In Conversation: Crystal Pak of Initiate
Having spent a life navigating cultural expectations and a feeling of persistent in-betweenness, Crystal Pak is done with division—and she's finally choosing all of herself.
When I first came up with the idea of relaunching Anti-Matter for its 30th anniversary, it was important to me that this project was not simply viewed as a nostalgia trip. This zine has always been about creating dialogues between hardcore musical styles, between regions, and between generations—and that was never going to change. So if I really wanted to test whether or not Anti-Matter was going to make sense in 2023, I decided that I needed to conduct my first interview back with a newer band. I chose Initiate.
Cerebral Circus, the band’s second album which came out earlier this year on Triple B, is somehow both immediate and eclectic, held together by Crystal Pak’s remarkable adaptability as a singer and lyricist—creating a space where any anger is leveled by a sharp, trenchant introspection. It’s the kind of hardcore record that lends itself to repeated listening, and it’s the thing that convinced me to open a conversation with Crystal for this relaunch.
For the record, this is the interview that convinced me this new iteration of Anti-Matter was ultimately going to be worth doing. The best conversation is collaboration, I believe, and I’m thankful that Crystal was graciously willing to put in the work with me.
There was a point in time when I was kind of trying to understand: “Why do we become hardcore kids?” I grew up in Queens—in New York City—and I grew up in an abusive home. So for me, hardcore was very much a surrogate family. It was a way to feel connected with people in a way that I didn’t feel connected at home. That’s what fucked me up to be here. And so the joke became that I would meet new kids in the scene and I would ask them: “What fucked you up to be here?” And everyone always had an answer. So let’s start there. What fucked you up to be here?
CRYSTAL: Wow. OK! [Laughs] I mean, that's a really cool question. When I was younger—especially growing up in a very multicultural household—for me, there was always this thing of being told, “You can’t do this because you’re a girl.” And then also my brother is deaf, so I was growing up and seeing all the crap that he had to go through. He got bullied a lot. There was this anger going on, and I was just feeling like, I don’t know what to do with this. So what attracted me to hardcore was that it felt like not everything had to be packaged up with a bow on it. It let me know that that’s not how I have to present myself all the time.
Even throughout my youth, when I first got into hardcore, not a lot of people knew about it. My parents didn’t really know I listened to hardcore. My mom called it “the devil’s music,” you know? I was listening to that stuff low-key on my iPod mini—just very secretive about it. And I honestly think what attracted me to it was just seeing fucked up things happen to other people and not knowing how to be angry about it…
…OK, hang on. I feel like I need to call you out on something. You’ve been talking a lot about being angry over the way that other people are being treated, but you just completely pushed your own treatment to the side!
CRYSTAL: Yeah, that’s true.
You started by talking about how you were expected to “act like a girl,” but then you pushed that completely aside, as if that wasn’t worth being angry about. Or as if that part is not important to who you are.
CRYSTAL: That's so me. That is so on-brand [laughs].
So let's talk about you then. My understanding is that you are half-Chilean and half-Korean. I’m also half-Chilean, so I appreciate that. My father was indigenous Chilean and my mom was Colombian, but technically, I am also Spanish and Portuguese on my mom’s side. It’s that classic Latin American mix of being both the colonizer and the colonized, all in one [laughs]! And so here I sit in this bowl of conflict. It’s maybe a little different than the biracial experience for you—both as an American, and as a child of immigrants with those respective identities. When was your first consciousness of that?
CRYSTAL: When I was really, really young. The classic story I think about was this one time when I really wanted to put Christmas lights on the roof. And I was told no—that the women in our family helped cook for Christmas. I was like five years old, but it always stuck with me. I thought, “Why does my brother get to do this and I have to be in the kitchen? I don’t even like cooking!”—at least at that age. But I think that’s when I first realized that, on a cultural level, my place was in the kitchen with the other women cooking while all the guys did the other things that I thought were fun.
At the same time, it’s kind of hard to say how strong the different cultural values came into my household because a lot of that had to be put on the back burner when my brother was growing up—[because he was deaf,] his doctor recommended that we not speak other languages in the house. Also, both of my parents immigrated to the United States at a young age. My dad came over here when he was six and my mom came after she was married, at 25. So they’ve been assimilating for a long time. My mom was actually still learning English when she had my brother. She was learning English for the first time, she was in the United States, her son is deaf, and she lives with my only-Korean-speaking grandmother. So it’s kind of hard to identify where that clash happened because I think my parents really had to focus on, like, “How do we raise our son in this household?”
