January 17, 2012
"About when we were writing Hidden World, we made a pretty conscious decision that we didn’t want to be a big fish in a mostly small and stagnant hardcore world. We knew that almost every person who had ever done something important in indie rock (ie “the mainstream”) used to either be in a shitty punk band, or grew up going to punk shows in the 80s, which meant we knew we’d hit the soft spot for a lot of people in useful places, but also that all those people had made their successes after giving up punk and moving on to more palatable projects, and that we couldn’t really think of any hardcore punk band that had broken into the mainstream/indie world while they actually existed as a band. Punk has always been something that people love to name check, but also like to keep at a distance. A punk band can pretty much only be important if they’ve been broken up for 15 years. Either that, or they have to be punk in secret, like Husker Du. A broad faced punk band can only really expect a life of quarantine. Think about the defining tragedy of The Ramones, one of the most iconic and influencial American bands ever to exist. Even while a million people were wearing Ramones tshirts in every country on the planet, they existed under this constant sense of under achievement, because they just wanted to be legitimate rockstars, and all they were ever allowed to be was a popular punk band. This sense of failure of the Ramones project permeates like every interview they did. They were footnotes at their own last show, the bulk of the story about what famous guests they were able to conjure up, like Eddie Vedder or whatever. Can you imagine how frustrating that must have been? These guys that had watched on the sidelines for 20 years as their cultural output, that influenced everything that would become even remotely popular in music, was relegated and marginalized?"

—

Mike Haliechuk of Fucked Up. The research and mental preparation I’m doing for writing about David Comes To Life sometimes feels like it’s only making it harder to ever get anything down on paper that explains how I actually feel. But this quote fascinates me, and I’m sure the sentiment behind it is bound up in what I have to say, somewhere.

More to come.

12:01am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-FUayEvLV3c
(Notes: 15)
  
  1. andrewtsks reblogged this from hardcorefornerds and added:
    Well, OK, you don’t like them and find their music boring—I completely disagree, but I can accept that. However, I have...
  2. hardcorefornerds reblogged this from andrewtsks and added:
    I don’t really care about ‘integrity’ in this sense, and I mainly referred to it because it was brought up in the...
  3. andrewtsks posted this