In Conversation: Neeraj Kane of The Hope Conspiracy
At the heart of Neeraj Kane's love for hardcore is the unconditional acceptance he received as a kid—a reprieve from the judgment he felt elsewhere. It's a practice that, he says, must be preserved.
To hear Neeraj Kane tell it, the Hope Conspiracy have never broken up. In the fourteen years that have elapsed since the release of their most recent EP, True Nihilist, in 2009, the band simply existed in some sort of suspended animation that left him with the freedom to explore: Neeraj moved around the country some. (“Usually after a romantic break-up,” he laughs.) He spent several years working as a teacher. He played sporadic shows with The Suicide File and made records with Holy Roman Empire, Godcollider, and Hesitation Wounds (alongside Touché Amoré’s Jeremy Bolm) whenever he could fit them in. When things for the Hope Conspiracy “clicked” again, he says, the decision to make a new album—their first new full-length in eighteen years—was a natural move.
Neeraj has always been an important and much-loved figure in Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles hardcore circles. Even before we met, I knew Neeraj as being the kind of hardcore kid that other hardcore kids make it a point to say they “love” whenever the opportunity arises. Having seamlessly moved throughout our outsider culture for almost three decades now, he has personally felt both its radical inclusivity and its casual exclusivity alike. But in the sum total of his lived experience, Neeraj says, “hardcore was a place where I found there was no real judgment.” It’s a strong inclination that he is still paying forward.
I wanted to start with something I’ve given a lot of thought to, something that we actually share in common, which is that no one in America pronounces our birth names correctly.
NEERAJ: [Laughs] Yes, yes. You are very correct.
I legally changed my birth name because it’s rife with family baggage. But for the sake of this conversation, I will talk about it. Unfortunately people won’t be able to hear me say it out loud, but I’ll try to create an approximation: My birth name is Arenas—pronounced: Ah-reh-nahs, with or without a hard R. But from a young age, and especially once we moved out of Queens, everyone started calling me Ah-ree-nas, like an “arena” but plural, or even worse, Ar-nehz. Either way, I remember being a kid and feeling sort of resigned to the idea that people were going to say it however they wanted. It wasn’t until I was much older that it became a real problem for me. When did you first become aware that you were essentially being re-named?
NEERAJ: I’d say early on—in elementary school, easily. Being a Gen X’er and growing up in the ‘80s, in a suburb that was predominantly white, I just never corrected anybody. My father also never corrected anybody. So everyone says my last name as “Cane,” but it’s actually “Kah-nay.” I was aware of this as soon as they started taking attendance in kindergarten. And my first name is actually “Nee-ridge,” but everyone says “Neh-rahj.” That’s just how they started pronouncing it, and I kind of just went with it because I didn’t want to make a fuss. It didn’t annoy me, but it became part of another separate identity, if that makes sense. Because I’ve lived in two worlds for most of my life: my first-generation Indian American culture, and then my being an American and going into that Western culture. So it kind of helped me partition the two things. I was “Nee-ridge Kah-nay” in this one world and I was “Neh-rahj Cane” in this other world.
I get that. I think that, for a long time, I had to really make it so that it didn’t bother me. Because even as a five-year-old in kindergarten I was thinking, “If I make a big deal about this, I’m only othering myself even more.”
NEERAJ: That’s very true. I didn’t want to be othered; I wanted to fit in. My folks aren’t super orthodox. Like, my parents didn’t grow up eating meat, but when they first came to this country, they did everything they could to assimilate, so we ate meat. Both of my parents are great cooks, so they were making great food and cooking meat in the house and that was my reality. It was a lot of fitting in. It was anything to avoid standing out or to avoid rustling feathers. As an immigrant family, we wanted to assimilate. There was no confidence of being like, “No, I’m So-and-So and this is how you say my name!” My father actually has a complicated Sanskrit name for Westerners to say, so he just goes by P.K. His real name is Prabhakar, but he’s always gone by P.K. Kane [pronounced “cane”] his whole life.
So it was like that anti-drugs commercial: “I learned it from watching you, Dad!” [laughs]
NEERAJ: Yeah! And it’s funny because my father doesn’t look overtly Indian. He could be Mediterranean or Middle Eastern. So there was never this sense of pride of being like, “I’m an Indian immigrant coming from India!” It was nothing like that. It was always like, “Let’s play it down.”