What's interesting is that some people would argue that there's four different cultures in that scenario. You have Chilean culture and Korean culture, but there's also a very distinct deaf culture. And then there’s also the culture of being a child of immigrants, right? It’s a very distinct experience, I think. When you look back at that specifically, did you feel like being in the middle of all that was instructive for you?
CRYSTAL: I felt very confused growing up as to where I was culturally. My mom was actually teaching me Spanish low-key [laughs]. But she had a really good tough love conversation with me once because I would always ask her stuff like, “How's my accent?” She said, “Hey. The reality is that there are going to be some people on this planet who are going to tell you that you are never gonna be Spanish enough, and especially because of the way that you look”—because I'm more Asian-presenting. But the thing is, I think I know maybe ten words total in Korean. I was never fully immersed in Korean culture. So then what? I’m not really there either.
Even deaf culture, that’s something my brother wasn’t even fully immersed in. I mean, yes, he grew up deaf, but he didn’t even learn proper sign language until he was in high school because the city we grew up in didn’t have the resources to give that to him. But from there I learned that there were some people who would get mad if I told them I knew sign language—there’s that facet of deaf culture. So growing up, I always felt very culturally confused. I actually kind of talk about that in “Your Own Means”—the one where I sing Spanish at the end.
Right. Like, I didn't know anything about who you were or what your background was when I first heard the record, but my ears are obviously immediately attuned to that. I hear Spanish out of nowhere and I’m like, "Sick!" [laughs] But for me, this song really hits because even the first lyric was something about wanting to feel comfort in your own skin. And I feel that. On some level, I don’t feel like an indigenous person because I wasn’t raised in that culture and I can’t claim ownership to it. And at the same time, I don’t feel European because, here in America, I am just perceived as “a brown man.” It almost doesn't matter where I come from—Puerto Rican, Mexican, Chilean, whatever. In America, I'm all of those and I'm none of those.
CRYSTAL: I was never comfortable. Like, let me give you an example. I went to community college in San Diego, before I moved to Santa Barbara to go to [a four-year school], and there were a million boba shops there. I felt like every time I went in there, that I was fake [laughs]. That’s so crazy to me, that I don’t feel comfortable in this space. Whereas when I walk into a carniceria, I’m cool, but at the same time, if I see someone struggling to speak English, and I can tell that they only speak Spanish, I feel like I have to be culturally conscious of how I'm coming off if I speak to them in Spanish. It’s always kind of walking on eggshells.
So how did you come to the decision to put Spanish in that song?
CRYSTAL: I think it was something I knew I wanted to do, but was never comfortable doing. And again, it's only because I am Asian-presenting. But for this record specifically, I feel like I pushed so many personal boundaries that it just felt like this is the record that it needs to happen on. Like, if I don't do it here, I don't know when I'm gonna do it. So fuck it, let's just do it here. The song was perfect for it.
What sort of personal boundaries did you feel like you were keeping?
CRYSTAL: At Initiate's start, a lot of my lyrics had to do with the political spaces around me, but they never really dove super, super deep into my own emotional space. I feel like this record specifically, I shed a lot of that insecurity with being outwardly vulnerable. I talk about death. I talk about my own insecurities about my identity. “Amend” and “Transparency” are two songs that everyone wants us to play, but we’re like, “I don’t want to be in a crowd with everyone crying around me [laughs].” I’m not sure when we’ll play “Transparency,” honestly. Those two songs specifically really dive deep into regret and grief and death. They’re about asking, “What if I don’t recognize the moments I’m happy because I’m so deep inside always thinking about the bad things going on?” I’ve never really talked about that. And “Transparency” was actually a song that our guitarist Jack [McTomney] and I wrote together. So that was one that was really fun to create because, up until then, all Initiate lyrics were mine. It was such a fucking hard song to write [laughs]. It was allowing myself to be vulnerable with a larger audience. I’ve never been comfortable with that.
I mean, this sort of goes back to the first point that I was making about you putting your own experience and feelings to the side and being like, “I'm pissed off about how everyone else is being treated!” How do you break that resistance to vulnerability?
CRYSTAL: Great question. I mean… Is my family gonna read this and know what I'm talking about?
I doubt it [laughs].
CRYSTAL: Yeah, I mean, they can't even understand half the stuff I'm saying in the songs anyway [laughs]. But ultimately, when we were writing Cerebral Circus, I was just in a very strong space with myself and with my life. And I think that was when I started to think that I could handle being vulnerable. Whereas before, I was just going through a shit-storm of things and I was kind of like, I'm not good with that right now—you know? But now I feel more solid in who I am. I feel like that's really the only thing that I could attribute that to. Before that, I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
It strikes me that when you speak about this attachment to your family’s perception of you, that also seems like a very cultural thing.
