to Hell”—this, in spite of the fact that Highway to Hell is objectively and almost exclusively an album about sex with women, and mentions Satan a total of one time, mostly in jest, and only in the context of being in a debauched rock’n’ roll band. It always makes for a better story when you can link a tragedy with a potentially dangerous movement or a trend, and heavy metal was the perfect catnip for newspapers in 1985.
With commercial metal out of vogue by 1992, however, finding a way to connect an aggressive and often misunderstood underground music scene like hardcore to a mass shooter was a no-brainer, and once again, the New York Times was on the case. In an article published two weeks after the shooting, one writer went so far as to dedicate an entire feature to the idea that “when Wayne Lo’s music changed, he changed”—the idea being that the seeds of Lo’s downfall were planted after his rejection of the classical music he grew up with, and only blossomed through his discovery of hardcore.
“As he sits in the Berkshire County House of Corrections in Massachusetts, charged with murder and assault with a deadly weapon in connection with a 20-minute rampage,” the writer asks, “only Mr. Lo knows what led him to turn away from the classical music he once loved and instead embrace the violent, discordant music known as hardcore, and a surly group of students who were equally entranced by it.”
In the wake of this story and others like it, outsiders began to view hardcore in only one of two ways: It was either a style of music that attracts violent kids. Or it was a style of music that makes kids violent. There is a third reading, of course. But in 1992, no one wanted to hear it.
II.
There’s no doubt that hardcore’s much-touted “tough guy” elements are rooted in authenticity. I’ve written about this before: There was, in fact, a time and place in hardcore’s earliest history where knowing how to fight, or even just looking like it, was a prerequisite for daily survival—not at the hardcore shows, mind you, but in the day-to-day lives of those pioneering inner-city punks who lived in some of this country’s harshest neighborhoods, neighboring with actually violent people. There’s also no doubt that there are a lot of early hardcore songs about fighting, from “Gonna Hafta Fight” to “Ready To Fight.” They exist. But there was also an understanding, from almost the beginning, that if you came to a show with the explicit intention of getting into a fight, you were an asshole. And if nothing else, we have always managed to maintain a distinction between knowing how to fight and knowing when to fight. Being a “tough guy” did not automatically equate to being a violent person.
That said, the harsh neighborhoods that birthed hardcore—from the Lower East Side to Adams Morgan and beyond—no longer exist in the way they once did. Violence at hardcore shows doesn’t exist in the way it once did, either. It could, in fact, be argued that “hardness” as a necessity or a feature of hardcore is a vestigial trait at this point, made redundant by evolution, like tonsils or wisdom teeth. And yet we still often revere it. Some of us fetishize it. Many of us even embody it. There are reasons for that.
When I look back on my own experience, I can certainly attest to the fact that I was not attracted to hardcore because I was a violent kid, nor did hardcore make me violent. I’ve never really been a “tough guy.” But in my case, hardcore did allow me to access parts of my psyche that were, at the very least, tougher—and I’ve been able to use those aspects of myself to access a kind of fortitude that I need to be the person I am. Sure, I “needed” to be tough to go to hardcore shows at one point in my life. But more crucial than that, I needed to be tough to confront my childhood abuse. I needed to be tough to come out of the closet. I needed to be tough to handle being disowned by my family. Whenever the stereotypes of “the weakling queer” flashed across my TV screen growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, hardcore was there to give me a way of feeling powerful—and even hard. “Weakling queers” couldn’t survive what I’ve been through.
III.
For the third and final week of Anti-Matter’s first anniversary month, I wanted to focus on a band that I believe represents multiple facets of what a hardcore future might look like—a band that feels tethered to our history, while determined to create new pathways. There are quite literally dozens of reasons why I believe that Speed is that band.
For one thing, having broken through on an international level while being from Sydney, Australia, is an incredible testament to hardcore’s current standing on a global level. For another thing, the fact that four-fifths of Speed’s members are of Asian descent—and that this was, more or less, an accident—truly speaks to hardcore’s growth as a factually diverse and inclusive community. But there’s another thing about Speed that isn’t talked about as much, and I think it’s their most intriguing characteristic: They have perfected “hardness” as an aesthetic, and according to singer Jem Siow, they’ve been consciously using that aesthetic as a means to flip the way that Asians have been historically typecast as meek and submissive. This is a subversion of the “tough guy” image, in the best possible way.
