Hardcore: that wonderful musical movement that kicked off in the 80’s pushing punk music to another level in the US. It’s been documented for years in zines, all over the web, bands have reformed, there’s a even a new film coming all about it. This scene is very much part of our make up and partly why why we spend hours bringing you skateboarding and music all day long in here, but unfortunately it’s becoming so popular that fashion twats are beginning to ruin this history with no care or attention and it’s getting worse by the week.
A month ago we plugged a new book and exhibition for American Hardcore that the Vinyl Factory have put together. On the surface, this looked to be legit but what actually rolled out on the opening night was quite the opposite from an account online today.
Hardcore lover Jamie Thomson was asked to DJ at the launch party and thought it would be fun, but his recent review about the entire ordeal shows American Hardcore to be yet another example of fashion conscious pillocks spending their spare time on trying to fit in with what is seen to be cool. The gallery ‘exhibition’ itself is made up of a “giant oblong frame of fifty 7″ sleeves – for this was what this entire exhibition consisted of: no explanations, no notes, no additional material – just a bunch of record sleeves”.
The party was said to be attended by “self-congratulatory cunts celebrating their charmed lives” as depicted in James’ blog – “full of moneyed arseholes with nary a clue about what they were listening to nor the inclination to investigate any further”.
The book itself was put together by UK punk collector and “Gold card anarchist” Toby Mott who is also alleged to have published the book riddled with wrong facts: “Adolescents’ ‘Welcome to Reality’ is listed as being from 1990, rather than a decade earlier, because he’s used the fucking repress!”
We will leave you with Jamie’s scathing ender as this says it all about this ‘book’, and made us laugh out loud.
“Worse still are the listings for the Fear and Bad Brains EPs, which refer to the boots of those respective records, and even then the fucking dates are wrong. The exhibition blurb claims it “visually documents the scene’s subtle shifts and changes between the late seventies and early nineties”. To put it in visual art terms, they’ve listed Warhol’s Campell Soup Cans as hailing from 1987, because that’s when you could buy a poster of it in Athena. And, lest we forget, now we’re just looking at covers of bootlegs in this special book? Maybe that’s why they’re charging £50 a copy, so he can afford to buy the originals and put them in their own special little exhibition.”
If you need a decent book on hardcore punk, try the real American-Hardcore by Steven Blush or the film that came out a couple of years back.