CRYSTAL: Oh, it definitely is. Not that it’s not important, but it has less of a grab on me now than it once did. My family is still like, “Well, what are you gonna do for money?” or “Is your job gonna be OK with you touring?” And that's something where I just have to constantly reassure them because culturally—especially on the Asian side—our families take care of our elders. They live with us, you know? My grandma lives eight minutes away from where I currently am. So I think that, at the forefront of their minds, it might be this thing where my parents are getting older and they’re wondering who's going to take care of them. I feel like there's that worry there. So that thing about perception and not wanting to let them down is still very present, but it's not necessarily controlling every aspect of my life anymore because I'm at a point where I feel like I can do both.
How much does your family actually really know about Initiate? Do they listen to it?
CRYSTAL: Well, that's why I’ve started to let go, because they haven't even been to a show [laughs]! I mean, they have the record, and they've seen videos online, but I don't think they've ever really dove into it. And even if they did, I care, but I don't want it to dictate how I am anymore. If it comes to a point where I need to take care of my parents, I know I'll be able to figure that out.
I didn't grow up playing instruments. I always performed when I was in theater, and I was in choir and all those things, but I never played an instrument. I just don't feel like my family really understood the time for playing. Like, my boyfriend is in Militarie Gun. He’s on tour all the time, and he’s doing these things, and I have to almost explain to my parents that he is on a path of, like, career musicianship—and that’s completely different from where Initiate currently is. It’s a whole other level. They don’t understand that. For them, it was always, “You’re going to be a doctor, you’re going to be a vet.” Just all these little things that put money at the forefront. It got to a point for me where I realized I just can't let this deeply ingrained cultural thing have control over how I'm going to live my life because, if it comes down to it, I'm gonna do both. I know that I'm capable of doing both. And that comfort of who I am plays into that.
What you’re bringing up is something that I feel is very relevant to our entire conversation so far—the idea of doing both, even when things seem at odds. I tell almost everyone I talk to about this thing I heard once that I became obsessed with—about the word “integrity,” and specifically its relationship to the word “integration.” I first thought about this with my queerness, because it’s a very popular thing to say things like, “Oh being gay is a very small part of who I am!” But that’s not how it works. Being gay is literally a part of everything I am. Compartmentalizing is not integrity. That’s watering down. So integrity is about integrating yourself. It's about knowing that being a gay is a part of everything, even when it's not. That being Latin is a part of everything, even when it's not. You can’t just turn those things off. So I think that’s what you’re talking about—trying to figure out one part of your life with another part of your life, and just being both, even when they feel like they are at odds.
CRYSTAL: I feel so seen [laughs]. I love that. No, I really, really love the integrity and the integration thing. That literally puts two words to it that I just feel like I've never been able to put to it before. So thank you.
Out of all the lyrics on the record, “Your Own Means” is the one that really made me feel like, “Oh, she’s talking about her family.”
CRYSTAL: Mm-hmm [laughs].
Did that make you self-conscious?
CRYSTAL: Oh, absolutely. I was stressing out about that one for a while, because it was just very clear that this is, one, about my family, and two, about my own cultural identity and how I struggled with it. So yeah, I was all kinds of self-conscious about it.
What did you hope to achieve by putting it out there?
CRYSTAL: I really just needed to, one, get it off my fucking chest. There was a need for me to be able to say: this is a part of me. You all know I'm Korean. I am very much Spanish. This is [who I am]. The second part of it was hoping that someone else could identify with it. There are songs that I write where I just hope that this touches someone the way other lyrics have touched me, you know? But at the same time, I also try to balance that with just writing for myself to be able to put it out there, because it almost kind of takes a weight off my shoulders. Especially with this record, that’s what I was really going for: Don’t worry about what other people are thinking and do what makes you feel good. “Your Own Means” was kind of both. It was both “let me make this declaration right here” and also, “I hope someone else can hear this.”
I kind of wanted to talk about the last line of the song—no es justo estar tan cansada—which I would translate as, “It’s not fair to feel this tired.”
CRYSTAL: Yeah [laughs].
I love that lyric because I feel like it really encapsulates that sort of “in-between” experience so perfectly—especially sung in Spanish. Even as it relates to hardcore. Like, I don’t know what it was like for you, but I came up in the Youth Crew era and I felt very not white at those shows [laughs]. Even going to shows could feel like work sometimes. People in those days used to say things to me all the time like, “You seem so white!”—as if that were a compliment I should thank them for.
