Let me tell you about the time I tried to foment a revolution. Clearly it wasn’t a successful one and with 20 years of hindsight its insanity was obvious. Though in the heat of the moment nothing seemed more sensible.
I thought all the particulars conducive to a successful overthrow were in my favor. They were not. I thought a new cultural wave was cresting on History’s shore. It was not. I thought I had the correct board on which to smoothly ride that wave. I did not. I thought I had sympathizers. I did not. I thought my opposition was vulnerable. Not on my account it wasn’t. I thought, even failing all that, that my cause was just. It was kind of.
Of course it helps to delineate between the cause I was advocating and the cause I wanted to replace.
About 1998 or 1999 I’d decided to become a punk. I can’t remember what precisely it was that compelled me to it, other than it seemed like the correct thing to do. The problem was that there were other punks at school with longstanding tribal bonds whose trust and acceptance I very much desired. Some didn’t care. Others cared about as little but, seeing certain personality quirks in me that lacked social graces and feared condemnation of “being a poser,” saw fit not to make my inclusion an easy one.
That gloss is not totally fair to those who indulged my over-eagerness and gave good-faith or at least not-bad-faith guidance. But the sense of intrusion was so strong that my formation in punk was done in a cloistered setting. I didn’t so much as become punk as study it. Relying largely on the Yahoo! directory, I explored the full range of punk and underground music, comparing neighboring subcultures (goth, rivethead, metalhead, rude boy) and punk’s own taxonomy (SHARP, emo, skater, pop punk, oi, hardcore, and so on). It encouraged me to jump around. For a while I was a rivethead, which was a bad thing to be post-Columbine, then I was straight-edge, which only cemented my ostracism in a predominantly drug-friendly scene. Then I embraced pre-Nevermind grunge, which no one cared about. Finally, and most crucially, I returned to the flow of the clique with hardcore.
This all seems typically adolescent, yet it exposed me to such a range of music that no one was ever going to tell me about that it formed a conception of underground culture that went entirely against my peers. 15 years before I’d ever read a word of Walter Pater, I had discovered and embraced a kind of aestheticism. Artistic excellence rather than group consensus was paramount in a culture that was worth its name. The problem was that this was a minority opinion in the hardcore-accented—not to mention American—punk scene at school, the agenda of which was guided by someone I’m going to call “Dr. Pepper,” because he emanated authority and his decrees had a weirdly medicinal aftertaste.
“Dr. Pepper” was not unique to our clique. This type always rises across scenes by sheer force of enthusiasm. He—and it is typically a he—always has the energy to attend shows, to network in scenes outside of town, to know certain bands personally, to keep up with the most anticipated record releases, and to have ready judgments on those releases. I was not privy to the in-depth critiques, assuming they took place, I only got the gist that each new record from whatever band was always worse than the one it followed. Even if it was a band whose records were totally indistinguishable, like Kid Dynamite, Hot Water Music, or Spazz. I don’t believe everyone agreed with this, or with the nature of his position, but it was never questioned, and I think in some respects it carried over to the rest of the group. How could it not? This was the majesty of authority that sustained hardcore for decades.
But hardcore was changing. It was moving further away from the aesthetic strictures of the past decade into more nuanced, metallic territory. Bands like Poison the Well and Dillinger Escape Plan were pushing, or at least refining, the boundaries of what hardcore was supposed to sound like. This in itself wasn’t bad, so long, I think, as it was kept in check, that it remained “hardcore” in spirit and did not shirk the community. It was a kind of populist elitism. The conflict was basically this: “Dr. Pepper” and others believed that there was a stark line that divided the true from the sellout. You were either one or the other. For me, selling out was on a spectrum. I was not averse to ambition. I didn’t think, to take the most contested example, that Jawbox’s leaving Dischord was some kind of heresy. It just made artistic sense. Their best records were made on Atlantic’s dime, and they weren’t corrupted by performing on Conan or opening for Stone Temple Pilots. But “Dr. Pepper” was more than just a man with opinions, he was also a talented guitarist, who put that into practice, and that carried some weight compared to me, who had bad or ill-informed opinions and could never get rides to shows. Not that there wasn’t a weakness I thought fit to exploit.
One morning we sat in the cafeteria waiting for school to start and “Dr. Pepper” was seething from what he saw at a Cave In show the night before. They were playing only new stuff, he complained. Even worse, the new stuff “sounded like Pink Floyd.” No matter how much the audience heckled them, presumably a good thing in this context, they wouldn’t play any of their hardcore songs. This piqued my interest. He and another friend had introduced me to Cave In only a few months earlier. First I was given a burned copy of Beyond Hypothermia, a hodgepodge of their early work, with two different vocalists, that didn’t deviate too much from standard chugga-chugga ‘90s hardcore.
