It’s probably common knowledge that Pete and Andy from FALL OUT BOY were once hardcore bros, but I’m not sure that people fully realize the extent of it. They weren’t just in some run of the mill, forgettable moshcore bands, they were in some of the lulziest, most absurd bands of the 90s, including what was without a doubt the most No Fun Club band that ever existed and most likely ever will exist!
I’ve posted a bit about this stuff in the past, but just figured I should collect it all in one place for anyone who wasn’t familiar:
Andy Hurley’s main band (as far as I know) was KILLTHESLAVEMASTER, a sick SICK metalcore band from Milwaukee who never got the props they deserved. There’s really nothing funny about this band other than how different they are than FOB. Also, chances are very high that someone who reads SYWH was in this band?? Download their EP here, it’s fucking awesome!
Here’s KTSM doing a cover of another one of my favorite 90s bands, ABNEGATION. The lulzy part about this is that Abnegation were infamous for their pro-life song in which they had a sample of a baby’s beating heart and pre-breakdown gang vocals chanting “THE FETUS IS A LIFE!!” So many awesome 90s vsxe trademarks in this video: the singer’s 90s-style “fall on the floor and freak out” stage moves; the guitarist’s super-high Ibanez, puffy vest and giant pants; the handmade “fur = murder” banner behind them; the fluorescent lights and acoustic tile ceiling; and the fact that there were probably 35 people at this show, half of which were in the other bands (and that was considered a decent turnout).
Andy also played drums in Racetraitor, and I think Pete played with them a little bit as well. Their album was called fucking “BURN THE IDOL OF THE WHITE MESSIAH,” does it get any more lulzy and NFC than that?! It’s like a NOFX or Vandals song title, only it’s not a joke! I saw Racetraitor in 1998 at a fest in Indianapolis with Charles Bronson and (wait for it) Hatebreed– one of the best and weirdest lineups of all time.
I knew Pete from being in a vegan sxe band called EXTINCTION, who were so generic and unremarkable that I can’t even find any of their songs on Youtube (they were also on X Catalyst X, which was the Back Ta Basics of 90s vsxe moshcore). Mirin his giant pants and dreads!
I saved the best for last: VEGAN REICH! As you might guess from their hilarious name, these guys were the most absurd No Fun Club band of all time, and I really can’t see anyone ever topping them. The story of VR is way more than can be told in this post, but read the Wikipedia entry on Hardline if you dare– it’s even more bizarre than Krishnacore, and it’s pretty hilarious that the singer for VR, who made his name for being a pro-life, pseudo-Muslim, borderline eco-terrorist also owns the label who signed T-MILLS. Mindbottling, especially when you consider that VR’s original logo was the M-16s crossed in an X at the top of this post. Unlike KTSM and Racetraitor, VR were really bad, but their lyrics are good for a laugh if you are ever bored.
Which band was more awesome, KTSM or Racetraitor??? How often do you think people bug Andy and Pete about their vegan sxe past? Did you ever make the mistake of buying a Vegan Reich record back in the day?????
what about Arma Angelus? weren’t they on Eulogy? chicago hardcore at its finest. lawlz.
I don’t really think hardline could exist in this day and age since this generation is the hypersexual one. Unless some lolzy butthurt nerds start a movement against bands that promote sex ala BMTH or Asking Alexandria
the NFC is making a comeback, so look for neo-Hardline in 2k12!
Every generation thinks they invented sex.
against bands that promote sex like BMTH and Asking Alexandria* sorry I’m super brain dead right now lol
There is a strange National Socialist Hardline in Russia that uses the same logos and I believe the one above (“Hatecore”) is from that (though initially from the Statement record – same colors) – My knowledge of this is completely limited to internet – so I should not comment, but the logo made me…
Also I do think Hurley used the crossed guns for his twitter logo for a while, can anyone confirm ?
straight-edge till college, pro-life till girlfriend gets pregnant.
+1
So true. I fell victim to the first of these scenarios and it was the best thing that ever happened to me
Dude I never even knew that hardline existed, i thought that straight edge and being an asshole about it was extreme as it got, but I was clearly wrong. It would be cool if you or someone else would write a post about more of this stuff in detail. It seems like there should be 1000000000 hilarious stories about it!
Ihaha at Nicky. for douchehardline also peep xFightEveryonex’s demo. and if you can their picture of “all hoody, bandana, camouflage pants and x’d up” god damn i thought it was tough when i was 16 still couldnt bring myself to listen to them tho haha
Hey walker check out courage crew or the show where the lead singer from Suffocate Faster (was it?) stabbed someone for smoking at a show, or just anything on reno straight edge haha. i remember in byron bay a bunch of sxe kids beat up local Fisherman celebrity it was on the news and they were asking them about sxe ha pretty funny
“the lead singer from Suffocate Faster (was it?) stabbed someone for smoking at a show”
that is my friend Chris, and that’s not what happened. Chris got stabbed at a Himsa show in Cincinnati. I won’t gossip about it on here, but google it if you want, it was in the news. Chris is a bad motherfucker.
