subject: Rulebound Rebellion: An Ethnography of Hardcore [print this page] Rulebound Rebellion: An Ethnography of Hardcore
Its founding adherents positioned themselves as keepers of the original, contrarian, anti-authoritarian musical values that had been framed during the punk rock revolution of 1977, but had been quickly co-opted, tamed and marketed as "New Wave" within the popular, commercial culture of the day.
Key among the formative hardcore values was the concept of "DIY" (short for "do it yourself"), which proposed that anyone could pick up a guitar or a microphone and join a band if they wanted to, since rock stars are really only regular people, with more amplification. This amateur ethos created a chaotic, but often inspired, musical genre and culture, with greater value placed on passionate performance than technical expertise.
DIY also posited that artists and audiences did not need corporate record labels, management companies or booking agents to facilitate their shows. (Hardcore performances are rarely called "concerts," since that implies a degree of formality and structure that is out of step with the DIY "hey gang, let's put on a show" ethos). Under the hardcore DIY model, fans and bands could collectively function as regional, self-serving, self-perpetuating communities, gathering for shows in traditional music outlets (bars, clubs, coffee houses) where possible, and in nontraditional venues of opportunity (VFW halls, gyms, barns) where and when there were no willing public halls to host them.
The hardcore movement and its values spread quickly across the United States during the 1980s, carried by charismatic, cult bands that toured incessantly, leaving freshly-inspired audiences in their wake, the members of which, in turn, often built their own hometown scenes. This founding focus on communal experience placed more value on shows than on recordings, and hardcore remains, to this day, a culture largely defined by the gathering of the community to experience live music together at shows.
I first experienced a hardcore show at the 930 Club in Washington, DC in 1982, pulled in by a friend whose musical taste I respected. It was a revelatory experience, in which traditional barriers (as I then understood them) between music providers and music consumers were destroyed. The dance area in front of the stage (now called the "moshpit," though that term hadn't yet been coined at the time) swirled with young males aggressively slamming into each other or "pogoing" up and down in place. Audience members who were familiar with the bands' repertoires could climb up onto the stage to sing a few lines through a microphone set up expressly for that purpose, before diving back into the scrum on the floor below them. Band members often followed them down, playing solos or singing from deep within the heart of the pit. Security personnel posted at the corners of the stage weren't there to stop this interaction, but rather to facilitate it, helping band and audience members alike as they moved between floor and stage.
My long-ago first hardcore show looked, felt, sounded and smelled virtually identical to any number of hardcore shows staged in and around Albany, New York in the autumn of 2009. As in 1982, crowds of short-haired, earnest, teenage males are still caroming off each other in the moshpit, driven by music crafted specially to feed their frenzy. The audiences dress in similarly low-key fashions, then and now, because the DIY focus on "musician as everyman" discourages ostentation in dress or demeanor. Occasionally, community members come "dressed up" to a show with such now-pass punk fashion choices as Mohawk haircuts, studded wrist-bracelets, dog collars or safety-pin piercings. These fashion offenders are openly scoffed at, and their wearers derided as "poseurs." If they return, they generally fall back to the default hardcore uniform: blue jeans (often with pocket chains holding keys and wallets in place), boots or non-athletic sneakers, t-shirts and "hoodies" (pullover sweatshirts with drawstring hoods), with the latter items often emblazoned with band names and logos, usually purchased at earlier hardcore shows. Sameness seemingly sustains solidarity. The one glaring exception to the anti-ostentation rule is tattoo art, which is very widespread (far more now than in 1982), and becomes even more visible over the course of an evening as dancers in the moshpit shed garments to beat the nearly-unbearable heat they generate.
Because it is counter-intuitive, it is worth reiterating that the average hardcore audience has not aged over the past quarter century, with the moshpit still being almost exclusively filled with 14- to 20-year old males. Such a condition over such a long period of time clearly indicates that there is a progression of participation, in which young people enter the hardcore community, participate for some period of time, and then graduate, clearing room for the next generation. The providers (musicians, promoters, lighting and sound men, club owners, etc.) who serve the hardcore community, on the other hand, have gotten noticeably older over the years, a fact that frames one of the core contradictions of the contemporary hardcore scene: the clash between commerce and authenticity.
In the beginning, hardcore providers and consumers were close to the same age, and had many of the same aims. Today, the gaps between the aims and ages of providers and consumers are rapidly widening. Most of today's providers are graduates of the moshpit themselves, and almost all of them are opportunistic businessmen who have recognized that there is money to be made from youthful idealism. The hardcore audience seems to be frozen in time not by accident, but by purposeful business decisions on the part of the providers to preserve a model that works. Hardcore is now the very type of business that its founders sought to undermine, with a revolving door of willing consumers, ready to embrace a ready-made culture that has been honed to nearperfection by skilled promotional practitioners.
