Early 2000s London hardcore is a vibe.
Knuckledust are a London-based hardcore group. They’ve been around since the mid-90s and are still going, which is pretty impressive given the shelf-life of most bands. Slash and Ignite is the second track from Knuckledust’s 2007 album, ‘Promises Comfort Fools’. The track is emblematic of the hardcore scene at the time, which had gained a lot of traction in the metal community. Beatdown-influenced hardcore and metalcore were starting to become more prevalent, producing bands like The Ghost of a Thousand and Bring Me The Horizon. Yeah. Those guys. They started off as a beatdown-influence metalcore group. Half of you probably have no idea that they have a song called ‘Rawwwrr!’ on their 2004 four-track EP ‘This Is What the Edge of Your Seat Was Made For’. There were more clubs back then, The Intrepid Fox was still pouring drinks for metalheads behind Centre Point, and metalcore kids wore more hairspray than Dolly Parton on a photoshoot in the Sahara.
Slash and Ignite’s firestorm energy clangs along at a pace past the intro. The track’s sawblade aggression is underpinned by a sense of desperation driven by the full-tilt tempo and urgency of words belted out in a frantic stream like a cracked out Tottenham street preacher.
This comes at a point in the scene before beatdowns started to really swallow the music, and songs would just devolve into 5-minute chug sessions for angry white guys to crowd kill teenage girls to. There’s a number of pace changes and switch ups, which keeps things interesting. The beatdowns are nice and chunky, but they don’t outstay their welcome and they rip back into groovy verses without feeling stilted as can sometimes happen.
The group’s vocalist delivers a brief, but respectable rapped verse, illustrating the overlap between the hardcore and grime scenes in London. Usually, when blokes start rapping in metal music, you clench your teeth and hope they’ll gain some self-awareness soon, but it works here and there’s clearly a deft set of hip-hop chops to accompany the hardcore vocals.
The song finishes on a great groovy two-step beat, although the “we love LBU” yelled at the song’s end sounds like the hardcore equivalent of something you’d see on a tourist t-shirt. Call me cynical, but it’s more goofy than inspiring.
The mostly incoherent crowd shout at the beginning of the song is “LBU”. Unless you were around the early 2000s metal scene, you probably wouldn’t have any reason to think anyone would yell that particular series letters at random. So, just to clear it up, LBU stands for ‘London Blackout Unit’ – a UK hardcore group to which Knuckledust belong, featuring other bands including Bun Dem Out and Ninebar. The collective is still around 20 plus years on and is still respected, which as far as music scenes go, is impressive. Rooted in London street culture, the crew have a reputation for a no-nonsense attitude coupled with a heavy emphasis on in-group loyalty and community; ideals that became a recurring motif in the associated artists’ lyrics.
Hardcore has always had a bit of a bro thing going on. It’s very into having a group and emphasising the importance of social bonds and so on. For music as aggro as hardcore tends to be, it can be a strangely wholesome subgenre. You’ve never heard guys get this enraged over how glad they are to have a best friend. In UK Hardcore’s case, you get kind of an equivalent to postcode repping. It took the mean street attitude of NY Hardcore, and applied the mentality of working-class Brits to it. As you might expect this is predominantly urban music. I’m not exactly in touch with the scene anymore, it’s been a long time since me and my lot used to drink at Camden Lock on Sundays and make abortive attempts to chat up goth girls, but I presume there aren’t many hardcore outfits screaming about the necessity of being streetwise in a village in Lincolnshire or the backache of a Cumbrian farmer after a long day in oat-harvesting season.
In Slash and Ignite’s case, this results in a lot of shouting about loyalty, “brothers for life”, LBU gets namedropped three or four times across a 3-and-a-half-minute track. There’s the usual chest beating about strength in the face of adversity and so on. I can get behind those themes, but hardcore in general always seems overly reliant on a cluster of topics it hyper-fixates on and rarely explores beyond them. It’s like Hatebreed, you start to realise that you’re just hearing the same mantra from one track to the next. Hatebreed’s entire discography boils down to a more aggressive version of Elton John’s ‘I’m Still Standing’. Some would contend that the lyrical themes are raw and honest. I can respect that, but at what point does being raw and honest about one thing just become recycling? Long story short, Slash and Ignite isn’t doing anything you wouldn’t expect and haven’t heard before.
I thought about this song because I’ve been thinking about progress and change recently. How it’s hard to progress or grow these days. The world seems to want to keep people in place. Confined to a space that other people have arbitrarily assigned them, if not remove them altogether. Probably because it benefits someone above them. Britain’s social mobility is at its worst in over 50 years. American social mobility is declining, and alongside it, the Americans are finally waking up to the notion that ‘The American Dream’ is a scam.
