A High Point for Our CounterPublic

Hardcore for Nerds: Joseph McRedmond Interview + TCR Unreleased Demos w/ Alex Dunham

This is why we nerds need our blogs. This – with the WFMU sessions – constitutes the high-point of Gabba’s Hoover Genealogy Project, and introduces to even us devotees a couple-three different bands/albs we’d otherwise’ve been ignorant of. High praise to Joe McRedmond for taking the time to satiate at least 2-3 dozen of us drooling/foaming Hoover/Crownhate-ites, and high praise to Gabba for having “the stones” (does that translate into Irish-Anglais?) to ask this question and stand up to Joe’s understandably dismissive response:

What do you think about the term ’emo’ (or its sister codeword, ’90s post-hardcore’)?

I don’t think about shit like that.

Sure, guys in bands don’t care for the genre-ing of their own particular efforts…why would they? But asking that question, Gabba remembers his readers as much as his reporterly/historian-y duty to ask ‘what happened’ and how the make-things-happen-ers understood themselves and their acts. (I wish we could pay him a living wage to do it, but mebbe that’d change things irrevocably.) That’s important to a few of us, at least. As actual people, god bless them, get actual book deals to put forth “definitive” accounts for whoever cares enough to know the key bands but not enough to interrogate the also-rans, it’s more-than-necessary for us devotees to stoke the fire of our broader, weirder secret history and secret critique. It’s only for the half-interested that “emo,” “post-hardcore” or “dc” and other taxa comprise iron-cage like, overdetermining frames. For us weirdoes, these terms are useful and always-only-half-serious, useful for conversation because of their falling short of describing much. (This is sorta like, to fall into Adorno paraphrasing, the idea that philosophy continues to be an important discourse because the opportunity for its realization has been missed.)

Thus hardcore for nerds, zen and the art of…, pukekos, one base, and so many others combine to provide my ever-present rock-nerd subject-position with the web equivalent of a Habermas-y coffee house, a “stitch and bitch” at Shenanigans (Sewanee, TN), and a stoned constitutional convention. May it always be. And may I finally start carrying my weight in 2009. What matters more? Lotsa things. But lotsa those more important things’re things I like less. And these days I need the things I like close by, in order to continue my trying-not-to-seize campaign.