Sick Of It All
von kk anno 2011
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Sick Of It All are one of the biggest New York Hardcore bands. They're already around for 25 years - a pretty long time in the music business - and jointly responsible for making the genre New York Hardcore so known. Karsten Köhler talked with Lou Koller, singer of the band, about the time back then, how the scene has changed and what hardcore should be all about.
The German music magazine VISIONS just published an interview with Vinnie Stigma of Agnostic Front. When asked about his musical taste, he answered: "If it ain't hardcore, it ain't shit."
Lou: [laughs] That's funny. I think it's great. I listen to a lot of different music but mostly hardcore and punk and metal. To me hardcore it's more of an attitude, too. It's being dedicated to something.
Besides Agnostic Front - who were your influences in the beginning?
Lou: New York Hardcore in general at that time. It was the big three, Murphy's Law, Agnostic Front and the Cro-Mags but we grew up listening to a whole bunch of different metal and punk like Motörhead and Black Sabbath, all the big ones, and punk bands like GBH, Discharge and The Plasmatics, it's all mixed in there.
Few of our readers witnessed the time back then. Could you give a brief description of the scene?
Lou: Back then it was smaller, definitely. We didn't realize that was going to be a worldwide phenomenon. It was more of a community. You had a center place which was CBGB's. Everybody just met there. You went there every weekend no matter who was playing, just to hang out and see the bands. As with any scene as it got bigger and bigger the ideals started to get a little watered down. People had different ideas. Some people think hardcore is all about just tattoos and fighting - which it's not. Bands like us and Agnostic Front and Madball, we tried to keep the original ideas that we had when we came in and we tried to spread it around in the world.
What were those ideals?
Lou: To be open-minded. The whole scene back then was very open-minded. You didn't have to look a certain way or have a certain kind of sneaker. We tried to keep those ideals going. But people change, kids want what they want. Sometimes it's about selling a style. You have to look like this and all has to sound like this. That's why we try to play with diverse bands. We don't just play all bands that sound heavy or all bands that are melodic, we try to mix the bands. It's the same with our records. We have songs that are really heavy but we have also songs that are heavy with melodic choruses or we have just pure sing-a-long songs.
Do you think a scene like the one in New York 25 years ago will someday somewhere emerge again?
Lou: I'm sure it is but it might not be hardcore. When a bunch of kids get together in somebody's garage and start some kind of a band and their friends all get around. We had friends from El Paso, Texas, and it's a small shitty town and there was nothing around so they started their own hardcore scene. Everybody from there and other neighboring towns did just come and play at this little club that they made. That's how it was. It keeps going. People just do it on their own.
Sick Of It All itself influences a lot of other bands. Do you sometimes listen to music and have the impression that some bands refer to you musically?
Lou: I never thought of that until people pointed it out. A band like Wisdom in Chains, we took them out on the road and everybody said "Those Guys are just like you", and I thought "No they're not". I think they write great songs and sometimes when I sit and listen I hear a little bit of us in it. Everybody's telling us how they're so much likes of Sick Of It All but I didn't think so. I can hear it just a little bit in there.
In 2007 you released a tribute sampler. Other bands interpreted your songs - how did you like it?
Lou: I thought it was great, because of the diversity of the bands. You had Hatebreed, Bleeding Through, then you had Rise Against and more melodic bands like Pennywise doing covers of our songs. We're very proud that we had some kind of influence or camaraderie with all those different kinds of bands.
Did you know those bands before?
Lou: We joked around on our 10 year anniversary about it, so when we hit the 20 year anniversary we decided to do it. I think it was Pete that called Igor from Sepultura, and said "Hey, we want to do a tribute record" and he didn't even wait to be asked, he just said "We wanna do 'Scratch The Surface'" and that was the start of it. Then, as soon as we got him, we were thinking of other bands and people started calling us, "Hey, I hear there's going to be a tribute, I want to be on it". We also took smaller bands that people might not know, like Kill Your Idols and No Redeeming Social Value. Because they're good bands that were working good in the hardcore scene and we wanted to get their name out there.
Your new album "Based On A True Story" sounds pretty hard in comparison with your previous albums. How come?
Lou: Oh yeah! It's just working with our producer Tue Madsen. We've always had trouble getting our live aggression and heaviness onto records. And Tue just happened to do it in 2006, the first time we worked with him, on "Death To Tyrants", and when we heard the result we were like "This is great, this is amazing." He said "If you come to Denmark, I can do this better", so when we were doing "Based On A True Story" we flew to Denmark to record there. The result just speaks for itself. It's just a bigger, louder, in-your-face-record than anything we've ever done. I think it was just his skill and him knowing us very well that he can pull out the right performances. And over the years the songwriting has gotten way better. I understand when people say "Oh, your first album is still my favorite", because it means something to them, it was like the first time they discovered Sick Of It All but soundwise it's a piece of crap and writing-wise the songs are ok. Now it's much better. [laughs]
How does the perfect hardcore song sound for you?
Lou: That's hard. For me, I'm from the old school; I like it fast and a good breakdown. A friend of ours who was in a big New York band called Token Entry back in the day, Ernie, their drummer, thinks the song "Machete" is the perfect hardcore song. It's very flattering because it was one of my favorites when we wrote the "Death To Tyrants" record. He wrote this whole blog about how "Machete" is the perfect hardcore song no matter what anybody says. I thought that was great.
