For about four years the two audiences fought each other outside venues they were both trying to get into. It was mostly performance and occasionally not, and it ended not because anybody made peace but because the participants noticed they were buying the same records.
What the argument was about
Hardcore in 1982 was an explicitly anti rock movement. Long hair, guitar solos, album length songs and any suggestion of virtuosity were the enemy, and the whole aesthetic was built as a rejection of exactly what metal had become.
Metal regarded hardcore as three chords played by people who had not bothered to learn the fourth, with no craft, no ambition and a great deal of unearned moral confidence.
Each considered the other a failure of seriousness in opposite directions, and both were partly right, which is why the argument had legs.
What it actually looked like
Mostly posturing, sometimes worse. There were fights outside venues, there was hostility at shows where a bill mixed the two, and there was a genuine physical risk in some cities to wearing the wrong shirt in the wrong room.
It is worth not romanticising this. Some of it was violent and some of the violence attached itself to worse things, particularly where skinhead subcultures overlapped with hardcore, which is a real part of the history of both scenes.
Most of it, though, was teenagers defending a tribe, and it dissolved the moment the tribes had a reason to talk.
What dissolved it
Economics and geography, in that order.
Both scenes were operating on the same tiny budget, in the same halls, using the same distribution: self released records, mail order, fanzines and a circuit of venues that would take anything loud on a Tuesday. When two subcultures share every piece of infrastructure, and share an industry that ignores both, the argument about hair does not last.
Then there is Motorhead, who were the one band in Britain that both crowds would go and see, and who did not require anybody to negotiate a truce because there was nothing in the music to argue about.
The generational fact
By 1984 the teenagers arriving in both scenes had grown up hearing both and had no investment in a war that started before they were paying attention. They went to a hardcore show on Friday and a thrash show on Saturday and could not understand what the fuss had been about.
That is how most subcultural conflicts end. Not with a resolution, but with a cohort who were not there for the original argument and cannot be persuaded to care about it.
| From hardcore | From metal |
|---|---|
| The skank beat | The riff vocabulary |
| Brevity | Guitar technique |
| The self booked tour | Production standards |
| Self released records | The audience with money |
| The mosh part | Solos, when wanted |
| The idea that anybody can do it | The idea that it can be done well |
What each side got
Thrash got the two things it could not have invented alone: a drum pattern and a sense of proportion. Without the first there is no genre; without the second there are no two minute songs.
Hardcore got weight, and a route into a larger audience. The bands who took the trade reached considerably more people than the ones who refused it, and several of them are still touring on the strength of it.
What it settled
Crossover is the moment heavy music stopped believing its two audiences were different species. Every scene since has been built on the assumption that a listener can hold more than one allegiance at once, which is now so obvious it is invisible.
The one thing it did not settle is the argument itself, which reappears every twenty years in a new costume: metalcore against hardcore purists in 1999, and again now. The tribes reform, the same accusations get made, and a cohort who were not there dissolves it again.
The bands below the famous names who did the actual work of the trade are in the crossover second tier, and the wider account is in Crossover: Where Thrash Met Hardcore.
Britain, where it ended first
The truce arrived earlier in Britain than in America, and Motorhead are most of the reason.
A Motorhead audience in 1980 contained both crowds, standing in the same room, with nothing to argue about because the band belonged to neither. That happened four or five years before the equivalent realisation in the United States, and it is why the British crossover of punk and metal produced Discharge, Amebix and eventually grindcore rather than a genre with a name and a marketing category.
The other British factor was economic. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal and the punk scene were using the same pressing plants, the same fanzines and the same halls, and a country that small cannot sustain two entirely separate underground economies.
What the war looked like in the records
You can hear the hostility and then hear it disappear, which is the most interesting evidence available.
Hardcore records from 1981 and 1982 contain explicit attacks on metal: on the hair, on the solos, on the seriousness. Metal records of the same period simply ignore hardcore, because from where they were standing it did not exist.
By 1985 the hardcore records have solos on them and the metal records have hardcore beats, and neither side is saying anything about the other any more. Nothing was declared. The subject just stopped coming up, which is how most of these things actually end.
The part that did not resolve
One strand of the conflict was not tribal posturing and did not dissolve, and it belongs in an honest account. Some hardcore scenes in this period had a genuine problem with far right skinhead violence, and several bands and venues spent years dealing with it directly.
That is a different history from the one about hair, and it was not settled by crossover or by anything else in this article. The bands who confronted it did so at real cost, and it remains a live issue in hardcore in a way that the metal and punk argument has not been for forty years.
Sources and notes
Descriptions of scene conflict follow contemporary accounts and participants' published recollections, which vary considerably by city.
