Records With History And Future

Although Hardcore can be perceived as a narrow field, there are many different ways to document it. The different ways to do this is what the following post is about. Hardcore is in my opinion one of the genres with the most active documenting public. There’s always the public and the bands, those two parties will always exist. And there’s almost always live-performances required too.

I won’t go further in that, this post is meant to bring you a reflection on the numerous ways of documenting Hardcore and it’s music, bands, culture, scenes, etc.

In my opinion there are roughly 4 main options in which you can document Hardcore in all it’s facets. These options are interchangeable with each other, they can have a mixed use. Every option has advantages but negative sides also. The four categories are:

1. tangible music format
2. paper printing in zines or books
3. motion screens
4. internet

tangible music formats

First way is documenting the music and a band’s delivery through recording music and pressing it on a tangible music-format. Different formats can be chosen. The oldest is the vinyl record. This format is still in use nowadays, also for recent releases. Roughly said; thereafter came tapes and then the final format is Compact Disc. There are also other format affiliated like flexi’s, mini-discs,… But you get what I mean.

Because it requires skills and money to do so, labels came to existence. Not only do these formats need to be manufactured they also need to be given layout and distributed. The layout of a record can be by the band or by the label or a cooperation of both or even a third party designer. All three formats need to be preferably given layout and have covers. Preferably lyrics are a welcome facet also.

Also brokers and distro’s came to existence by the need to press recordings of sound on tangible copies so that they could be spread among the people.

paper prints of books and zines

Second way is in a printed paper (book) format. Within the book format there are many different types of documenting you can take on. There are several concepts that can fit in the book format. I’m elaborating some of them:

1. First of all and the life blood of our culture are the paper zines. They can be made totally DIY and are not so expensive to be printed.
2. If you have taken many pictures of bands and live-performances you can for example create a photo book. The majority of the pages are filled with photo’s. Those photo’s are the main content featured. Live shots breath the atmosphere and show the people attending the Hardcore Punk shows, their way of clothing, their band shirts,…
3. Another way to document the Hardcore scene is by making a flyer book. The main content here are promotional flyers from Hardcore gigs. Personally I find that an interesting take because you immediately get a view what bands played at which moment in time. If they are both on the same flyer that means they were both active in the same time-era and that they knew each other to some extent.
   Often the year of the show is not mentioned on flyers. Use a search engine on the internet and enter the date with the day of the week. Given that for a certain year the 17th of July for example can only have taken place on a certain day of the week, you can filter out the years on which the 17th of July was on a Saturday. There are only a handful of solutions. And it will be 1982 for the flyer shown beneath since Urban Waste was an early eighties band.
4. The third approach to the perception of Hardcore for interested people is the (self-) written biography. There’s no collecting of material involved here, such books mainly contain plain text. And deal with the person’s life and if he or she is still alive and has written it by themselves, then it’s an auto-biography. For sure the author can use artifacts to recollect what happened in his or her life.
5. Fourth is also a very informative way of bundling knowledge on a certain scene. These kind of books also lean on collections, in this case collections of zines. Zines are mostly written not long after a record’s release or a show that happened, so these are in my opinion the most knowledgeable sources.
6. Fifth and last but not least are discography books. They give an insight in the existing tangible remnants of an era; namely records. Records pressing info’s are if known also included. So you can measure the popularity and or influence throughout the years of a release. If you get what I mean? If there were several pressings, that meant that it sold out and that it needed to be repressed and implicates that many people got them on different moments in time.
7. There are mixed versions possible also. With texts, photo’s, flyers, discographies, etc. all mixed in one…

zines

Photo books

book with flyers

Book with a biography

book with zine compilations

books with discographies

Motion screens

If you don’t want to aim to a reader public but rather to those who like to watch and hear on a screen of a TV or a computer. Those who film live sets of bands. Those who have footage of old performances can always put it on DVD’s. DVD’s still are the main format for anything with motion screens related and audio related. Not only live-sets can be on a DVD but also interviews, documentaries and also movies about Hardcore Punk.

Internet

This can be combinations of the above used methods. They can put photo’s, music, video’s and texts on the web. The advantage of this is that is wildly accessible to anyone that has access to an internet connection and a way to view and browse it. I’m talking about laptops, PC’s, smartphones, tablets,…

Nowadays with the uprise of technology, internet became a huge role-taker in that field of preserving knowledge and documenting events like shows and record collecting. Blogs definitely try to document the history Hardcore in the musical way. They digitize music from CDs, tapes and vinyl records, but also scan zines and insert or whatever can be digitized. Also VHS digitizing is done.

Some of those blogs also blatantly copy and spread music while it’s still in print. I do not know the exact laws concerning all this, but I’ve personally got ethical issues with this way of handling. I mean without asking bands and or labels who actually paid all their savings to get the music on a physical bearer, because there was no digital format back then. And then comes that new generation comes and demands and or even claim the rights to all this by spreading all their music, artwork, song texts,… It just doesn’t feel right to me.

Collectors also take advantage of the internet possibilities. But they first buy the record and then take pictures of the pressing characteristics of a certain release. And along with that they usually voice their opinion also. Also pressing info can be added to their writings. And much more, such as:

• news sites such as Punknews, No Echo,…
• online discography databases such as Discogs .com
• price guiding sites for vinyl records and tapes such as Popsike, Collectors Frenzy

Internet content can also be spread on social platforms.

As Hardcore Punk books aren’t widely spread in public libraries, the internet often becomes the only place people can freely search information about it.