It’s interesting because as I got older, I was less embarrassed to correct people or at least tell them, “Hey, this is my name.” The guys in the band, who I’ve known for 20-plus years, they know my real name. But I think it’s being more talked about now in the past ten years just because of the nature of the zeitgeist—people are more cognizant of culture now. And there are a lot more people who look like me, South Asians or Asians, that are in the media or in other places where they are seen. There’s more of a conversation of, “Hey, are you going by the way you really pronounce your name? Or are you going by your Western name?”
You sort of hinted at this before, but I feel like every child of immigrants has either one of two conversations with their parents growing up: It’s either the one in which you should be proud of your culture and you should represent your family and you should let people see that. Or it’s the one that’s more, “You’re an American and you need to be like the Americans.” And in my house it was very much the second conversation. My father was a top-tier assimilator, the first in line to get U.S. citizenship—and the first in line to look down on other immigrants.
NEERAJ: Same thing.
At the same time, I had this internal compass that told me I would always be different, and that I should embrace that. But my parents unfortunately used shame as a way to beat me into assimilation as much as possible.
NEERAJ: Shame definitely plays into a lot of it. In our home, though, I do think we still had our religion and our culture—that was very strong. But it wasn’t pushed. We weren’t going to Indian Pride parades or anything. But I learned a lot of Vedic philosophy at home, for one thing. So when I started seeing all of the Krishna stuff in punk, I was like, what the hell is going on here? It was interesting to see something that I grew up with here. That was my cultural [outlook]. It was like, be proud of our traditions and our ancestry, but there’s no reason for us to be outwardly paraded around.
That’s funny to me because the way you talk about it, it reminds of me of how people talk about queer people. Like, “I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own temple!” [laughs].
NEERAJ: Yeah! [laughs] It’s so weird because I see a lot of people now who are South Asian who have a different take on this. They’re in a different spot because of the way our culture is now. I dealt with a lot of racism growing up that I didn’t really process until years later. I just internalized it, and packed it away, and then it kind of came back. A lot of it was shame. Like… you might know this because you’ve been to India, right?
Several times.
NEERAJ: Right, so there’s colorism. [My parents] were like, “Hey, don’t go out into the sun! You’re going to look dark, you’re going to look more Indian.” And I was like, “I thought we were Indian?” [laughs]. It was about trying to blend in as much as we could.
So where does hardcore come in?
NEERAJ: I had been buying records and I was into bands for a while, but it didn’t really hit until probably the first More Than Music fest [in Dayton, Ohio, in 1993]. I ditched school and I went to that with four friends. Being in the midwest, we had a hardcore scene, but I hadn’t really bought in yet. We had Tony Brummel’s band and the Chicago straight-edge scene, but when I went to that specific festival, I just thought, This is something different. It was the zines, it was people talking about politics, it was really more than music. That’s when I was like, I’m in. 100 percent.
How do you think that discovery fit into your upbringing?
NEERAJ: My parents didn’t understand any of it. They just saw that I wasn’t dating. I wasn’t doing drugs because I was super straight-edge. I was shy. I didn’t go to any [school] dances. This actually just recently happened: My cousin lives about ten minutes from my folks and he has a daughter in high school right now, and she’s going to prom. His wife asked my mom, “How did you deal with your son going to prom?” And she was like, “He never went to prom. He didn’t date. He was only into skateboarding and that punk rock stuff” [laughs]. My cousin’s wife was looking for some sort of insight into how to deal with American teenagers and my mom’s like, “He wasn’t the typical American teenager at all because he found his tribe early on. His American friends were completely not what we anticipated.” So for me to get involved, it was a very easy transition for me. It was seamless, almost.
I was a teacher for a long time, and after seeing how kids learn and how identities develop, I think that a big part of it for me was that hardcore didn’t have a rule book. There were a lot of things, like high school, where I had issues with systems. I wasn’t a great student because I had issues with learning something in a systemic way. So a lot of the STEM subjects, like math and science, I was horrible at them. People were like, “But you’re Indian! You should be great at this!” Well, I didn’t get that gene [laughs]. I didn’t really feel confident in high school.
When I was ten, my parents put me in guitar lessons where it was like, you open the book and you’re learning “Greensleeves” or whatever. And I didn’t want to do that. So my teacher told my parents, “You’re wasting your money.” It just didn’t take. I had a hard time with that kind of codification. But when I got into hardcore, it was like, maybe I could try this? So I picked up the guitar again and started learning bass lines because I didn’t know a chord yet, and then a friend of mine showed me a power chord and I was, “Yeeesss!” [laughs]
The first time my brother showed me a power chord I was like, “OK, that’s cool. That’s all I need to know.”