While trying to find the story about the Himsa stabbing, I ran across this: http://www.metalunderground.com/news/details.cfm?newsid=10563
Apparently the guy from Suffocate Faster didn’t stab anybody. On the contrary, he got stabbed by a security guard at a Cradle of Filth/Bleeding Through Show. The more you know!
Yes, thats correct. Security guard was a shithead from the university of cincinnati football team.
whoa had no clue that he was in killtheslavemaster..they were actually pretty decent. just listened to their ep last week and its still decent!!
forgot to mention they killed live(saw em in 99 @chain reaction hahah) and didnt they do a u.s. tour with caliban??
They would NEVER have toured with Caliban
Arma Angelus Had Pete Wentz as well as Patrick Stump, the singer of Fall Out Boy AND… Tim McGrath, the singer of RISE AGAINST on bass or something. Does it get more NFC that that?
Tim McGrath is pretty much the the king of NFC. All bow down before his swollen, lacerated anus.
both awful bands
I had only ever heard of these bands by name, first time hearing them now…wow.
no fun club or not, i am moshing for racetraitor.
lulzy lyrics/politics aside, they were SICK. one of the very best 90s metalcore bands, hands down.
Absolutely! Both Racetraitor and Killtheslavemaster were amazing back in their heyday.
james shart used to wear a vegan reich shirt. i’ve also read he was pretty hardline and used to carry a gun.
No knowledge about the gun part, but i def remember the other two!
The logo is crossed M4s not m16s
Noted! I guess when you are fighting for the honor of mother Gaia you want the reliability of the trusty m4 over the finicky but more advanced m16?
m4s serve mother gaia better because they are shorter m16s and thus use less of our precious natural materials.
Reading the hardline wiki page, were these fags really anti gay?
the “official hardline policy” was that they opposed any sex for purposes other than making babies on the grounds that it “wasn’t natural.” this included masturbation (there was an infamous, super lulzy article in a zine called Destroy Babylon that proclaimed “MASTURBATION DEPLETES YOUR CHI!!!”) and homosexual sex, although all the hardline-ish people i knew fapped and banged sluts on the regular and i definitely don’t think any of them were homophobic.
so to answer your question, maybe a couple of the hardline guys were anti-gay, but i think it would be more fair to categorize hardliners as lulzy puritans than homophobes.
At least hardliners take straight edge and veganism to their logical extremes instead of talking a whole bunch of shit but still drinking coffee and buying bananas grown with slave labour…. or something
whoever wrote the lyrics to “the way it is” definetely wasn´t banging anyone on the regular
and regarding the upcoming NFC-wave: check out the artwork:
http://www.nuclearblast.de/shop/artikel/bilder/title-fight-the-last-thing-you-forget/163036.jpg?x=1000&y=1000
I like that yhe dude who started that hardline shit went to jamaica to become a rastafari, white people make my head hurt.
jame shart had ‘hardline’ tattooed on the back of his neck but got it covered up. Also had dreads and big pants.
There’es a 50% chance that’s just an OC rumor haha but I remember it well
i have a whole new respect for fall out boy after reading this post. pretty cool that they left this shit behind, formed a ghey band, and got rich.
Hardline! Remember Raid- Above the Law. Crucial jams!
We’re missing the lulziest part of all….they went from THAT, to start Fall Out Boy!
From the hardline wiki page:
“especially the ongoing debate among group members as to whether or not cooked food was natural enough”
“…was an attempt by some Hardliners from Massachusetts to establish an intentional community in Hawaii.”
“Muttaqi left for Jamaica to explore the Rastafari movement.”
Da fuck. These people really don’t need drugs if they do shit this stupid sober.
Also, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-sex/drugs/alchohol, anti-masturbation? Why not just call yourselves conservative christians and be done with it?
Can you be a straight edge rasta? Someone should have told the Bad Brains
Hey, isn’t Botch’s classic “C. Thomas Howell as The Soul Man” about Racetraitor?
Dead on. Both Ktsm and racetraitor still rip. No one ever actually bought a vegan reich record, rite? I recall one new copy just sitting for years at my local hxc/punk/metal record store and gathering dust/generating laughs.
Question though. About the same time these bands were active there was a lot of gossip (at least in the midwest) about mormon-raised kids in sxe gangs and bands out in Utah and such, which seems like they would also be among the ultimate NFC bands. Thing is, I never heard any of those bands or any decently documented shit about that. Can anyone confirm or deny or expand on mormoncore?
I don’t know exactly what rumors you heard, but the Utah scene in the 90s was definitely crazy as fuck. Ask around on B9 and you will get some good stories, but a lot of that stuff was so out of control that it even made the newspapers/TV news, I’m sure you could google around for it.
