“Ever since I was a young child, I’ve been addicted to vinyl.”

“I’ve always had lots of records….at one point I had 10,000 or so. The funny thing is that I can remember where and when I bought most of them. Perhaps all of them, if I think hard enough. Records have taught me a lot over the years – not only about music, but about cultures and eras and languages, about styles and how they change, and about sound and vision. How technology has changed and how it has changed us.

Records have taken me to other lands, other worlds, other sounds, both in my mind and in reality. They’re an obsession, I’ve traveled the world in search of them. There’s something about the thrill of the hunt, especially when you’re digging through piles and piles of dusty platters. You never know what you’ll find! Yeah, I know a lot about collecting and rarities and monetary value – hell, I spent nearly a decade working in used record stores. While there are many factors that go into why people collect things, the bottom line is that it’s still about the music.

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Looking for some current hardcore kicks? If so, then Muuy Biien’s This is What Your Mind Imagines might be right up your alley. In a nice twist, this five-piece sidesteps the creative blunders that once made hardcore such a dirty word. They smartly aim for reckless abandon rather than an atmosphere of the generic, and they’ve also got some other non-HC tricks up their sleeves.

Anyone looking back a quarter-century or so with the intention of gathering a measurement of opinion from that period regarding the state of the then-current hardcore punk scene will surely find the style evaluated, at least by anyone with their head screwed on half right, as being a near-complete wasteland of regurgitated formula.

While it’s unadvisable to ever step onto the proverbial soapbox to pronounce the death of a floundering musical genre, in the late-‘80s the situation with hardcore punk had gotten so freaking lousy that any foreseeable improvement in fortunes seemed to be, at best, a fanciful thing to consider. If not dead, it was certainly in a deep coma, and very few naysayers seemed all that interested in waking it from its critical condition.

For starters, nearly all of the trailblazing bands in the movement had ceased to exist, and those that actually were still active, either through recordings or by simply electing to endlessly parade their wares via the punk rock touring circuit, had become unfortunate shadows of their former incarnations. And frankly, some of those groups weren’t all that interesting in the first place

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“There’s a fire extinguisher strapped to that guy’s drum set. WHY? His sticks are on fire and I can clearly see smoke…is he going to be ok? Is he going to use the fire extinguisher? As a kid, this is what I would repeatedly think to myself as I stared at the back cover of my older brother’s copy of Van Halen 2.“

“I would fixate on the photo of David Lee Roth and try to comprehend how the split he’s doing is as high as the mic stand. Was there a springboard or something that they pulled away right before the photo was taken? I didn’t have the answers but I knew what I was looking at and listening to was AMAZING.

Downstairs in the den was my parents’ record collection. I had been having dance parties there with my mom courtesy of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The coffee table would be removed to make room and then I would go to town. That record is now sitting in the basement next to a Sergio Franchi album.

I didn’t own my own piece of vinyl until “Start Me Up” was released a few years later. I had it on 45. Having my own record was definitely a big deal. Otherwise, if I liked a song, I had to tape it when it came on the radio.

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