The old heads who are mad about this Linkin Park cover allowed it to happen

Let's all take a look in the mirror

Picture this: you’re at a hardcore fest in New Haven, Connecticut. Your belly is full of pizza as you patiently watch some alt-rock band with hardcore clout do their thing. Suddenly, you hear a familiar riff. The room erupts as the band rips into a cover of Linkin Park’s Y2K smash “One Step Closer”. Kids are literally bouncing off the ceiling to get mic control as the biggest pile-on you’ve seen in 10 years breaks out.   

This was the scene over the weekend at the Ephyra Records showcase, as a room full of 22-year-old hardcore kids went feral for a band called In 2 Again’s Linkin Park cover. Footage hit the DAZE Records social media accounts and the clip went “hardcore viral”, presumably causing a Twitter war between the “fun is all that matters” crowd and the “nobody should be allowed to have fun” people. 

I don’t have Twitter, so I was luckily spared from the discourse. I saw the video on Instagram sometime over the last few days. It did briefly ping some deep-seated ethical need to hand-wring in my old man brain, but I wasn’t surprised. I know plenty of kids in that age range. They don’t just love nu-metal, they treat it with the same (or even more) cultural cache as old school hardcore.  

I didn’t give the whole thing much of a second thought until my favourite hardcore podcast Axe to Grind released a Patreon-exclusive episode on Wednesday night. The three hosts, all of whom are 10-15 years my senior, lamented this Linkin Park cover as a sign that hardcore’s role as opposition to mainstream culture seems almost entirely diminished.

I’m not gonna single those dudes out, either – especially considering how much respect I have for their work. They apparently got texts about the Linkin Park cover from friends in big current bands saying things like “hardcore’s cooked”. Shit, the original DAZE Twitter post has 307 quote-tweets on it. That’s a hefty amount of discourse, and you know not all of it is positive. 

I have two questions for my fellow old heads who are screaming about this being the end of hardcore as we know it. Did you not see this coming? And do you not recognize the role you played?  

When Turnstile, arguably the most important hardcore band of the last decade, decided they were going to do the late-night TV circuit, everyone gassed them up (look in the comments of the video below). We kept saying “if one kid gets into hardcore through this, it was all worth it”. Guess what? Thousands of kids came walking through the door. It was our job to take them under our wing and explain the difference between hardcore and every other genre of drop-tuned music with screaming vocals. Namely the fact that our bands don’t usually aim to be musical guests on talk shows. 

We didn’t do that. The older generations were too wrapped up trying to ride the gravy train. We didn’t set the kids straight for one of two reasons. People were either a) trying to make money off the influx or b) too afraid to be called a dusty hater for saying “hey, I don’t think it’s cool for Monster Energy Drink to sponsor the biggest tours in a scene where staunch anti-commercialism is a core tenet.” The shows were too much fun. The money was too alluring. The over-30 crowd lost the plot before the kids even had a chance to understand it. 

We’ve had numerous important hardcore frontmen go on the BrooklynVegan podcast to promote their new band’s coke-rock albums by saying shit like “I actually think Michael Jackson was the most hard-core artist of the 1980’s”. We’ve had relevant and historically important zine writers capitulating about shit like “well, Walter Schriefels wrote every lyric CIV ever sang, so if you think about it, paying people to co-write your songs is part of a long, storied hardcore lineage”. We’ve heard so much shop talk about venue caps, guarantees and streaming numbers that people are starting to think these things matter. How can you blame the kids for not understanding the difference between their favourite hardcore band and some bouncy nu metal from 2001? 

I can’t. That’s why I don’t give a fuck about this Ephyra Fest debacle. I still have my Designated Moshers Unit cassettes. The DIY spot in my city is doing better than ever, and you know what? At least half the kids who pack it out every weekend would instantly mosh to a Linkin Park cover,

For the record, I genuinely enjoy Hybrid Theory. Nostalgia probably has a lot to do with it. Those songs were everywhere when I was a kid. I didn’t really like them at the time – I was too busy listening to “good” music like AC/DC and The Doors. Then one fateful Wednesday night in 2010 my roommate Chris and I got absolutely cranked on ecstasy and sat in his Pontiac Vibe blasting that shit at four a.m. Ever since then, I’ll throw that record on once a year and thoroughly enjoy it start to finish. 

^THIS IS THE WORST SHIT I’VE EVER HEARD LMFAO

Here’s what I will say to the youth, though. It’s been done. We don’t need any more. Please do not run this into the ground like swoop-haired kids did with Lady Gaga songs in the late 2000’s. 

Shit, I was in a dorky Emmure-core band in 2012 (because I had no friends who liked actual hardcore) and we tried doing the alt-rock cover thing after our local homies “really killed it” with their rendition of “Guerrilla Radio”. Our shit bricked. Nobody liked our deathcore spin on the Deftones because it was inauthentic and lame. I know you youngsters are in the practice space trying to learn “Butterfly” by Crazy Town right now. Cut that shit the fuck out and cover a Merauder song like the rest of us.