CRYSTAL: The pure idea of code-switching, mentally, it is just so exhausting. I was so excited when Krimewatch became a band because it was like, oh my god, here’s another Asian vocalist. I just didn’t see that, you know? But that lyric encompasses more than just culture. Because even as a female, I’m just constantly… Well, that’s a whole other conversation…
No, wait. Have it. Keep going.
CRYSTAL: You're gonna make me have it? [laughs]
Yes! Have that conversation!
CRYSTAL: I mean, that conversation is always just kind of annoying to me. I recently had a conversation with my bandmates on this last tour, where we had some weird situation going on with being paid out from a show. I usually settle every night, but some weird stuff happened and I came to my bandmates and was like, “Hey, it is deeply pissing me off to have to come to this conclusion, but I can’t settle anymore. Because as a woman, I don’t feel like people are taking me seriously.” And that sucks because I should be able to settle for my own band and not feel like I have to be a total asshole about it. I don’t like being an asshole. That was hard for me to believe that, truly at its core, this is happening because I’m a girl.
My mind goes a million miles an hour when we talk about this stuff. Like, even how sometimes I’ll see comments about my [female] friends where they are just grotesquely objectified. You never see any guy in the hardcore scene that grotesquely objectified, but I do see that happen to my friends all the time, and that part is so heartbreaking to me. I hope to God I never read something like that about me.
That goes back to the integration conversation: There’s a Crystal that I am meeting here who, when you’re talking about settling, you say, “I don’t want to be an asshole.” But then there’s also this Crystal I hear on Initiate records who talks about breaking people’s necks [laughs]. So how do we integrate neck-breaking Crystal with aftershow-settlement Crystal? Is there a meeting of the minds here?
CRYSTAL: There’s gotta be! Because I can’t let them step all over me, but I also think what made me more mad is that they were stepping all over my bandmates, too. I mean, yes, I am very aggressive in my music. And sometimes the comments I get are, “You're so mean on stage, but you're so soft-spoken.” And it's like, “Do you want me to yell all the time? I can have both!”
Like, something that I have actually been really struggling with lately is the lack of personal space people give me at shows. I'm trying to figure out a good way to address this in person because I don't want to be the breaking-your-neck Crystal all of the time [laughs]. But I had someone recently at a show come up from behind me and hug me, and I was like, “I don't know you.” That’s not good! You should just never go up to a stranger and do that. I don't know any of my other friends who are guys, who are vocalists, who get that shoulder-rub or that hug from behind. I don't know people who experience that to the degree that I do or that a lot of my femme friends do that are vocalists. Where's the respect for my personal space?
When you were saying that, it sounded like you wanted to say, "Where's my power?"
CRYSTAL: Literally, yes.
It also feels like you still want to be nice about it?
CRYSTAL: I do still struggle with people who don't have ill intentions, because their impact on me is so massive and they just don't understand it, you know? So a part of that is just me being too nice.
There's a huge world between “nice” and “mean.”
CRYSTAL: I think there are moments when, especially when it comes to my own self-advocacy, I feel like I do struggle in that. Again, going back to the very beginning where I was just like, “Yeah, all these things are happening to all these other people!”—but where am I standing up for myself? I’m 30 now, and it feels like I’m just finally able to do these things. But I’m still coming across these challenges, and the next one right now is: How do I get people to stop fucking touching me?
I actually pulled out one of your lyrics and I think this is a good place to put it because, in my mind, I feel like you may have the answers to your own questions. The lyric is: “I am the hostage, captive, prisoner, and the guard.”
CRYSTAL: Let's go! [laughs]
So the way I personally read that lyric is as a moment of awakening—this feeling of saying, yes, I feel completely constrained, but also I'm the one holding the key to the fucking lock!
CRYSTAL: No, I think that's cool that you are definitely using a lyric I wrote in a completely different scenario to this smaller nuanced one. I think it's cool and I think I should eat my own words on that one [laughs].
OK, I wasn’t planning on doing this, but I feel like the conversation moved into this place. One of the weirdest things that Anti-Matter was known for was this question that I first asked Zack de la Rocha from Rage Against the Machine in the first issue. We were talking about a million different things, but it all felt so political and I wanted to break it up, so I asked him about the last time he cried. And he gave me this really beautiful answer, so it became something that I went to ask a handful of other people. One of the reasons I started asking that question was because hardcore was so hyper-masculine that it almost evened the playing field [laughs]… Like, I didn’t want people to think hardcore kids were just animals. But with you, I feel like the question I want to ask is slightly different…
CRYSTAL: OK… All right… [laughs nervously]
When was the last time you made someone else cry?
