Every so often, the DIY hardcore community gets some sort of confirmation that big music publications don't care about us. Last week, that confirmation came in the way of an extremely convoluted review of the newest Candy record, where the reviewer spends a couple hundred words babbling about some dead German actor before even mentioning a note of music. .
People were quick to jump in with the usual retorts once this gibberish started circulating on hardcore Twitter. "Kill all music journalists", "music journalists are cancer", and so forth.
I've always side-eyed this type of rhetoric, as someone who's spent a considerable amount of time writing about music, and in particular, weird underground music that nobody is compensating me to write about. For a few reasons. Some of them are personal, but mostly, I see how people react to music journalism and that attitude just doesn't line up.
I was recently at a show where the dude from Webbed Wing was on stage, going off about music journalists.
"Fuck music journalists!" He said. "You know, people always say, 'fuck music journalists' but as soon as they get that big write up it's 'thank you so much to Pitchfork for the review of our latest album', You won't catch me doing that, Fuck music journalists!"
I had to laugh. His statement was dead-on. To me, it's always seemed like the "fuck music journalists" thing was couched in a little bit of resentment.
"Fuck music journalists for not covering me or understanding what I do."
I've never stuck a microphone in someone's face and gotten that classic Henry Rollins "fuck you" attitude back. Most of the people I interviewed or reviewed, in fact, were pretty stoked about it.
Which makes sense, because hardcore and punk have long traditions of music journalism, complete with the same DIY and egalitarian ethos that drives the music.
Stop and think before you echo your favourite band dudes/social media heroes and say "fuck music journalism".
Do you consume/have you ever consumed one of the following:
Demolisten Podcast:
Grey from Demolisten always starts the show with a spiel that includes the phrase "we're not trying to be critics. This isn't a review show in the traditional sense." I would argue though, that the Demolisten dudes aren't just doing criticism, they're actually doing it better than anyone else.
They have an insane breadth of knowledge, an un-fake-able chemistry, and the sardonic attitude to realize what they're doing doesn't "actually matter". They're probably smelling literal farts in the basement they record in, but that's about it for fart sniffing. Could you imagine how much more entertaining The Needle Drop would be if instead of wearing a red flannel button up to signal his tacit disapproval, Anthony Fantano told artists to fling themselves off the top of a building?
Demolisten works because they take hardcore music about as seriously as it needs to be taken. Still, I think it's fair to say the rising popularity of bands like Gel and MSPaint can be attributed in some small part to their exposure on Demolisten.
Forum of Passion:
FOP is basically the 60 Minutes of hardcore. Long-form, in-depth, expositional storytelling that focuses on the lives and contributions of your favourite musicians. Each episode goes a number of different places, but the central theme remains the same. How did underground music shape the life of the person being interviewed? This is the go-to if you're looking for the type of raw emotion and connection you would get from a human interest feature in a magazine or NPR interview.
Razor Blades and Aspirin:
I've admittedly never copped one of these, but even from a distance it's apparent the dude who does them, Michael Thorn, puts a painstaking amount of energy into each issue. This zine has in depth interviews, many of which follow some sort of storytelling format. It also has some of the highest quality photojournalism you're ever gonna get in the hardcore scene.
I mean, let's be honest: "music journalism doesn't belong in hardcore" is a stupid statement because 'zine is literally short for magazine and guess what? THAT'S JOURNALISM. Razorblades and Aspirin is about as good as a 'zine gets. It's probably better than most professional magazines in this day and age.
Axe to Grind:
A2G is a very specific brand of edutainment that most people probably wouldn't consider journalism in a traditional sense. The show has been referred to (sometimes by the hosts) as the sports radio of hardcore. But hey, if you go ask everyone at ESPN who didn't dribble a ball in their last career what they went to school for, 4/5 of them would tell you they have a journalism background.
Tom is a great storyteller. Patrick has incisive and influential opinions. Bob has probably done more research on hardcore than any other living human. Putting together, listening to, and discussing a list of every hardcore album released in 1996 in a captivating way certainly requires more journalistic ability than re-writing press releases and posting them on the Lambgoat website.
No Echo:
No Echo is probably the closest simulacra to the "dreaded" type of music journalism our community derides, but interestingly enough, it's also the most egalitarian. Site owner Carlos Ramirez seems hellbent on covering every single hardcore release in existence. He also lets anybody contribute to the site. I think that when it comes to a journalistic vision, No Echo lines up with hardcore's ethos better than any other media outlet. Anyone can get on stage if they try hard enough. I also have it on good authority that people are definitely paying attention to what gets printed on the site.
I wrote most of this last week so I don't know what the fuckin point of this was except to highlight some of the cool music journalists who inspire me to write. People who drive hardcore forward with their niche and quirky but also universally understood brands of thought leadership. Even if those people would cringe and puke at the thought of being called journalists.
Cringe and puke all you want, dear reader. Fact of the matter is, you like journalism and rely on it for a big part of your hardcore experience.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