NEERAJ: Yes! I saw that there were no rules to it. It was something that felt like a pure form, an outlet that was unadulterated. You could suck, but no one cared. There was no judgment necessarily, and I had been judged all my life—whether it was in elementary school because of my name or the color of my skin, or whether it was from the Indian part of it, where I was judged because of where my parents lived and because they weren’t wealthy professionals. Hardcore was a place where I found there was no real judgment. I had white friends who didn’t see me as an Indian kid or as a brown kid; they just saw me as another person who had the same interest for this music that we were passionate about.
In 1992 or 1993, by the time you fully embraced hardcore, Krishnacore would have already been an established thing at that point. I’m curious what your take was on that whole thing because I feel like it wasn’t until I started playing in 108 and Shelter that I realized how few Indian American hardcore kids there actually were. For some reason, I thought they’d all come out and I’d meet them all [laughs]. So as a first-generation Indian, and someone who probably saw these things as a part of the cultural India your family raised you with, what was your impression of what was happening there?
NEERAJ: From my parents’ standpoint, we were told that the Krishnas were a cult [laughs]. But I thought it was awesome at first. I thought it kind of solidified something for me where it felt like this community that I’d gotten into and that had embraced me was now embracing another part of me—and very passionately embracing it. Whether or not I agreed with a lot of it or not, that’s a whole different story, but early on, I did. Seeing the cover of Best Wishes in the record store was like… Wait, what? I was actually kind of proud. It didn’t make me want to feel ashamed about anything anymore. And not just that, but speaking of the Cro-Mags, now you have these tough guys embracing a part of your culture, so you’re like, “Fuck yeah!” [laughs]
I get that. Because it allowed you to take ownership of something, even if you weren’t a direct participant. I imagine that it gives you a much stronger feeling of wholeness.
NEERAJ: Yeah, it did. When you’re hearing a bhajan or a kirtan on a recording of Shelter or 108, you just felt like, OK. This is not foreign to me.
So here’s a weird follow-up question: Beginning with the moment that you got into hardcore, how long did it take before you met another Indian American hardcore kid?
NEERAJ: Probably 2010.
Are you serious?
NEERAJ: I’m serious. It was Sunny from Hate5Six. One of my other bands used to play This is Hardcore, and every time we’d play, me and Sunny and this other guy Ravi, we would always take the “Bollywood punks” photo of the three of us [laughs]. But Sunny was the first person I actually met, where he came up to me and he was like, “I look up to you because you’re one of the only ones”—and it was interesting because that was when I realized I never had anyone to look up to. Some people might be like, “Is that really important?” But it is sort of important for anybody to feel like they can connect with somebody, to have someone you could look up to, or someone to look at where you can say, “I can see myself doing that.”
Was Extinction your first band?
NEERAJ: Extinction was my second band. My first band was called Cornerstone, but not the youth crew band from Connecticut. We put out a demo and that was about it.
I pulled out an Extinction record where everyone in the band wrote a song explanation for the lyric sheet—which is so ‘90s, I love it—and I kind of wanted to see what 1990s Neeraj was feeling. It starts with you writing, “Sometimes I feel ashamed to be part of the human race. Humanity seems to be a scourge to this planet, to this environment, and to the life that inhabits it.” I mean… fuck!
NEERAJ: The funny thing is I don’t think I’ve changed that much [laughs].
OK, but you don’t actually strike me as that kind of person. I don’t get hopelessness or nihilism from you. I get that there’s a feeling we all have, a sense that the world is fucked—even today. Maybe especially today. But we also exist in this paradox where, on one hand, you can be like, “We’re doomed!” But on the other hand, you still go out and try to do something. So obviously there’s hope for change.
NEERAJ: Yeah. I think that’s where as you grow older you realize that you’re not going to live as that scornful person going through society. Like, I got into education primarily because of the punk scene. When the touring stopped for The Hope Conspiracy and I moved back to Chicago for a while, I got into education because I wanted to make a difference.
Right, and it would be impossible to be a teacher if you truly believed that human beings were incapable of change.
NEERAJ: Exactly. Because you see it. You see that there’s people who can do good. But it’s a sobering reality when you’re working in that world and you’re just getting browbeaten by the apparatus. People always assume that I quit teaching because of the kids, but no. The kids are great. I could see the impact I had and the positivity.
