Friday 6/25
[HARD CORE FUNZINE 侍 PRESENTS ～ TALK 4 MAKIN'IT REAL vol,24]
DECAY
D.S.B
FC FIVE
DSL
PUBLIC DOMAIN
ELEMENTS 4 UPWARD
to see all the pictures from the show, go here
the theme of tonight’s show was, “DON’T YOU HATE IT WHEN YOUR MUSCLEBOUND ARMS BECOME SO TOTALLY THICK THAT YOU CAN’T TIE YOUR OWN BANDANA ANYMORE?” I have to admit this is not a question which I had ever asked myself before, but it seemed to be much on the minds of the performers.
I just figured it was another punk show, but when I got there, it was all a bunch of kids I’ve never seen before, all trying to be Mike Muir or something, all frowning and dreaming of their lowrider bicicle and their future stomach tattoo. I kept hearing the phrase ‘new york hardcore’ (“nuu yoku haad kowa”) over and over again. But the people mostly looked like Vatos or little Tupac guys.
I know/care exactly jack shit of a percent about NYHC, so I don’t know if the Japanese guys are just getting it wrong, or if the Americans they’re copying are ALSO super confused. It’s like, “look at me! I’m a rapper! A lowrider! A punk! A jock! Someone call the village people, we need a cop and an Indian too!” all this tomfoolery would be fine, except they take themselves so damn seriously. Like moreso than gothic people. No one is smiling, everyone is trying to be hard. I think they are overdoing the attitude because they KNOW they will never be as hard as the guys in DECAY. Those dudes are seriously burly men, and the fans are like 17 year olds from the countryside who read magazines obsessively, trying to find the ‘real’ things to buy which will make them all burly.
ELEMENTS 4 UPWARD: simple (short fast songs) hardcore that kind of reminded me of suicidal tendencies.
PUBLIC DOMAIN; fucking amazing singer ? the ‘Brown Pride’ shirt, the medallion, the backwards Locs. . .just so vatoish, except he was singing with this total Cookie Monster Death Metal voice. Public domain had the most moustaches and bandannas so they ruled. Plus there's like 20 guys in the band, all sort of wandering around the stage wearing billowy shirts. Plus, during the next band, the singer jumped in the middle of the pit and started doing the ‘Running Man’ which was pretty much the best part of the whole show.
DSL: aside from having one of the most ambiguous names in rock music, and a haircut that resembles a Dick Tracy villain, DSL just play some really good slow rock. I don’t really understand how this whole ‘new york hard core’ thing works, but they can get these slow headbanging tempos but it doesn’t feel like ‘headbanging’ music, it’s got it’s own feeling. Everyone started doing that ‘I’M A HUMAN WINDMILL OUTTA MY WAY!’ dance. One big bald guy even started running around doing handstands and karate high kicks, he was pretty rad. Some of the wimpier gangstas were all holding their hands up to protect themselves in case they got kicked. One guy was sort of pretending that ‘holding your hand up to protect your face’ was in ITSELF kind of a dance, which was even more retarded. Dude, that’s not a dance. You’re just a girly girly girl gangsta.
FC FIVE: what my friend mike calls ‘screamy hardcore’ : you know, atonal, synchopated music that’s really heavy on the mid-range and emo kids like it? Well that’s what happened. These guys jumped really high in the air all the time and the singer seemed to be really happy. I think he was the only guy in this whole ‘tough guy butch festival’ to crack a smile.
DSB: normally they play to a room full of punks, but today they faced a whole mob of 17 year old Tupac/Agnostic Front wannabes (I don’t know how those two performers managed to become interchangeable, but this is the world we are living in). they played really hard and kept jumping off the stage and playing in the audience.
DECAY: decay were really amazing. The songs were simple but good and catchy, the bandannas were low, and the bass player was just not human. The guy was this amazing machine that kept throwing his bass around, waving it like a kid waves a little lollipop, then doing crazy karate high kicks, then grimacing, then just cold murdering like five people with his bare ass, then playing some riffs. It’s easy to make fun of jocks ruining shows with their macho bullshit, but I have to admit that jocks can hella jump around more and do more acrobatic shit, so they can be good performers. Hella other guys from other bands came up and sang with DECAY, and it just kind of turned into chaos.
The dancing: so there was the human windmill, the running man, the guy doing high kicks like some kind of thug Rockette, and then there was this whole new dance I’ve never seen before: the Just Run Across The Whole Room Real Fast And See How Many People You Can Knock Down. Plus some guy with a travis bickle haircut kicked me in the nuts, which was fantastic.
Anyway, it was good fun because it was different. So rock on.
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