In Conversation: Kevin Seconds
As the singer of 7 Seconds, he gave us hope against hardcore nihilism and championed community like few others. Forty years in, Kevin Seconds still has so much to give.
I was fourteen years old the first time I saw 7 Seconds, so when I tell you they altered the course of my life, I really can’t be more literal. As one of the key architects of hardcore punk as we know it, Kevin Seconds contributed a unique point of view that spoke for kids like me: Kids who were angry, but not cynical. Kids who were hardened by circumstance, but sensitive by nature. In 7 Seconds, I found a band who centered community, who were aggressively inclusive, and who actively worked to expand the seemingly limited parameters of early hardcore music and thought. In Kevin, I also found a model of evolution. 7 Seconds were there when I needed my hardcore loud and fast in 1987, and they were there in 1995 when I started wondering what a band called Texas is the Reason could sound like. They have always been there.
It’s truly remarkable, then, that Kevin and I only met for the first time this year. Our r…