Say What You Mean

Punk and hardcore are often touted for being brash and blunt and direct. But the canon of lyrical approaches in our community has always been more diverse than that.

“Stage dives make me feel more alive.” Gorilla Biscuits. Live at White Eagle Hall. Jersey City, NJ. April 28, 2023. Photo by William Marks.

I.

There is, in fact, one defining lyric of hardcore’s transition into the ‘90s, and it is as ironic as it is prescient. I say it’s prescient because this song was released in 1989, just before the turn of the decade and long before we really started talking about post-hardcore beyond whatever was happening in Washington, D.C. But it’s also ironic because that same lyric was used against its author, Walter Schreifels, not even a year later when Quicksand released their first EP. Of course, the lyric I am referring to belongs to “New Direction” by Gorilla Biscuits:

I'll tell you stage dives make me feel more alive
Than coded messages in slowed down songs

In just two lines, this lyric really embodies something about hardcore’s earliest impulses—and specifically its reactionary approach to the bloated rock landscape of the 1970s that birthed twenty-minute songs split into “movements,” overblown concert pyrotechnics, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. (And sometimes all three at the same time.) When we talk about 1970s punk, from the Ramones to the Clash, we are talking about a genre of music that emphasized desire and raw talent over training and virtuosity. It was a genre of music that was literally built on the idea of stripping rock of its excesses. That was the revolutionary potential of punk: It necessitated a complete and total eradication of rock music’s growing exclusionary practices. Hardcore adopted this outlook as it evolved out of punk, and in many ways, emphasized this particular piece of the culture: Only know one chord? No worries, that’s all you need to start a band. Can’t afford to have fireworks shoot out from the pickups in your guitar? The rooms we play won’t allow that anyway. Can’t decipher the meaning behind the lyrics to “Aqualung” by Jethro Tull? Fuck that song, because Sham 69’s “If the Kids Are United” is quite possibly the least impenetrable lyric ever written. That’s the world that Gorilla Biscuits waxed nostalgic for in “New Direction.” Everything really was simpler back then.

The way that lyric was weaponized later on, though, and especially the way it was used against Walter, is an interesting study in oversimplification. There seemed to be a suggestion that “coded messages in slowed down songs” stood in stark contrast to a presumably transparent and “direct” style of hardcore lyricism; the assumption always seemed to attach an air of righteousness for eschewing such “code” for the “plain truth.” (Plain Truth is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the name of an ‘80s hardcore fanzine written by Born Against’s Sam McPheeters). But this doesn’t always check out. For example, if so-called direct lyricism is truly code-free, then how did the New York hardcore episode of Donahue from 1986 turn downright catastrophic after Phil Donahue read aloud the lyrics to Agnostic Front’s “Public Assistance” and then asked, “Have we got racism here?” I won’t relitigate his point, for or against it, but I think it’s worth asking whether or not those lyrics are as straightforward as the New York hardcore scene members in the audience argued that it was. One hardcore kid on the show actually went so far as to contend, “There’s no racism there! All it says is what it says!” But therein lies the rub: Even if we were to agree that “coded messages in slowed-down songs” aren’t hardcore, that doesn’t mean that even the simplest hardcore lyric can’t be drenched in layers.

J. Robbins. On the corner of AvenueA & East 11th Street. New York City. November 6, 1998. Photo by Shawn Scallen.

II.

The first time I met J. Robbins was when I interviewed him for Anti-Matter in early 1994. Jawbox had just released their now-classic album For Your Own Special Sweetheart, but I was already somewhat of a superfan. Dischord Records in the early ‘90s had so thoroughly captured my imagination with its stubborn fearlessness—from the literary shamanic punk of Lungfish to the wildly eccentric Shudder to Think—that a band like Jawbox who were just weird enough felt more aspirational for someone like me. You can only imagine how surprised I was that day to meet someone who, upon being asked if he remembered his first crush, immediately went on the offensive—and at one point, gleefully rebuffed one of my questions by saying, “I know the answer to this, but I am not going to tell you.”

