the guy in the taco bell drive thru just accidentally said “have a nice day I love you” and I thoughtlessly responded “love you too” and we just sort of stared at each other for a second before I drove away
“He’s twenty years old. I try to take him outside whenever I can so that he can have some new experiences before, you know…”
PHOTO COURTESY ROCHESTER ACCENT
Emily Good announced her candidacy for Monroe County Sheriff on Monday. The release also invited media to a press conference to be held this morning at 10:30 a.m. in front of the Monroe County Jail on S. Plymouth Ave.
Good’s unlawful arrest for recording…
What I have learned about our hardcore scene over the years.
First of all, here is what I’m not doing: speaking for anyone but me, speaking on behalf of myself from 3 years ago, saying I want no part of the hardcore scene anymore, saying I don’t like the people in our hardcore scene, describing any other hardcore scene besides Iowa’s, or saying hardcore isn’t a fun genre.
That said, I’ve been realizing that I have some issues with it.
I was about 14 or 15 when I started listening to hardcore and going to shows. Pretty quickly I got the message that it’s a “community,” in some sense, so for about 5 years that notion has been flying around in my head in one form or another, loosely a community and sometimes bordering a family of people who a real family of people I don’t even know (my own fault, I’m too shy), for the most part. I’ve been into and will always be into plenty of bands in the genre, and most of the bands I’ll love forever are not local bands. Verse, Bane, and Ceremony come to mind immediately. Certainly, there are local bands I love as well (Modern Life Is War, who I’m glad are back together), and some other acts over the years, such as Expire, Agress, etc., but I really don’t love the locals for the same reasons I love the first bands I named,
and that’s important.
I don’t know when exactly or why I got the idea I have and refuse to let go of, of what punk means. I don’t personally respect any notions of punk that don’t coincide with mine at this central point: that punk is about saying things you think are important, in order to make the world a better place and to help bring justice into being where it’s missing. Now, if it’s something other than that, oh, Elite Authorities of Punk, please enlighten me and then confiscate my visa. I’ll go back where I came from. But I don’t think my visa will ever be confiscated (not for that reason, at least) because that ideal is frequently brought up.
Hardcore preaches a DIY ethic, and while it may be rooted, to some degree, in simple pride, it’s also, more importantly, rooted in notions of independence that are tightly connected with my definition of punk. So, where is this independence? What exactly does Iowa’s punk scene do for the world?
I had a high hope and a lower one and I’ll explain them both.
My high hope was that the music that we all love and listen to would motivate us to do things. Not ‘do things’ like start a band. The point of being in a band, talking about issues is to make people informed and then active, not to just make them informed. Nothing happens just because we’re all informed. Perhaps I’m oblivious, but where are all of the benefit shows? When, in all of history, have Iowa Hardcore organized an actual protest? There’s so much to protest. When was the last time a local show raised money for a charity, and after you name that show, tell me why EVERY show doesn’t raise money for charity? What’s the other motive? If organizing shows is a for-profit game, then I’m going to just start sneaking into them. Obviously, I’m not accusing anyone, anywhere, of anything like that. I’m well aware that most of the money goes to food and gas for the bands. I don’t have enough information and I live in Ames now, so I’m out of the loop sometimes, and it’s rare that I have the money to actually go to a show I want to go to.
While we’re on that point, let me briefly mention how much I completely loathe people who tell you you aren’t punk because you didn’t go to a certain show, or haven’t been to a show in forever, or that what makes you punk is going to a certain/every show. Duh. Go to shows. Don’t go to all of them. And don’t support bands just because they’re punk/hardcore bands. That’s total bullshit and you don’t owe anyone anything, especially people or bands you don’t like.
Back to the real issue.
My high hope was never met. In the past five years there have been a couple of fundraisers (note, I’m primarily a Waterloo show-goer. I don’t know about much in Des Moines, and most cool stuff there happens during the school year when I am very very busy. I could very well just be uninformed) but that’s it. Note, I go off of what gets posted on the IAHC page on facebook, which I think is fair of me to do. If there is a show, it should be posted there. Hardcore isn’t about secret shows for the subculture’s elite, especially when the subculture claims to not have an elite, so I just assume it’s all available on facebook. Want to inspire someone else to love hardcore? START DOING FUCKING FUNDRAISERS FOR CHARITY. DO GOOD IN THE WORLD WITH THE MUSIC THAT YOU MAKE, AND SHOW THE WORLD WHAT PUNK REALLY MEANS.
