Publication:
HeartttaCk

Author:
Felix Von Havoc

HeartAttack #20
TOP 10
Uncurbed-Peace Love Punk Life LP
Totalitar-7"
Damnation AD-Kingdom of lost souls LP
Rolling Stones-Sticky Fingers LP
Suffer-Last 7" and split with Urko
Drop Dead-LP and live
Subhumans-Live
Tuomiopaivan Lapset-double 7"
MK Ultra/ Seein Red-split LP
Tumult-Kung Fu Hardcore 7"

This will be my final contribution to Heart Attack for the forseeable future. I am resigning this august post due to the continued downward spiral of so-called hardcore into the realms of progressive rock, college rock, bad metal and post hardcore. Post hardcore my ass, I outta hit your poseur ass with a post for frontin' that shit. I was baffled to read the results of the Heart Attack Reader's Poll. Presumably magazines do this to pin point their readership as a demographic group for the benefit of their advertisers. Maybe Heart Attack just does it for the fuck of it. Who knows, but I really don't think I have much in common with a group of people who choose Fugazi as their favorite band over Minor Threat. Or those who list Dischord as their favorite label without a qualifying statement such as "up to Dischord #9." In my day the Smiths was a girlie pop band that got play on the radio not an influential pioneer of that nebulous and "beautiful" music called post hard core. Sorry to say, I just can't relate to what passes for hardcore these days or what I presume to be the readership of this magazine. To me most of the reviews and top ten lists might as well be in Chinese. Who the fuck are all these bands? Who is calling the shots? My guess is that all this stuff is a front for the manilla envelope, back pack and Kleenex industries. You can call me out of touch, and you might be right. Times have, in a way passed me by. The final straw however, was the column in the last issue advocating nudism. Seriously wack hippie shit for 1968 not 1998. I totally oppose nudity in the punk scene except of course by consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes, Darby Crash and Iggy Pop. This could really get out of hand. We've had enough problems with naked guys at shows already. The scene has suffered. Keep your pants on!

As some of you may have heard on November 20th in Minneapolis there will be a punk celebrity boxing match. I will strap on the tape and the gloves and defend my hardcore pride in the ring against some upstart sucker MC's from the band Animal Chin. Animal Chin, a local ska band currently operating under the motto "skinny and sensitive" have shown much disrespect to Extreme Noise and tried to organize a boycott. We have offered them the simple option of Trial by Combat to determine who is right. So come on down and see me, Jason of THD records, Billy of Dillinger 4 and Rana of Scorned represent in the ring. Now that I write this it occurs to me that most of you reading this probably think Animal Chin are hot shit, that "skinny and sensitive" is a clever title and that boxing is vulgar and barbaric. Well, what the fuck do you know anyway?

The theme of this issue is the DIY ethic. I guess I covered all this ground before, but since most of you got into hardcore after Earth Crisis appeared on C-span I'll have to cover that ground again. Hardcore needs to remain free. Free from the corruption of commercialism. Free from big-business. Free from the trends and fads. Free from the pressure to be marketable. Free from control by entities outside the underground music scene. Our music is the only thing we have left to call our own in a society where all other aspects of our life are under the control of the Man. Say what you will but I know some of the cats in local alternative rock acts like Son Volt, the Jayhawks and Run Westy Run. They all tell me how lucky I am to be involved in a kind of music where I don't have some music business schmuck telling me what to play and how to sound. Those guys always say shit like "wow man that's so cool you have your own label, I wish WE did." Hardcore is the voice of the disenfranchised youth. The voice of the streets (or in today the voice of the suburban cul de sac). When we sell our souls to the system for a sack of gold we compromise our artistic and economic integrity. So to quote Raybeez who said it like it was "Hardcore music should stay out of big business and stay in the streets where it belongs. "

First the barcode. Fuck the bar code. Any record with a barcode is not aimed at the underground but the mass market. If it appeals to the mainstream mass market its probably watered down shit that you wouldn't want to listen too any way. Should Heart Attack review records with barcodes? NO! And fuck the labels who put a sticker with the barcode on the records that go to chain stores while leaving the sticker off for the copy that gets sent to Heart Attack for review. Pick a side of the fence and stay on it.

Second, the Compact Disc. I've gone into great detail about how I feel about CD's in the past. CD's are the biggest scam foisted upon us by the music biz since Milli Vanilli. When CD's were introduced in the 80's they cost about 20 bucks each. At the time records cost about five or six bucks. The word on the street was that the industry wanted to even it out so that LPs and CDs both cost about 10 bucks. Now ten years later most record stores carry little or no vinyl at all and the CDs still cost around 15 bucks. Even so called DIY CD's sell for ten to twelve bucks. Even in quantities as small as 1,000 CD's cost less than two dollars to make. If you are manufacturing on the scale that major labels do that cost can be as low as 60 cents per unit. I cringe when I see CD's wholesaling at 8 bucks per unit. That's a huge profit margin for the label. If the distributor and then the store marks that up it will retail at over fifteen bucks. Really unbelievable for an item that cost around two bucks to make. Drugs are about the only other commodity I can think of with such a high profit margin, and in that business there is an element of risk... I'm used to dealing with 7" records with a per unit mark up of twenty five or fifty cents at each step of the distribution chain, shit maybe I should've gotten into the CD business. I applaud Profane Existence Distribution's recent decision to quit distributing CD's unless they are priced at or below the LP price for the same release. This stand on principle effectively means Profane will quit distributing CD's. And good for them. If I was Heart Attack I wouldn't review anything on CD, I wouldn't manufacture or distribute them either. If it was up to me CD would take its place on the shelf with 8-track.

