Is it okay to have fun? Is that allowed? In certain sectors of the music scene — shoegaze, metal and its varied sub-sects, Goth — the answer isn’t always cut and dry. Crack a smile and you crack the facade. But is there really any point in maintaining such a false spectacle of perpetual grimness, aloofness, self absorption, whatever you want to call it, when both band and audience know it’s a put-on? There can be a needed escape within the bounds of the suspension of disbelief, but sometimes you just have to allow for the fact that you’re human — a being wired for a wide expanse of emotional expression. Sometimes, you might actually have to let yourself laugh for a change.
Enter Singapore grindcore — actually self-described “fun core” — band Truth Be Known. The five-piece act, active since 2005, knows how to have a good time on stage while pummeling out one-to-two-minute blast and groove-infused songs that are by turns acerbic, poignant or just plain silly. Even seemingly pointed songs such as the 30-some-odd second blaster Sucks to Be You, with the title also comprising 95 percent of the lyrics for the tune, seem to come with a wink and a knowing nod at the end.
That doesn’t mean the band, coming from the increasingly oppressive city-state of Singapore, doesn’t know how to get serious. They hail from a country wherein regular folks are finding it harder and harder to scrape by due to an ever rising cost of living and stagnant wages for locals while salaries for imported foreign talent continue to rise. It’s a place where a teenager can be incarcerated merely for posting a video online deemed to offend religious sensibilities of the hothouse flower Christian right, and where journalists or bloggers can be sued into soul-crushing financial ruin for writing something that displeases the ruling elite, even if their reporting is wholly factual.
Photo courtesy of Tiger.
It’s easy to take a look at some of the song titles on Truth Be Known’s latest album, By Any Means Necessary, and think they’re having a laugh. But if you listen to the message on songs such as Life Kills You you get that sense of growing desperation, frustration and abject rage of watching a country disintegrate before your eyes along with your very future while greedy politicos wring their hands and tell you your pension you’ve been contributing to your whole life was never really yours to begin with.
Smiling while the world burns around you doesn’t always imply ignorance of one’s surroundings. Sometimes it’s more a sign of one who saw it coming, sounded a warning and watched the masses collectively choose to ignore it. Truth Be Known might be known, as it were, for their at times funny antics on stage and off, but they didn’t earn the title of “angriest band in Singapore” by tap dancing and playing the ukulele either. Humor is a sign of intelligence. Anger is a sign of knowledge that things are not as they should be. Put the two of them together, and you’ve got the musical equivalent of George Carlin — god rest his crotchety and darkly incisive old bones — a band that sees the awful truth for exactly what it is, and tells you of your imminent doom with a smile on its face.
■Truth Be Known plays tonight at Jack’s Studio (杰克音樂), B1, 76, Kunming St, Taipei City (台北市昆明街76號B1). Tickets are NT$400 in advance, NT$500 at the door and the show starts at 7:30pm. You can catch them tomorrow as part of the Wake Up (音樂祭) festival lineup in Chiayi.
Photo courtesy of Steven Chew.
Another bit of good news this week as Taiwan hardcore pioneer and all around good guy Mike Huang (黃祐鼎) brings back his Friendship Hardcore concert series. Huang, who has featured in the lines of this column before, has worked tirelessly over the years to promote hardcore music in Taiwan, with limited, if marginally encouraging, results.
The goal of the concert series is simple — bring some overseas hardcore bands to Taiwan, show them the local scene and in turn inspire some local kids to pick up an instrument and perhaps get hooked on the PMA heaviness of hardcore (that’s Positive Mental Attitude for those unfortunates who don’t know who the Bad Brains are).
Truth be told, hardcore hasn’t really taken off in Taiwan — at least not yet. Shows are still sparsely but passionately attended by a close-knit few. And as for local hardcore bands, there are basically three who would fit the textbook description — Hsinchu born and bred Huang’s own Human Brutality (人類暴行), Taipei’s Hateful Rezpect and Taichung’s melodic hardcore band Defeat The Giant. It’s a small community, but that in no way diminishes the dedication and drive of those committed both to the music and the lifestyle of loyalty to friends, family and oneself that it preaches.
In the hopes of growing the hardcore community even further, Huang has once again practiced what he himself preaches with the fourth installment of the Friendship Hardcore series, reaching out to veteran blackened thrashers Bazooka to fill a somewhat unlikely supporting slot for the show. To the outsider, this might not seem like much, but it actually goes toward healing a longstanding rift between certain members of the hardcore and metal community in an increasingly hostile scene in which personal beefs have seen it turn divided and cliquish. Perhaps this will be the catalyst that sees some of the old wounds healed, and some of the words exchanged in anger or slights, real or only perceived, finally forgiven.
■Friendship Hardcore Vol 4, headlined by Osaka, Japan’s Tiger is tomorrow at Revolver, 1-2 Roosevelt Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路一段1-2號). Tickets are NT$500 at the door. The show gets underway at 7pm.
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