I’m sure you’re all enthralled and wondering what my lower hope was. My lower hope was that, at the very least, the music made within this scene would be meaningful and move outwards to inspire others to act. And not on some personal but on a greater scale. Have you read Verse’s lyrics on Aggression (in fact, every album?)? Read them. That’s a punk band that says very important, thought-provoking things. Do you want to know what doesn’t provoke any thought? 99% of the bands that make it ‘big’ in Iowa and become local legends. I’m not naming names because I guarantee that someone will act tough and send me a message about it. One statement I hate hearing from people is “You can’t just compare every band to a band you admire.” Why the fuck can’t I? And why can’t anyone seem to meet that (honestly, meager) standard? When was the last time a local band motivated you to call your congressman, protest something, or simply, broken-heartedly scream into your pillow about how unfair life is to the underpriviliged and how you take your life for granted sometimes? Verse does that. I can say verse does that because every time I listen to verse, I can’t think about anything else. I lose a whole day thinking about it sometimes, and that’s important. Hardcore should do that.
If hardcore is punk, and punk is about what I’ve been led to believe it’s about, then where is it? What embodies it, and why do I find myself praying that certain bands will stay around forever just to inspire people to stop making shitty hardcore bands that have no point. Why don’t we as a scene do anything, and why are the only people involved in the scene those that organize it, while everyone else’s contribution is a minimal $5 per show. Where are the charities? where is the deep hatred for the things that are wrong in the world? and what made this change that obviously occurred in the last ten years, judging by the bands that are remembered from the 90’s and 80’s? Are we selfish, are we lazy, are we thoughtless? Are ‘I’ and ‘me’ the only words we want to hear in lyrics anymore?
One thing I can say for certain is that no matter how small of a visible impact hardcore makes, Iowa’s hardcore community has values I have seen nowhere else. Granted, I haven’t been out of the state in a while. I don’t go to other hardcore scenes, but the drama goes around, and we’ve got integrity that you can’t find everywhere. We have pretty liberal views (typical of hardcore, but important), and racism, fascism, sexism, and any similar notions are not welcome. People say that this or that will build character, but nothing builds it like being a part of this scene. That said, all I want is for us to do something with that. There are so many of us, and we’re just an open palm of someone laying in a bed, asleep. At the risk of being cheesy, wake the fuck up and form a fist. That’s why we bang our heads and slam into each other. That’s why we scream and jump on top of each other, because we have aggression and we know there are reasons to get pissed. The world provides a plethora of those reasons, and if we bring back and create bands that really show us where to point that anger, or if we at least TRY and MAKE AN EFFORT to point our anger somewhere that matters, and then throw our collective rage at it, we will make a difference. But we aren’t there. I don’t feel like we’re anywhere close.
If you think hardcore is less than what I think it is, then so be it. You can have that view. Then eventually I’ll give up on it, and I’ll forget it and you can have your pathetic, broken scene, if you so desperately want to settle. I have friends like that and I do look down on them for holding that view. That punk is whatever you want punk to be. And maybe that’s true and I’m wrong. But if none of us want punk to be much of anything, then I don’t care for it at all. If it’s powerless and dead, as the saying about punk goes, then how can you revel in that? How can you enjoy that when you know you could instead have a powerful movement and force of change? Many of you think this whole rant was prescriptive, and you’re exactly right. It was. I value others’ views, but if my friends wanted to sit on a couch all day every day for the rest of their lives I would scream at them and kick them in the face all day every day until they got their asses up and did something. So that’s, in a sense, what I am trying to do here.
My final statement is that the arts are the arts. But hardcore, in my eyes, isn’t supposed to be just an art. It has utility and the raw, fast power to do any number of amazing things through the people that love and cherish it. I don’t want to lose my respect for hardcore, but we need to step up our game and make something of it, before we, and it, and our scene become the most dreaded things that any of us can be: powerless and unimportant.
A Whole Raw Potato. - Imgur
Oh my god this can’t be real. This has to be a joke. This is the funniest thing ever.
You’re still going to get criticized, so you might as well do whatever the fuck you want.
“
| — | Kathleen Hanna (via thesextape) |
