The internet is having a weird influence on hardcore. Every day, thousands of kids who weren’t even old enough to be in kindergarten when I first started going to shows are scouring the internet for the most obscure shit no one in hardcore cared about at the time, and forming revivals around that sound. For example, never in a million fucking years would I have imagined an 18 year old kid in 2014 being a connoisseur of Crown of Thornz.
The odd thing though is there is a funny dark spot in this phenomenon roughly around 1998-2003. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because there hasn’t been enough time for nostalgia to set in; maybe this period of time hasn’t been mythologized yet; or maybe it’s just unfortunate that it happened to occur during the Web 1.0 days and documentation of this period is not well known because who the fuck wants to comb through poorly edited video tape transfers of 240p live clips of these bands on youtube.
The lone exception to this seems to be screamo, which had its vocal and sperg-level precise documentarians, and thus survived relatively in tact. I suspect screamo had the benefit of having a certain appeal to a wider audience because HURR DURR, IT’S ABOUT GUURLZ.
Today, I want to aware you on sass.
Sass was an extremely short-lived style of hardcore, lasting perhaps, at peak, two to four years. It was roughly contemporary with the classic screamo era (late 90s/early 2000s), it wasn’t uncommon for sass and screamo bands to play the same shows, it came with an easily identifiable and fashionable visual esthetic, and it was wildly fun (for those of us who liked fun).
Sass was all about tight pants, pink, snotty attitudes, sweaty dance parties, keyboards, androgynous Asian band members, and explicit homoeroticism. Hardcore for the angry skinny boys full of sexual tension and a great collection of skinny ties and thrift store slim-fit suit jackets before those were even a thing that cool people wore.
See that girl on the left? That was pretty much every girls at a sass show. Actually, pretty much everyone in this shot could have been a sass audience member.
The genesis of this is a really hard thing to pin down, as it probably is with most subgenres. My own personal take was that it was social more than anything. In the late 90s, hardcore (screamo, whatever you want to call it) got a little more adventurous and started to reach a different audience that normally wouldn’t be into hardcore, generally the types of people who comprised the very first wave of hipsters, before that become a dirty term (these were actually cool people). They took it and threw in their own femme arthouse stuff and what we got was sass.
At this point, the term “hipster” and “scenester” were roughly synonymous. Neither was really an insult or meant you looked like a Spencer’s Gifts exploded. A lot of these bands were made up mostly of art students, which sort of implies they crave attention, and a lot of their antics were specifically done to make people feel as uncomfortable as possible, but you could just be a dick independent of all of this.
So what was a sass show like? Imagine an over-the-top snotty, somewhat danceable, explicitly homoerotic music that wouldn’t be out of place in some stinking, sweaty basement between a couple of hardcore and/or screamo bands.
You have to understand just how different this was at the time. It was going to be polarizing no matter what.
Sass had a contentious at best relationship with the greater scene. Some people loved it and some people hated it. People hated it for a variety of reasons, but I think mainly it was due to the latent discomfort hardcore has always had with male sexuality, be it heterosexual or homosexual. A good number of people who hated it were the prudish PC thought police types. Which was bizarre as it “brought in” non-traditional audience members, mainly homosexual men and good looking women, something the PC monks always complained about. Of course the tough guy hardcore, or pv, or edge, (and so on) crowds hated it on their own terms, which should be obvious.
In short, sass tapped into something very primal, something very fundamental that hardcore never understood:
GIRLS LIKE TO DANCE
Yes, even the damaged fucking goods that are into hardcore and weird/artsy/indie shit. Yes, even a little dancing goes a long way. Why this was never understood by the No Fun Club hardcore crowd (which should be how you read any mention of “hardcore” in this article) should be self evident.
You might be asking yourself, “But Pete, none of this stuff sounds particularly danceable, what the fuck are you talking about?” Different time, little dude. If you’re used to only seeing apoplectically spastic TOP SKRAMZ or nauseatingly earnest ultra-PC hardcore – complete with lectures, rants about shit that happened on messageboards, shitbrained political beliefs, and all the ethnomasochism all you dumb, cruel, entitled, tunneled vision, shit eating white male heterosexual Christians can handle – you’ll dance to something with a little hi-hat shuffle thrown in.