Then I got their first proper album, 1998’s Until Your Heart Stops, which was a different matter entirely. On the surface it doesn’t go against the grain of what coincided with it, especially in the Hydrahead Records cohort in which the band moved. But it was soon evident that it had something approaching a singular aesthetic vision. I was transfixed. And in those early days of listening to the album—which was so often that, once I actually bought it like a good boy, I wore the CD into three pieces by college—I worried that I’d come to be ashamed of it in my adulthood. That didn’t happen.
I don’t think I exaggerate in describing the operatic magnificence of that album, which infuses the rigor of Seasons in the Abyss with the grandeur of Disintegration, simply because it just occurred to the band to do so, and all while most of them were not yet 20. Of course it has some of the markers of teenage excess. Some songs are complex simply for complexity’s sake, overstuffed with as many riffs as a song will allow. “The End of Your Rope is a Noose” clocks in at just over eight minutes and feels like three songs in one. The lyrics take a more abstract impressionistic tone against the agro telegrams of Dillinger, the Bukowski-isms of Cable, the raw emoting of Converge and Poison the Well, and the polemics of Botch and Coalesce. They fit the complexity of the music, and like the music can be overwrought. Yet as a whole, the album has a force. “Moral Eclipse” is easily one of the best hardcore songs of the era. “Juggernaut” surely must be one of the best metal songs in turn; while songs like “Halo of Flies” and “Bottom Feeder” play like Sunny Day Real Estate at various stages of demonic possession. They’d raised the bar to such a height that I don’t think anyone has passed it. Not even Cave In themselves as it turned out.
Cave In’s infamous pivot came almost as soon as Until Your Heart Stops was released. They usually opened their sets on the tour with “Luminance,” a then-unreleased song that retained deceptively sufficient mosh-friendly riffs against an increasingly spacey element. By 2000, Cave In was nothing but space, quite literally. Their album Jupiter was loud, sometimes crushingly so, but hardly metal or hardcore. Vocalist Stephen Brodsky no longer felt the obligation to scream, and the band was content with more melodic chords and cohesive song structures. There are highlights: “Big Riff” and “Brain Candle” are still strong rock anthems on the band’s own terms. The album as a whole sounds like Rush, albeit more muscular and Americanized. But it pissed off everyone I disagreed with, and the people I did agree with (Buddyhead) didn’t seem to mind. It was an audacious gesture to which hardcore even at this stage was otherwise allergic. Cave In seemed to want to be more, and for me to not be on board would be philosophically inconsistent. Even if that meant disaster.
It seemed like 2000 was the year that “selling out” became a serious matter. Thursday moved up the food chain to Victory Records. Jimmy Eat World had floundered in the majors, but demos for Bleed American that circulated online at the time indicated a change in fortune. At the Drive-in was the most shocking indicator. After six years of relentless touring and lineup disruptions, the El Paso quintet were omnipresent. Or at least they could be easily found on MTV, Letterman, and all the right magazines (“Emo=MC5” as Rolling Stone described them). Rumors that Cave In was getting signed to RCA bubbled up around this time as well. Even with their sound change that seemed difficult to accept, but once it was confirmed, I did without hesitation. All was going according to plan.
I think most of us still held true to the Spenglerian conception of pop history. The Bad Things would spoil into decadence and be replaced by the pure and true Good Things. We millennials wanted our Nirvana. At the Drive-in seemed like ideal candidates, though in reality their sales momentum did not match their hype, and anyway they went on “indefinite hiatus” within months and fractured into Sparta and The Mars Volta. Everyone’s mom got into Jimmy Eat World, so that was out of the question. That left The Vines (?) and whatever emo band was in the pipeline. I on the other hand went into what can only be called a delirium in which whatever Cave In had planned was going to wipe the slate entirely clean and reorient the cultural landscape as I preferred it.
20 years on, that is an incredibly stupid and unfair expectation, though probably not very different from what the industry itself was trying to impress upon Cave In. Subsequent interviews suggest that the band was being guided against their better judgment in making Antenna. In five years they’d gone from a stockpile of impossible riffs to an arsenal of sharpened power chords. Its production shimmers to the point of blindness, and seems to have been outrageously expensive. It has a strong element of try-hard, though it’s not clear what the album was trying so hard to accomplish. Having made a habit of ditching audiences, it is as if the band submitted themselves as guinea pigs to an A&R rep in hopes of stitching a new and larger one out of whole cloth. Something near that could have been reached, perhaps, if they’d junked tracks two through six, added two strong B-sides, and the earlier single “Lift Off.”