Third, record pricing. Fuck the four dollar 7"! Domestic releases three dollars retail, three dollars post paid. Period. Imports I can understand reaching as much as five or six bucks retail due to the high cost of shipping and import taxes. I wholesale my 7"s at $1.75 each to distributors. There is no reason for that seven inch to wind up in a store for four bucks, unless the store is in Malaysia or something. If your overhead is so high that you have to mark up a $1.75 record to four bucks, you need to cut your overhead. I still think LP's should sell in the five to eight dollar range depending on the packaging. Plenty of labels are still making LPs that wholesale at four and five. Now I can understand paying a little extra for a record with really nice packaging or an import, especially from Japan. But I'm sick of seeing domestic LPs at nine or ten bucks. Not so long ago every hardcore record was five bucks. I understand that tastes in packaging have gotten more elaborate and other costs have gone up but not enough to justify charging nine bucks for a domestic LP.

Fourth, record distribution. Consignment has got to go. Pay up front or trade. Too many bands and small labels get screwed by distributors who don't pay on time or don't pay at all. Not getting paid is the number one complaint I hear from every small label and band I talk to. If any one factor has helped to kill the DIY spirit and encourage centralization its distributors who don't pay for their stock. I'd rather ship ten records to a distributor who pays on receipt than a hundred records to a distributor who will pay me a few bucks at a time for the next two years. Not getting paid on time is what has led a lot of underground labels to...

Fifth, exclusive distribution. Once again I've already dedicated a column to this topic but here's a summary. Labels weren't getting paid so they signed exclusive deals with distributors who would pay them on time with a check that wouldn't bounce. Freed from having to spend their time trying to collect the label cats can now concentrate on putting out nice records by good bands with quality sound and packaging. Sound Pollution and Prank have signed on with Mordam. Slap a Ham with Revolver, Clean Plate with Ebullition. Etc. When Doghouse took over Lumberjack they offered about a dozen labels including mine an exclusive deal. I can see what makes this attractive to the label. For me though I think it is important to stay independent and not put all the eggs in one basket. I also know that stores are fickle and many only deal with one or two distributors, therefore spreading your releases out among several distributors gives you better access to different markets. I know when I first started my records were only distributed by Profane Existence. It didn't take long to realize that lots of stores never ordered from Profane but did order from Ebullition or Bottlenekk so I spread my releases out. The downside of this is lots of different accounts to keep track of some of who may be late in paying. As I have said before the best way to get paid in this business is to put out a hot new release and then ask everyone to pay you for the last one before they get the new one. The best way of course to put out new releases without getting paid for your old releases is not to quit your day job. This is why I still get up at dawn and pick up my tool belt rather than sitting around at home waiting for the checks to come in the mail.

So don't stab your comrades in the back. If you are going to do business in the punk rock scene keep a fair and ethical business sense at all times and remember this is about music first and money second. Sure everybody has to make a living, but if you are interested in profits first and music second I suggest a different line of work. The scene is smaller than you think and if you disrespect people and rip them off word will travel fast. Still, the biggest fuck ups aren't always the sleazy rip off artists but the well intentioned who got in over their heads. Watch your bottom line and don't quit your day job until you absolutely have to. Don't take on anything you can't handle and finish what you started.

Should Heart Attack accept ads from Epitaph, Victory and Revelation? Well if I ran a fanzine I would accept no ads. But my fanzine went under in 1985 so what the fuck do I know about publishing a zine in the 90's? I will guiltily admit to being a fan of Victory recording artists Blood For Blood and Revelation recording artists Damnation AD. Both releases carried bar codes, but I bought them any way. Lenin once said "The capitalist will sell you the very rope you intend to hang him with" In this spirit fanzines accept Epitaph ads in the same issue they run a "boycott epitaph" article in. If it were up to me I'd say that those labels already have plenty of places to advertise and Heart Attack should use its ad space to support the truly underground DIY labels. I know that part of why Heart Attack started was to rebel against Maximum Rock N Roll's "exclusionary" review and advertising criteria. I personally like their exclusionary criteria and wish they'd make it more exclusionary to get rid of all that damn garage rock and make room for more punk rock and hardcore. Then again if I was still running a fanzine I'd mostly be covering bands that broke up in 1984 and bands from obscure foreign countries right?

Last question: Is DIY dead? No you nitwit. The flame burns on. Hardcore is undergoing an onslaught of commercialism similar to that which it experienced during the Crossover years of the mid 80's but enough of us are left over who learned the lesson of that period. Punk hasn't made any great political or social strides in the last fifteen years but we have made some progress economically. We have a better (but still not perfect) distribution network than ever before. Some will sell out and some will give up, but those of us who are true to the game will continue to keep hardcore music free, independent and honest. Hardcore survives on the underground. It will weather the current storm of interest from the mainstream and then sink back into obscurity where it belongs. Its up to us to keep the fire burning.

Publication Date:
January 1, 1988

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