The History of Our World: The Hardcore Continuum Debate

Abstract

Early in 2009, I became embroiled in a vigorous and at times heated debate about the retroactive validity and future viability of a concept I came up with a decade earlier: the “hardcore continuum”. For a succinct explanation of what the term refers to and the background to the concept’s emergence, check this piece in The Wire ; and for a much longer and more detailed account from me, check this: At Dancecult’s invitation, I am returning to historicize the concept and pinpoint what it refers to. I’ll also attempt to historicize the controversy itself and account for some of the heat of the exchanges. I want to start by taking slight issue with a comment of my esteemed colleague (and good friend) Mark Fisher in the first of this journal’s commentaries on the hardcore continuum debate last issue. He characterized the approach I took in my talk at FACT in Liverpoool February 2009 (which if it didn’t catalyze the proand antihardcore continuum debate, certainly raised it to a new pitch of intensity) as involving a strategic retreat from theory, which he regarded as a mistake. I take issue with this characterization. There’s been no retreat from theorizing towards the empirical: there has actually been, on my part, a consistency of approach. My theorizing about the hardcore continuum, including the coinage of the term itself, emerged from field research, in the sense that it was the byproduct of a long period of extensive scenereporting as a working music journalist of, combined with years of intense involvement as a fan in, the subculture. On the one hand, I was interviewing people involved in the scene, writing genre overviews, reviewing albums and compilations and DJ performances, doing round-ups of new 12-inch releases. On the other hand, I was dancing at raves and clubs, going down the record store on a weekly basis to buy new tracks, tuning in to pirate radio stations and taping their broadcasts on the occasions I was in London, and then, when I was back in New York, importuning my London friends to tape the shows and mail them to me. But I didn’t really separate these activities, or consciously think of it as a form of participant-observer research: it was all one unified front of passion and evangelism. After coining the concept in 1999, its theorization as it developed through the Noughties continued to be inseparable from the activities of journalism and fandom (with blogging falling somewhere in between the two), especially in the first half of the decade with grime, which was especially thought-provoking and fanaticism-catalyzing.