Old Codger Screams - 'Hey You Kids, Get Off My Half Pipe!' -- Film at 11

...It's just dawned upon me that I don't think I have bought an issue of Maximum Rock 'N' Roll since sometime in the late 80s'. The friggin' thing used to be the bible to me and all my skate buddies in high school. What other publication could make you so politically aware as well as keep you abreast on the Hardcore Punk scene in Peru? Sometime in the early 90's, I traded my (somewhat) complete collection of the mag for a stack of Hawkwind bootlegs and a bag of dirt weed sprayed with Lysol. So what I’m trying to say is I don’t really have that firm of a grip on the goings on in the Hardcore scene of 2006. All I know is whenever I do get the chance to peruse through a box of recent Hardcore 7”s, I see a severe lack of images I think should be essential to our time and place. You know, bad collages of ole G.W. mixing it up with warheads and starving children and stuff like that. All I usually see is kids in basketball jerseys and bad graffiti. It’s sort of a bummer to me, but luckily a shiny piece of tinfoil has just come out that might teach the kids a thing or two. For some reason that is still foggy to me, the Subterranean label has re-issued the complete discography of Code Of Honor, a politically charged Skatecore band from San Francisco in the early 80’s (Jesus, did I actually just type all those words out in a sentence and not bust out laughing?) C.O.H. were the perfect embodiment of the typical teenaged MRR reader of the era. Earnestly left wing kids who could lecture you on the atrocities of Nicaragua while busting the raddest christ air you’ve ever seen. Their tuneage was a pretty streamlined form of melodic thrash that didn’t offer much in the ways of cacophony or chaos…sorry Void fans. But for some stupid reason or another, their songs were infectious enough that they stick in my head some twenty years later. I can still recite both the ‘code of honor’ stated in the song of the same name (‘Never desert your comrades in need in danger or in trouble…’) as well as the declaration of revolution in ‘New Era’ (‘Take away the government and you take away the lies/Kill all the politicians and no one else will die..’) Perhaps these raging tunes will incite the youth of today to drop acid and not bombs. But most likely all that’ll happen here is oldsters like me will listen to this and sadly reminisce on endless days of skating and waiting for my Ill Repute 7” to come in the mail while ’the kids’ buy up more cone belts at the local Hot Topic. Bleech.

Comments

[Jason]

Wait a minute, you traded your MRRs for fucking hawkwind records, you go on to claim there's no politically charged hardcore these days based on your perusal of 7" bins of whatever shitty record shops you frequent and then have the gall to tar today's hardcore kids with the old Hot Topic brush.

Maybe you should have laid out a few bucks on an MRR for research.

[Dave McGurgan]

Dude, I just renewed my subscription to MRR. IMHO, it's as good as it's ever been. The columnists are really interesting and have some compelling things to say. I tend to skip over the scene reports, but there are usually 1-2 articles per issue that profile old and somewhat legendary bands. Plus there ARE a bunch of new bands who are following in the spirit of hardcore punk such as Career Suicide, Direct Control, Government Warning Terminal State and Formaldehyde Junkies. And MRR is still good for the ads so you can keep up with CD reissues, etc... I may be slowly becoming an old fart, but I still love my MRR! And also check out Razorcake!

[Mike Lupica]

MRR always struck me as completely forgettable compared with the unique voices that other (smaller) zines spoke with. I am consistently surprised to come across anyone who reads it. What's "Hot Topic", and why does everyone seem to feel so strongly about it?

[Jason]

You could debate the merits of MRR until the end of time but, as Dave mentions above, its the sheer amount of ads combined with its regularity and international distribution that gives it its real strength.
For a swarthy foreigner and suburban teenager such as myself there was no better thrill than stuffing some carefully concealed cash into an evelope, sending it to somewhere you'd never heard of and getting a few 7"s, more often than not a nice note and occasionally a lasting friendship in return.
Its the idea that this no longer happens, that only "oldsters" are interested in discography cds and that the hardcore kids of today are more interested in shopping at Hot Topic that I find objectionable, even laughable.

Although I wouldn't and couldn't defend the zine's actual content, that's a matter of taste and I agree with Mike on the smaller zines thing, I will say they've had some damn funny columnists over the years. Eugene Chadbourne when I first started reading and then later on Rev Norb wrote stuff that had me in stitches, for example -
http://www.diehippiedie.com/maximum/norbjuly97.html

[Puffer]

I really want a tee-shirt that says, "Hey you kids, get off my half-pipe!"