BUT I totally hate the way it is dealt with hardcore here. The variety of styles reaches from about youth crewish old school to old schoolish youth crew. With this broad taste it is quite a logical consequence that there are amazingly ten reviews of which two are zines… Well the amount of reviews indeed is no indicator for the quality of a zine but in this case it is a representative symptom of the disease of narrow-mindedness. If I look at the logo of A Step Apart (another band on that tape) I don’t know if I should laugh, cry, puke or rip someone’s head off as it shows X’d up hands along with an X watch that are tying a Nike basketball shoe and – guess what! – the shoestrings are forming another X. Has anyone told those guys that there is something else in this world apart from straight edge? And I don’t mean record collecting by that…

The shit culminates in an interview question to Espen of Damage Control where he is asked what his favourite T-Shirt design was and he replies it was Uniform Choice’s “use your head” design. Is there anyone in living in the present there or are you all living in the past??? I mean even d.i.y. extremists like Sick Of It All used to sing “for the fakes and frauds it's a fucking fashion show” and were damn right about it…

I am totally into people doing something themselves and creating a scene but here is something going totally wrong. This got nothing to do with hardcore the way I understand it. This is a nostalgia club of adolescent boys whose world turns around T-Shirt designs and the question who really belonged to the original youth crew back in the glory days. All the interviews with bands like Lion Of Judah are absolutely pointless and unsubstantial and apart from The First Step, who are okay, all bands on the tape suck. In my eyes this is absolutely ridiculous. When Minor Threat or S.O.A. or Bad Brains or whoever started to play hardcore the music had power. It was extreme and it was putting their teenage angst and denial of society or at least parts of it into an adequate musical form. So it did when Uniform Choice or Youth Of Today sprung up a few years later but it could only fit because the bands were sounding different from the first wave mentioned above. If bands today try to sound like their favourites from decades ago they will never reflect their social reality and they will never have any impact whatsoever. It will always be folklore for a small circle (pit) of insiders. Hardcore was about breaking laws and all these bands and this zine do is building up new laws over and over and trying hard not to break the holy ones set up by their idols at some point of time in a distant past…

But if you want to you may very well go on with your allotment hobby shit. As long if you hurt nobody (or will you bash me now?) and stay in your small niche I am fine with that. Or as DS 13 put it: “if this is hardcore I’d rather be punk, if this is straight edge I’d rather be a drunk”…  [jan]

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