Are politics genuinely a part of a song?
Lou: For us, yes, because we grew up in that era. We listened to bands like Discharge and Exploited and Crass, a lot of the English stuff, it was very political. So it was always part of our nature. Some of the newer bands are more personal. They sing more about their surroundings and I think that's more of a hip hop influence. I mean we've had that too when we were growing up but for some of the newer bands it's more like a personal expression. I think there's a place for everything. There are people that write poetry to music. That's cool, whatever. I'm not too into that stuff. I like people who tell stories like a Bruce Springsteen or that motivate and try to inspire you like the more political stuff. I think it's a good mix of both. You don't want to people beat over the head with political ideas all the time because then you'll only play to a certain amount of people. The way we do it, we have our personal expressions in there and the political stuff and hopefully the people who aren't into politics will once in a while catch one of those songs and really get into it.
Do you think your listeners do understand?
Lou: I hope so. Some people are getting confused but you can only put it out there and people interpret it how they want.
Sick Of It All is a political band, too. Recently there has been a lot of discussion about giving the people of Lybia weapons to fight Muammar al-Gaddafi. What's your opinion on that?
Lou: I don't know the whole story. Is he the tyrant they make him out to be? Is he not? Everybody has fucked up leaders; we have really fucked up leaders, too. When Obama got elected there was this whole idea that he's going to be great and he's going to be the opposite of George Bush but if you look at his history he comes from the same exact places Bush did, colleges and all that stuff. But as far as North Africa, all that he does - what they're doing, whether it's right or wrong they're inspiring these people to start a war basically that they get rid of Gaddafi and the oil companies can move in and steal their oil. It's true. They're all scrambling. They got to stop using the oil and come over to some other idea.
What was your impression of the politics back then 25 years ago?
Lou: That was like the Reagan era. It's funny, in America now they romanticize Reagan and I read about him now, when I was young I was like "Reagan was the evil guy, because he was for the rich and against the poor" but if you look at the record some of the stuff he did for the US was smart. He put more tax on the rich. And that's what I don't understand: The republicans of the United States now are against taxing the rich more than taxing the poor. Reagan taxed the rich! That's why he did so well for the economy in America. And nobody understands that. Or they don't want to remember it. But when I grew up, Reaganomics really sucked. People would say that he would take away from the middle class. In America the middle class always pays for everything.
And that was fueling you as a band?
Lou: I don't remember exactly why we all hated Reagan. I think we just were teenagers, "OK, We have to hate the government".
This may as well be a distorted perception but sometimes it appears that hardcore concerts have become more brutal. Do you witness something like that?
Lou: With our shows it's weird. We just had a big 25th anniversary show in New York and the club loved us because there were no fights, there were no incidents. In New York City every show has to have barricades but this club lets us not have barricades and they were very grateful that the crowd was very respectful towards each other. They were stage diving, going crazy. The thing that attracts a lot of people to hardcore, especially young men, is the anger, the aggression of it. Then they see the muscular tattooed guys, throwing the kicks in the air. That's all they think it's about. It's not about just that. That's part of it. But it's not the majority of it. It used to be more all inclusive. Seeing at the scene I know what you're talking about. I think it's more of a thing with younger bands that you get that kind of a crowd, where it's very brutal, a lot of spin kicks and all that. I'm not against the spin kicks, but you got to be respectful. If you going to do your spin kick and you kick somebody in the face on the side of the pit you better stop and see if they're ok so a fight doesn't break out. If you just do it and keep going somebody's going to get mad. And that's going to end up very bad. For us lately it's been great, like the past few years. I've seen aggressive crowds, especially South America we've gone. The crowd looks so aggressive and angry. We were told that in Chile there was a number of fights but we couldn't see any. There were only a thousand people but I did not see any fights, we didn't see anybody get hurt. They said "There was two stabbings and a fight and this". We were like "Where, when, we didn't you stop the show?" They answered "No, no, no, it's ok!". I think they were just making stories because the promoters wanted to seem cool, too. For some reasons that's cool. I don't know...
This may sound a bit heretically, but how many more anniversaries of Sick Of It All will there be?
Lou: [laughs] Maybe we'll make a thirty and that'll be it. Five more years. We'll see. As far as bands we're pretty much still one of the most active. Not to mention names, I watched the other day the video of the reunion of a big New York Hardcore band and they played amazingly musically but as far as they were on stage they were not themselves. When I had seen them back in the 80s they were jumping everywhere and really inspired by the music. Then watching them on stage they looked like they were going through the motions. The only guy who was really into it was the singer. And I find that really weird because that music still gets me excited. When I'm on stage I move because I want to move not because they expect me to move. If you're really not into it, why would you come back? Is it just for money? These guys all left hardcore to get real jobs. They have established real lives and bought houses. We haven't. Because we just play hardcore. That's what we love.
If you could... would you change something in the history of Sick Of It All?
Lou: That's hard. There was a lot of... Should we have started our own record label back in the day and put out our own records? Maybe we would be better off. Maybe we wouldn't. Maybe we would have broken up because it would have been too much pressure. But there were certain things. Little things, nothing really big. We've done pretty well for ourselves.
Thank you very much.
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