A statement by Schifonoia: hardcore as direct action!

Here’s the text published by Schifonoia

We receive and share this beautiful text written by Schifonoia, in order to stimulate a constructive debate on the current situation of punk counterculture.

“We prefer the balaclava to the colourful mohawks.”

“We are the dead bodies / of this shitty town / where we can’t live where we never do anything / where what remains to us / is anger and despair all the rest has been imprisoned / all the rest has been seized”.

– 5°Braccio – Rabbia e disperazione –

These dark years that we are forced to go through, are years in which any spirit of rebellion and conflict is suffocated through control, repression, jails, labor, and wars. Mass of corpses, who experience death every day and seek meaning in this existence, we become increasingly dependent on the gadgets and patterns that capitalism shoves down our throats. Hardcore, today is no less. What surrounds us is the continuous monkeying of stereotypes; colourful mohawks that hide empty heads, concerts organized in ambiguous places, in venues linked to the logic of gain, where to access you need a card and money to pay for expensive tickets. We become fashion, entertainment, consumable and defecable goods by the Capital; postcard subjects full of circled A’s, who scream their alleged hatred towards society which remains only a slogan and never leads to action. Politics has been put aside, to mold under the social rise in the “scene”. To take a stand today is to get scorched earth around you, a patch on your jacket is worthier than an idea that explodes in the face of reality. Punk and Diy are daily practices, but today we prefer to pass a watered-down rebellion that lasts the time of an evening, under distorted notes and furious tupatupas, to return the next day to our harmless lives. Our being anarchists and punx is not an identity, but an attitude that wants to deny and tear down this society and the ideas on which it was built. If DIY calls for a change of direction towards unbridled consumption, if hardcore is the bulwark of a subversive otherness, it is necessary to ask ourselves where we are going and with whom we are walking. Our intention is to spread the echo of our anger towards the social and political nothingness in which this disgusting town finds itself, against the resignation and indifference that opened up inside our spaces, our concerts and our heads. It is not drugs, alcohol or popularity that give us an answer or make us someone; it is our essence and our actions that determine us.

Hardcore for us is direct action. Ours wants to be a call to think and act, to have the courage to take sides, to return to being authentic individuals, who express their diversity and together return to have fun in the denial and destruction of the existing.

We prefer the balaclava to the coloured mohawks

The instruments in one hand, in the other the rifle