This post is self-flagellation as much as it is a thrusting finger screaming "j’accuse!" at the current state of our culture and hardcore punk in particular. Holier than thou I cannot be, willing cog that I am in this hyper machine, but let us light a beacon for an issue facing our beloved music:
Instagram is actively damaging to anyone who wants to connect with music on a more-than-superficial level. And this goes for hardcore punk more than almost any other scene or genre, it being built on the unspoken agreement that the metaphysical barrier between audience and artist is as thin as possible.
But.
Loose topics.
ZINES! No, I don’t have new ones. But maybe soon, thanks to the idea of one sheet zines. Print out a series of images on a single sheet of paper and fold and cut them into a zine. I recently came across this post by photographer Emon Hassan. He sells a Photoshop template if you use that software. If you don’t, check out these resources from the Instagram page One Page Zine (what’s in a name…). They are online templates to do the same thing. Now go forth and make zines!
Not gonna lie, chat, we’re going through it when it comes to flyers. More and more AI-generated flyers are showing up and, again, not gonna lie: it sucks. Making a flyer is the easiest thing in the world: put on who’s playing, where they’re playing and how much it is. That’s fucking it. There’s plenty of free Photoshop alternatives out there that’ll let you put that together at least. And if you need some fun pictures and you can’t draw or photograph for shit? Guess what: I gotchu with the public domain hookup.
New music alert! Belgian post-hardcore heroes Wrong Man announced a new LP called Here’s That Feeling, and put their first new track online. It features Jeremy Bolm from Touché Amoré and it rocks.
Finally, one small tech thing: a funky little build-it-yourself PDA with an e-paper screen. That’s all. Have fun, lads and lasses.
First, a few unremarkable anecdotes.
There was that time I bellyflopped onto the floor after attempting a stage dive. Knocked the wind outta me real good.
There was that time a fight broke out outside the venue and someone hit me in the back of the head with a bike chain.
There was that time I awkwardly tried to make conversation with someone who was in a band I really liked who was very definitely not interested in talking to me.
There was that time I overextended my knee in the pit and couldn’t walk for three weeks.
There was that time a band showed up way too late for a show I booked and everyone was already gone yet they still demanded we pay them and we did because it was six burly guys versus two nerds.
There was that time I was in a band and while it was a lot of fun it became clear quickly my skills at taming the four snared low end beast were lacking. Nor was our original singer that good at being a human being that one could get along with.
All these events and moments are not on Instagram, or Facebook, or TikTok, for good reason. They’re not particularly shocking. Not particularly fun. Not great "content". And yet they were the mortar of my hardcore punk experiences, seeping in between the ecstasy and terror that also fed into it. It shaped me.
But Instagram et al are high peaks and low valleys. It’s the sold out release shows and call out posts for alleged abusers. It’s a limited edition colorway for the vinyl and the death of a beloved scene uncle.
And ironically, through this celebration of the extremes, the entire experience flattens. Neutral takes don’t get rewarded, only the highest praise and most scathing criticisms find traction in the infernal networking machine, its algorithm ingesting the foundations of our souls and leaving an unstable husk.
It makes into a series of vignettes our experiences, rather than a whole three-dimensional all-sensory experience that mixes the highs and lows with the mids, which is what life is – and by extension the showgoing-music-listening-photo-taking-zine-making experience.
Mids are important. Without the mids, the highs and lows give you whiplash. And we’re just being trained on highs and lows at this point.
Any album has songs that you might not connect to. And yet, those songs are important, the artist(s) put them there for a reason. Listen to a full album. Take in the songs that you don’t like and don’t just put a playlist together.