CRYSTAL: Oh my gosh, that’s a question! Dang, I was prepared for the cry question and I had my own spin on it! [Laughs] Holy crap. Let me think. The last time I made someone cry… Oh man, I do know the last time I made someone cry. I'm not very proud of it. This literally happened on the last tour. They weren’t necessarily crying; they were more tearing up.
That counts. I think this is ultimately about wanting to understand more about you—how you felt, and how that unraveled in you.
CRYSTAL: Oh, it didn't feel good. But it is kind of relevant to all the things that we were talking about, because it came down to settling. We were on tour with this band In Time, who are amazing friends of ours, and we played this show that had maybe 250 kids. At the end of the show, I was given $300 to split between Initiate and In Time. And I was like, “Heeeey, the math isn’t really mathing here? Like, if tickets were $15 a person and we got $300 to split… like, can I see the breakdown?” [Laughs]. I had never really asked that before, but to me, this was such a lowball, I just couldn’t let this one go. I had to. I still feel like I wasn’t actually as assertive as I could have been, but I was just like, “We’re going to need more money than this. This just doesn’t make any sense.” And it also just isn’t fair. We were two out-of-state bands and this maybe just covers gas.
So I was talking to the person about it and they came back with a wad of cash, but they were, like, shaking, with tears in their eyes—and it didn’t feel good. In the end, I do feel like we got screwed over, but I did feel bad in that moment. I don’t want to make people cry! But there’s also a community aspect of it, which is like, we take care of each other, and that’s just not happening here. I feel like we've had this happen with a few smaller DIY spots run by a lot younger kids, where it's just kind of like, “Yeah, we're making all this money. We're having this show at our house,” but then they're just not taking care of the artists that are coming through. There feels like a disconnect. And so we had that conversation. They were like, “We really hope you come back,” but I felt bad. I don’t know if me being confrontational about it was the reason, but I didn’t mean to make anyone cry.
I get that. I’ve been in that exact position. Honestly, I feel like this crosses into something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and something I probably plan on writing about for the site at some point, but that is how we, as hardcore kids, have this tendency to depreciate our own self-worth and value constantly. And part of it is still based on these outdated economics—like the five-dollar show. It’s so hard because we come from a culture where we’re supposed to be doing this because we love it. But we are also working really hard and this is very expensive to do, especially in 2023. And it seems like there has to be a way of doing this without making anyone cry [laughs].
CRYSTAL: For the most part, I do feel like that culture is changing. Initiate, we’re always, first and foremost, thinking about how, like, if the kid can’t afford to come in, just let him in. If a kid at the merch table is a few dollars short, who cares? If they’re like fifteen years old and they’re just looking at our record, I’m giving it to them. We are very much people-first.
But then there is the aspect of it where, you know, we are putting our jobs on hold. We’re still at a point where, on a DIY tour, we don’t feel like asking for a guarantee is our style. We didn't ask for a guarantee this entire last tour. Whatever you can make, as long as everyone is getting paid fairly, that’s cool with us. But there needs to be a communal ethos to this. It’s not just kids doing it because they want to play for free. Bands are putting their lives on hold, renting a van, paying for gas, needing to eat food. People aren’t working. We need to take that into consideration. It’s finding that balance between the part of you that is doing it for fun and because you genuinely love it, and then there’s that part that’s like… hey, we still need to survive [laughs].
I always compare being in a band to being a teacher. I was a teacher for about five years, but ultimately, I had to stop because, well, it pays nothing. But as a teacher, you are constantly told, “Oh, this is a vocation! This is your calling!” And that is often used as an excuse and a cudgel to pay you less. I feel like bands get treated in a very similar way—like, “How dare you! This is your calling!” [laughs]. So we have to be careful not to undervalue ourselves; that’s ultimately the point. And I’m not just talking about money. Bands are valuable. Promoters are valuable. Making sure we all survive is in everyone’s best interest. I have been told so many times that what I’ve done has changed lives. Initiate is changing lives. That means something.
CRYSTAL: Thank you. It’s weird. I'm still trying to be comfortable with that whole idea—like, we have had a few people come up to us and say really, really sweet things like that. It’s just so not anything that I'm used to. But there has to be a way of finding that balance. I don’t know what this band is worth, but I know this band is worth something because it means something to other people.
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This was such an engaging interview, but that is no surprise at this point. I think it was before Initiate was formed, but I still remember the first time I saw Crystal take the mic during Free's set at Sound and Fury 2016. It's been cool to observe how Initiate have developed as a band and I appreciate getting more insight on who she is as opposed to someone I'm aware of because of their being in a band or seeing them at shows.
This really was a remarkable interview and such an engaging and inspiring read. Thank you Norm and Crystal.