X-Force - Demo CS

A lyrical snippet, before we begin in earnest: "Because you're a fucking retard / shoving shit up your nose / because you're a fucking retard / swiggin' shit down your throat."

Let's ignore for a second that this is some of the weakest attempt at flow, rhythm, and rhyme scheme; this is straight edge for the absolute lowest common denominator. Absolutely pathetic. Everyone from Convulse Records to Rage Deposit to the four goons responsible for writing this shit should be embarrassed.

I guess it should come as no surprise that a bunch of white guys from central Indiana are high-functioning conservatives. The "street cleaning" mantra typical of this end of hardcore, its pitch and cadence ringing in harmony with every fascist excretion, has long disgusted me, but this feels particularly brain dead as the state contemporaneously makes very real moves to cleanse the streets of every single person it deems unworthy of life and freedom. I don't really think you can separate this release from the context we've been in livin' in since 2016, (and since 2001, 1964, 1865, 1776, and on and on and on), and I don't think you can ignore the parallel rhetoric we're inundated endlessly with from above, either. The mainstream has tossed out all pretense to civility and resistance, and the underground, for all its vaunted ideals, despite the lip service disdain X-FORCE directs towards "corporate" hardcore, follows suit.

Bands like X-FORCE or CONSERVATIVE MILITARY IMAGE become commonplace, people casually toss out slurs, and every capital H hardcore band has at long last re-established a safe space wherein their every whim is catered to. They lurch to and fro, from one Hoosier basement to another, and perform their apex masculinity drag show revue, unconfronted by opposing thought.

I'm the victim of an addict who was the victim of an addict who was the sister of addicts, and whatever contempt or resentment I may hold towards erstwhile parental figures, I don't wish death on any of them. In response, I chose straight edge for 13 years of my life. It allowed me structure and control in a complicated world. It allowed me solace and distance from the addiction that has plagued my family and friend groups for generations. I broke edge 9 years ago this September. I regret nothing. Straight edge made me a better person in many ways, but never better than anyone else.

This is a common theme throughout these four meandering, not at all brief tracks: superiority, supremacy. Four guys dressing up ridiculous, reactionary, crypto-Christian vengeance in X-swatches and dunks, an impotent rage lobbed against a boogeyman they'll never know within the confines of the top-40, five-band Convulse package deal tour infrastructure, and they'll never see when the tour ends and they return to the Demolisten podcast booth.

It's a bit, and a bad one, and the righteousness falls apart real quicklike 'cause at the end of the day, these people are dumb Indiana hicks too inert to have ever left their hovel, too stupid to conceive of a reality beyond their own, too scared to confront the structures and apparatus that perpetuates the addiction they vilify, and fortunate enough to have only ever experienced their carefully constructed fantasy of violence.

You can find this yourself if you really must subject yourself to this 10-minute aural atrocity. It's the sort of uninspired dog shit one would expect from this end of the spectrum, nothing ventured and nothing iterated upon in the least; hell, even THE RIVAL MOB (my least favorite hardcore band of all time until 10am today) had the good sense to rip off decent bands while hating AIDS patients, and the FUs wrote a magnum opus whilst raw-dogging the stars 'n' stripes.