Five Things I Miss About 90s Hardcore

For those that know me, I tend to be a pretty nice guy, but I often hear that some people think I'm an asshole. It's probably the sarcastic cynic in me that some people just never get past. This also heavily extends to my humor. Cynical, sarcastic things make me laugh the most, and that's probably why I love reading Metal Inquisition so much. One of my favorite contributors to that site is Sergeant D, and today we are blessed with a guest writeup from him. - Justin

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5 Things I Miss About 90s Hardcore
I haven't listened to much 90s hardcore in a long time because nearly all of it is tuneless, amateurish garbage played by self-important assbags in clothes that don't fit. With the exception of, well, most of the bands on this blog, it is better if we just pretend it never happened. For every sick band like Turmoil, Day of Suffering, Abnegation, or Wrench, there were a hundred Extinctions and New Day Risings, to say nothing of the seemingly endless glut of atrocious, generic "power violence" bands in the late 90s. Rather than dwell on the negative, it's probably best to just put on our rose-tinted nostalgia goggles and remember the good things about those years. Like any other old asshole, I could go on forever, but because I value your time I will just share the five things I miss most (you are probably reading this at work and have to be in a meeting soon).

1. Stages full of scenesters
Whenever a bigger band would come to town, you weren't shit if you weren't watching them from the side of the stage- conspicuously positioned so everybody could see you, of course, so everybody knew you were hella tight bros with the band. Mike Ski from Brother's Keeper was a big fan of this technique, which was ironic since they had that song "Namedropper" or whatever. I feel like he must have really low self-esteem because he overcompensated a lot back then. It makes me a little vicariously embarrassed when I look back on it, but it's hard to be too judgmental. I mean, if I was from Erie and had a girl voice I would probably have an inferiority complex too, so I can't blame him. It's just hard to watch someone who seems like a pretty nice dude embarrass himself so frequently and publicly. For example, the atrocious cover art he did for the BK records or, well, their music.

Anyhow, aside from Mike Lastowski, one of the most common and annoying members of the Stage Scenester Crew TM was the Photographer Girl. There was at least one in every city, usually they were either the Alpha Mosh Hott of the local scene or the Plain Jane Who Is Really Talented/Cool/Sincere/Authentic. Either way, they got in the way at every show, pushing their way to the front of the stage where you were trying to mosh with your bros so they could stick a camera in the face of some asshole in whatever flash-in-the-pan band she wanted to feature in her zine this month and pat herself on the back for "documenting the scene." I always imagine these girls digging through boxes of old crap and finding like a huge stack of fucking Knapsack or Campfire photos and being like "I would have been better off just buying film and immediately throwing it in the trash without ever using it. Same result but I could have saved myself a lot of time and I would be a lot less ashamed of myself."

Kurt Catalyst: The last person on the planet who still thinks putting out jaw-droppingly average vegan straightedge hardcore records will save the world. Also, he is 100 years old.

2. Backpacks, JNCOs, sweater vests, and other fashion disasters
Sometimes you don't realize how absurd something is until you try to articulate it. For example, a while ago I was trying to explain 90s hardcore fashion to this 23 year-old hipster girl I was dating and the ridiculousness of it all hit me harder than the xbreakdownsx on the Green Rage 7". She listens to electro and Animal Collective so it was a bit hard for her to grasp: "I don't get it," she said, "Why did you guys wear Tommy Hilfiger? I thought you were like punk or whatever. My dad wears that stuff." I did not have a good answer for her, nor could I explain why Kurt Catalyst wore a backpack while onstage singing for Birthright (Catalyst records deserves a while thread of its own; that label's quality control practices are so atrocious it makes Back Ta Basics look like Rick Rubin's hit factory).

Before he was into pleather pants and eyeliner, 18 Visions singer Jame Shart (far left) wore JNCOs and Excessive Force shirts just like the rest of us.

It's hard to even know where to start when it comes to all the atrocious elements of 90s hardcore fashion, but let's begin with big pants. There aren't a whole lot of things more ridiculous looking than some 140-pound 18-year old with acne and an XXL Andrew Thomas Company shirt wearing size 40 JNCOs and karate-moshing his balls off to Downset. Wait, I just thought of one: the same thing, but with the addition of a sweater vest, a Krsna bead choker, and an Andre Agassi-style headband. I can only imagine what our parents thought: "I can't believe I'm letting him leave the house like that, he looks like a complete fucking asshole and he's going to be so embarrassed about this in five years. Oh well, you can't tell kids shit, we just have to let him make his own mistakes." One day I will write a book entitled "Why People Should Not Be Allowed to Express Themselves Before The Age of 21" and pictures of 90s hardcore clothing will be chapter one. Chapter two will be exerpts from Eddie Refuge's zine paired with a photo of my enormous denim shorts with a Shelter patch on them.

If you have the Hellfest 2000 DVD you can see one of my favorite showcases of 90s fashion in the Brother's Keeper interview segment. I tried to find it on YouTube, and although people have ripped what seems like every single other second of the DVD, I could not find any of the BK parts (to my complete lack of surprise). I am sorry to pick on BK so much, but it's just so easy. If you went to the boardwalk and had one of those caricature artists draw a cartoon of entry-level 90s hardcore, it would probably come out looking exactly like Brother's Keeper. Anyway, in this interview the drummer is wearing giant jeans, a Nautica shirt, and to cap it off, this colossal assface has on a fucking Gilligan's Island-style bucket hat! The first time I saw it I nearly fell of my couch in amazement. But again, you have to cut them a certain amount of slack, they are from Erie and don't know any better. It's like if you had an exchange student from Latvia, you can't laugh at him too hard for having a bowl haircut and a "USA" sweatshirt.

