If It Feels Good, Do It
Late nineties Chicago was a Wild West of post-punk and hardcore transformation. Their guiding principle was a simple one: It's not what you make, it's how you make it.
I.
I moved to Chicago from New York in late 1997. At the time, I was working through a series of major transitions—the breakup of what I thought might be my “forever band,” coming out as gay, entering my mid-twenties and feeling less like a kid every day—but picking up and moving to a new city felt less like running away and more like a life hack. I knew that whenever you trade in a familiar environment for an unknown state, you’re going to find out what parts of you are most consistent and true. The parts of you that don’t survive the change were always going to be temporary vestiges anyway.
I landed on Chicago because it was cheap. The rent on my first apartment there, a two-bedroom on the edge of Wicker Park, was only $660—which, quite frankly, seemed impossible to me. (My rent in New York at the time was at least twice that.) I also came to Chicago because it had a reputation for being a place where people tried things. These two things are related: Sometimes when you exist in a single environment for so long, you can find yourself bound to expectations that can become tied with both your identity and livelihood. When Texas is the Reason broke up, for example, the expectation was that I would pick up a guitar again and start a new post-hardcore band within days. That was who I am, I was told. And unbeknownst to almost everyone, for a minute there, I actually did attempt to start a new band with Walter Schreifels from Quicksand. That ultimately fizzled out after a few writing sessions, when I figured out that evolution wasn’t really what I was looking for. I just didn’t have the vision or desire to keep exploring only one style of music. I wanted to make a hard left turn, completely fucking out-of-nowhere. I wanted to try things.
One of the first things I noticed when I got to Chicago was that the hardcore scene, which was still primarily situated around shows at the Fireside Bowl, didn’t feel as fractured as the scene had become back home in New York. I could expect to see the same faces at almost every show, without fail, whether it was Racetraitor or American Football or 90 Day Men or Alkaline Trio. More interestingly, outside of the shows, it wasn’t uncommon to see hardcore kids mingling with people from other Chicago underground scenes. Sometimes, this mingling led to cross-culture collaborations that resonated in real ways. Casey Rice, who was better known around town for his work on records for Liz Phair and The Sea and Cake, for example, wound up recording and mixing the debut album for The Promise Ring in 1996. No one in Chicago thought this was weird, and part of the reason for that is because Chicago, at that time at least, had a punk ethos that centered process, not product.
II.
There are at least two assumptions that people often make about the nature of punk which have a tendency to go both unspoken and unchecked. In the first, there’s this assumption that if you approach a creative project with an authentically punk process, the resulting “product”—your band, song, fanzine, live performance, or whatever—should be identifiably punk. This is, in part, why bands who strayed too far from a familiar path were for so long branded as sellouts: The logic goes that in order for a band to have created something that can’t be clearly identified as punk, they couldn’t have used a punk process. And so, the logic follows, these artists must have been following a different trail: trends, money, fame. (Kent McClard’s story about how Maximum Rock’n’Roll founder Tim Yohannan once told him that “he could listen to the first ten seconds of a record and tell whether or not it was a hardcore record” is a testament to the stubbornness of this idea.) The second assumption, however, is actually the greatest rebuttal against the first. In this one, we assume that an ostensibly “punk product” must have been created by means of a punk process. But right off the top of my head, I could probably name a dozen records that prove this assumption wrong. You can, too, no doubt.
Punk products—or perhaps a better word, outcomes—are often all we have to go on. Bands, shows, fanzines. They’re certainly what we talk about the most. But in the two and a half years I lived in Chicago, I can’t even tell you how many conversations I had about process over coffee or drinks at Jinx or the Rainbo. There seemed to be an implication that many of the well-worn signifiers of punk that we’d come to depend on had lost their meaning in the wake of grunge and the mainstreaming of pop-punk. There was a growing consensus that we needed to use the punk processes we’d learned over the years in order to innovate new punk outcomes, with few people in the city back then particularly bothered by whether or not these outcomes were “identifiably punk.” For many, being punk or hardcore in the nineties became a matter of adhering to the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law.