We’ll get to the bands in a second, but every microgenre should have its record label, and for sass it was Sound Virus. Pretty much everything they put out, with a few exceptions like the Last Match discography (basically a straight up Euro hardcore band), was sass gold. They put out records by sass mainstays like Blood Brothers, The Red Light Sting, The Sick Lipstick, The Cinema Eye, A Trillion Barnacle Lapse, Death From Above (later with the “1979″ added), and Hint Hint, among others.
So, let us begin the deluge of youtube clips.
Nation of Ulysses is not a sass band. They were a joke, not really a joke, possibly a joke Leftist revolutionary band beloved by No Fun Club types at the height of the NFC’s power in the 90s. They did, however, have impeccable style, the right attitude, and and overall esthetic that I would have to imagine influenced every other band on this list. NOU was the first draft of the blueprints. Think of them as proto-sass.
A little later in the game we have Le Shok. Again, still too early in the 90s, and still not sass, but notice what is going on here. The style. The flagrant antagonism of the crowd. The band’s mannerisms. The fact that it is hardcore, but there is a certain je ne sais quoi of experimentation and sass about it. There’s something altogether more…sexual about all of it. Serious LOL @ :40 where that awkward beta kid gets mad about getting hit with the beer and tries to throw it back at the band. Must have been edge.
The Crimson Curse, featuring Justin Pearson of Struggle, Swing Kids, and The Locust not-really fame. This was his short-lived foray into proto-sass. Look at that still. If that doesn’t sum up the entire zeitgeist of everything that was to come in sass, I don’t know what does.
Now we’re in the right time period, but Q and not U still didn’t quite fit into the “sass” category. Virtually everything is here though, esthetically and musically. This was the makeout record of 2000-2001. I feel despair sometimes knowing I’ll never be a 17-18 year old making out with a girl with shotgun haircut. Weep for me.
If you’re at all familiar with sass, it’s going to be The Blood Brothers. They were huge (relatively speaking) enough that they got mainstream press attention. “Sass” wasn’t a term many people outside of hardcore used, so they were usually referred to as hardcore (sort of, I guess) or screamo (LOLWUT). Music journalists have always been idiots, and this period of time was no different. Screaming meant you were screamo and emotion meant you were emo. Keep in mind, “emo” back in the 90s meant you wore argyle sweater vests and got freakishly violent and flopped around the floor like a fish, not that you were a handsome boy from the midwest and you were kinda sad about girls and wrote pop punk songs about it.
Anyway, listen to that sleazy sexuality just coming through, especially on 1-900-USA-NAILS. The breathy and simultaneously mush-mouthed vocal delivery is the calling card of sass. Hyper sexualized, but not masculine at all.
Later Blood Brothers records got even more artistic. Some people hate it, but I love it. I remember reading a review when this album came out saying it was “on some Elton John type shit” or something similar. Guy Picciotto produced it, and he got the homo way up in the mix, if that’s what the reviewer meant by the Elton John joke. This record was like a pair of hot, salty nuts in your face, but in a good way.
There are some bands that you can’t really talk about outside of comparing them to The Blood Brothers. The Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower is one such band. Largely seen as a Blood Brothers clone at the time, and while fairly popular, they have seemed to fall into obscurity. Out of all the sass bands, they were the most over-the-top when it came to the homoeroticism. You don’t name an album Love in the Fascist Brothel complete with tranny (?) Nazis on the cover and songs like “Lipstick SS” if you aren’t trying to send a message. They were also notorious for really pushing the envelope when it came to their live shows, going so far as to wander into the audience and kiss men on the mouth and grope crotches. Some real shirtlifter type shit.
Another such band that always gets the Blood Brothers comparisson was These Arms Are Snakes. Being from the Pacific Northwest probably didn’t help that, either.
If any band had the esthetic of sass down, it was An Albatross. The pants, the hand on the hip ( a signature sass move), the sexuality, putting his hands down his sassy pants, the between song banter, it’s all there. Pretty much everyone into this kind of stuff had their first two records; Eat Lightning, Shit Thunder, and We Are the Lazer Viking.
Along the same lines, esthetically speaking, were xbxrx, who incidentally did a split with An Albatross. Less extreme sounding, but no less weird, this band had a prolific output of records almost no one cares about today.
The Red Light Sting were fairly popular at the time, but have fallen into almost complete obscurity. For some reason, I identify the sound of sass with this band more than any other. Their existence as a band almost perfectly coincides with the rise and fall of sass, so maybe that’s why.
