Just Like Crossing Over
…And you will know us by the disparate conversations we have over metal and emo in hardcore.
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. T…