"For the rest of your fucking life/ You will mark my words."
- Hatebreed, "Mark My Words," Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire
Newton's Third Law of Motion is commonly referred to as the law of action and reaction. Action-reaction pairs are ubiquitous, as formally described above. Philosophically speaking, this law demands, of an external reality, a causal relation between forces. It places a leash on the world and reins in the seemingly-distinct and disparate actions of climates, galaxies (empirical examples), and vibrations (on a subatomic particle level). We find hardcore music in a similar vein.
"Hardcore" can be characterized as demanding that its listener respect the pulsating kickdrum and the "imperativisity" of its lyrics. It asks of its listener to, on the one hand, hear the sheer brute force of the hyped-up bass guitar and percussion section, and, on the other, to heed its lyrics as if written from above. Hence, all of the finger-pointing and otherwise-imperative physical onomatopoeia.
Even the dancing brings to mind action-reaction pairs as bodies bounce off of one another, but the total energy of the system remains stable: For every fallen man, another bounces back up.
Consider the quotation above. Hatebreed's song is an eminent payback of sorts. It demands some causal relation between two forces. It's like a slow-motion, elastic collision. While the singer is being hit full on, he asserts that in the future he will bounce backwards, and the original force which hit him will be repelled back in the direction from whence it came.
Consider further the name of Hatebreed's album. Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire denotes the end of one emotion evolving into the resolution of another, action-reaction pairs. The album wants to assert, as a whole, that this world around us, even if it is full of lies and fire and all sorts of dark images which the songs describe, is subject to a series of laws. At the end of desire is satisfaction. At the behest of the singer, the unknown subject will submit to his will. The listener will be empowered to "smash his enemies" - the title of a song on another CD.
The darkness of the music seems to connote the underlying themes of the music: pain, suffering, struggle, survival and the ever-elusive triumph of the spirit or will. Thus, there is something inherently philosophical about hardcore music as it certainly advocates for the assertion of the will as the highest-possible achievement a man can hope to achieve in his few years on this earth.
If one cannot understand why a singer would want to "bark out" the lyrics to a song, consider the undercurrent of torment and pain of which the song speaks. What better way to convey this message than by shouting out the words themselves? It is as if there is a certain level of background suffering which occurs in the world which is not given a proper voice in normal everyday life. This is what "hardcore" looks to express. Again, this background noise is doubled in the world of physics as the background radiation which has been ubiquitous since the Big Bang.
For those who do not enjoy when singers bark at them, I can only sympathize so much. While the line between metal and hardcore is frequently blurred these days, there is something about the music which can be traced back to the "Screaming at a Wall" days of Minor Threat. When this association can be made, there is little doubt that the deep voices of today share the spirit of the shrillness of Ian McKaye's voice of yesterday.
Both back then, and now today, the hardcore scene aligns itself with the assumption that there is an external reality which is subject to the laws of physics. The music doubles this association and demands of its listener the same subjection by which the world moves and exists. Newton said it best when he wrote, "FAB = -FBA" or, to put it another way, "Mark my words.
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