HTC & HXC

YOUTUBE LINK: COMEBACK KID- WAKE THE DEAD

This past weekend I spend Saturday night at home with my family. While we were sitting around a bonfire, my cousin started talking about how she went to her first "hardcore" show on Friday night. Her friend had started dating a guy who played in a band, they went out to see him play. Hearing her talk about the experience was interesting to me, because I used to go to those kinds of shows. She interpreted the experience much differently than I did.

My cousin and I are close. we grew up together in similar households, in the same town. Although we went to different schools, we were both on dance teams, liked "girly stuff" and gossiped about boys and teen drama television. It's safe to say that we came from very similar cultural backgrounds. However, one of the few things we don't always see eye to eye on is music. We both like pop, rap, jazz and country, but unlike her, I also enjoy music like punk, post-hardcore, melodic scremo etc. I might not have "looked like it" but in high school I went to a lot of those shows, watched my fair share of "circle pits", stage dived a time or two...and loved every second of it.

My cousin however, described her Friday night excursion as nothing less than horrific. Her first problem was that she had no idea what to wear. Upon consulting her friend's boyfriend, she was told "it's always pretty safe to go with jeans and sumthin' black I guess". They went to the show, but didn't stay long. In her opinion the music was too loud, the words were indistinguishable, the room was too sweaty, and people were running around pushing each other and jumping around like monkeys.

I think the difference in our tastes and interpretations lies not primarily in a predetermined "disposition" towards heavy music, but is rather as Becker states in his article, "the result of a sequence of social experiences in which the person acquires a conception of the meaning of the behavior...which make the activity possible and desirable".

I think that I get pleasure from hardcore punk and other heavy music not because of an inherent taste for it, but because I was taught by friends who already loved it, how to to love it. I remember the first heavy song I heard, given to me on a burned disc from a friend; upon first listen, it rubbed me the wrong way. It was too brash and aggressive, unlike anything I had listened to before. After a couple more plays I learned how to hear the lyrics. I dug deeper and my friends shared what they loved about the music "listen to the breakdown in this one" or " I love that line". I heard in the songs, what they meant to my friends, and they heard what they meant to me. The music took on new meanings as they played through our lives; after we listened to them driving around late at night in our buddy's junker van or during our first tastes of freedom when the older kids moved into their own houses. Hardcore dancing didn't seem so silly when it was my high school crush throwing first up to a song about loving your hometown, supporting your brothers, or the death of a close friend. Had I not lived those experiences though, I may have very well had the same reaction to that scene that my cousin had.

As Becker discusses them in his article, in the same way that as marijuana users teach one another to appreciate marijuana's effects as a pleasurable and desirable experience, my friends taught me to appreciate the passion, power, and intricate musicianship, that was hiding behind what first appeared to be a wall of sound.