So many hardcore kids are fucking boring. They're all mildly autistic, pedantic record collectors or childishly territorial pretend gang-members. To use an two Americanisms, they're either nerds or jocks, and hardly ever the devil-may-care, wiseguy badasses they'd love to think they are.
It's good that there's exceptions to every rule I make up in my head, otherwise I'd think I controlled the world. Dirty Money are the exception in this case, a London band with a scouse singer (you can hear the accent on the recordings, I'm told the girls love it) who play a gnarlier, uglier kind of tough hardcore than the regimented Hatebreed-style stuff everyone in the world must be so fucking sick of by now. It's kind of like Cro-Mags and Integrity played by skinny boys on a budget, it sounds smart and cool as well as violent and heavy.
The good thing about Dirty Money (and a few other bands on their label, Dead and Gone Records) is there's no fucking stupid, old-hat agenda going on, they're not super-positive douchebags in Chain Of Strength shirts or dark, arty douchebags in Jacob Bannon art print shirts either, they're singing about their actual lives and I don't think they think hardcore is the only way. It probably helps that their singer is some big graffiti writer up North and so obviously has interests outside of limited seven inches and being "nailed to the X" (he definately isn't), and I think this is the kind of hardcore normal people who don't spend their lives milling about in youth centres or searching ebay for shirts could get into.
You see, I reckon the thing with proper, good hardcore is that it's so brilliant and amazing and cathartic that I don't think it should be just for the girlfriend-less anal-retentives or the fat thugs, it should be for anyone who's ever been pissed off or wanted to vent spleen about anything. You know how anyone can go to a rave, no matter what music they listen to in their bedroom? Hardcore could be loose like that, less vegan currys and scene politics and more actual rage and universal themes, it shouldn't be this dry ghetto with loads of rules, it should be available to anyone. I'm not saying let the hippy girls and tory Etonians in like the raves have, I'm just saying that if more people were in on the vibe the world would be a better place.
www.myspace.com/thedirtymoney
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