“The New Reality”: Hardcore’s Shifting Authenticities Under Capitalist Realism
This thesis challenges the common assumption that hardcore punk subculture is an eternally subversive and progressive musical movement. Particularly in North America – hardcore’s geographical origin and primary locus of discourse – the subculture’s norms have been reterritorialized alongside late-20th and early-21st century neoliberal capitalist expansion. Using the theoretical framework of capitalist realism introduced by Mark Fisher (2009), and considering the work of Simon Reynolds (2011), Agnes Gayraud (2019), Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari (1983; 1987), I map the ways in which this reterritorialization has suppressed hardcore’s social-political imperative and limited its collective capacity for sonic innovation and DIY (do-it-yourself) practice. Further, I problematize the tendency amongst participants to ignore or claim immunity from this reality due to the discursive ‘truth’ that hardcore is inherently tied to negation and activist impulses. Through discourse analysis and in drawing on my own experience as a participant (including hundreds of domestic and international shows played, attended, and promoted), I examine hardcore histories and the gradual “infusion of capital” into cultural production (Peterson 2009, 20), before exploring social-political and artistic stasis in the contemporary scene. Ultimately, however, I determine that hardcore is not predestined for a 21st century of inertia, but must tangibly reassert itself as a politically engaged social entity in order to establish lines of flight from its capitalist realist present.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, University of Regina