Question: Do you think punk/hardcore is suffering from a brain drain? LET ME KNOW YOUR THOUGHTS?

Just the other day, i was on the train to my last law lecture for the semester and i was thinking about the question below, I decided to pose that same question to one of the most committed and thoughtful people i know in the punk/hardcore community. Ioannis (BOB) who runs Crucial Zine in the UK and also is completing his PHD on the subject of zine culture in hardcore.

Please let me know what you think about this subject? Can we as members of the community do more?

This was the Question :

Do you think punk/hardcore is suffering from a brain drain? i.e. is the community lacking intellectual growth, learning and development.

This was his answer:
As for the ‘brain drain’, I think that is the case more or less; there is a fine line between being preachy and entertaining, with not a lot happening outside of venues. There are probably a billion crusty anarchowhatever bands who can probably rehash and paraphrase the lastest hit articles from znet and probably just as many jock broseph bands who couldn’t care less aside from getting high and laid, but I think people will seek out whatever scene and attitudes they want. At least in places where there are big enough scenes so people can fragment into a bunch of neighbouring niches for everyone to drop in and out as they please.

Not wanting to make hardcore/punk seem less improtant or significant, but a lot of the politics, at least from my own experience, come from ‘flawed readings’ and understandings, ie without a relevant knowledge of philosophical or academic concepts. Now I’m all up for the enthusiasm to self-educate, but

I mean every other band quotes ‘god is dead’ and nietzsche, but few people understand the context and implications of that, at least on any real academic level. It’s usually ‘oh yeah, dude was a nihilist, fuck everything’, which is incredibly far from truth. That sort of mentality is somewhat prevalent in hardcore, though it’s not necessarily a bad thing, just revealing about the wants and hopes of the individual.

I think there is a reluctance from people in hardcore to take it more ‘serious’, since it would probably dillute the ‘dionysian’ side of things, which is just as important as the ‘apollonian’… to sound like a social studies prick. I mean, fuck, I dig all the Tragedy-like bands, but going to some of those crusty vegan anarchist animal rights parties and gigs is REAL drag. I feel like I have to apologise for every little aspect of my life that doesn’t conform to whatever it is they think it should be, every time I speak to someone. If I want some dreadlocked trustafarian to tell me I’m a bad person for enjoying a bacon cheeseburger, I’d rather they did it in a lecture hall where I can at least hear and understand everything, rather than over blastbeats and wailing guitar solos, you know? I think by the time people in hardcore start getting more radicalised, they move on to other things since it’s probably a bit futile to try to effect any real change through a music-based social structure like hardcore, punk or metal.

But ultimately this will be different in different places. In Athens there is a huge expectation for anyone involved with the punk scene to be into anarchism; sure, quite a few kids can probably quote some Bakunin or Kropotkin slogan, but I feel it has to do more with going along with the prevailing trend of ‘punks = circle a’s', rather than truly having an interest. Not surprisingly, as soon as a lot of these kids hit 25, they move onto something less ‘complicated’ and loaded with meaning. There is a more ‘trendy’ punk scene of bands that play more like the latest bands on Epitaph or Fat Wreck, but even they are going to be down with the whole DIY and squat scene.

I don’t know if I made my point clear, but essentially I think that depending on what your scene is, hardcore can potentially expose people to great ideas; what you do after that though, whether you actually get serious about exploring them in a scientific kind of way (ie being thorough, systematic and unbiased) or just take it all at face value.

I’d like to think that people do the former, rather than the later, but ultimately it suffers from the same thing every other music-based millieu of subcultural activity (yikes!) takes place; just like rock, punk, metal (especially metal), rap and every other such scene that at one point or another has had mainstream exposure and therefore been ‘co-opted’ by the forces of evil that generate mindless popular culture; namely that is that people can strip away (and add) as many ‘layers’ of it as they want and still claim to be a part of it; you can get a Good Charlotte sticker on your SUV and a faux-hawk and claim to be a punk, or you can go all the way and worship Amebix and Charlie Manson to be soooo punk rock that you don’t even call yourself punk rock.

I think because in hardcore there is a tendency to draw influence from the past, there is a tendency to idealise all that history, so just to keep up with times people end up posing a lot, to ‘live up to’ all the history they’ve made up. So I think that people get wrapped up with trying to figure out how all these exaggerated attitudes and ideas work together that they end up losing interest into the why’s and how’s of it.

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