The Kids Will Have Their Say

U.S. Hardcore shaped the alternative rock explosion of the 90s.

I decided that I wanted to be a professional musician from a very young age. Until my teenage years, I escaped into fantasies about being a rock star. It didn’t seem like an attainable prospect, and it didn’t matter. I also fantasized about being a professional baseball player, and anyone who knew me will tell you that wasn’t ever gonna happen. Then one day in 1981, at age 14, I had my brain rewired at a free concert by a regional hardcore band called The Zero Boys.¹ Suddenly anything seemed possible, and in one way or another I’ve been chasing it ever since.

When people ask me how I got into making music, I tell them I come from hardcore punk. I’m lucky to have been a teenager in the early 80s because I found my way to hardcore. Hardcore was for and (mostly) by teenagers (mostly) apart from the commercial music business. We could use something like that now, but kids aren’t as bored as we were in the 80s. For a brief time in the beginning there weren’t many rules - at least in my local scene. You could dress any way you wanted and you’d be welcome. You could party or not party, but most of us partied as much as we could get away with.²

The music helped to form communities among kids like me who weren’t cut out for regular high school life and culture. Nobody made money, but hardcore had an economic infrastructure. If you wanted to make a record, you needed at least a little money for recording and pressing, and you had to fill the tank to get to the show. The soon-to-be-legendary records found their way to our ears eventually; but we read or heard about the bands before we’d heard a note. Nobody cared if you scrawled the Dead Kennedys “DK” logo or the Black Flag bars on your undershirt with the sleeves ripped off before you could name - or had heard - a song by the band. Then when your buddies finally got their hands on a copy of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables or Damaged, it didn’t disappoint. You knew it would be awesome.

I pretty much ONLY listened to hardcore music for a few years, around 81-84. Maybe we’d sneak some Black Sabbath, Van Halen, or Pink Floyd into my listening, but we didn’t talk about it. The hardcore music I loved the most sounded the most like classic pop music. My tastes haven’t really changed much over the years. When arena rock ruled my stereo, I loved the anthems. Rock And Roll All Nite, Runnin’ with the Devil, Paranoid, Black Dog, etc. When hardcore took over, I loved the massive hooks those bands snuck into their aggressive songs. The Ramones opened that door in the 70s, and we should all be grateful. Hope by Descendents, 20 Eyes by The Misfits, It’s Not Funny Anymore by Husker Du, Sun God by Squirrel Bait, Up on the Sun by Meat Puppets, anything by The Zero Boys. Pop songs. I’ve always been a pop fan drawn to great melodies.

Hardcore didn’t so much shape my musical tastes as it rewired my brain to think about building community around music. I am still drawn to great melodies regardless of genre as my taste constantly evolves; but the worldview I adopted hasn’t fundamentally changed. Hardcore showed me that music built meaningful connections, and that anybody who wanted in could be part of it. The distance between “artist” and “audience” was nonexistant. By kids/for kids…our world.

In my recent article about independent labels, I noted that I brought a base of knowledge to Boston that informed how we build Blake Babies and The Lemonheads. The hardcore approach was DIY with the assumption that the music business wouldn’t have anything to offer. The audience was the scene; building an audience meant finding a way into the scene. When hardcore moved into its second wave and suddenly there were all these rules, the “scene” for those bands became all the (slightly older) kids building community around college radio. We’d all graduated Hardcore University, so knew all we needed to know about getting a record out, booking into all-ages clubs, and tapping into existing scenes. That’s what we did in the 80s, generally without any adult supervision or help.

I remember when I first joined The Lemonheads (early 1987), someone approached us about making a video for Second Chance off the Hate Your Friends album (I didn’t play on that album, but I joined the band before it came out). I can’t remember if we paid anything for what amounted to a student film - if we did it wasn’t much. I can’t remember if we sent the video to MTV for consideration for the brand new 120 Minutes underground music program or if Taang! Records sent it - but it got played a few times and changed our lives. That’s a big part of how we were able to go on a tour that summer. Getting a video on MTV (which for anyone under 40, I assure you was a very big deal) was an extension of getting a record out, which was central to the punk DIY ethos. You made shit happen.

Our bands were part of an evolution out of hardcore into something else that for a long time didn’t really have a name. Hardcore became far less interesting to me in the later 80s. Underground music across multiple genres carried forward the experimentation and creative ambition of early hardcore. My mindset as someone deeply immersed in hardcore for those formative years, but who moved on musically, wasn’t uncommon. Some of that music remains bedrock for me, but most of it I can live without ever hearing again. It isn’t all that I had in common with the Lemonheads guys; we’re the same age and had many common cultural touchstones as music obsessives and armchain pop culture critics. Hardcore was our shared frame of reference. We loved much about hardcore, but we also bonded over finding much of it increasingly ridiculous. It shaped us, then we moved on while holding onto the spirit.

