Hots On For Nowhere #2: Meta-Hardcore Hates You

At this point in time, punk rock is older than rock and roll was when punk reared its ugly head. Things have changed: whereas in its initial incarnation punk adopted a basic anti-everything, pro-party platform, and its more extreme offshoot hardcore turned its dislikes (conservative politics, suburban homogeny) into a rabid us-vs-them ideology, hardcore's modern incarnation seems willing, even intent, on taunting its own audience.

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From a certain distance, the Brooklyn/Netherlands band Das Oath sound like most "classic hardcore" bands--bar band chord changes played at lightspeed, glass-shattering screamed vocals, and a little arty noise thrown in for good measure. But check out the lyric sheet: what sounds like "rrrraaaaaaawwwghhh" on record translates in word form to intellectual vomit like ""debone pleasure's carcass/kicked in the corner/just more old scabs scarring under chatter/to gauze the vampirism/and draw straws for transplants." Vocalist Mark McCoy seems to enjoy dressing hardcore's nostalgic nihilism in self-conscious philosophical trappings...or is it the other way around? Here's an excerpt from their MySpace bio:

No one is born with tattoos, but you can be born hardcore...With the ink, the music sets in, and next thing you know youre [sic] an annoying face in line at the merch table - exactly what DAS OATH needs. DAS OATH may behave like they live in the stone age, but its all a clever act to ensure Hardcore 4 Life stays an empty slogan that can conveniently be purchased here on a T shirt from this very site for only $18.99.

There are so many levels of irony at work here that you can't really tell whether the band really consider themselves a useless diversion playing to a mob of desensitized louts, or are simply keeping abreast of the cutting edge of band-audience meta-interaction. It's been so long since hardcore bands really weren't in it for the money that maybe it's time for that to be in again. In either case, Das Oath are trying so hard not to care—so into it—that they may as well not.

The opposite may hold true for Some Girls, a thrash supergroup (they probably hate the term) from the Bay Area. Featuring members of The Locust, American Nightmare, and The Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower, Some Girls possess one of the deadliest stage presences today. When I saw them open for Converge late last year, the spaces in between songs kept widening and widening, without patter or even the slightest recognition of the sea of people beyond the stage. Songs--minute-long squalls of blastbeats and gory noise--ended as if chopped by a razor, leaving singer Wes Eisold to just stare at the ground, smacking the mic into his palm. The set closed with "Deathface," a grinding one-note hulk of an almost-waltz that went on for what felt like 20 minutes (on the record it clocks in at 9:07). It was unclear how much of the crowd were simply waiting for them to go away—we were packed in pretty tight—but I was transfixed. With every passing moment, the sound grew more noxious, as if the song were transfiguring into a cloud of poison gas floating over the crowd. It wasn't anger, exactly, or frustration—it sounded like contempt.

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Alexis "Lex" Mitchell, singer for metalcore outfit Daughters, possesses an ungodly croon derived of equal parts Nick Cave, Julio Iglesias, and Wesley Willis. His stage presence is mostly defined by his penchant for drooling on himself. At a show last month with The Locust, a drunken party-boy crashed the stage and, in the process, knocked Lex completely off his feet into the amplifiers. Within seconds, the guy was hustled out the door with a bleeding lump on his face. There was applause.

Twenty years ago, stage diving was all about obliterating the boundary between performer and audience—"anyone can be up here." But if anyone can do it—and with the sheer number of bands and labels around these days, it feels like everyone is—then so what? The only time I ever jumped on a stage was because I thought the band sucked, and I paid for it with two broken wrists. The message: stay on the ground where you belong, and nobody gets hurt. In a sense, it's become necessary to be wary of one's audience: in addition to the roomfuls of alienated misfits, hardcore shows are filled out with jockish boneheads eager to lockstep into the role of "punk audience members" and drunkenly run amok, just like they saw in American Hardcore. Any self-respecting band is going to react to this self-conscious role-playing with a measure of scorn, if not outright contempt. The sight of a crowd of tribal-tattooed, six-packed Spring Break casualties attempting to "mosh" to Dillinger Escape Plan is enough to curdle anyone's outlook on the underground, if not life in general.

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The most necessary bands at the moment, in thrash hardcore and elsewhere, are the ones straining against the barest acknowledgment of accessibility. And at this point, a touch of elitism may be all that's saving rock from the cultural scrapheap. As with any pioneering artistic style, hardcore has seen wave after wave of brazenly opportunistic bands and labels swell, crest, and spread into a thin and foamy puddle on the beach of youth culture; bands like Das Oath are the detritus left to rot in the sand, ugly reminders of the muck hardcore sprang from. The concept of authenticity in rock and roll has been pulled so thin that it's scarcely more than a bauble for college freshmen to argue over.

"We're the last intellectual thrash rock band alive," McCoy self-effaces in the bio. "It's like pretending a bad drug addiction you can't shake off or like a bad marriage and only sticking around for the kids. Honestly, we don't live it, but it looks good to act like we do. Its our lives and its all we know. Trust me, I went to Grad School!"

Photo courtesy of bluecollardistro.com

Das Oath MySpace
Some Girls website
Daughters MySpace