Yeah, I remember that Time article on Mormon and sxe was a big deal and some other media shit about violence. And that Bloodpact song about violent SXE gangs being government funded which was pretty funny. I guess the real questions I had are: are there any awesome/lulzy bands (like the ones in this post) that almost no one remembers? And did anyone do sxe songs about mormonstuff?
paging Jav or Jose?? As far as Reno goes check out Unconquered and Fall Silent… the only SLC band I remember is Clear, but I’m sure there were a bunch of smaller ones that I never really knew about- maybe Jose can help us!
and america’s most wanted, yeah:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9MuHmX0-KQ
ctrl-f BIRTHRIGHT not found?!?! Come on brah!
Yeah James did have a hardline tat, also a lot of RENO stories are exaggerated but some are WORSE than the rumours.
liek wat, pls respond
what about sxe vegan hip hop?? lolzzzz!!!
Foreshadowingwhere Title Fight will be in ten years?
Found the Racetraitor disc for five bucks yesterday. Very happy with my purchase.
No fucks given about NFC and vegan kids with to much time on their hands, BUT HOW I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF T.MILLS BEFORE THIS? SHIT IS BANGING.
Banging so hard to T.Mills I cant even type…. “HOW I HAVE” == “HOW HAVE I”
T-Mills goes hard! Straight out of the 909
ouch. i remember this stuff all too well. and i have to admit for us “old people,” watching the whole hardline thing go down in MRR was one of the best/worst things ever. i have to admit that racetraitor was the last straw for me. my last travelled-to show was some fest in NC that featured racetraitor and torches to rome. between the two of them i think they played maybe 4 songs each, with 20 minutes of “discussion period / question and answer talk” in between each song. from what i remember, all race traitor wanted to talk about was how gap tshirts are evil and how they were all down with the uhuru movement. why a bunch of skinny dirty white kids thought they were part of uhuru was beyond me, but in the time where every show also featured some kind of anti-rape quilt-making class, i wasn’t surprised by it. after a couple hours of sitting through it all i got my turn during a question and answer period of torches to rome set and spoke about the fest and how 99% of the people here drove to see the bands play music, not listen to all this stupid hummus is good / the gap is evil nonsense, they all ganged up on me and told me to go fuck myself. haha. oh well. thus ended my love affair with mike kirsch and thus ended my giving a fuck about any of these bands’ or peoples’ “politics.” i remember speaking to a large number of us “older, fest going and playing” crowd who were on the same boat of “this is starting to suck real bad, i don’t think i’ll be coming to these things anymore.”
i have enjoyed your site and very excited about all these “back in the day” posts. as i would assume it is like reading some kind of journal from mars for the younger folks. good times.
hare krsnas, vegan militants, afrika-powered whiteys, no internet. it was a whole different world.
A+++ comment!
I remember Apt13 from the “fest scene,” he speaks the truth.
More blog posts like this one, plz.
Absotlluey first rate and copper-bottomed, gentlemen!
vvMlbk uswzgbhpeimq
original poster/comments: beautiful soul syndrome, look into it. being a cheesy cynic is more lame than any of the bands listed. not to mention the corny, typical blog of “heres some hearty quasi-masculine blogposts disguised as “jokes” (cause we’re all having fun here laughing at the absurdity of our lives. the singular point of a cynic’s existence.) about things i was tricked by in my teens/20′s and now im trying to make fun of its remnants.”
“im a cynic. youre a hypocrite. everythings fucked so ill just point out how youre wrong while laughing.”
No Fun Club? its right here, bros.
GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR WRITING COHERENTLY GOALS IN 2011
Sorry but I just stumbled across this and I have to chime in with some additions to the nostalgia (that I suspect some of you will remember):
1) Pete’s “punk” name (or “hardcore” name) being “Pete Vegan” and he typically being decked out in a bright yellow Tommy Hilfinger puffy, upside down sun visor, frosted dreadlocks, etc. circa 1997
2) The guitarist from Ractraitor yelling that the guy complaining about the long Uhuru-related “discussion” between songs should “go to some punk rock show if you don’t like it” at a show at Black GG’s apartment.
3) The general bizarreness of having shows at the Hare Krishna temple in Chicago. 4) Pete’s whole extended circle going through the super-slick dress pants-and-tutlenecks phase.
4) Burn It Down (which often played shows with these bands) kneeling to Mecca and leading a crowd of white suburban punks in afternoon prayer at a show in Indy.
5) The kid who would set up a booth and make you a custom choker necklace (required hardcore uniform accessory) while you moshed at the Fireside.
6) The two lonely kids at the Hardline literature booth in the back.
6) All the ironic/capitalist places all these guys have ended up now that the “no-fun” circus has ended (MTV, being bar owners covered with straightedge tattoos, E! network hosts, lawyers, etc.)
In retrospect, we were definitely watching the messy (and hilarious) collapse of a subculture. But it was fun!
This is pretty late, but Hurley is now playing in a pretty sweet tr00 hardcore band called Enabler here in Milwaukee.
“Bleeding Cunt” I wanna find the song with that lyric in it, it was sick.