Learning curves - Christian Hardcore parts I-V.

As always with these histories, there is a risk of errors and omissions.  I welcome your comments and corrections.

I.

I have started and restarted this post a few times now, spending countless hours thinking, writing, and researching (listening to old records, watching YouTube videos, etc.).

The challenge is this: I became very active in the hardcore scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  I played in bands, I put on shows, I volunteered at DIY showspaces and at a collectively-run punk rock record store.  Much like my exposure to Christianity (and its concomitant music scene), my involvement in the hardcore scene was an important and formative time in my life, and I came into that scene via the Christian hardcore bands that I was introduced to in the mid-1990s.

So I'm grateful for those bands and their influence, and for opening my eyes to the larger scene (and in this case, the word scene doesn't really do justice to what was going on in the world of hardcore punk - a world that challenged the political order, gender roles, our race and class system, and even diet), but it was that very exposure that cast a light on the limits of the Christian hardcore scene.

Mostly.  Or so I thought.  Or, the truth is, after all of this writing and thinking and listening, I have no fucking clue.

I was prepared to write a really scathing critique of the Christian hardcore scene and how they got it really wrong in a lot of cases, and while there's room for some of that honesty, I also need to be honest about the fact that, in most cases, they weren't too far off the mark of what their "secular" counterparts were doing.  Maybe the problem is that they culled, initially, from a very small pool of influences, and when many later bands visited that pool, the only additions to it had been the early Christian bands themselves.  The natural result of this is going to be a recycling of sounds and ideas, but this happens all the time, and is how regional (and other) scenes and sounds develop, and is usually not that terrible of a thing.

II.

And so in sticking with the decision to approach this with a degree of honesty, I might as well acknowledge what the real challenge is.  Hardcore punk expanded my worldview tremendously, and while for years I embraced new ideas and ways of thinking, folding them into my ever-developing faith, it was at times a challenge (though I was loathe to admit this to myself at the time).

In the end, challenges to my faith proved to be too much, and then one day, I didn't believe anymore, and realized I hadn't for quite some time.  The framework was still there, and I still liked thinking theoretically within it (when Scripture says this, it can be interpreted this social justice-y way), but the faith was gone.  I hadn't prayed in some time, or read the Bible, and I didn't feel like either was missing.  My faith, my spirituality, my connection (or need of one) to Something Beyond was gone, and has been ever since, and while I respect religious belief in others and feel that there is a wealth of beauty in it, it's something I can't get at.  Moreover, I feel absolutely at peace with this.

Of course, hardcore punk music didn't do this to me, and it is likely an end I would have found for myself anyway.  In a recent conversation, JH said that I "burned hot and bright," and maybe there was nothing left, so maybe it's no wonder my anxious, ADD personality couldn't sustain that kind of zeal for more than the dozen years that I gave to it.

And it was that very zeal that drew me to hardcore.  Who in their late teens or early twenties doesn't appreciate a very strident, cut and dry worldview?  I definitely did.  Which is how I came to be a straightedge evangelical vegan Christian with anarchist leanings, in no particular order.  It looks goofy now, and I'm sure it was to many then, but it obviously made a certain sense to me.

Even as hardcore was diverse and pushing boundaries of what the status quo could be, it did provide a sort of moral framework with which to take on the world, and sometimes that produced some narrow thinking.  Despite all contradictions, then, it isn't too hard to see where a bunch of evangelical Christians were able to carve out a place for themselves within this scene.

I was one of these, some years after the Christian hardcore scene had become more established, and in the years since losing my faith I've often reflected on this and other evangelical pursuits I was involved with, mostly wondering why I didn't just leave people alone.  This is likely the source of my disdain for much the Christian hardcore scene; ultimately I find that sort of evangelism disrespectful, and I suppose I want to alternately purge it from my memory or castigate myself for it.

Here is why this is silly of me: For starters, our band wasn't even all that evangelical, aside from being a Christian band that sang about our faith.  I'm not sure our goal was to save souls, as much as to stake out a space for ourselves.  Secondly, in researching old hardcore, I came across this video from 7 Generations, a vegan straightedge band from the early 2000s, including a minute and a half of preaching about veganism, including the emotional appeal and "you don't have to believe me, you can go home and look it up for yourself, find it out for yourself" I came to associate with altar calls as a young teen.  Basically, it's as or more obnoxious than anything I remember any Christian hardcore band doing (but don't think I won't highlight the notable exceptions).

So I'm starting over, being nicer, and remembering a really fun time in music, and with the (decidedly non-Christian) Gorilla Biscuits in my ear: Too bad you can't see / all the good things that I see.

III.

Given hardcore punk's long history, it should be a challenge to write about Christian hardcore music while staying within the strict confines of a blog which is bound by blood oath to covering ONLY the years 1990 to 1999.

But it's not.

It's easy, and that's a shame.

In 1993, hardcore, like me, was fifteen years old (The Middle Class and Black Flag both released pioneering EPs in 1978, but Santa Ana's The Middle Class came first), and had a long history, though you'd never know it, listening to Christian music.  There were always punk bands, to be sure, but listening to Christian music, excluding the Crucified, it was as if Focused were the first hardcore band.

There was no reference within the Christian scene, musical or otherwise, to the first wave of hardcore typified by bands like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, and the Dead Kennedys, and it was as if the youth crew hardcore of the late 1980s as played by the Gorilla Biscuits, Youth of Today, and Bold had never even happened.

