The thing that made Inside Front stand out so much as a zine in the late 90s was their attempt to infuse punk/hardcore with an element of romance. Looking back, it seems to me like an obvious reaction to the ubiquitous enforcement of white male guilt that had come to dominate the scene. “Your politics are boring as fuck,” said some anonymous CrimethIncer the first time any of them got writing into Maximum Rocknroll, and whoever that was, they were correct. I think at the time their goal was to bring an air of romance and passion into the political causes that were generally supported by the punk scene, to make political interest and involvement seem like a worthwhile and progressive outlet for our energies, instead of being both a pointless waste of time and a drudge, which is how it felt then. I don’t think they ever succeeded—they did too much romanticization, in their earlier days, of the exact place most of us already were, and later on, when they went for a more substantive critique, they ended up right back in a place of pointless drudgery, one that was perhaps even less effective because of how many excuses for middle-class privilege had already been set in place by their earlier work. These days, that CrimethInc mentality has evolved into the dominant mindset of the folk-punk scene, which is, as best as I can make out, “everything we’re all already doing is totally revolutionary, except for the things that obviously aren’t, which are totally excusable.”

CrimethInc weren’t folk-punks though, at least not originally. They were into the point where political/straight edge moshcore met up with political crust—a musical convergence point that didn’t originally encompass any bands. There were bands that came close on both sides (Integrity, Amebix), but nothing that totally fit. But soon that changed, and as that change occurred, Gehenna became the CrimethInc mentality’s flagship band.

Even more than actual CrimethInc ringleaders Catharsis, Gehenna embodied the dark, anti-social worldview that was the eternal starting point for CrimethInc’s quest for romance. Even when they had just started and were still more like a straight edge moshcore band than anything else, their songs didn’t focus on anything so mundane as straight edge or beefs between ex-friends, like most bands of that stripe. Instead, they took the deep-ecology principles of hardline as a jumping-off point for condemnation of the entire human race, condemning all civilizational development as shit and hurling contempt at all responsible (including, presumably, themselves). By their third EP, their music had sped up to a frenetic tempo that made youth-crew seem slow but was still just this side of the inhuman speeds of power violence—which allowed them to retain an essential human quality to their sound, even as Mike Cheese’s lyrics were moving further all the time into paranoid, Lovecraftian flights of fancy. Cheese’s guttural vocals were closer to the sounds one would expect to emanate from the throat of a monster than from anything human, and this fit well with his outsider’s perspective which seemed to regard itself as separate, in some respects below, and yet eternally more intelligent than the human masses that surrounded it. In songs like “Birth of Vengeance”, “Covet Thy Crown” and “Crush Opposition”, this outsider gave every indication of being prepared for and on the verge of launching an assault on civilization as a whole—an assualt civilization seemingly hadn’t a prayer of withstanding.

This defiant stance of disdainful outsider fit perfectly with CrimethInc’s constant romanticization of struggle for food, shelter and, seemingly most importantly, freedom from mainstream society’s arbitrary restrictions. Truthfully, I couldn’t relate to Inside Front’s endless references to poverty and homelessness any more than I could relate to Gehenna’s hazy images of mythological zombie armies. And to be really truthful, it’s always seemed to me that a fair amount of gilding the lily must have gone into those stories in Inside Front—after all, the thick newsprint magazine in which I read them came out on a regular basis for years. But there were emotions underlying all of this fiction, emotions that I understood and related to, that seemed true even if their circumstances did not: alienation and depression.

These days, when I look back at that whole CrimethInc era, I see the entire endeavor as one that was undertaken in order to provide punks and hardcore kids, who at the time felt stifled by the emotionless nature of the music and the scene they were part of, with the ability to express their emotions openly and honestly within the environment of the scene. The fact that they still felt the need to hide this outlet for expression beneath layers of subterfuge probably indicates that the endeavor was doomed from the start to end up the way it did: as an expression of emotion, but one that was fundamentally DIShonest. But, regardless, the music that came out of this movement captured a feeling that still speaks to me today. Perhaps it’s a shame, in some ways, that I’m still feeling that same fundamental alienation and depression that initially drew me to Gehenna and Inside Front. But then again, look at the current state of society—is it really any surprise?

In response to my guilt at not posting on here more, around half a dozen scanned-image posts will closely follow this one.

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   late 06/early 07

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