Fellow Sound Virus band, Hint Hint wasn’t as well known, and are now completely unknown outside of the handful of sass aficionados left. Basically me and Alex Bigmin. It’s 2003 and you see a beautiful weird girl on campus and really want to fuck her. That’s the essence of Hint Hint.
If there was any other “big” sass band, it was Death From Above 1979. Their style was more accessible; it was much more danceable, and there was no screaming or vestigial hardcore elements. Just looking at these guys and you can see where every douchebag in Brooklyn got their look half a decade later.
The sound quality on this is atrocious, but it’s important to include. A Trillion Barnacle Lapse was fairly popular, and they’re so fucking off the radar now that this is the “best” video of them I could find on youtube. Look at the date: live circa 2001. This band was way ahead of its time esthetically. Their 12″ on Sound Virus is a must have.
I was actually surprised I was able to find anything from Eleventh Symphony. This was some real deep cut type shit even at the time, so I’ll take what I can get. I even tried to find some Soliah Shawcross as well (a related band) but that proved to be too obscure even for the internet.
While were on the topic of shit so fucking obscure I can’t even find a youtube video of a single representative song, I’m going to mention Black and White Photo Enterprise by Radio Vago.
This is so fucking unknown I had to take a picture of it from my own collection. This record is one of the few records that sounds exactly like its cover looks like. See also: Sean Price’s Mic Tyson.
Radio Vago were an all-girl LA band heavy on the synth. I don’t think I need to explain anymore about what they sounded like, at least on this record. They later kinda sorta released a follow up album years later recorded by Omar Rodriguez from ATDI/Mars Volta. It doesn’t sound anything like this record. Buy it if you can find it.
A little more hardcore that was around at the time than outright sass, Hands Are… gives a good idea of just how ubiquitous sassy stage presence was at the time.
Even in the belly of the beast of the No Fun Clubbers, Dischord, was getting in on the act. Between Black Eyes and Q and not U, Dischord temporarily forgot about boring and/or bumming everyone out 100% of the time. Just kidding, I love you guys. Back to the band at hand though, just listen to that fucking trashy, sassy sound. “A loneliness no fag could comprehend.” Yep.
The Number Twelve Looks Like You were pretty much universally hated by everyone at the time. This video isn’t particularly sassy, and their later stuff on is completely different than their early work, but they definitely had the gift early on. I’m pretty sure this video was shot in a house in New Brunswick, too.
Time for the crossover stuff. x Vincent Price’s Orphan Powered Death Machine x were pretty much the zenith of sassy screamo, along with After School Knife Fight (that band THAT band). They were known for their big, Ric Flair style WOO!s.
I’m in this video which was shot at xvpopdmx’s last show, and yeah, there was all kinds of weird things at sass shows. This particular show had a couple of guys with tennis rackets miming lobbing tennis balls to people moshing to the metalcore bands that played earlier (you can see them briefly in this clip), and then at one point one of the vocalists in vpopdm (they had a total of three guys just doing vocals) ran a duct tape lasso around the whole crowd. You just went with it. Being 240p quality, I’d point myself out but it would be fruitless. I’ve actually got the complete last show on an old laptop. I need to dig that shit out one of these days because there is a wealth of 2001-2007 hardcore history on that thing.
ASKF (THAT band). If I remember correctly, Jacen Beers claimed to have the largest collection of screamo girl n00dz. I have no reason to doubt this.
“i dont like the way u treated me i wanna fite”
“and u r and u r and u r”
teh orkidz
Orchid are still fairly well known, so I’ll spare the details. Fans at the time, and still to this day, are divided in their opinion of their last album. Orchid were known for screamy hardcore about undergrad philosophy. Their last album was somewhat of a departure. Sure, you still had all the philosophical quotes and references and “revolutionary politics” and a picture of Angela Davis on the cover, but the sound was majorly sass-influenced, and not a lot of the old guard (pause) liked that. Needless to say, this is my favorite Orchid release. It even has a Brooklyn/tight t-shirt guy reference. Ahead of the time, truly.
Panthers, which had three members of Orchid, took off after Orchid called it quits. You can hear how the sass sound carried over to the new band and how it influenced that last Orchid record. A lot of people refer to the Gatefold album as a Panthers record. I’m p sure they mean it as an insult. P sure.
