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Originally Posted by atsonicpark
Nation were interesting enough but I wasn't always excited to listen to their "I-hate-everything" swagger...
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I like bullet points.
1) Whatever follows is by no means the opinions of someone who's ever enjoyed hardcore. NOU are one of my favourite bands, and I can just about stomach Refused but the vast majority of it, at best, leaves me bemused.
2) NOU had a very arch humour. I always liked to imagine that lines like "who's got the real/ anti-parent culture sound?" were rhetorical and parodical - that is to say the alleged 'I hate everything' swagger was undermining the narrative of punk music's 'nihilism'
3) NOU's sleeves have more contradictory ideas than a million bands. It wasn't rhetoric in the sense of 'I know some words - if I write them, people understand me'. They
understood writing as a device for persuasion and confusion - destabalising the 'truth' notion of 'pure' music - to me they're one of the few 'hardcore' bands who introduce an intelligence that is, lamentably, absent a lot of the time. I'm not saying this is true of every hardcore band - it's more often boorish and puritanical if it is present though (cf Ian Mackaye).
4) To Mr Neurotic - NOU
do sound fake; but something like 'today I met the girl I'm going to marry' is something like a garage/ doo-wop sentiment over a (pseudo-, I suppose) hardcore backing. Ian Svenonius has, in most of his career since, made an outstanding job of undermining and parodying genres without pitying and hating them; a fakeness born of love if you will.
5) Somehow NOU avoid being anything like a 'postmodern' band.
6) These words are my own, and not terrifically important.