Brendan Yates and Daniel Fang of the hardcore band Turnstile had crossed paths at shows growing up in Maryland’s hardcore scene, but it wasn’t until their first year of college, in 2009, that they became good friends. Drinking was the default activity at Towson University, just north of Baltimore, but neither of them were partiers, so, outside of listening to hardcore records, they found another hobby: lifting weights.
A mutual friend showed them the basics, and soon their time was divided between going to hardcore shows around Baltimore and working out. “That whole era of our lives was formative because we were just changing every day, in the actual physical transformation of exploring lifting weights and the progress of becoming a different person physically, and then consuming so much music and meeting so many people in Baltimore,” Fang tells me. “We were just living for lifting weights and being as creative as possible.”
Yates and Fang, who both played drums, proudly put on the Freshman 15, but in muscle. By the end of their first year, Yates was filling in on drums for Baltimore hardcore legends Trapped Under Ice. In 2010, the pair started their band, which went on to crack mainstream charts, sell out shows around the world, earn three Grammy nominations, and generally led a hardcore renaissance in pop culture. Yates and Fang are also carrying the flag for another time-tested hardcore punk tradition: being incredibly jacked.
Hardcore punk’s reputation as a literal stomping ground for muscular dudes started sometime after 1981, when Henry Rollins took over vocal duties with legendary Los Angeles hardcore band Black Flag. Today, Rollins’s yoked, shirtless physique feels like a piece of hardcore history. Other punks followed and cemented the aesthetic: Misfits’ Glenn Danzig, Gorilla Biscuits’ Anthony Civarelli, and The Cro-Mags’ Harley Flanagan all looked like they spent more time in the squat rack than the studio.
At first, the physical build seemed at odds with punk’s outsider status. James Pligge was lifting weights long before he founded Chicago hardcore band Harm’s Way in 2006. His father was a weight lifter and played in a metal band, passing his love for both iron and heavy metal onto his son. But Pligge says that punks have a tendency to label weightlifters like himself as jocks. “That [term] is affiliated with homophobia, sexism, toxic masculinity,” says Pligge, who now works as a physical education teacher outside Chicago. “No matter what I do, even to this day, I always get put into that category because of the way I look.”
Stereotypically, the jock caricature is a football-playing, hair-gelled sexual harasser, whose love of sports is only matched by his hatred of nerds. The only thing Pligge has in common with it is a shared affection for lifting up heavy things and putting them down. But he says because punk culture historically squared up in opposition to the jock crowd, it stayed hostile to anyone with muscles. “‘Oh, you lift weights? You must be this way,’” he says. “When I first started going to hardcore shows, I was the only person who lifted weights and was into sports. That was kind of unheard of in my hardcore scene here in Chicago.”
Over time, the scene shifted. Sports were no longer wholly unwelcome in punk circles, and by the early 2000s, lifting weights was a staple subculture activity in some hardcore communities. When Trapped Under Ice frontman Tripp and his friends saw Pligge performing shirtless, in a ski mask, they all wanted to look like him. “I remember seeing him play for the first time and I was like, ‘That guy’s a murderer,’” laughs Tripp.
Tripp had been lifting casually since middle school, when the ripped Russian immigrants who lived with his family took him under their wing and taught him about weights. When Tripp got deeper into hardcore, he says he saw a lot of people like Pligge, “people you don’t wanna mess with.” That didn’t mean they were aggressive assholes. “They were very welcoming and way more progressive than a lot of people in other parts of my life,” says Tripp.
Yates, of Turnstile, agrees: the most heavily-muscled dudes in Baltimore’s hardcore scene were also often the gentlest. “When I started going to shows, I felt like the strongest or most intimidating physically, were also the nicest and most welcoming and caring,” he says. “I think even that was just an attractive quality.”
When Trapped Under Ice toured Australia between 2009 and 2011, kids there picked up on Tripp’s physicality. One of them was Jem Siow, who now fronts Sydney hardcore band Speed. Siow describes himself as “a fucking nerd in school, a straight up Asian nerd” who played classical music, listened to punk, and thought going to the gym was for assholes. “That was the opposite to what I thought hardcore was at the time,” he says. “I had seen going to the gym as this hyper-bro thing that only is for aesthetic purposes.”
Then he met Dennis Vichidvongsa, Speed’s guitarist. Vichidvongsa lifted with Tripp when he toured Australia, and later introduced Siow to the sport of powerlifting. “That was the first time that I saw that lifting weights was a sport and a way of personal development,” says Siow. “I was never really great at team sports, but this was just you against yourself.”
Before long, hardcore and lifting were connected for Siow. Hardcore flattened the hierarchies that surrounded him and welcomed everyone to participate, and it seemed like working out could be a similar equalizer. “Just like anyone can pick up a bass guitar and start playing or a microphone and start singing, or just mosh and be part of the show, anyone can pick up weights and do that too,” says Siow.
Luke Ottenhof
Source link
