- Hardcore for Women – A site to encourge women’s participation in hardcore punk rock. Photographs, a manifesto and links.
- Hardcore Pride Webring – Hardcore punk rock webring.
- Hardcore Underground – Free site for all DIY hardcore bands and their information, with release ads, mini homesites for bands, MP3 downloads and show listings.
- HC Stuff – Profiles, lyrics, discographies, photos, and links from The Used, Raised Fist, Sick of it All, Cave-in, Snapcase, and Song of Zarathustra.
- Kill-O-Rama.de – Information on bands like Immanuel Cunt, Destroyer, Alma Atta and The Omnipresent Penisknight with MP3s, videos, picture galleries, a guestbook and contact information.
- NotPopular.com – For those with a love for punk, hardcore, and straight edge music and also a love for talking and meeting new people. Profiles of members, featured bands with MP3’s, record reviews and message boards.
- N.Y.H.C. – A Documentary – A documentary about the New York Hardcore scene around 1997, focusing on bands like 108, 25 Ta Life and Madball.
Hardcore punk (or hardcore) is a faster and heavier version of punk rock usually characterized by short, loud, and often passionate songs with exceptionally fast tempos and chord changes.
Hardcore originated in the late 1970s and early ’80s in North America, primarily in and around Los Angeles and Washington, DC, but also in around New York City, Vancouver, Boston, and other cities. Former DC club promoter Steven Blush claimed, in his book, American Hardcore: A Tribal History, that hardcore was punk rock adapted for suburban teens. Hardcore lyrics often express righteous indignation at society, usually from a politically left perspective.
The origin of the term «hardcore punk» is uncertain. One story is that the term was coined by New York City producer and manager Bob Sallese while promoting a show by the band The Mob, circa 1981, at a Bayside, Queens club. (The common New York term for fast punk, at the time, was «thrash.») Another possibility is that it comes from the Hardcore ’81 album by Vancouver’s D.O.A.
Nevertheless, the term was used in the California fanzine Flipside in the early 1980s, although not in the sense of a particular musical style, but in a sociological sense, to positively describe acts which were in the «in crowd» of the Los Angeles punk scene.
Until roughly 1983, the term «hardcore» was used fairly sparingly, mainly as an adjective, not as the name of a defined musical genre: American teenagers who were into hardcore considered themselves into «punk» — as opposed to «punk rock» or «77 punk,» the earlier, slower style of the Sex Pistols et al., which they generally considered hopelessly dated and passé.
«Hardcore»‘ was initially an in-group term, meaning «music by people like us,» and included a surprisingly wide range of sounds, from hyper-speed punk to sludgy dirge-rock, and often including art/experimental bands such as Mission of Burma, The Stickmen, and Flipper. Today (and for the purpose of this article), it refers more or less exclusively to what used to be known as ‘thrash.’
Hardcore had a huge influence on other forms of rock music, especially in America. The San-Francisco-based heavy metal band Metallica were among the first crossover artists (circa 1982-83), incorporating the compositional structure and technical proficiency of metal with the speed and aggression of hardcore (Metallica would eventually cover three Misfits songs). Venom were another very early crossover band, as were Hellhammer and Slayer (formed in 1982, Huntington Beach, CA) a largely influential «thrash metal» band who , put out an album in 1996, Undisputed Attitude, which portrayed their hardcore influences by covering hardcore songs on the album by bands such as Minor Threat (formed in 1980, Washington, DC) and Verbal Abuse (early 80’s to current, Texas). The new style became known as «Thrash metal» — or, later, «Speed metal» (another transitional term was «Speedcore»‘), and soon became a trend which still exists today, including other bands such as Megadeth and Anthrax, with Slayer in the well known ranks.
The rising influence of heavy metal in the hardcore scene —the Boston scene had gone over en masse, circa 1984, while other bands such as Corrosion of Conformity, from Raleigh, North Carolina, gained prominence through popularity among metal fans–dismayed some hardcore punks, especially veterans, who felt that the hardcore bands who were crossing over to metal styles were selling out to some of the very sensibilities that hardcore had organized against. Long-time hardcore punks, who remembered only a couple of years earlier fighting in streets with hostile metalheads, now felt that those same people were attempting to co-opt hardcore. These die-hard hardcore punks argued that the new long-haired interpreters of hardcore were merely mimicking emotions, such as raw anger, that they did not truly feel.
A 1986 concert by the U.K. band Discharge in New York City generated brief international notoriety when a crowd of roughly 1,500 paid $10 admission and pelted the band with garbage, an apparent response to the band’s recent turn to a more metallic sound.
In 1985, New York’s Stormtroopers of Death, an Anthrax side project, released the extremely popular album Speak English or Die. Though it bore similarities to Thrash metal, such as a characteristic bass-heavy guitar sound, and fast tempos and chord changes, the album was distinguished from Thrash metal by its lack of guitar solos and heavy use of crunchy chord breakdowns (a New York hardcore technique) known as «mosh parts». Other bands, most notably Suicidal Tendencies (from Los Angeles) and DRI (from Austin, Texas) played music similar to that of Stormtroopers of Death. The music, dubbed Crossover in the 1980s, is today often called punk metal.
Many hardcore bands branched out and began experimenting with other styles, moods and concerns as their careers progressed in the 1980s; the music of many of these bands are some of the earliest examples of what became known as alternative rock. Hüsker Dü’s artistic growth from Land Speed Record to their final album Warehouse: Songs and Stories is a chief example of this development. Grunge was especially heavily influenced by hardcore. The sense of liberation that many of the grunge bands got–that you didn’t have to be the world’s greatest musician to form a band–was at least as important as the music. Even though the early grunge sound was more influenced by Black Sabbath and Black Flag’s My War album than hardcore punk rock, bands like Mudhoney and Nirvana would instill a traditional hardcore influence as well as take the sound into more conventional pop-oriented territory. (Kurt Cobain once described Nirvana’s sound as «The Knack and The Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath.») The popularity of grunge ultimately resulted in renewed interest in American hardcore in the ’90s.
In the early ’90s, bands like NOFX and Bad Religion, both of which had been around since the early ’80s, achieved varying levels of mainstream success. They added catchy melodies and anthemic choruses to the hardcore template whilst removing much of the aggression and anger that had been the genre’s trademark. While NOFX and Bad Religion are usually accepted as authentic by fans of hardcore punk, other Pop punk bands that had a poppier sound, such as Green Day and blink-182, were often accused of being «sellouts» or «posers.»
Bands that retained the aggression of ’80s Hardcore into the ’90s include Agnostic Front , The Dwarves, The Distillers and Zero Bullshit (although debatably The Dwarves and The Distillers took just as much from influences outside of the hardcore genre as inside it). Many early hardcore bands have regrouped.
The hardcore punk scene had an influence that spread far beyond music. The straight edge philosophy was rooted in a faction of hardcore particularly popular on the East Coast. Hardcore also put a great emphasis on the DIY punk ethic, with many bands making their own records, flyers, and other items, and booking their own tours through an informal network of like-minded people. Radical environmentalism and veganism found popular expressions in the hardcore scene.