3. Tour laminates
Some time in the late 90s, hardcore bands started to have Pro Gear And Attitude TM. Victory led the charge, of course, but the worst offenders were the bands on then-smalltime labels like Ferret and Trustkill who acted like they were Aerosmith. One of the silliest manifestations of this was how these bands would have their friend who worked at Kinko's make tour laminates which they would prominently display on their keychain to make sure you knew they were in the band. This makes a lot of sense if you are playing, say, Warped Tour where there are a zillion kids and you need to control access to backstage, but this was 1998 and these bands were playing to 50 people in DIY venues with piles of cat shit on the floor. For example, Harvest played a little punk rock flophouse called Speak In Tongues in Cleveland and were literally laughed off the stage after walking around like rockstars with their laminates.

Ironically the people in legitimately successful bands like Earth Crisis and Bloodlet never gave a fuck and were much more down-to-earth than their entry-level counterparts. If I had to guess, their thinking was something like, "My band is about as big as a hardcore band can possibly be, and I still have to tour 9 months out of the year just to afford sleeping on my parents' couch. Even if I wanted to act like a rockstar, years of this torturous existence have humbled me so much that I could never pull it off. Is Subway hiring?"


"Our next song is a cover, it's called 'Panty Raid' and it's by a band called Murphy's Law!"

4. Everybody being a secret creepvert
I will go into more detail about it below, but as we all remember the 90s were very uptight and it was definitely not OK to be into chicks like it is for alt kids today (see Brokencyde, Hollywood Undead, 3OH!3, etc). That doesn't change human nature, though: boys were still super horny boys, and the No Fun Club TM simply forced it all underground. The net result was that there were tons of undercover creeps and it was that much funnier when they were uncovered. A few examples (I don't want to blow up these girls' spots so I will do my best to anonymize them; my intent is to make fun of the dudes, not the ladies):
- Charlie King is disappointed
One drunken night in Pittsburgh, I mentioned a girl that we both knew to Charlie from Bloodlet. The conversation went like this:
Me: [Girl] is super cool. She's a good photographer, too.
Charlie: Yeah I guess... But she's shitty in the sack!

- Scott Vogel's hamfisted game
I used to live across the street from a girl who was dating Scott Vogel, who was then in Buried Alive. They played in our city and she of course went to the show. Scott seemed to think he was being super slick/discreet when he asked her to "have a talk with him in the van." They returned about 30 minutes later, hair all messed up and sweaty; we pretended not to know what happened since it was really uncomfortable.

- Mike Score: Panty thief??
I can't remember if it was All Out War or Unconquered, but one of them may have stolen some panties (I'm going to say it was Mike from AOW, but it's possible I'm wrong so don't accuse him of panty-stealing just yet). They stayed with this girl I used to date. She was the local Alpha Mosh Hott and Mike was sweating her pretty hard. After they left, we were cleaning up and she got a little pale, paused and said "Dude, I think he fucking stole my underwear!! WTF!" I cannot say for sure whether this is true or not, but I can tell you that I never saw her wear the pair of underwear in question again. Also, in a moment of extremely poor judgment, I got a Morbid Angel tattoo from the guitarist of AOW in her kitchen.

Did you go to the infamous Pittsburgh fest in 1996? If so, then you must remember Rent America literally crying about all the worms on the sidewalk because it had rained. It still makes my head spin to think about that day!

5. The No Fun Club
The No Fun Club really deserves a post of its own. Shit, it deserves a BOOK of its own. I have written a little about this before [http://metalinquisition.blogspot.com/2009/01/screamo-crunk-cultural-primer.html], but the No Fun Club TM was the essence of 90s hardcore, with the whole Ebullition scene being the most annoying example. I think I would rather chop off my dick with the pieces of a shattered Manumission 7" than listen to Spitboy again. The basic idea was, if you enjoyed something other than being on the front lines of the war for animal/earth/human liberation, it was grounds for being excommunicated from the scene. Or worse, someone might write a scathing letter about it and you would be tried in the pages of HeartattaCk!

A while ago I was listening to the Chokehold 7" after finding MP3s of it on some blog. I hadn't listened to it in probably 7 or 8 years, but I definitely loved it back in the day and I remembered every note. I was singing along and moshing it up at my desk at work when that one line came on about the Bible being a "sexist book of lies." I remember thinking that was like the coolest fucking shit ever when I was in high school, like "Yeah!! Stick THAT in your pipe and smoke it, organized religion!!" But what the fuck is a 15 year-old doing worrying about these things?! I should have been chilling at the mall, hanging out at Orange Julius and chatting up skater girls who were coming out of Zumiez, not trying to save the world. And regardless of how sincere I was, what does a fucking high school kid know about anything??

For example, when I was 18 or so my friend called to tell me he was going to raid a mink farm and wanted me to go. I told him that I couldn't because my friend's band was in town and I wanted to say hi since I hadn't seen them in a couple of years. He called me a straightedge poser who only cared about music (he was hardline, you see) and hung up on me after swearing at me a little bit. (As an aside, in addition to being hardline he was also a big fan of Mucky Pup and for a while made his meager living selling Beanie Babies on eBay) He and his girlfriend "raided" the mink farm, which basically amounted to opening their cages, then getting pissed off because the stupid things just sat in their cages. He didn't think about the fact that they were raised in captivity and didn't know any different. He got arrested, convicted of a felony, and the mink ranchers quickly rounded up what few animals escaped and put them back in their cages. So much for the No Fun Club saving the world- and I had a great time hanging out with my friends at the show!

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What are YOUR favorite things about 90s hardcore that I didn't cover?
Did you ever have someone in a moderately successful 90s moshcore band steal your panties?
Have you seen Kurt Catalyst lately? Was he wearing a backpack?

-Sergeant D