As part of my continuing series of 30-year anniversary interviews, I decided to reconnect with J. to revisit that intensely frustrating conversation, and to find out what was specifically going on with him that wouldn’t allow him to open up at that time. As it turns out, being direct—in songs or in interviews or in his own life, for that matter—was something that he avoided as a rule.

“I think the context of that moment, where things were sort of snowballing for [Jawbox], aggravated a thing that is intrinsic to me—which was growing up with an interior life and with a lot of self-loathing,” he explains, for an interview that will be published in full on Thursday. “It could be that I’m just talking about me and my personal experience, but I really feel like your twenties are a time of generalized terror and panic and freaking out. Even in lyric writing, the idea that I would want to reveal something of myself to anyone was completely anathema to me. It wasn’t conscious, but a lot of the lyric writing in Jawbox is word salad. It just is. That’s the case with a lot of Jawbox songs. It’s a fear of being too easily understood. Part of it is an aesthetic, of course, not a fear; it’s like wanting to have a challenge of putting lyrics together like a puzzle. But 50 percent of it, for me, was also just really trying not to be understood. I always believed that if anyone knew anything about me for real, they would run in terror.”

Interestingly, elsewhere in our conversation, J. makes the case for punk not being tethered to a sense of directness, instead arguing that it’s the things that make punk difficult and not simple that define what it is that separates us from the outside world. That “weirdness” and “obscurity,” he says, is a natural outcome of hardcore’s no-rules policy, and despite his attempts at becoming more straightforward with his lyrics in recent years—a shift in paradigm that he also explains—it was punk’s opacity, the thing that kept the others out, that ultimately drew him in.

The flyer in question. I always wonder who wrote these words though.

III.

The false dichotomy between a direct approach and a “coded message” falls apart when you consider that hardcore actually has a rich history of diverse lyrical strategies that don’t always neatly fall into either of those categories. Bands like Crucial Youth and Gayrilla Biscuits, to name only two, use satire as a method to subvert hardcore norms and shine a light on the absurdity of straightedge fanaticism and homophobic hardcore, respectively. They couldn’t be any less direct. Los Crudos made the decision to sing in Spanish to mostly white audiences for their entire career, making a point about heritage and linguistic access—while writing exactly one English-speaking song, which they called, “That’s Right, We’re That Spic Band.” Other bands, including everyone from Jawbreaker to Have Heart, have employed a mode of storytelling with their lyrics, using compelling narratives and rich visual images that often work as critiques or express broader cultural concerns. There are also, of course, bands that just want to have fun. “Crucial Bar-B-Q” by Murphy’s Law is neither direct nor coded; it’s just a good time.

There’s one more type of lyric that might actually take up more space in our record collections than anyone will ever admit to, and that’s the meaningless lyric that just fits. In my own discography, there’s one lyric that immediately comes to mind.

The first song Texas is the Reason ever wrote was “If It’s Here When We Get Back, It’s Ours.” The music was easy enough. I came in with most of it written, and I knew that I wanted to treat it like a hardcore song—even if it spilled a little bit more into melodic territory. What I hadn’t considered is that this was Garrett Klahn’s first opportunity to write lyrics for the band. We always talked about what we wanted to sound like musically, but unless your band is an ideological one from the outset, most bands don’t really discuss a lyrical direction. We trusted Garrett, and when the time came, he delivered.

Once it was finished, we all heard a particularly striking lyric very early in the song: “But I hate you all and that’s for free / and that’s what makes it easy for me.” I asked Garrett if that lyric felt too negative, and he just shrugged and pointed to the wall. We practiced in a basement that was covered in hardcore flyers, and sure enough, hanging directly in front of his microphone was a bright yellow flyer for a show at the Cook Cafe at Rutgers University featuring Railhed, Ressurection, and Lincoln. On the top of the page, it reads simply, “We hate you all… But it’s for free…” In the case of this song, and certainly more so than with “Public Assistance,” all it says is really what it says.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with J. Robbins of Jawbox.

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