I used to teach at an all-girls high school in Los Angeles where 40 percent of the students were pregnant or parenting, and a lot of them were from the foster care system. It was a tough group of kids who came up with a lot of baggage, a lot of trauma, and there was always this danger of [repeating] a negative cycle. I had one student, who came to me at fifteen. She had a child. Her mom wasn’t really supportive and her father was an alcoholic. But she was really sharp. I told her, “Hey. You know you have the opportunity to break that cycle, right? You’re very intelligent.” I worked at a school where I was able to be very honest and very blunt with the students. She was dating the father of her child at the time, and I remember this conversation where I told her, “Listen. He might be a good guy now, but he’s not going to stick around. You’re fifteen years old. You have your whole life in front of you. Don’t limit yourself from doing something great with your life because you think this guy is going to help take care of your child. Like, what is he doing for work now?” Oh, he doesn’t have a job. Well, strike one [laughs]. But eventually, as the years went on when she was in my class, she was able to get internships, her grades got really good, her relationship with this guy went on the rocks, and she was like, “I think I’m going to go to Berkeley. They’re giving me a full ride.” She took her kid there and she enrolled, and after her first year, she told me, “You changed my life. I was able to break that cycle. My child, at six years old, is watching the election and schooling me on political policies. I know that my daughter is going to have a bright future.” She’s in grad school and works in public health now. Getting that sort of feedback makes me feel like I did something good, you know?
I was lucky to get a job in some really innovative schools, but it was tough, because you do take that trauma home. That sort of angst that I used to love to listen to in hardcore bands, you really start to internalize it. But the fact that you’re here to help them, I really miss that part of the job.
Did leaving that career coincide with the return of Hope Conspiracy?
NEERAJ: No. I mean, the guys in that band are my family. I’m an only child and I don’t have brothers or sisters, so they’re like my brothers. But Hope Conspiracy, we never really broke up. We just stopped playing because the landscape of music was changing. This is just my take; I don’t know what the other band members would say. But in 2005, the Warped Tour scene was just huge. It was all that sort of heavy music where you sling your guitar around your shoulder and it comes back? That Hot Topic kind of thing? And we just didn’t fit that mold. So we started drifting away a little bit. The full-time touring stopped. We weren’t a full-time band anymore. And then, you know, I had to get a “real” job. We put out another full-length in 2006, but we never really became that touring machine that we were in 2003 or 2004 again. We were really just doing it for us, because we’re all family and we love playing music together. We finally put out another EP in 2009, and then in 2010, that was the last tour that we did. After that, our lives were in transition. We’d start writing songs and stop when it didn’t feel like stuff was clicking again. And then we’d get together again for a year, start writing songs, and then we wouldn’t touch it for another six months. We kept coming back to it.
Eventually, when COVID happened, we had like 50-something songs—just parts and skeletons. And it was like, What are we going to do? If we’re not going to do this, if we don’t want to do this anymore, then let’s not get anyone’s hopes up. So we finally decided: Let’s do it. Let’s put a new record out. We got asked to play a lot over the years, but we didn’t want to be a band that’s coming back and playing only our old catalog. We want to be relevant and current. We wanted to write songs that sound like they’re a progression from what we did before, and not just rehashing older styles. And I think we’re able to see some progression. Do you know that band Weekend Nachos?
I do. They’re great.
NEERAJ: One of the guys in the band texted me the other day and told me how their drummer didn’t know who we were, and how he thought we were some kind of ‘90s mosh-metal band. But then he heard us and he was like, “Oh, no. These guys are like stadium crust” [laughs]. I love that.
The album launch came with a missive that described the new record as “aimed at political division, economic manipulation, war profiteering, media propaganda, and other vile forms of global oppression”—which immediately called back a kind of political hardcore from the ‘90s and the early 2000s that I’m not sure fully exists anymore in the way that it once did. There are obviously bands that are political in nature who exist right now, but it’s almost like there’s a difference in aesthetic or presentation. I’m kind of curious if you had any conversations inside of the band about this approach.
NEERAJ: Not consciously. Because early on, the lyrics on the first two records were more introspective. Some of them dealt with political issues, but it wasn’t like this. I think Death Knows Your Name was different, it was meant to be a concept record based off of Animal Farm, so there was some darker political content there. But it wasn’t necessarily conscious. I think [this record] comes from a lot of the stuff we’ve been listening to more of lately, like the Exploited, GBH, a lot of D-beat stuff, and even Crass. That stuff was always an influence, but when we were kids, that wasn’t seen as hardcore—that was “crusty punk.” In reality, though, all of it falls under the same umbrella. All of it has influenced our music.
I don’t know. I’m not on top of what bands are singing about these days. For me, I think there’s still a need for this kind of punk and hardcore. That’s why I got into it. Now you have the internet, now you have Wikipedia, now you have all this access. But for me, my education into different views and the different aspects of society was through listening to punk bands. Even that attitude of being accepting of everybody, that was ingrained into the ethos of that time. But I don’t know if people feel the need to sing about those things anymore because it’s so much a part of the national conversation.
