Following on from recent postings, here’s Allen and Steven Taylor in Allen’s kitchen (437 East 12th Street) in New York, discussing “hardcore”, the music immediately following punk.
Here below is a transcript:
AG: …(which) leaves it open to any kind of polymorphous perverse, at best, and is a kind of declaration of independence from social identity, or reassertion of a personal stamp of their own social identity, also there’s a political implication of subversion and rebellion against the rigid moral (morale) of the financial, sexual, commercial, rules and regulations imposed by the American government, or the Russian government, or the Czechoslovakian government, or whatever government is trying to repress individual intelligence, (and) delightfulness (?). So it seems to be, like, a way that almost anybody educated, or not educated, can propose their own genius, and, I think, evading all the social demands of education and of reading and of…
ST: …bourgeois virtuosity?
AG: well no, social accomplishment, but going back to some natural state of genius where unobstructed delight, or unobstructed feeling, can be expressed and recognized, so (somewhere) where people (otherwise thwarted) where kids… that are otherwise thwarted, can actually find intellectual expression of their highest feelings, their, most extreme feelings, and sometimes, sometimes their highest feelings, or recognize, sometimes, their lowest feelings… And for those of us who are already hyper-intellectualized, and hyper-socialized, it also gives them a way of getting out of the straitjacket of their rigid discipline, and joining in with the hoi-polloi, and joining in with the lower classes, in some kind of Dionysian abandon, awakening the otherwise-sleeping spirit of (the) middle-class kids who come out to hear..or encouraging the ecstatic emotions of people already kind of aware of their channels of expression(s)..”
But still it’s a little bit too noisy
ST: too loud?
AG: yeah, for my ears, yeah….
We once again draw your attention to Steven’s book, False Prophet: Field Notes From The Punk Underground, published in 2003 from Wesleyan University Press.