Also along the lines of other notorious No Fun Clubbers making sass-influenced music, we have Milemarker. Al Burian (the male keyboard player) has been a member of many No Fun Club bands and writes books about why capitalism is evil. This particular video is from the Michiganfest 2002 DVD which my roomates at the time and I had a copy of back in 2003. We used to watch the shit out of this video (among others) because we were pretty sure his keyboard wasn’t plugged in because he was just hitting random keys and it wasn’t corresponding to any sound. I also suspect because we all thought the girl was cute, but none of us would admit it.
JR Ewing were a bunch of mustachioed Norwegians who covered a lot of ground during the time they were a band. They started out almost a straight up Euro hardcore band and progressively got softer and more melodic with each release. Their later records were completely different and heavily sass influenced. For a time, it was impossible to go to a show of any kind and not see a girl with a JR Ewing t-shirt.
Van Johnson was more of a sass-influenced screamo band than anything else, and if you weren’t friends with Steve Lam on MySpace and didn’t have him in your Top 8 you weren’t shit.
Another sass-influenced screamo band, The Wolfnote also had some more straight up sass tracks. Note judicious use of pink bandanas and white belts.
For example.
The Rapture were one of the “The” bands from the early 2000s. They looked like they were going to be huge. They were getting better reviews than The Strokes for the most part. They never really took off and are pretty much forgotten nowadays. A fine example of sass-indie. Those handclaps. Another sass mainstay.
This might be a bit of a stretch, but hear me out. When Hot Damn! came out, pretty much everyone who was into metalcore hated it. It didn’t sound anything like their previous work, and for all intents and purposes, make a complete mockery out of metalcore. This was a masterful troll job. Handclaps? On a metalcore record? Sass-metalcore, there you have it.
Head Automatica was Daryl Palumbo’s (of Long Island hardcore band Glassjaw fame!) attempt to get rich, I think. It didn’t really work, but they managed to make…sass-pop? If memory serves me correctly, there is an earlier cut of this video without all the neon graphics and more slow mo shots of guys with cigarettes in their mouths wailing on guitars.
A.R.E. Weapons are an important band that almost no one remembers. First off, they’re ex-Clikatat Ikatowi (SD old school emo band [shoutouts to Andrew in the comments for picking up on this] ). Secondly, they were among the first bands doing this kind of sound in Williamsburg. Shit, they were among the first bands in Williamsburg that consisted of hip white people. This was 1999, Williamsburg was still a fucked up hellhole with cheap rent because no one wanted to live in a part of town where you were likely to get robbed or assaulted. “Hipster” still meant you were cool, and not a catchall term that now means “literally anything a white person under the age of 45 does outside of the realm of sports.” Full disclosure, I hated this band at the time because they were a bunch of try-hards. Sass-electro.
From what you can gather from these songs, sass didn’t really have a “sound.” It was more an esthetic than a uniform, cohesive sound. You had to have certain elements, but more often than not, those elements were about style and presence than they were about sound. You knew what you were getting into when you went to a show though. You were getting your money’s worth, you were going to sweat, you were going to get felt up and maybe kissed (usually by another guy), and you were going to dance with kyut weird chicks who dressed well and were getting their B.A. in art history.
It went away almost overnight. The halcyon days were from 2000 to maybe 2004, and that’s stretching it in both directions. 2001 to 2003 was probably the height. I was and apparently still am in a very, very small minority who will openly admit to loving it at the time, actively collects it, and yearns for a revival.
Why did it go away? Why would anyone want to stop dancing and having fun and actually having a handful of not terrible looking girls at shows? Beats me. By 2004, most of the relevant bands broke up and new ones were not forming. I blame the No Fun Club. I mean, it’s not like all the early punk bands were made up of effeminate weirdos or anything. Too much fun, not enough lecturing.
If you’re reading this and are so inclined, please start a sass revival. Make a comp. Call it Diamond Dust Shoes and have the cover be a guy’s coke covered face with spit chains leading to what can only be assumed to be an off camera penis. What you will need to make it authentic:
proverbial mountain of cocaine
denim, lots of denim
old style American Apparel t-shirts, preferably pink
art degrees from colleges no one has ever heard of
songs containing the following words: lipstick, sick, baby, cigarettes, OH!/OH-OH!/OH-OH-OH!, WOO!, and the phrase “doctor, doctor!”
sassy dance moves
questionable sexuality
sneering
paper-thin guitar tones
hi-hat shuffles
There may even be a nascent sass revival. Here are a few newer sass-eque bands:
Neon Navajo is no longer with us, but members went on to form Stripper Pussy, which has a GREAT name for a sass band