What on earth is Sasscore?
Where on Earth would music be without genres that sound made up?
Now I know some snot-nosed berks will take an almost sexual degree of relish in reminding us all, pushing their glasses up so hard the lenses get embedded in their temporal lobes, that “akshewally, ‘all’ music genres are made up!!!” I’m sure we all thank them very much for that and wish them the very best of luck at their next Magic: The Gathering tournament. Each of us knows exactly what we’re talking about, right? That there’s a world of difference between rock, punk, metal, hip-hop, etc, and, like, crab-core.
The world of music genres that could count as Cryptic Crossword clues is endless, and has only gotten deeper and more obscure with the advent of the internet age. There’s freakbeat, brostep, abstracto, fidget house, and those are just a few from Spotify alone. Take your search to the blogs and you’ll find shitgaze, Simpsonwave, Punk Pathetique and millions of other forms of music that have genuine scenes devoted to them. Even if those scenes are a couple of lonely nerds with a guitar, some production software and a dream. Having nothing better to do also helps.
The world of punk rock is a fertile breeding ground for sub-genres. This checks out perfectly. Punk rock is a world built on a foundation of freaking people out with wild, aggressive music, and as the genre has evolved, the number of directions people have taken it is basically limitless. Today, any one-syllable word you can think of has probably been combined with the suffix “core,” and the wild world of Sasscore is a perfect example of this.
It may sound like a joke, and what’s more, if you ask any of the genre’s leading lights about it, a decent number of them will tell you it is. However, that’s not to say that those bands aren’t taking their music deadly seriously and only in the world of sasscore does that combination work.
What on earth is Sasscore?
So, I don’t think it’ll blow your mind to know that the world of hardcore punk is a serious one. Sure, there are the occasional outliers like the Dead Kennedys and Descendents. However, considering I’ve probably sparked a riot among the more punx readers of this fine site by even calling them hardcore, you can see two things. First, just how much of an outlier the bands that don’t take hardcore that seriously are, and how seriously hardcore punk fans take this stuff.
Now, taking things seriously isn’t a crime, yet there is always space for light and shade, especially amongst something as inherently silly as rock n’ roll. In the 1990s, though, a number of bands started to take the po-faced world of hardcore and inject it with a bit of outrageous style, both in the presentation and in the music itself. Now, as is so often the case with niche subgenres like this, narrowing its genesis to one genre and one scene is difficult. Bands like The Nation of Ulysses, Le Shok and Brainiac set a tone that many other bands matched going forward.
The look consisted less of beefy dudes with shaved heads hollering about the government and more of twinks in blazers with feathered hair screeching about pretty much anything else. More often than not, with the accessory that actually gave the “scene” its name for a brief period of time, a white belt. The irony was that this more metrosexual, homoerotic look lead to bands playing more crushingly heavy, legitimately distressing music, with bands like The Number 12 Looks Like You and A Trillion Barnacle Lapse looking like butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth while playing heavier music than basically anyone else in their scene.
As the sound softened, a few bands from the scene broke into… well, not the mainstream, but the closest thing a hardcore band will ever get to it. Every Time I Die and Daughters both rose out of the more sassy, daring sides of their scenes. Death From Above 1979 are probably the most successful example of a sasscore band, with the look and the sound to match. So the next time you read about a scene with a name that makes you roll your eyes, look a little deeper, you might just be sneering at the sound of the future.