When I spoke to Jem, for an interview that will be published in full on Thursday, we talked about Speed’s beginnings—during the early days of COVID lockdowns in Australia, at a time when anti-Asian violence was becoming an international issue—and how this particular climate influenced the band’s presentation.
“The song ‘Not That Nice’ was really about me realizing that there is a line in the sand that needs to be drawn, and that I do actually need to put my foot down for some things—especially because, unfortunately, Asian people have been stereotyped to be very passive and soft-spoken,” he explains. “It’s about us channeling this visceral part of our personalities that is locked away. This kind of music enables us to channel that in a positive way and let that come out. So there is a conscious element of portraying ourselves the way that we do. People have said that we’re just ‘so macho’ or that we’re ‘beefy gym guys’ or whatever—and I understand that. But for the majority of time, Asian males have been largely emasculated in the media. Part of me and Aaron and Dennis showcasing that we are strong individuals who have a harder side to our personalities—and part of us opening that door by saying, ‘We can look like this,’ and that we can be confident enough in our own skin to go out and look this way—is that there is a consciousness in representing that. It all comes back to the point of being authentic to who we are and hoping that someone might see that and feel empowered in a certain way.”
Hardcore’s reputation as punk’s violent cousin is an albatross we could certainly stand to shake. But what Jem is saying here also makes sense. In our rush to declare that hardcore’s “tough guy” aesthetic has outlived its original purpose, we might actually be missing out on new opportunities to get creative with it. In many ways, that’s what Speed is doing: By extracting the threat of violence and using the “tough guy” image as more of a hardcore cultural symbol, they have discovered a mechanism to distribute a type of transformative power that might have otherwise been withheld from us.
IV.
On January 15, 1993, one month after the Wayne Lo shooting, and only after mounting pressure to allow Sick of it All to issue a response to the paper’s reductive take on hardcore’s violent reputation, the New York Times finally published a rebuttal from the band titled, “It’s Too Easy To Blame the Music for the World.” In it, Sick of it All attempt to recast hardcore for what it really is: an oft-maligned, but ultimately resilient community of truth-seekers. Sometimes disillusioned, but always fighting for something greater.
“The message of hardcore music is predominated by a strong stance against apathy and complacency,” they wrote. “This is the message to which the name Sick of It All relates. The music expresses rage against injustice, dishonesty, and discrimination in the world. The political message of punk has always leaned toward idealism and optimism about the possibility of a better future. Our music and message are opposed to the atavistic tendencies of the rightist skinheads grabbing headlines in Europe.” After offering their condolences to the families, the band ended their rebuttal with a fact: “Mr. Lo's problems, no doubt, go much deeper than his T-shirt.”
Reading it again now, so many years later, I’d like to think it was their way of saying: If you come to hardcore with the explicit intention of enacting violence, you’re an asshole. The rest of us are just tough.
Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Jem Siow of Speed.
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I don’t know why I have never made this connection before but maybe all of those years going to hardcore shows, navigating violence and aggression, gave me the foundation for my career in education. It’s really interesting because I work with autistic students, many are limited or nonverbal. Often the violence and aggression of my students is their communication, and I am continually working at giving them verbal language to express themselves. Some of these kids are two and three times bigger than me with superhuman strength and I am never scared or get burnt out. I love everything about it…now I know why! Thanks for the clarity.
I'd never really thought about how toughness in hardcore emerged from necessity before, but on reflection it makes complete sense. I had a safe, stable home life and didn't grow up in an especially dangerous neighborhood, but I think about all of the shit my friends and I would get for being different and violence (or the threat of it) *was* omnipresent. It took a really long time to move on from that feeling of constant vigilance.
On a lighter, t-shirt related note: When I was in high school, I came to class one day in a Minor Threat t-shirt with the "bottled violence" illustration from the back of the first 7" on it, and one of my teachers expressed concern that it might be glorifying alcohol abuse. I don't think they knew why I laughed so hard at that.