SlapShot
Old Tyme Hardcore (Taang!)
by Doug Sery
Jesus Christ, how times have changed. Boston’s stalwart hardcore label, Taang!, has moved to San Diego; the Middle East, long a bastion against the encroaching vanillaization of Boston is faced with imminent closure, and studio apartments are now renting for $900. Yet, when all seems at its most bleak and the swimmer is going down for the third time, a life preserver, proudly emblazoned with the name of the S.S. SlapShot, is thrown to the rescue (most likely hitting the swimmer in the head and sending him/her to the bottom of the ocean – but, I digress). SlapShot, a fixture on the Boston hardcore scene since the mid-’80s, has (according to various reports) released Old Tyme Hardcore as their final album, citing the idiocy of a scene that is increasingly predominated by college frat boys who will mosh to anything that even closely resembles punk (hell, I myself have seen these steroid-ridden microcephalics trying to form a pit at a Throwing Muses show at the Hatch-Shell). And, people, this is indeed a shame. More than ten years since their first EP, Back on the Map, SlapShot still possesses the power and, yes, ugliness, that made Boston, along with Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C., one of the great centers of punk back in the late ’70s and early ’80s. As hardcore becomes increasingly segmented by labels (emo, grind, straight-edge) that reek of abject and pathetic territorialism, SlapShot (true to their name) lets loose with a wicked commentary on a scene that is beginning to resemble the Christian Right in its goose-step ideologies and intolerance. Call me sentimental (or senile), but lyrics like “Pennies from heaven is all they want to see/and all this religion is spreading like a fucking disease/used up all the others, now they’re using the hardcore scene/heard the lies so often they’ve lost touch with reality” strike me as a valid wake-up call to what was previously a style that allowed for freedom of expression. Besides, it’s worth buying the CD just for the sake of their using Paul Newman and the movie Slap Shot as a cogent political statement.
(706 Pismo Ct. San Diego, CA 92109)
