Just Like Crossing Over

…And you will know us by the disparate conversations we have over metal and emo in hardcore.

The ‘80s crossover wave was real—and divisive at best.

I.

Hardcore is a culture, and all cultures have value systems. That’s just a fact. Value systems are not codified, or even verbalized. They are more generally expressed as reflections from the culture itself—carried by artifacts, transmitted through language, confirmed by representation. They are also subject to change. There have been times, of course, when hardcore’s more professed values haven’t always measured up with our representation, and I have certainly been to more than one show where “Fuck Racism” shirts outnumbered actual people of color. But sometimes saying is the precursor for doing, and sometimes we’re just in the middle of progress. The strength of a culture is dependent on how it welcomes criticism and corrects its flaws. The hardcore scene is, as they say, doing the work.

Yet there are still some aspects of our culture—many of them ingrained from hardcore’s first decade—that seem to persist without much pushback. Their reflection in our current scene is subtle, but after relaunching Anti-Matter, and more specifically, after considering how broad my vision of “hardcore” was going to be in 2023, I found myself repeatedly brushing up against an idea that has somehow become entrenched—in which typically hyper-masculine expressions (such as anger or aggression) are widely assessed as “authentic” and distinctly “hardcore,” whereas more sensitive expressions (such as love or emotional hurt) are depreciated as “weak” or “frivolous,” as well as subject to a much higher level of scrutiny for acceptance.

Before I say anything else, I should concede that this is something I’ve had to think about more often than most people. As a young queer kid who wanted to belong, the hardcore scene in New York City that I walked into in 1987 made several things clear to me: For one thing, there were no visibly out gay men—and in response to that observation, the presumption I made wasn’t so much that gay men “couldn’t be hardcore,” which would have been bleak for me, but rather, that hardcore couldn’t be “gay.” For years I’ve made the joke that New York hardcore’s most emotional songs at the time were called “Show You No Mercy” and “Don’t Tread On Me,” and maybe that’s only funny because it’s true. After being the lifelong “sensitive kid” in his family, I somehow stumbled upon a new family that not only allowed me to crush my feelings, but actually celebrated it. Yay, masculinity.

By 1993, though, as I was slowly inching my way out of the closet—and perhaps not coincidentally, starting Anti-Matter—I had already begun to recognize how problematic this was becoming. For one thing, as anyone who has ever gone to a show can certainly tell you, conflating masculinity with authenticity is how you eventually find your community overrun with (mostly) men who fake being “tough guys” in a bid to be seen as real. The paradox is staggering. It’s also true that the uneven balance of value given to this kind of steely demeanor at the expense of other traits runs the risk of discouraging some amazing people from experiencing the ways of belonging that actually bond us as a community—the ways in which we were outcast, the passion we share for being different, the creative energy that allows us to take limited amounts of knowledge and technical ability and go on to make incredible things that feel like we have more knowledge and technical ability than we actually do.

But there’s a third thing about the way we’ve privileged traditionally “masculine” expressions in hardcore that disheartened me the most back then, while also inspiring many of the best ideas I had while dreaming up a band like Texas is the Reason or a fanzine like Anti-Matter. These projects were, in part, reactions to the notion that some feelings were simply not allowed.

A high-water mark in foolishness, preserved here for posterity.

II.

I want to get back to the point I made earlier about how relaunching Anti-Matter really amplified the way this issue continues to exert its influence on our culture. Ever since this project went public, I’ve been asked to define—in conversations with friends and interviews with podcasts and other media—what kinds of bands I’d be covering, and it occurred to me that I was more often than not expected to justify the inclusion of some bands more than others. It’s apparently a given, for example, that a band like Harms Way (who I love, by the way) would be “hardcore enough” for Anti-Matter. But when I say that I’d be equally as comfortable with featuring Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional, there is often a pause.

At that point I would go into what I eventually realized is a line of defense: Chris grew up in the hardcore scene in South Florida. He played in any number of post-punk and hardcore bands growing up before Dashboard became a thing, and even then, Dashboard started as first of four on tours with bands like Snapcase and H2O. Absolutely no one, including Chris, expected for Dashboard Confessional to become the phenomenon it turned into, but had things not turned that way, I truly believe he would have just stayed the course—playing hardcore shows, making indie records, hanging out with his friends in the scene. I know this because I know Chris, and I have seen the way he operates as a human being. Recently, when we played a show together and my guitar tech suddenly fell ill right before we were about to go on, Chris walked up to me with absolutely no self-consciousness whatsoever and said, “I will be your tech. Just tell me what I need to do.” That’s what a hardcore kid does.

