Hybrid Moments - On Today’s Skramz
I turned 20 in the grasp of a boy I would never know, wrapped up in sweaty limbs and cigarette ash. In a room far too bare, and in a city far too known, a few blocks away from the prestigious bourgeois hospital I was born in.
I turned 20 against the backdrop of holiday sale advertisements, neoliberal nationalist monuments, and the coke bags of bureaucrats' disgruntled (and secretly wealthy) children. Flashy americana red and green fluorescence strangled my youth, as I gazed out of speeding car windows, the glass muffled and distorted by our hot breath, laughter, joints, and quiet whispered nothings to one another.
In an effort to distance myself from all other coming-of-age tales, I will not write about lustful infatuations, tendered-hearted kisses, or twin flames. I will not write about finding myself in pastel pink-pressed pills or indie rock music. I will not write about virginity, or purity, or heartbreak, or romance. I will even try not to write about the dear friends I met while bridging the gap from a teenager to your twenty-something scenester.
Rather, I wish to explore how this moment, and all the similarly shared moments in time, in this place, in this scene – sounded. Why they sound the way they do, and why listening to the sound of the youth of these places in this situated time matters.
So, for a moment, let me drop my needle, let me snort the cultural crystalline powders hanging from your belt chain, let me light your flashy coloured and grossly unregulated spliff, let me kiss your cold, pursed, trembling lips, let me taste your substance riddled gums against mine, and let me feel what this fleeting moment has to offer us.
Amidst sparsely dispersed apartment high rises, boutique pet stores, chain coffee spots, and slightly dodgy metropolitan gas stations, I found myself being slammed awake by wet, fruitful, energized bodies. Ski masks covering their faces, X’s marking their fists, movement, thrusts, jolts of energy flew at me with little regard for myself or anyone around me - fuck- I’ve found myself at a hardcore show.
It wasn’t easy to get here either, this moment is an accumulation of hours of web surfing: “dc underground music venue” “dc raves”, “dc shows underground under 21”, “how to not get carded when buying cigarettes in america”. After perusing reddit forums, “centralising the scene” instagram accounts, and DMing especially stylized +1 telegram accounts, I was able to reach this space, this moment, one so foreign and opposite of the European club scene that I’ve grown far too accustomed to.
Us continentally separated sonic adolescents already know the sound of this space, but only the reverberations made here some 40/30 years ago - ala the guitars of Fugazi, the permanent record store posters of Bad Brains, and maybe even your fathers old grimey Minor Threat CD. The popularised sound of D.C. is archaic at this point, reminiscent of a time when the music here seemed to speak to something, when the air of the city was just right to start two stepping and sky punching.
Right now, standing in this packed, once traditional 1890s Victorian era living room, feels like going back in time, like the shitty VHS videos of Waiting Room 16-year-old me watched on repeat. But I have no time machine, and to deny the particularly contemporary aspects of this moment would be doing a disservice to all the sweaty shoulders and arms that have wrapped themselves around me. Because, although it may be easy to look at this moment, and say that these are just hardcore’s forgotten bastard children - desperately attempting to relive a moment they watched playout on archived Youtube videos and Spotify playlists - it's never that simple.
The bass shaking the walls and coating my skin isn’t from your typical 1.5 minute fast hard repetitive hardcore song, the vocalist doesn't pop up in between clashes of noise to yell about white supremacy or alcoholism. There is no rough end or rough stop, rather these songs find the ability to flow out and in of each other, one starting just as the effects of the elaborate guitar pedal board begins to wear off and float into the atmosphere of the surrounding private property. My punch wielding, Marlboro gold smoking companions, only refer to it as ‘skramz” but you can exchange this localized phrase for screamo, post-hardcore, hardcore-punk, or even most frighteningly of them all - emo.
No, these sonic phrases are much different, even though most of the crowd and posse surrounding the musicians still sport reprinted tees of an older hardcore royalty, their sound is distinct from their attire. These songs are - at their core and as given in their genre’s name - emotional. They are still heavy and rough and insight a similar level of violence as their aging counterparts, but the content, the visceral intensity, and the intimacy of the lyrics plead and beg and scream to you in a way Salad Days never could. Male sirens swimming in oceans of eyeliner and studded armbands.
Of course, politics, injustice and corruption still exist - but not at this moment, not in this particular time in space. Songs of an incoming leftist revolution or “breaking free from the man” no longer ring true, these sentiments have been screamed across venues and bars and halls for far too long to mean anything anymore. These kids don’t care to listen to yet another member of their community bitch and moan about the “political and economic state of the world” - why would they? They already live in this nation’s capital, they already get bombarded with it enough on their smartphones, this fabric is so deeply embedded into their reality that stating the obvious would only leave behind a bad taste of inauthenticity.
Instead, what has these kids moving is the noise and emotional momentum of lost lovers, tales of self-realisation and inadequacy, missed moments, situations that never were and heartbreaks that never could have been. “For the first time, since I can remember, I thought to myself, I'd like to wake up tomorrow, looking forward, all I see is you” the lead vocalist growls into the makeshift sound system. Such intimacy has changed the way this generation touches hardcore music, these songs are not only made for short bursts of macho male dominating energy but also for gentle caresses, messy kisses, and melancholic shared cigarettes because “Smokers Die Younger” but this moment may just as well sooner.