But that was not to be. The album’s notice can be considered adequately whelmed. Alternative Press ominously compared them to Hum. They played Carson Daly’s graveyard shift talk show, which should tell you a lot. I could tell the enthusiasm had waned by how they started reintroducing songs from Until Your Heart Stops into their sets during the lackluster Lollapalooza revival.
I saw them play in 2004. They were doing a kind of time-filling shoestring tour, by van. It was at a banquet hall in Allentown, the kind with a bar and dance floor. The openers, as I recall, were local nobodies. I spoke to Adam McGrath, who didn’t know what they were planning to play. He seemed high, but maybe he was just being coy. Some dudes at the bar heckled them, as usual, to “play ‘Crossbearer.’” They ignored them and, with almost machine-like efficiency, powered through a set comprised mostly of new, more aggressive material. At the merch table, McGrath told me and other fans that they were in contractual limbo and forbidden from releasing new music. They released Perfect Pitch Black on Hydrahead in 2005, followed by 2011’s White Silence. They wisely sidestepped the triumphant return to form and went with careful amalgams of everything they’ve done well.
By that time I’d known that my “revolution” had failed. While writing reviews for the campus paper, Eric, our production editor, slid me a burned CD of an as-yet-unreleased album after an editorial meeting. As advanced copies were hard for me to get, I gladly took it, listened to it that night, and wrote a noncommittal review for Good News for People Who Love Bad News. I’d been aware of Modest Mouse and of their seemingly small but protective fanbase, but I could not muster the passion for Pavement on Adderall. So when I noticed that VH1 viewers felt otherwise, I was like Bill Pullman in Lost Highway, being taunted by Robert Blake in pancake makeup.
It’s easy to look at the person I was 20 years ago and conclude that he did nothing and believed in less. But given how effortlessly I could distort the one principle I actually held, nihilism sounds like an improvement. If I’d simply backed the wrong horse that would be one thing. But I believe what I did was worse. In trying to counter populist elitism, I’d gone to the opposite extreme of aesthetic aristocracy, to which I deferred my own judgment absolutely. Moreover, I’d confused natural artistic progress with forced career momentum. It was not just snobbery on my part, but self-annihilation. Rather than do what was good and proper and assess my relationship to a work of art, I sought to reorient my mind to that of the artists, even if their minds were in no way similar to my own. This was my perverse manner of “respecting the process.” This carried over into my personal relations, especially with “Dr. Pepper” and like people. One particular incident overwhelms me with dread whenever I think about it.
In 2000, Drowningman released their EP, How They Light Cigarettes in Prison, which “Dr. Pepper” had instantly acquired and had a ready assessment: the lyrics “sucked.” I hadn’t heard Drowningman before that point but was now curious. I bought it a little later at a show and could immediately grasp what he was getting at. Vocalist Simon Brody’s lyrics were different, that much was obvious. They had a mordant levity that was rare in hardcore before Every Time I Die and The National Acrobat. They didn’t lament lost love or deceitful friends, they didn’t go on political harangues or do motivational speaking. Their songs were dismal narratives of broken people in dire situations or making questionable choices. (Not for nothing, it was through Drowningman interviews that I’d first learned about Raymond Carver and Mary Gaitskill.) I’d actually thought that they were pretty good. And with a better grasp of literary and rhetorical technique (like irony, which I practiced habitually rather than consciously), I could have argued the point. Instead of grubbing for power, I could have challenged authority. But New Jersey is an unimaginative place, and the New Jersey public school in which “Dr. Pepper” and I found ourselves was, so far as I could tell, not enthused by the range of available imaginative and discursive faculties. At least not for people like us. So I self-annihilated again, forcibly changing my mind and disrespecting both of us.
Until Your Heart Stops was one of the most transgressive artworks of the 1990s. This was not obvious in the era of Marilyn Manson, when the most important transgression was thought to be moral in nature. Manson was hardly shocking compared to Cave In; all he did was tell his audience what they already knew in a theatrical manner, that’s why he was popular. Cave In’s audience were hardly aware of the intellectual and aesthetic boundary-pushing inherent in that album. Impressing it by example rather than by dictum made it all the subtler, yet all the more effective over time. Without realizing it, creative excellence and critical thinking where freed from the restrictions of authority, whether in the form of a self-appointed scene arbiter or some random guidance counselor. They are mine to cultivate. And if I fail to do so, that’s on me.
This has an ironic outcome in my newfound love for authority. When authority is yours and when its scope seems limited, loving it is the easy part. But hardcore in the traditional sense isn’t around anymore, so you go out in search of new, unusual forms to apply it and cultivate it, and you find your authority is like Banquo, lesser and greater. Hopefully this will go down better than my Macbeth phase.