Thousands Now Living Will Never Die

Hardcore origin stories used to have currency with credibility-seekers, but there's a reason they're also called "creation myths."

I actually found a photo online of some members of Z.O.W. This would have had to have been in 1985.

I.

I discovered hardcore across multiple sites of entry, and over several years. Over time, I’ve been able to identify the three most consequential entry points—the sum of which has made for an interesting, if not entertaining hardcore origin story.

My initial point of connection was made in 1983. I was a fourth-grade student in Astoria, Queens, who was absolutely obsessed with my teacher, Miss Koncz. I can’t actually articulate why I felt such a deep sense of belonging around Miss Koncz except to say that she gave me affection at a time when I needed it, and that she always encouraged me to pursue my interests—regardless of whether or not they were aligned with some kind of academic pursuit. Even in grade school, there can be a subtle environment that centers a future life in “the real world”; the fact that kids are relentlessly asked what they want to be when they grow up suggests that what they’re doing now isn’t as important. But Miss Koncz only ever seemed to be interested in whatever was capturing my imagination at the moment. She knew everything else could wait.

My older brother was into heavy metal that year—Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath, among others—so I dutifully followed in his footsteps. I drew band logos in my notebooks as best I could to signify my interest; I wore badges on a denim jacket to promote my allegiance. I didn’t really know if heavy metal was my music, but I did know that music was my thing. Miss Koncz took notice and nurtured that. One day, she asked me if I’d ever thought about learning an instrument. I told her that I wanted to play drums, which is the instrument that every nine-year-old boy wants to play.

“My brother is a drummer!” she told me proudly. “Maybe someday I can ask him to show you some things.”

Not long after, Miss Koncz came to school with a tape of her brother’s band for me. I didn’t particularly care for it, but I do remember seeing a picture of her brother—who called himself “Johnny Feedback”—and thinking he looked as cool as anyone could ever look to a fourth-grader. I would come to discover much later that his band, Kraut, were legends and pioneers of the early New York hardcore scene.

My second point of contact was more circumstantial. I grew up in Woodside, Queens, which was a working class neighborhood not too far from Manhattan. I lived on 52nd Street, across from Windmuller Park, which means that almost every childhood memory I have is in that park. From the first time I smelled weed—on the handball courts, where members of the 52nd Street Crew hung out—to the first time I got into a fistfight, which my brother instigated as a way to “toughen me up,” Windmuller Park was there. My fondest memories, though, involve this group of weird-looking kids who took over an area we called The Benches. One guy in particular—in my memory, his name was Charlie—acknowledged me one day by asking, “What’s up, little man?” From there, we struck up a park-friendship of sorts. He always called me “little man.”

Charlie looked a lot tougher than he ever acted with me. He wore ripped clothes and leather wristbands. He treated me like a kid brother, or at least like he’d always wanted a kid brother. I told him about my home life—which was dire and abusive—and he told me about his friends, a crew they called the Zombies of Woodside, or Z.O.W. for short. Some of them were skinheads, some of them were punks, some of them just neighborhood misfits. They always listened to music on their boombox, and again, I didn’t particularly care for it. But I was intrigued by their loyalty and love for each other. Years later, when I started going to Sunday matinees at CBGB, I would come to meet people who knew them. It turns out Z.O.W. had a presence in the New York hardcore scene.

My third point of contact is the most banal story of the three, but it’s also the most consequential. It’s about a week in 1987 when my brother invited a new friend named Tom to our house. By this point, I knew what hardcore was and had even gone to my first show. But aside from buying random 7-inches and copies of Maximum Rock’n’Roll and Flipside, there wasn’t really any sort of coherent way to “become a hardcore kid” back then. I wanted to know more about the history and the development of the music. More importantly, I did not want to be a poser.

Tom wasn’t exactly a hardcore kid, but he loved obscure alternative music enough to have a box of hardcore tapes in his car the day he arrived. I asked if I could dub some of his tapes while he was hanging out with my brother, and he graciously agreed. It would be the first time I’d ever heard Minor Threat, Stiff Little Fingers, Discharge, and 7 Seconds, among many others. Tom’s tapes became the foundation for how I thought about hardcore for the rest of the ‘80s. They made me bold enough to think I could go to an Agnostic Front show at CBs in 1987, and after doing that, they put me on the path that brought me to you—right here, right now.

Kat Moss of Scowl. Live at Fest. Gainesville, Florida, 2022. Photo by Sean Reilly.

II.

There was certainly an era when hardcore origin stories were a form of prestige, when we could all recite Harley Flanagan’s origin story by heart—from the poetry book he published at nine years old with an introduction contributed by Allen Ginsberg, to the childhood pictures with Andy Warhol and Joe Strummer and Debbie Harry, to playing drums for the Stimulators and hanging out at Max’s Kansas City when he was only eleven. Origin stories were used as some kind of de facto certificate of authenticity at a time when “hardcore gatekeeping” was more of a literal street activity than the preferred sport of internet trolls. Admittedly, my origin story helped me get a leg up when I started going to shows. The older kids loved my connection to Johnny Feedback, and despite the fact that I’ve still never actually met the man, their early acceptance was clearly preferable to the alternative of being chased down the Bowery, beaten up, and having my Doc Martens stolen.