In many ways later 80s underground rock that eventually shaped the 90s mainstream grew out of hardcore. Major labels eventually signed the brightest lights of the punk underground, Husker Du, The Replacements, X, etc., while the greatest talents of the punk underground evolved to embrace broader genre categories. I still remember where I was the first time I heard Waiting Room by Fugazi. I remember being one of a dozen people who heard Spiderland by Slint performed live before the album came out. I remember when band played shows with Beat Happening in makeshift DIY venues that resembled hardcore shows but sounded like something new. Music evolves. The explosion of creativity and experimentation coming out of U.S. hardcore opened the door for Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, and all that followed. I remember being a kid listening to Milo Goes to College and thinking, “These should be hit songs on the radio - if everyone heard this music, it would be really popular.” Did I want everyone to know that music? Absolutely not - it was our secret. Eventually it happend anyway when Green Day broke. Now the stylistic touchstones of hardcore and its spawn, from grunge to emo, are part of the language of pop. If you don’t believe me, listen to Olivia Rodrigo or Paramore. I’m OK with that, especially when the music’s good.

What I loved most about hardcore is that it coalesced into a community, or rather a bunch of interconnected communities. It gave kids the power to do things collectively, and to dream up an alternative to the mainstream music industry way before said industry saw the opportunity to appropriate the term “alternative” as a marketing device. Anybody who took part in the 80s scene and launched bands did it for the “right” reasons, because there wasn’t a way to make any money. Blake Babies and Lemonheads initially weren’t really meant to be for-profit businesses to make us rich. They were vehicles to get to do all the fun shit we dreamed up. If you’d have asked 21-year-old me, a member of both those bands in their most formative times, what I wanted out of it, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned making a living - because I never expected to make a living. Did I want my rent to be paid? Of course! Did I want to quit whatever shitty menial job I had? Yes! Did I imagine it would pay for my house and my kids’ college in middle age? I don’t think I dared consider that as a possibility, which made it easier to move on to a career doing something else.

Maybe that’s the real sellout, damning evidence I wasn’t really committed to the cause. I’m fine with that. The lasting value for me is a worldview I’ll carry throughout my life that’s about bands and community, not about the industry that gives it structure. Gigs and flyers, as my hardcore punk hero Mike Watt used to say - the show is what matters - all the other stuff is to put people in the room. That’s the music business.

In my worldview there’s a hierarchy that puts the artists and their community of fans at the top of the pyramid and everything else - especially the music business - on a lower level supporing the bands. Music business people should help or get out of the way. Everything has to be fair to the artists or else it’s a cancer that should be removed.

One of my teenage dreams came true over a decade ago when I had the opportunity to spend the afternoon with Ian MacKaye, co-founder of Dischord Records and frontman of Minor Threat and Fugazi. I’d always understood that Dischord was one of the originators of the 50/50 profit share record deals that are common in indie rock and are becoming more popular in major label deals. Wrong. The Dischord model, Ian explained, is that the artists get all the money after operating costs. It isn’t a 50/50 structure; it’s a 0/100 structure in the artist’s favor. They’re able to do that because the two biggest acts on the label by far are Ian’s own bands. But still, I assume to this day, Ian hand-writes a royalty check to each Dischord band, even if it’s only a few dollars. That isn’t a sustainable model for any imaginable label functioning as a for-profit business. it is, however, very inspiring and something to aspire to, at least in spirit.

Hardcore music merged with the mainstream business when it went mainstream in the 90s. The independent spirit of hardcore, however, is alive and well in many corners of the independent business. It’s carried forward by kids of today who weren’t even born yet when first-wave hardcore hit in the early 80s. It’s OK for music business people to get paid of course. The work we do - if done well in the right spirit - has real value to artists. But, bottom line, we should constantly remind ourselves how lucky we are to have the opportunities to work with artists who impact the culture. We should constantly remind ourselves it isn’t about us - it’s about the connection between the music and the listeners, and the communities that are built.

1. If this topic interests you, click the link and read the article I wrote in 2014. I’m not gonna worry about whether it’s redundant with this one, because it’s SUCH a formative thing for me.

2. I remember a brief time in the summer of 1983 when a bunch of us got into Minor Threat and decided we were supposed to be straight edge. For a couple weeks, nobody was allowed to drink or smoke weed or those repulsive clove cigarettes that became so popular. Soon it came down to just one guy insisting everyone abstain, poor guy. We weren’t cut out for straight edge.