What was the Massachusetts hardcore scene like when you were first dipping your toe in?
“It was in transition. Hardcore in general was, from an urban thing to a more suburban kind of thing. As a result of that, there was a lot of culture clash. Consequently, shows were often violent. I’ve always felt like hardcore has been intentionally exclusionary at times. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but it definitely was then. It wasn’t exclusionary to income brackets or ethnic backgrounds, but it demanded that the people involved invested themselves in it. It was a ‘no posers’ kind of exclusion. A lot of the kids were hyper-vigilant about keeping the ‘tourists’ out – they didn’t want the scene to grow, they were happy with how it was, because that was their space to be who they were. My generation of suburban kids came along and it took a while for things to level out. It was a pretty rough scene, but there was an intensity to it that was different to anything else. I was hooked as soon as I started going to shows.”
Were you welcomed into that community?
“I don’t feel like there was a hierarchy that had to approve my application to join (laughs). I just kept going to shows and people were generally pretty kind to me and welcoming. I think elitism is a word you could use, but it’s more like the people that were involved in hardcore at the time had felt ostracised by a lot of things in their life, and they found something that was theirs, so they were protective of it. There was a lot of transitioning going on in music in that period.”
In what ways?
“In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, record labels didn’t know what was going on and were signing all sorts of weird stuff. That’s how Nirvana happened, and all the grunge stuff. High school was very much like it is in ’80s movies. There was a distinct line between the popular kids and the freaks. And I fell on the side of the freaks. Metallica had released the One video, and not too long after there was Smells Like Teen Spirit, so suddenly the popular kids were wearing Vans and my world exploded, I didn’t know who my friends were anymore. That transition to what we thought of as counter-culture appearing in the mainstream was an enormous cultural shift.”
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Do you consider Converge pioneers of blurring the lines between metal and hardcore?
“I consider our generation to be pioneers among the second generation of that. As long as punk has been around, punk and metal have taken turns reinvigorating each other. That was definitely something that my generation did. We took a lot of the thrash stuff on MTV and the hardcore we found through Thrasher, and we started forming a hybrid of those sounds, but there were a ton of bands that did it before us, like The Accüsed, and lots of weirdo metal bands like Voivod and Rorschach, who were hugely influential on us. People draw parallels between us and Cave In or Dillinger Escape Plan or Botch, but it was all happening at the same time amongst a lot of different people in a lot of different cities. Converge gets more credit than we’re honestly due because we’re the one band from that era that never broke up. But we’re not solely responsible for pioneering anything.”
Did it feel like something special was happening at the time?
“If you think about the name Converge, and that things are converging into something new, that is how we felt. We didn’t really feel like we fit in with the late-‘80s hardcore scene, but we also didn’t fit in with straightforward metal, and it didn’t feel like there was an existing community where we felt we fit in, either. So we made our own. When people are driven to make something, if there’s nobody there helping them, they either do it themselves or they stop. A big part of the reason why the business end of Converge is done internally – Jake [Bannon, vocalist] co-releases our music, he designs the merch and graphics, I do the recording, our booking agent in the U.S. was one of our first roadies – is that it allowed us to maintain artistic control, but the real reason was that nobody else cared, and if we didn’t do it ourselves nobody would do it for us.”