I mean, it’s an interesting point because there is such a different demographic landscape of hardcore bands right now. It’s amazing. In the fanzine days of Anti-Matter, I remember being self-conscious about the fact that it really featured a lot of straight white boys [laughs]. But with this iteration, I’ve just been really natural about picking out people who interest me, and I feel like I’ve managed to include a much wider roster of people without actually trying that hard—more women, more queer people, trans people, people of color. That’s been like a dream for me.
NEERAJ: I remember that interview you did with Crystal [Pak] from Initiate. It was really fascinating because I want to get those perspectives of people who grew up in the punk and hardcore scenes who are people of color. I think Chicago [in the ‘90s] was a little unique in this category; it wasn’t as white as other scenes, and hardcore was a very political scene to start with.
I actually wrote an essay about racial erasure in emo and hardcore for a book called Negatives. I used Pete [Wentz, a Chicago hardcore native and former Extinction member] as the lead example for this erasure because a few years ago, there was a thing on Twitter where someone posted a picture of Pete with his mom and the internet exploded. Everyone was like, “Wait. He’s Black?” And then people started trying to critique his Blackness, which was fucked. So I was trying to say that this kind of thing wouldn’t be so shocking if we hadn’t created the weird trope of emo being comprised of sad white boys crying in their bedrooms over girls. It’s like, people blame my band for emo and I’m neither white nor straight. Some fundamental pieces of mine and Pete’s selfhood are erased by that stereotype.
NEERAJ: That’s true. Visibility is so needed. When I was younger, whenever I’d see a band, I’d identify with anybody who was a person of color, you know? Some of them were Black, some Latino. Like, someone I’ve become really close with is Rob Moran from Unbroken and his brother Ati. Yeah, it’s because we’re from the hardcore scene. But there’s also a camaraderie [as people of color] that’s there. Like, even when I was at their house and I talked to their mom and dad, there was a sense of familiarity there.
OK, we’ve gone through quite a bit here, but I still feel like this is a question worth asking. You’re about to put out the first full-length Hope Conspiracy album since 2006. How do you think you’ve changed most significantly as a person since the last time you did this?
NEERAJ: That’s a tough one. [Pauses] When I first moved to L.A., I never called myself a musician. I was always reluctant to call myself a musician because I never thought that hardcore, or the music I made, was ever going to actually be received as music. I had a lot of confidence issues growing up. I was very self-deprecating, and I still sort of am. But a good friend who I started writing music with at one point, she said, “Neeraj, how come you never call yourself a musician? That’s who you are.” And I was like, I don’t know. I told her that I don’t know how to read music that well. That I’m not a shredder. I play and I write music because that’s my outlet and sometimes I don’t have anything else. I played hardcore and punk because it was the thing I could play and because it was the thing that helped as an outlet. She insisted: “You have to call yourself a musician because you’re creative and it’s a part of who you are.” But still, I thought, I’m not going to call myself that because I don’t make money doing it. It’s not my trade. It’s not my career. I wish that I could, but whenever I’d go anywhere, I would introduce myself as a teacher. It’s like, you have a day job, but this is your passion.
I think part of it comes from my Indian upbringing of not being overtly proud—which is seen as a very American or Western thing. I’m still horrible at self-promotion. But yes. I am a musician. And calling myself a musician and feeling that affirmation has been transformative to the way that I’ve started approaching my musical projects in the last ten years.
I actually think there’s an intersection there between being an Indian kid and being a hardcore kid in the sense that hardcore kids always seem to compulsively devalue the important things that we do as well [laughs].
NEERAJ: 100 percent. And living in a place like Los Angeles, you see a lot of people validating horrible stuff all the time [laughs]. I mean, I was also an illustrator for a long time, too. I never talked about it; I never posted about it. I needed to hear good friends tell me, “You’re a musician that a lot of people look up to and that a lot of people appreciate.” That means a lot. So going into this first full-length record that I’ve done in a while, I went in with the confidence of being an experienced musician that is working with an artform that also happens to be kind of massive right now. That’s a significant change for me. That’s been a journey for me. But it was a legitimate craft when I started and it’s a legitimate craft now.
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ohhh the story about his student made me so happy :')
"I play and I write music because that’s my outlet and sometimes I don’t have anything else. I played hardcore and punk because it was the thing I could play and because it was the thing that helped as an outlet."
Though there were many great quotes, thoughts and feels shared in this interview, this one spoke to me personally. Another awesome interview from a solid torchbearer in our collective hardcore history.