What Hardcore's All About

Here's a little segment from my interview with Rich McLaughlin of Breakdown and Killing Time in which he explains to me how hardcore punk works musically and thematically. And, below is a video of Crazy Spirit [I brought in a few of their records last week] playing a show at -- the now defunct -- 285 Kent last year, just to give y'all an idea of what shows are like.

"Of course, in hardcore you can't let any part go for very long. You have to constantly be changing the parts. You know, if anything drags on like sixteen times…it's not…like eights and fours, and if you want to get crazy you can do threes and sixes. So we would sometimes do threes. Like, this part's only gonna go three times. People want it to go four or two. It's not! It's going three! Or, it's gonna go two and a half. Or it's gonna go five and there's gonna be a little thing on the end before it goes to another part, so it jars you. It's gotta keep some jarring aspect. I mean, some of that is the tension of rhythms that push and pull in between the two so that the thing is never settled. Because one of the things you don't have with hardcore is you don't have dynamics. That's one of the things that's mostly off the table. You always play at full volume. So your pallet is: double time/half time and opposing rhythms. So you gotta work out all your songs out of those things and you could also have guys playing at different times against each other. Like, two guys are playing half time and two guys are playing full time -- or whatever you want to consider it, double time. And you could also have that move. You could have three guys playing and the the drummer drops down to half and then people follow him into half or…you know, all kinds of stuff. 

This is also something I bet you all bands like that do, but I named it. It's called "personal hardcore." So, sometimes you mash the parts together…the next [part] jumps onto the one before it and cuts off a little piece. But sometimes you can't exactly explain how that happens. Like, the last repetition of a part you have to rush or your not going to make it to the next part. So you gotta figure out your own way -- that's not really musical -- there's no real musical explanation that I know of, of how come the next part's gonna come a little bit too soon, before you're ready for it. That's personal hardcore.

 We also have a song called 'Personal Hardcore' about friends stabbing friends in the back. You know, every hardcore song is basically about getting stabbed in the back. Don't you think so? I thought you were my friend! Then you stabbed me in the back! If you had to distill down "what is a hardcore song?" it would be I thought you were my friend, then you stabbed me in the back. I trusted you. Nine million hardcore songs are written from that basic idea. And I guess that's a thing at the point where most people are at in their lives then. It's like, leaving your family and trying to make some kind of support group of friends which, you know...I almost don't even want to say this. Young people often need something out of their friendships that just doesn't exist. If they're lucky, maybe that stuff will exist in some degree. People say: my friends are my family. I can trust them through anything. That's why we end up with so many songs: I trusted you, you stabbed me in the back. Kids do that. ' I don't know, that was not particularly important to me. But for a lot of people it was. It probably was more when I was younger. I just already knew, most people you can't depend on. Or you can depend on them in varying degrees. Like, who can you call in the middle of the night to come pick you up? That's some real shit there."