“Ugh, hArDcOrE is sSooOOoo mAsCuLinE!” 🤕

You mean the subgenre of punk that was pioneered primarily by male aggression… which featured a form of dancing that was borderline a contact sport… and was heavily influenced by early skateboarding culture… which again involved (mostly) men getting their asses kicked every day by these concrete streets…?

Both literally and figuratively, as it were.

Too manly for ya, is it?  But there’s something special there, you’d love to just borrow a little bit of for a socially “improved” rebrand?  Yeahhh 🤢…  No.

I think you’re lost, kiddo.  This is not the nursery you’re looking for, you must have wandered down the wrong block, but we’d be happy to help you find your way home.

Speaking of which…  This song’s been stuck in my head all week and I can’t figure out why or where I even heard it recently.  I had to google the chorus just to find out whose song it was.  I didn’t really grow up listening to 7 Seconds like that, aside from maybe a few stray mp3s or compilation tracks.  I went through a brief period of being enthralled by all the early hardcore bands that lent so much influence to those gateway bands of 90s “pop-punk” before I fell hard and heavy into the anarcho-punk, avant-garde, and metal realms, where my “heavy” music had a lot more feminine influence (think crust, proto-grindcore, doom metal, sludge, death/black/thrash metal, 90s screamo, powerviolence, riot grrrrl, post-punk, goth, post-rock, etc.)

Actually a lot of my favorite artists had prominent female musicians or vocalists, but shhh don’t tell the gatekeepers of neo-feminist narratives who pretend that progress was at a standstill for all of eternity up until they showed up on the scene to femme-splain the day and knight away.

Anyhow, to be quite honest with you, hardcore never moved me like those genres moved me…  I think it was too masculine for me too during that phase when I had so much primal feminine energy bubbling up out of the molten aethers of my rupturing soul.  (As any young pagan should, striving to survive this concrete jungle, no?)  It’s funny because people in those days often mistook me as a metalcore kid, which was a completely different subculture from punk by that point—although sh!t gets pretty weird in the 90s right before that divergence happened between punk and metalcore/hardcore, especially in small towns where punk scenes looked a lot different from each other.  You’ll hear a lot of “Punk is…” from those midschool kids, and it’s like sitting through an awkward family reunion of insular weirdos who’ve been living in a bubble of isolation for multiple generations and damn near lost contact with the outside world.

Anyhow, I digress, but a lot of my favorite bands related to that early “fastcore” style were either proto-hardcore, Germs, Black Flag’s “Nervous Breakdown” era, X “Los Angeles,” all from the L.A. scene where I grew up two decades later, Dead Kennedys, Flipper, etc. from the bay area, or likewise the no-wave from NYC not too far from where I was born in NJ, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Lydia Lunch, early Sonic Youth, Swans, etc., and then there were the blistering UK bands like Discharge, Crass, Subhumans, Vice Squad, Rudimentary Peni, DIRT, Sacrilege, Amebix, Killing Joke, X-Ray Spex, et. al (where ironically enough prime minister/matriarch Margaret Thatcher was the arch-nemesis of choice throughout the era), and even many of the more classic hardcore bands I listened to had queer members (MDC, The Dicks, Los Crudos) &/or were from the later Riot Grrrl incarnation of hardcore.  Not exactly your prototypical macho-core.

So why am I defending the macho all of a sudden?  Because, bro, my fucking preferences at a given phase in my life’s story don’t determine how other people should live…especially historically speaking.  That male aggression is part of what lent punk its beloved charm of unapologetic rebellion, and it’s the very same middle finger in your face energy that so many men have invoked fighting and dying on the battlefield so that their progeny might hope to live a better life than they did.  It’s the reason we have the freedom of speech to have a punk scene in the first place.

This neo-Feminist notion that all masculinity is somehow toxic rather than a by-product of extremely harsh historical conditions… it’s not even human, let alone humane.  It’s some test tube academia sh!t where intersectional oppression is so hyper-analyzed and deconstructed we lose the plot and all context therein.  VR life.

I dunno what to tell y’all.  Punk has a ton of incredibly amazing, talented, prominent, influential, fierce women, who were present in its earliest days—who absolutely should be celebrated much more than they are—and in my opinion the reasons why they aren’t have a lot more to do with lazy neo-feminist confirmation bias, toxic passivity and victimhood, and an addiction to these comfortingly destitute narratives, but alas…  That said, parts of punk and especially hardcore are *VERY* male, in essence.  As they should be.  It’s quite literally “the culture” it came from.  Men have had to live with the overt brutality of tribal war and physical-strength/tactical supremacy for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, told to swallow our tears, our fears, and our pain.  That’s an insane amount of grief and unfathomable existential frustration to keep bottled up.

Have the ladies started to imagine they have a monopoly on all that?
Men had it goooooood, right?  “Privilege.”  🤮

*projectile vomits into your mouth.*

This genre, this art form, is supposed to be raw human expression.

That’s the mission.

Why is it surprising that our dancing gets a bit rough, or that we make a show of strength to let people know that messing with us is more trouble than it’s worth?

These are evolutionary qualities, and indeed revolutionary.

When’s the last time women fought a true revolution for our freedom?

Yeah…  Hey, pardon moi, but maybe we don’t need to feminize every corridor of the human spirit.  Maybe y’all could use a little more masculinity in your step, and/or if that’s not your kind of dance kindly move out of the way.  Just like you would on the floor of a halfpipe.  It’s there for you, and if you want it, the men will support you.  If you stand there in the middle of the dancefloor like a stubborn lost child looking for an excuse to throw a temper tantrum to attract attention, don’t assume that’s the type of cluster-B (passive) aggressive language we’ll show respect to.

Not everything in this world is meant for you, much less made for you…  But show us some basic dignity and you might be surprised by how much you’ll receive in return.

Or was that supposed to be your line?

#hardcorepunk  #sorrynotsorry