FOR THOSE WHO ARE IN MALAYSIA, YOU MAY GET THIS BOOKS THROUGH REFLECTIONS – TECHNICAL DISTRIBUTION
By Brian Peterson
For the past six years I have been assembling a book about the nineties hardcore music scene called Burning Fight: The Nineties Hardcore Revolution in Ethics, Politics, Spirit, and Sound. While Steven Blush’s American Hardcore was an excellent examination of the pioneers of the hardcore punk movement, after reading his book one gets the impression that hardcore died in 1986. Although that particular era of hardcore may have ended in 1986, an influx of new bands took the genre to new places, the story of which shall be told in Burning Fight.
Picking up where eighties hardcore punk innovators left off, nineties hardcore sparked profound change and debate across musical, social, spiritual, and political landscapes. Many of the ideals that were ingrained in hardcore since its beginning were taken in new and often controversial directions. Inspired by the music and the community that developed around the scene, many immersed in hardcore’s ethical and social movements such as straight edge, animal rights, D.I.Y., spirituality, and a host of other issues debated these beliefs and implemented them into their own lives, eventually taking what they learned outside the hardcore scene and influencing the broader culture. At the same time, many of the ideologies that united people ended up dividing them in the long run, which eventually led to the splintering this era of hardcore by the decade’s end.
Burning Fight: The Nineties Hardcore Revolution in Ethics, Politics, Spirit, and Sound draws upon the memories of many who played influential roles in the scene and understand what made this era of hardcore so unique in its ability to synthesize music and ideology into what for many felt like was a powerful counter-cultural movement, where change was just around the corner.
Bands featured in Burning Fight include: 108, Avail, Burn, Cave In, Coalesce, Damnation A.D., Deadguy, Disembodied, Downcast, Earth Crisis, Endpoint, Groundwork, Guilt, Inside Out, Integrity, Los Crudos, Mouthpiece, Racetraitor, Ressurection, Rorshcach, Shelter, Spitboy, Split Lip/Chamberlain, Strife, Swing Kids, Texas Is The Reason, Threadbare, Trial, Unbroken, Undertow, Vegan Reich
Here are just some of the many voices and perspectives present in Burning Fight:
Duncan Barlow (Endpoint, Guilt, and By the Grace of God) on how hardcore changed his life: “Rites of Spring made it okay
for me to cry. Teen Idles made it
okay for me to stay sober. Black
Flag made it okay for me to be angry.
Youth of Today made it okay for me to be vegetarian. Bad Religion made it okay for me to think critically. Void made noise beautiful. I could go on forever.”
Vic DiCara (108, Inside Out, Beyond) on the “definition” of hardcore: “[Defining hardcore is] like defining falling in love — definitions really miss the point. You don’t need a definition to know if you’re in love or not — you just know it. You just feel real hardcore when you experience it.”
Adrienne Droogas (Spitboy) on hardcore shows as a “conversation”: “I always looked at our shows as having a conversation. When we were on stage then I was
just having a conversation with a couple hundred people in the audience… It makes me feel less isolated when people come to me and say they lived through that too, or that something I said was important for them to hear. It was an incredible opportunity to feel less alone in terms of the issues I was struggling with as a human, regardless of gender.
It’s really easy to build up walls and be isolated, so I’d rather break down those walls and be open.”
Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi) on straight edge: “When
I wrote ‘Straight Edge,’ the point of
it for me was that I’m a deviant. I
don’t partake in what society partakes
in, which makes me consistent
with the other punk rockers — even
the drug users and people who were drinking. The point was they were
also deviant but for other reasons.
I felt more comfortable with people
who were living different types of
lives and I felt like we were all outsiders for different reasons. My point of
view was I believe in community by
inclusion and not community defined by exclusion.
Martin Sorrondeguy (Los Crudos, Limp Wrist) on D.I.Y and hardcore: “So many people started out D.I.Y. when they had an audience, but when it was no longer convenient for them they kicked punk and hardcore to the curb. How many times all these years have I heard kids scream about revolution and then walk away because they have the ability and the privilege to do so? That really bothers me. We can’t walk away from our neighborhood. We know that when we go back home we go back to what we were singing about. That was cute, your rant about revolution and changing the world, but where are you now?”
Norman Brannon (Texas Is the Reason, Anti-Matter Fanzine) on extremism in hardcore: “Hardcore is a youth movement and
young people do and say stupid shit.
We were all taking ourselves way too seriously. The nineties were weird because it was like someone flipped a switch and there was no middle ground. You were either Vegan Reich or you were Born Against. [laughs] The dichotomy was so broad.”
