Post-Hardcore
Where do I even start this?
It’s 11.05pm on a Monday and I’ve been listening to some pretty shit music for the last half hour since peeling myself off the couch and heading up to my desk to write.
Some of it’s good. And I guess the little journey here started with a song that I didn’t even end up hearing, ‘The Past Should Stay Dead’ by Emarosa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0fCXsles90
I especially like the opening few bars; Johnny Craig’s powerful high vocals. There was like a few of these dudes from that naughties post-hardcore scene who had this outrageously high vocal range and thought themselves the pinacle of modern poetry with largely self-indulgent lyrics (regularly about dissolved relationships) that tend to be devoid of real lyrical content or theme; vague gestures; a suburban white guy confidence that the pain described is unique and profound; a general ‘it’-ness that goes hand-in-hand with not quite being able to articulate what you want to say but having plenty of words with which to say it.
Like honestly the lyrics to ‘The Past Should Stay Dead’ are incoherent but frontman Johnny Craig belts them out with such unwielding conviction that, hey, what can you do? Listen to the guy. He means it.
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/emarosa/thepastshouldstaydead.html
“Tailored sheets to fix this dirty bed / for once this dirt won’t come all off.”
That’s the start and it’s just kind of an unpleasant image, dirty sheets. But hey, when you’re a young fella – and Johnny would have been like 22 when this record came out – then tailored sheets on the dirty bed (wait the sheets aren’t dirty? the bed is?) are like normal I suppose. Worth just belting out about.
We get a little image next of the wind “blowing through closed doors with shadows dancing in the hall”. A kind of nothing image, but it’s there.
Then it’s chorus and verse of vagueries, one after the other, before those shadows dancing in the hall come back around.
Johnny Craig was a troubled fella. He had a great set of pipes and could write the types of songs that at the very least convinced his peers to put their time into building whole songs around. But he was also a junkie. Slipping in and out of active heroin use he went from one band and to the next before bandmates got sick of his shit and found someone else who could maybe hold a candle near his voice but was less of a cunt.
Heroin addiction was kind of a thing in this post-hardcore period in the mid-to-late 2000s. Saosin and Circa Survive’s Anthony Green has been open about his struggles with the drug, as recently as October last releasing the song ‘Imposter Syndrome’, written just before he checked himself back into rehab.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtBYJUjbgIk
The film clip has Green getting his head shaved from a faceless barber who roughly shears his scalp bald of its bleached blonde hair.
Lyrically, it’s not genius stuff. He touches on the US troubles, “American is burning from the inside out”, and ponders the meaning of freedom in the context of, well, that plus the whole drug dependency he and a not insignificant portion of the US population is going through.
“I was searching for a painless way to die … I was searching for a painless way through life.”
The first time I heard Anthony Green’s voice was in high school. Saosin was one of the bands coming to Adelaide for Taste of Chaos, a short-lived emo/post-hardcore/metal concert that brought over a bunch of these bands from the States. Two of my friends were super into Adelaide’s own little ‘scene’ (MySpace; Bebo; hairspray; painted nails; cut wrists) and introduced me to the 2003 Saosin EP Translating the Name which was best known for ‘Seven Years’, a fine showcase of post-hardcore’s main innovation: duets of clean, good ol’ fashioned singing grouchy screamo cookie monster vocals.
Coming from formative years listening to Eminem and the nu metal stylings of Slipknot and Limp Bizkit, post-hardcore was fresh and raw in a way that captured my attention. The lyrics never mattered – it was all about the music and the singing that fell over into full screams. Here was a kind of non-performative expression, unmasked and kept in the shadows (dancing in the hall). Why were they mad? Dunno. Seriously, even looking back now the lyrics for songs I liked are almost nonsense. Like this from ‘3rd Measurement in C’ which I cringe about a memory of me expressing my love for one afternoon walking along a park in Gawler.
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/saosin/3rdmeasurementinc.html
“Taking back, overdone “Free and safely “Souvenirs, out of style “Right in front and right on “do it so, I’ll be mad, you’ll be gone”
Like, what?
The final repeated lines of “Don’t say that I’m the one you want to lose” was what you’re there for but moreso it was the overall vibe. You could pop your iPod on shuffle and listen to a bunch of vaguely angry and musically engaging music, swimming in the general sense of emotional instability and anger at something from a bedroom in your parents’ house.
The whole genre and fandom around this screamo/emo/post-hardcore/whatever was predicated on peer-to-peer music sharing. None of this music was broadcast anywhere. A few niche stores held the CDs but for the most part it seemed to get around on Limewire, Torrents, and Megaupload.
Word of mouth dragged the music from one ear to another until it found its way out in the cultural backwater of Adelaide’s Northern Suburbs where I’d waste time with my friends playing the screams as loudly as possible from cheap tinny speakers.
Here’s something fun: while playing Translating the Name just now with Spotify’s cool lyrics thing singing along, I found something to identify with on the track ‘They Perched on Their Stilts, Pointing and Daring Me to Break Custom’:
“I see a blank notebook page “And it’s my life and there is “Nothing I can think to write “I fear the thought of not sensing a thing”
The way those lines are delivered are etched deep in my brain from the hundreds of listens I would have given this song in high school but I never really took in what it said til now.
Funny that.