The story is not there to extend you an offer for the opportunity to get rich and have the corner office job, the big home, the two-point-one children, the white picket fence, and the dog. It’s there to keep working people towing the line and buying into the survival-of-the-richest economy, all parroting the same line that if you just keep working hard then you too can have a McMansion in Beverly Hills. Only, you’ll probably go into crippling debt via medical bills for standard consultations long before then, and the insurance guys certainly aren’t interested in helping.
Question the narrative, of course, and the predictable talking heads waddle out of the herd to move the goalposts. Something something small print it’s about opportunity not expectations. Also, it’s essential that you come from wealth. Working hard is good PR, being born into it is what actually gets you there. But don’t say that part out loud. The plebs might hear. Smaller print: The opportunity is not for you.
Then there’s the crab bucket that I’ve rambled about before.
Unless you’re in The Big Club, fuck you.
Contrary to Slash and Ignite’s emphasis on the importance of loyalty and group cohesion, and the general UKHC crew attitude, I don’t necessarily agree with the fanatical adherence to in-group membership. The modern word emphasises ties upon ties upon ties until a man is tied up like a Gordian knot and cannot escape. How did Alexander The Great solve the Gordian knot? He hacked the fucking thing apart with a sword. What a lad.
The world is growing more unstable and more unpredictable. You need to be responsive and agile to survive it. Stability is for the neo-aristocracy at the top of the great societal ponzi scheme. You aren’t them. Punching a shifting landscape achieves nothing. You can only move from one safe place to the next before it sinks. So ask a question: Why would anybody ever tie themselves to anything? They wouldn’t. The only reason that anybody would want other people to bind themselves, is to remove competition.
How many fuck-arse LinkedIn posts from a herd of pointless dweebs complaining that there’s no company loyalty anymore or that – shock horror – so and so left a company for, get this, a higher wage. Reality: business wants easy canon fodder that they can pay bottom dollar to. And then they will throw the same loyal workers to the sharks at the first sign of trouble. Business doesn’t want to deal with people who are alert and light on their feet and going to save themselves. That’s why we hear this constant pitiful mewling about about millennials and gen Z job hopping. Sure, they’ll talk a big game about loyalty and culture, but at the end of the day it’s a hyper-competitive every-man-for-himself economy. Under the logic of hypercapitalism, you’d better be willing to kill everyone in the room for a quid. If you ain’t, someone else in the room is going to kill you.
You’ve also no doubt had unsolicited advice shovelled onto you about how maintaining connections and building the biggest widest network ever conceived by mankind is the best idea ever conceived (never mind the fact that a person can only deal with just over a hundred relationships). I guess the man who has 8.2 billion connections is the man whose dick must be sucked 24/7? Because… I don’t know. It looks good on a quarterly report and sounds good in the annual review or something? Clowns in a harlequin’s world.
You ever get the impression that you’re dragging bodies behind you? You’re always dragging yourself behind you anyway. A million dead versions of yourself, corpses of the people you no longer are. It’s enough weight by itself. You don’t need to drag everyone else too. There’s no point to slowing yourself down with attachments to people who aren’t really there anymore. They’re going their own way. As they go they pull against you. As they must. It’s not a slight on you. It’s just people doing people things. Paths diverge. Directions change. Priorities shift. And bindings that are intended to keep people close become constrictions, becomes sources of resentment.
As you go through the world, you must constantly hack at the chords and ties attached to people who are moving away from you. If you converge at a later point, you can always make a new binding.
Got a knot? Shank that bitch.
We can fear fire. And we’d be right to do so. There’s few things more double-sided than flame. The same thing that delivers a sumptuous banquet can also burn your life down around you. But that destructive power is not inherently negative. Put the right things to the flame, and you can produce a positive.
Fire purifies. Cauterisation is the practice of scorching a wound to prevent excessive bleeding or remove harmful tissue. We exchange temporary pain for a greater healing. Controlled burns are an ecological measure to prevent greater more harmful out of control fires by burning away excess fuel. The soil of a volcano, having been scorched bare, is all the more fertile for it. Burning bridges stops you from going backwards. Progress birthed by fire.
Right wingers and billionaires love to whine about the declining birth rate and how it’s going to destroy society or whatever. Casually sidestepping the fact that they created the systems and the big club that led to the state of affairs they’re complaining about in the first place. They just want more meat to feed into the grinder. And you know what they say about systems that require infinite growth… These tin-horn dictators should reap as they have sown. They need bodies to survive, so starve them of bodies. Scorched earth. It’s tempting to conclude that maybe it needs to die. Maybe it needs to be destroyed for progress to be made. The neoliberal survival-of-the-fittest game is drawing to a crescendo, but a crescendo signals a change, and change creates progress, a move forwards – wherever forwards takes us. Good? Bad? Who cares. It’s all relative. The point is not the destination, the point is to keep moving.
All things must move. Stasis is death.
Sometimes, the cost of progress is great destruction and a period of great uncertainty and upheaval. But primordial chaos is a mother.
From chaos comes creation.
Words and Chaos 
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