Over on Vice.com today is “What One Life Crew Taught Me About Hardcore,” a fun read by Brooklyn-based music writer Jonah Bayer, recalling his teenage years as a skinny kid from Cleveland and his introduction to the city’s “hardcore” music in the mid-90s. It focuses on his friendship with the guys of Cleveland band One Life Crew, and it’s an entertaining piece:
Despite their lifestyle choices, the group—which rose out of the ashes of legendary Cleveland hardcore acts like Mean Streak and Confront—bragged about drinking non-alcoholic margaritas and posed in front of low riders with Cuban cigars in their mouth. They essentially took the more flashy elements of hip-hop, paired with hardcore’s trademark riffs, and created an entirely new aesthetic in the process.
They were also the first people to introduce me to hardcore.
I became friends with One Life Crew shortly after they were kicked off Victory Records for inciting a riot at a now-legendary festival in Ohio in 1996. (The footage is still available on YouTube.) I’m not sure exactly where we met but despite the fact that I was 15 years old and weighed 130 pounds, they were super friendly and inclusive. Soon enough, I began hanging out at the tanning studio that their singer Mean Steve owned, Sunbelievable Tanning, which was located in the same shopping complex as the Kids “R” Us that I would work at later in high school. I would basically just loiter around and talk about hardcore and try to pick up knowledge about early Revelation bands before the internet was as wide-reaching as it is today.
Read it all on noisey.vice.com…
This article appears in Apr 1-7, 2015.
You sold more than bootleg VHS tapes!