You have the Crucified, mentioned elsewhere and really deserving of some serious coverage of their own at some point.  They were a crossover thrash band, which means they had one foot in the metal camp and another in the hardcore punk camp, though I think for a lot of people they were either another metal band that they liked or another punk band that they liked, and so many people missed the connection to hardcore.  Fair enough.  At a certain point, Adam and I were saying to each other recently, pinpointing a genre gets kind of silly.

But for the sake of argument, let's at least say that the Crucified had ties to hardcore, a la Anthrax, Suicidal Tendencies, Hirax, et al.  They were a band until 1993 their first time around, but their final full length, Pillars of Humanity, was released in 1991.

IV.

And then, in 1993, a fledgling Tooth and Nail Records released Bow, the debut from Southern California's Focused.

Let's be fair.  When Tooth and Nail burst onto the scene, I was excited.  I bought Focused's first record and loved it.  But I didn't know the first thing about hardcore.  A portable black and white television looks like a miracle to someone stumbling out of the woods, completely unfamiliar with technology, but it's no 3-D Blu-Ray, right?  See Plato for more on this phenomenon. 

In the band's defense, there was a lot of plodding mid-tempo hardcore being played at that point, and Focused (maybe with a different singer and/or a drummer who could effectively play fast parts) might have been able to hang in there with the likes of Outspoken, Strife, or the rest of the New Age, Conversion, Revelation, or Victory rosters (indeed, if I'm not mistaken, they played shows with many of these bands).  Not only that, but next time you're tempted, like i was, to hate on the first Focused record, go back and listen to Chorus of Disapproval.  They were stylistically a little different, but from roughly the same era, and kids today still go crazy for that shit, even though it's not very good.  

But there was also a lot of interesting hardcore music being created to which the Christian scene was tone-deaf: Kent McClard's Ebullition records was in full swing, releasing emotive hardcore and post-hardcore bands like Fuel, Moss Icon, Julia, and Portraits of Past.  Bloodlink was doing similar work on the East Coast (with plenty of overlap).  Integrity were just starting to rage, Los Crudos were blazing trails in Chicago, and a million other bands were doing incredibly interesting things within the scope of hardcore.

The early Christian "spirit-filled hardcore" bands seemed more apt to follow in the footsteps of the more straightforward straightedge bands -- bands that, while in many ways awesome, were maybe not as interested in creativity or pushing the boundaries of the genre. 

If this is harsh, let it be harsh.  There are people who don't know the first thing about hardcore who make the early Christian hardcore bands sound like they were pioneers.  They weren't.  They were vying to participate in a flourishing scene, to be sure, and in many cases were surprisingly successful (getting on to bills, etc.), and that's great, but to ignore the hard work of their contemporaries and forebears is, at best, a bit short-sighted.

Anyway, here is Focused at their best during this era:

Like a sword / two-sided / the sharpened edge ... but if it's two-sided, aren't both sides sharp?

V.

Next came Unashamed.  The guitars were dirtier, shredded harder, the energy was higher, with more of a slowed-down New York hardcore approach (though they, like Focused, were from Southern California).  The drumming, though, was the worst thing ever, and pretty much ruins the record, which otherwise might have been pretty great.

Unashamed were, I think, better than Focused, but didn't seem like it at the time because of the awful drumming and poor recording quality.  Thankfully, someone had the good idea to tack three live songs on at the end of Silence, their debut album, which showcased some of the band's raw energy.  On one of the songs, singer Jeff Jacquay says, "you know, we're not doing this for any other reason than to get the word of God out.  It's not about money, it's not about fame, it's about what we found true in our lives and that's Jesus Christ.  We don't mean to throw it down your throat, but we're trying to help you because we love you."  This was in a song that began with "Nevermind those scientists / with their crooked lies," presumably a reference to evolution or the Big Bang theory or global warming or some other craziness.

It seems that Unashamed's mission was to evangelize, an undertaking that can alternately be viewed as the natural product of youthful zeal or arrogant and disrespectful, depending on the vantage point of the onlooker.

At this point, the Christian hardcore scene remained largely isolated, partially due the (understandably) insular nature of these bands, partially because Tooth and Nail hadn't really yet broken out of the Christian bookstore distribution circuit, and largely because many hardcore kids had suspicions about Christianity.  In an interview, Jacquay said "I think that there was an overall acceptance of Tooth and Nail within the hardcore scene," something that's just patently untrue.  He goes on to report that "Sure, there were some who dispised [sic] Tooth and Nail but that came from a hated [sic] of all things with ties to any religion.  I think Equal Vision was in the same boat.  But generally everything was cool."

Equal Vision Records was founded by Youth of Today/Shelter/Better than a Thousand frontman, hardcore god, and Hare Krishna devotee Ray Cappo.  Initially the label released solely Krishna hardcore, diversifying their roster in the mid-nineties, and even if they hadn't, there are two major differences from the Tooth and Nail scenario: 1) While many in the hardcore community might have thought Ray Cappo's conversion to Hare Krishna an odd move, they still respected him because he was Ray Cappo.  2) Unlike Christianity, Krishna was kind of an unknown quantity at the time, and as such was often met with less skeptical eyes.

No videos on the YouTubes of Unashamed during this era.  Sorry, dudes.

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Next up: Helpless Amongst Friends, Strongarm, Six Feet Deep, Overcome, and more