As the singer for Cap’n Jazz, Tim Kinsella was one of Chicago punk’s most idiosyncratic and provocative figures in the early- to mid-nineties. He was also one of the least constrained: Cap’n Jazz thrived on making brash and discomforting thrash in odd time signatures, and Tim’s lyrics—teeming with lines like “Hey, coffee eyes / You got me coughing up my cookie heart!” and “Hey God / I’ll pull you out of the sky and make you fourteen again”—were seemingly designed to make the listener ask “What the fuck?” in a way that upended whatever hardcore norms we held dear. Considering that, it was somewhat frustrating to see his next project, Joan Of Arc, regularly criticized for somehow being too far removed from “punk.” As far as Tim was concerned, putting together a new band where no one really knew how to play their assigned instruments—including his own stab at playing guitar when he “had only ever played guitar in The Sky Corvair for a minute”—was moving in the most punk direction he knew how.
“I’ve always loved the communities, but I’ve bristled at the scenes,” he explains, in a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “It’s a very different thing. It feels almost built into my sense of purpose as a creative person that I need to reject scenes or something. It just felt too easy to do anything that we knew people would like, you know? But the spirit of punk is still alive and well, in terms of process, in the Chicago music communities—underground, experimental, whatever the forms, whether it’s techno or free jazz—even if it doesn’t ‘sound’ like a punk outcome. Because how many times have you seen a punk product like the Warped Tour or whatever and thought, ‘I’m not really feeling the rebellion here?’ Not that rebellion is always the end goal, but in my mind, there does need to be some kind of friction. There does need to be something that unnerves the listener a little bit, even when it’s a beautiful sentiment. Even feelings of beautiful wonder can be unsettling.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean that punk can just sound like anything, of course. But it does open a door to the more intriguing possibility that anything can feel punk, even if—and maybe especially if—we are also tasked with the challenge of identifying exactly what punk makes us feel.
III.
Living in Chicago in the late nineties did eventually allow me to make a hard left turn, completely fucking out-of-nowhere. The more I mingled with members of Chicago’s electronic music community, the more I began to recognize and identify with so many of the parallels that early techno and house producers shared with hardcore’s early pioneers. I saw the way those producers managed to invent an entire genre of music with extremely limited means, based on digital instruments that had been sold back to pawn shops, discarded by so-called “real” musicians. I saw the way those so-called “real” musicians tried to delegitimize techno and house as “repetitive noise” at worst or “a fad” at best. I saw the way early house and techno contributors created an entire ecosystem of DIY clubs, record labels, and zines despite these criticisms, and later, how they turned it into a global movement with its own culture, history, and traditions. And unlike punk, I also saw how the work of these early techno and house communities was frequently diminished for so often being the work of queer people and people of color. Being a freshly out queer person of color in 1998, that hit home as well.
So I did what any hardcore kid would have done and I dove in. I bought some turntables and a vintage keyboard-sampler off eBay. I wound up getting a job at Gramaphone Records, Chicago’s legendary house music shop, after another hardcore kid who worked there recognized me, befriended me, and introduced me to everyone else who worked there. And eventually, I started playing out—sometimes as a traditional house DJ, but other times making more experimental electronic music with that keyboard-sampler, two turntables, and a mixer.
On November 19, 1999, under the last-minute name Carte Blanche, I agreed to play a show at the Fireside Bowl. It was unlike any show I’d ever played. I mixed ambient records with found sounds. I triggered string samples over sound-effect compilation albums. I ran movie monologues through reverb and delay pedals I’d normally use with my guitar. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and that was almost the point. Hardcore didn’t teach me to value professionalism. It empowered me to just do things, to express what I needed to express, regardless of whether or not I thought I had the equipment or expertise to do it. That is punk process, and even if the outcome didn’t sound like hardcore, I still think it felt like it. Which is why—after that night, in front of many of the same hardcore kids who packed that same club to see me play with Texas is the Reason only a few years earlier—I can assure you: No one in Chicago thought it was weird.
Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Tim Kinsella of Joan Of Arc and Cap’n Jazz.
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"I didn’t really know what I was doing, and that was almost the point. Hardcore didn’t teach me to value professionalism. It empowered me to just do things... regardless of whether or not I thought I had the equipment or expertise to do it."
— Hitting the punk nail squarely on its head.
I loved that. You put a lot of things into writing which I've only vaguely sensed over the years trying to write different styles of music. And Tim is such an inspiring songwriter, I can't wait for that interview.