The Unheard Music
Hardcore "history" is a project of collective memory. That means being thoughtful about what we remember—and being careful not to forget why those memories matter.
I.
When I took last week off from publishing, I had no idea that instead of doing the things I needed to do to recover from tour and catching up on some Anti-Matter backend work, I would wind up completely physically incapacitated for the entire week—including at least 72 hours of straight sleep inside of a fever dream. To be honest with you, I am not completely free from whatever this wicked flu has wrought as I write this. But instead of taking another week off, I decided to push forward with an archival interview until I can get back on my feet again.
Back in October, I posted a photo of Endpoint on Instagram. The response on that post—and the love that Endpoint received that day—was so heartening to me because it not only confirmed that other people remembered the band, but it affirmed that other people remembered them the way that I remembered them. This distinction is important because cultural memory is a group project, and Endpoint were an important band whose light, in my view, has seemingly diminished over time. I can’t remember the last time I heard a newer hardcore band mention Endpoint as an influence. I haven’t seen someone wear an Endpoint shirt at a show in years. (Although they still make them, if you’re interested.) And as best as I can tell, no one has made whatever offer it might take to get Endpoint to reunite for one of the several currently thriving hardcore festivals in America or otherwise. That’s all fine. Most bands will live largely inside of their historical place and moment. Which is why when I talk about remembering Endpoint “the way that I remembered them,” it has less to do with keeping the fact of their existence alive than it does with maintaining the substance of their existence a fact.
In a recent interview with Alternative Press, Geoff Rickly spoke about the way the passing of time makes it easy to forget how many hands it takes to pry a door open—and this is specifically true with bands. “I think of that saying,” he explains. “The first person that tries to get through the door bounces off the door, and doesn’t get through. The second person gets through the door, but only through the door, then falls flat. And the third person just walks through, chilling. By the fifth person, they don’t even bother to go through the door anymore.”
I think about Endpoint in that way. They bounced off several doors in their initial seven-year run. But by doing that, they made it easier for other Louisville bands like Rodan and Slint, and eventually, Falling Forward and Elliott. They were an older brother band to Split Lip, which eventually gave us Chamberlain. They weren’t an “emo” band, but their love for D.C. hardcore—crossed with their firm commitment to the identity of being “a Louisville band,” and all the freedom that implied—created a range and dimensionality and even fearlessness that most bands simply didn’t have back then. You don’t have to love Endpoint to appreciate how they, albeit unwittingly, played a crucial role in changing the direction of American hardcore in the nineties.
II.
There’s a video that seems to make the rounds at least once a year in a bid to “show the new kids” what a “crazy” hardcore show actually looks like. And it’s true that this video, from No Justice’s final show in 2000, is certainly that. It’s a timeless clip that’s wild and dangerous and nearly impossible for any other band to replicate with any level of authenticity. But the reason this video won’t die, even after nearly 25 years, is because there’s almost suspension of disbelief attached to watching it. We are not used to seeing shows like that, and while we identify with the energy of these images, we also quietly hope to protect the rarity of it. This video, in particular, resurfaces every year not to say, “This is how every show should be,” but to say: “Hardcore can be whatever you imagine it to be.”
Endpoint shows didn’t (always) look like that No Justice show, but I’ve been to Endpoint shows that were more shocking—to me, at least. For one thing, I’ve been to more than one Endpoint show that descended into total chaos on stage, but that was the least of it. More memorable was that show in New Jersey where, out of nowhere, singer Rob Pennington declared on stage that he was a virgin, and challenged the audience to check our biases about how we felt about that and what that meant. (The audience was dumbfounded in the best possible way.) Somehow even more memorable than that was a show in 1994 at the Wetlands in New York, where in the middle of Endpoint’s set, the entire front row just broke out crying. When I asked Rob about all this in the Autumn 1994 issue of Anti-Matter, he spoke about these incidents as if they were the most natural conclusion of the relationship he’d always wanted to build with Endpoint’s fans.
“It feels nice to think that we’ve created a band that [makes] people feel so secure that they can cry in front of us,” he told me, in a conversation that will be republished in full this Thursday. “They felt secure enough that we wouldn’t hurt their emotions. That’s all I ever wanted to do—to just be in a band where we cared and people could care back and there would just be an openness. Not ‘we’re the band, you’re the audience.’ Not at all. So it doesn't seem strange to me because sometimes I'll play and I’m crying inside the whole time. It’s beautiful in a way.”
These are the kinds of things I talk about when I talk about “the way that I remember” Endpoint: From a musical perspective, they were idiosyncratic and free, not bound by any geographical conventions of style—like East Coast or West Coast or Cleveland or D.C. But from a lyrical and practical standpoint, Endpoint was radically inclusive, radically open, and radically connected with their audience in a way that was as singular and rare as the energy at that No Justice show. If we’re not sharing Endpoint videos with each other every year, it’s only because, these days, we’re used to watching bands walking through that door of radical transparency without even bothering to turn the knob. Endpoint helped to imagine that future and worked to make it possible for us. Protecting that memory, and memories like this, still feels important to me.
III.
We “forget” bands over time for lots of reasons, but more often than not, they’re practical ones: The band broke up before the social media age and only exists online as a random hashtag. The label went under and/or the records went out of print. The band only played shows in the pre-iPhone era, when your best shot at a document depended on someone having both a camcorder and the patience to shoot the show. Outside of a benefit show in 2010, when they reunited to help with medical expenses for Rodan’s Jason Noble after he was diagnosed with cancer, Endpoint check almost every one of those boxes. It’s not surprising, then, that I feel like I need to create a longer preamble than most to explain why a band like theirs mattered in the history of Anti-Matter.
But I also feel like it’s valuable to use Endpoint’s example to talk about cultural memory as it pertains to hardcore, and how that’s different from mere historicizing. I’ve said this before: Being a “historian” has never interested me, if only because it implies that there is a single, or at least dominant narrative that is reliable and can be agreed upon. Most punk documentaries take this position, if only silently, when they ask the same talking heads to tell the same stories over and over again. Trying to capture cultural memory, though, is different. Because a cultural memory is less about exactly what happened and more about how we experienced something as a community—and the ways that it affected us, both at the time and years later. It’s about a cumulative effect.
In my mind, these are the kinds of indelible impressions that make up the fabric of who I am and how I try to approach the work I do here: We are a collective body of memory, and we keep this collective body alive by telling stories. That’s the hardcore tradition to which I belong, and it’s the reason I choose to share any of these stories at all.
Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: An archived conversation with Rob Pennington of Endpoint.
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Thank you, Norman. I think there is something in my eye. Love you
That middlesex show clip--that's where I got smashed in the head with the guitar and started bleeding like a fountain.