In place of an introduction...

As with most technology, I'm coming a little bit late in the game. Blogging never seemed that interesting to me, and it certainly didn't strike me as the super-democratic endeavor many people made it out to be. However, I realize I'm losing touch with the current goings on in hardcore punk, a music scene that's always been very dear to me, and I thought this might be a good avenue to communicate with people about it, and perhaps to share some of my experiences of it.

It seems like tape trading, zine reading, and general interest in bands and scenes of the past has been on the wane for a while, and the punk and hardcore scenes have become much more globalized and significantly less local. Many people seem to sing the praises of platforms like Myspace and the like for "getting the word out", which it has done well, but to the detriment of much local flavor. Perhaps that's my impression from living in NYC for a number of years, where there didn't seem to be much in the way of a hardcore scene after 2000 at all. Or, perhaps I was too busy to take notice.

Either way, printed zines, demo tapes, hand drawn flyers, and the activities that produced these artifacts seem to have made way for webzines, myspace pages, and blogs. Both the speed at which information becomes available and the vast amount of it there is diminishes some of the coherence that comes about when scenes develop more organically. Sure, there might be 3 blogs/ websites for ever zine there was, but it doesn't seem like it helps scenes develop (specifically; hardcore scenes) any better. It seems a lot LESS prevalent that there are local scenes springing up that are documented the way Dischord documented DC scene of the early and mid 80's, Touch and Go the early midwest hc scene, or even WreckAge Records the NY scene of the early '90s. Of course there are exceptions; Toronto seems to have developed some amazing bands in the past few years, Copenhagen's had some great bands in the circle that developed around Amdi Petersens Armee some years ago, and now it seems like there's a good number of bands springing up in the South-eastern seaboard of the US.

That said; I don't care for nostalgia and I'm not interested in being critical of what's going on today. If what I mentioned has been lost to make way for some technological innovations, I certainly won't lose a lot of sleep over it. I have enough other interests that I don't feel a profound loss and I know from experience that doing a print zine is too time consuming for me to be able to do one now. However, perhaps I can find some other way to share my viewpoint and experiences. Some of the best zines simply exposed information and shared experiences of music from a very personal point of view (remember Hardware, Guillotine, even Radio Riot?); that's what I'd like to give a try. There are a few blogs I've come across that actually do this in a way that may very well take the place of tape trading, etc.

My particular experiences in hardcore/punk extend from the early 90's NJ/ NY scenes, and my memories are of the Court Tavern, the Down Under, 67 Handy Street, Princeton Arts Council, Coney Island High, CBGB's, ABC No Rio, the Pipeline, etc etc. While of course I'm rather smitten with the canonical early days of hardcore, that's not what I come out of, I'd like to give pay homage and give voice to some people, places, and things that might otherwise be forgotten.

That said, I'd also like to familiarize myself with what's going on today.
Cheers!