So why do I feel the need to shore up Chris’s credentials at all? I don’t think Dashboard Confessional is any more or less hardcore than Shudder to Think or Farside or Garden Variety—bands that were all featured in the first iteration of Anti-Matter. But to be honest, I also don’t think Dashboard is any more or less hardcore than Harms Way—who, again, I love. Because the fact is that Harms Way sound as much like Minor Threat as Dashboard does. The only difference—and herein lies the point—is that our culture still identifies aggression as more “authentic” or “hardcore” than it does for introspection, despite a tradition of melodic and even “emotional” hardcore that goes back at least 40 years. Which means that bands from our community who essentially play metal get to call themselves hardcore without reservation, while bands from our community who play “emo” don’t experience the same courtesy, regardless of how far away all these bands have strayed from the traditional hardcore musical blueprint.

Justice Tripp with Trapped Under Ice. Disturbin’ The Peace Festival. Baltimore, MD. Photo by Sean Reilly.

III.

One interesting wrinkle in this conversation is that there are other artists, in more aggressive bands, who have also felt this same suggestion that some feelings were simply not allowed, and who have pushed back in their own way. Bands like Burn, Damnation A.D., and Touché Amoré, to name a few, have all done it in one way or another.

Justice Tripp, who currently sings for Angel Du$t but first came to our attention as the singer for Trapped Under Ice, is perhaps notorious at this point for retaliating against any form of perceived limits. So when we discussed Trapped Under Ice’s reputation for being a colloquial “ignorant hardcore” band, Justice bristled at the reductiveness.

“When people would brush [us] off, saying, ‘Oh, this Trapped Under Ice record is all about fighting or being tough or whatever,’ I was like, Did you read the lyrics? It’s very vulnerable lyrically,” he explains for an interview that will be published in full on Thursday. “I sing about some things in my childhood, like abuse and things I never came to terms with at that point—and maybe didn’t come to terms with until the last couple of years. I acknowledge those things without ever saying it clearly, but that’s how I came to know myself. It’s kind of coming from the perspective of an insufferable, self-centered, woe-is-me, brat of a child, but everything I was saying was real. I was really hurt and all I could see was my hurt. I had to just wear the hurt and that helps you to overcome it.”

The way Justice frames his work—where the only “toughness” necessary is the kind you need to be vulnerable, where you “wear the hurt” before you can heal from it—is a paradigm for a hardcore future that shares a specific continuity with the past while also forging ahead with a crucial update to our value system: It acknowledges that we can and should use this music to access a wider range of experience, and that we, as hardcore kids, have every right to just be hurt sometimes.

IV.

The irony, lest we forget, is that metal was not always welcome in the hardcore scene. Agnostic Front’s Cause For Alarm created an actual controversy in New York for moving the band into a more metal territory. Discharge’s Grave New World, their 1986 stab at playing heavy metal, was largely rejected. The mid-’80s “crossover” wave in general—bands like Crumbsuckers, D.R.I., or Nuclear Assault—was popular, but divisive, at best. Even Mike Judge, in our interview from this summer, told me how distraught he became when his band at the time, Death Before Dishonor, began moving into a metal direction—so much so that he literally walked off stage after a show at CBGB and left the scene for two years.

Which is to say that the argument that all aggressive music is “closer to hardcore” than less aggressive music doesn’t really hold historical water. We’ve made accommodations over the years, for some more than others, and at the very least, we should probably admit that our application of “the rules” has been somewhat arbitrary.

What does still hold water, to me and to many, is the continual expansion of the conviction that hardcore is more than music. Since its beginnings as a barrage of power chords, thrash beats, and disgruntled screaming, this scene has undergone countless transformations—with every new groundbreaking band, with every new movement, with every new generation that embraces and evolves with it—and we deserve the privilege to refine and redefine what we deem crucial to our culture. In my mind, hardcore values like loyalty and community outweigh anyone’s musical preference for either Slayer or Superchunk. So if Chris Carrabba does, in fact, get his Anti-Matter interview in the future—and he probably will—all I can tell you is that my decision-making process in this regard is anything but arbitrary. Hardcore, to me, has always been about the people who have contributed to its story, and the experiences that make us who we are.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Justice Tripp of Angel Du$t.

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