The thing is, when I went to my first shows in 1987, hardcore was less than ten years old. Aside from a handful of random television appearances—that infamous episode of the Donahue show, the Kraut video they played on MTV—there wasn’t really a “mainstream” way to discover the scene. It was always a story about someone’s older sister or getting kicked out of your house or even finding an abandoned van full of records. (Full disclosure: most of my initial record collection came from a van.) Which is to say that many of us had colorful stories on our road to hardcore back then. After 45 years, however, it was inevitable that our hardcore origin stories would eventually become stories that were less enviable—and in some cases, even boring. That shouldn’t be a bad thing.

In my upcoming conversation with Kat Moss from Scowl, which will be published in full on Thursday, we fell headfirst into a discussion about hardcore origin stories when Kat described her introduction to “scene kids and emo kids” as a pre-teen, and how that became “[her] punk”—to which she immediately added, laughing, “Oh, don’t quote that please.”

Of course, I immediately pushed back. Ever since I returned to publishing Anti-Matter, I’ve already had the opportunity to speak with so many amazing members of our community who arrived several years or even several decades after me, and I’ve absolutely loved hearing their stories—like the way Brendan Garrone from Incendiary went to his first show at a mall or how Akil Godsey from End It somehow found his way to hardcore from a MySpace meme. This is, after all, what I’d expect: After Green Day and the Offspring blew up in the ‘90s and then Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance blew up in the 2000s, was there really any wonder that a whole new generation of fans would dig into that music deep enough to find hardcore?

“What culminated as the epitome of ‘punk culture’ at that time—it was Hot Topic, Warped Tour, scene kids. It was that,” Kat recalls of her childhood discovery. “Those were the kids in middle school that I felt like I kind of resonated with, but also everyone had their own little thing. Everyone knew we should stick together, but it wasn’t an exact fit. It was just the Island of Misfit Toys that we could get because we didn’t have anything else like that in our community. Honestly, I have a little bit of jealousy for kids who grew up with actual punks and hardcore kids who were really about it, kids who had shows around them. I didn’t have that. That wasn’t a thing for me.”

Kat’s hesitance to identify with those emo and scene kids as an adult—even though she was only eleven years old in the story she was telling me—is honestly quite relatable. We all look back at our childhoods and cringe. But when I think about my points of entry into hardcore, I notice a distinct absence of struggle. I was lucky enough to grow up in a city that had access to a hardcore community with such a strong presence that I could accidentally brush into it at school or at the park. If anything, finding out about My Chemical Romance at a suburban Hot Topic and then somehow reverse-engineering that discovery into becoming the singer of one of the most abrasive and visceral hardcore bands of your generation is a far more impressive feat of determination than showing up to your fourth-grade class and having your teacher hand you a Kraut tape.

“There’s no shame in that story at all,” I told Kat. “We don’t all get born in the gutter with a copy of Victim in Pain.”

III.

For as long as I’ve been around, hardcore kids have always worried about where “the next generation” was coming from, and not so much about whether or not they’d actually come. We have also worried about scale and letting things get “too big”—as if there is some kind of limit to how popular hardcore can get before it’s not hardcore anymore. If you listen to this 2016 interview with Harley Flanagan, patron saint of the origin story, we should have killed our scene off a long time ago:

I can only put it like this, CBGB is gone now. But there are murals outside of where it used to be… This whole city has become a shrine and a memorial to what it no longer is at all. On the same block where there used to be lines of junkies, strung out coming out of a burnt out building, there are now people paying thousands of dollars a month to rent a studio apartment. It’s kind of a mockery of the realness that it was back then. Punk rock was supposed to die. Once it became pop, that was its undoing.

All this tells me is that we’ve been worried about all the wrong things. The hardcore scene that I know has an incredible gift for adaptation and self-regulation; it was certainly never “supposed to die.” We have survived every single thing people worried would kill us: First it was crossover and metalcore, but we found a way to make them our own. Then it was pop punk, which we also absorbed, opening up so many new dimensions for expression. Then it was Nirvana, who may have prompted several major label signings but killed zero scenes. Then it was emo, which—whether you like it or not—brought some much-needed introspection into our tradition. These days, I’ve seen people worry about bands like Turnstile and Scowl, who are reaching across the aisle and exposing our culture to an even newer generation aching for something real to hold onto among the artifice of our digital world. We will not only survive their current and future success as well, but we will be better because of it.

What’s interesting to me is that of all the real and imagined existential threats that people have saddled around hardcore, extinction has never placed highly on the list. Because extinction is what happens when we romanticize “lines of junkies” and “burnt out buildings” over the resilience and talent of our community. Extinction is what happens when we close the gates and the shows turn into social gatherings for middle-aged men. Extinction is what happens when we can’t understand that most of our hardcore origin stories aren’t really all that cool either. In the end, no one is going to care if you hung out with punk kids in a New York City park when you were ten years old. They’re going to ask, “What the fuck have you done?”

The new kids are doing fucking amazing.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Kat Moss of Scowl.

---

Anti-Matter is reader-supported. If you’ve valued reading this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and backing independent, ad-free hardcore media. Thank you, friends.