Ray Cappo (Shelter, Youth of Today) on spirituality in hardcore: Every question that everyone asked me I had already criticized the [Hare Krishna] devotees for—I had already went through that level of questioning everything. Believe me, before I put on a robe and danced in the street I had thought about it. [laughs] I didn’t do it because it was cool; it was probably the most un-cool thing ever. People hated God, but for me I never thought that you had to hate God to be into hardcore or punk. Hardcore is about being against the grain.
Dan Yemin (Lifetime, Paint it Black) on animal rights in hardcore: “The content of hardcore had always addressed human rights issues, so it was only a matter of time before somebody made the connection to animal rights. If we’re really against violence and suffering then why wouldn’t that branch across species?”
Chaka Malik (Burn, Orange 9mm) on discussions about race in hardcore: If I’m a kid that needs to hear that message and it’s a beautiful message of race relations or something beautiful that helps promote understanding then who cares who writes those songs? Is it valid? Of course it’s valid! Anytime you are asking people to be more humane in any way is valid. Would I rather have you write something negative?
Nobody has a monopoly on anything. We’re lucky to be here and the smart people learn from other people. You can try and criticize and say who is or isn’t important enough to be saying these things, but why? Just shut up and deal with it or don’t deal with it.
Scott Beibin (Bloodlink Records) on politics/activism in hardcore: “The hardcore scene wasn’t just passive consumers — it was kids putting on shows, making zines, creating music and artwork. They were figuring out how to make things work either with their parents’ money or their own money or no money at all. Almost every person who was really a part of that early nineties hardcore scene seems to have gone on to do amazing things. The whole D.I.Y. aspect was really what got that going.”
Kent McClard (HeartattaCk Fanzine, Ebullition Records) on what hardcore means: Hardcore isn’t about a musical style; it’s about emotion and anger and hope and you can express those feelings in a variety of ways and not necessarily rely on traditional hardcore sounds.
Rob Moran (Unbroken) on the satisfaction of putting out your own record: All we ever wanted to do was release a seven inch and we would have been happy. We had no idea it was going to turn into tours and an LP! We had no clue what we were doing, but it was fun. To hold an LP in your hands when all you wanted to do was release a seven inch was a huge deal! I’ll never forget that feeling! Everything was fun; no expectations or anything else for that matter. It was just friends and sometimes adversaries creating something special.
Greg Bennick (Trial) on politics in hardcore: Cynics say that discussing politics in music will never amount to anything? Neither will apathy. Artists transform the world and give it back to us in new forms. They represent the world, but let’s look at that word “represent” for what is really going on with the artist: they re-present the world. They take issue, they interpret it, and then they present it back to us in angle or with a new inflection or interpretation. We need artists to help us interpret the world around us, including social and political events.
Sean Muttaqi (Vegan Reich) on extreme debates in hardcore: If you hit a message really extremely then it forces the issue. People who didn’t agree with us couldn’t even really hold an argument with us at the very start; for instance, the abortion issue. Someone right off the bat might say, “We think that you’re off base.” We’d just say, “Do you eat meat? Well, how can you even argue about anything concerning whether we’re oppressing people with our beliefs when your actions are oppressing animals?” The debate was so hot at the beginning that people actually became vegetarian for consistency purposes. Eventually a lot of the basic points won through. By the time the kids into us started bands they toned down a lot of the issues and made it more palatable and in turn it got a lot more people into the issues. Eventually it ran its course kind of like the sixties. You had a bunch of kids who were kind of burned out on social activism and it
seems like it’s the 1970s all over again with its excesses and lack of social concern.
Tara Johnson (Disembodied, Martyr A.D.) on the diversity in the nineties scene: Hardcore was a much different scene back then compared to today. The scene was more unified. So many different styles of bands could play together and we all got along for the most part. I think we fit in because we didn’t try to be anything other than what we were — four or five kids trying to figure out who we were and who we wanted to become, experiencing many things for the first time, playing music just for the love of it, not to become big fucking rock stars. We never thought or expected to make a lot of money and we didn’t care. If we cared, we wouldn’t have lasted even five years with all of the shit that we went through.
D. J. Rose (Path of Resistance) on hardcore’s “immortality”: You can’t kill hardcore. People have really tried to exploit what we like in this culture. That doesn’t mean it’s over, though. It’ll never be over unless you let it be over.
This is the overall direction of Burning Fight but there is a lot more featured. The book is over 500 pages and covers straight edge, veganism/vegetarianism, religion in hardcore, race, gender, D.I.Y., and political activism. It also includes oral history articles on 31 bands including Avail, 108, Burn, Earth Crisis, Los Crudos, Strife, and Unbroken.
Burning Fight is now available for pre-order at
www.revhq.com or at other select independent online music outlets.
For more information, check out 
