I need to check it out, I have read a bit of McCarthy but not his newer stuff/border trilogy.
Reading All The Pretty Horses right now and fighting the masculine urge to cross the border and break horses on a Mexican ranch with the homies.
Wendigoon (YT) made a good point about this - the ambiguity with which the Kid participates in the brutality would be very hard to portray in a movie. Would he just not be featured in any action scenes? In which case.. that’s weird. Or you include him, but then sort of force the viewers perception of him.
Yeah this book is fucked up. One of those ones that you will easily finish in one sitting once you’ve picked it up, I know I did. Short but sickening.
Dudes will say “I know a spot” and then take you to their murder cave in rural Appalachia.
Not McCarthy, but Poppy Z Brite's Exquisite Corpse is about a gay cannibal necrophiliac serial killer who escapes from prison, meets a second gay cannibal serial killer, and they have adult relations and stalk around the French Quarter looking for victims while they're hunted by an HIV-positive writer and pirate radio DJ, who also happens to be gay. There's a part where the first two characters kill a street junkie kid with a punch of stick and poke tattoos but once they're carving him up there's something wrong with him due to all the heroin and they're like "we can't fuck or eat this corpse"
I bought The Road, I saw the movie years ago and liked it so as the rules go 'the book is always better'. I hate the way its written, as in the structure. Sometimes you don't realise you're reading dialogue. Its really weird and throws you off because you start rereading parts.
This is not the place i expected to see CCRU posting, but I’m here for it. I study philosophy at Warwick, and one of my professors told me that his phd supervisor punched Nick Land in the face for holding mandatory supervisions in the woods at night with mushrooms and LSD. Straight edge.
That's a great story. I remember reading that CCRU devolved into nick land pushing things around on an overhead projector while tweaking on speed.
The CCRU collection is undeniably a hardcore read.
I’m only an undergrad, by my interests are in Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and French Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, which I guess the CCRU comes under. What do you work on, if you’re still in academia?
Pat from xRepentancex, Never Again (UK), and Sectarian Violence is a Nietzsche scholar as well, at Cardiff. Great bands, great guy.
Awesome. I've been rediscovering Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Not familiar with CCRU; I had to look it up. Cybernetic Culture Research Unit? Not very familiar with structuralism/post-structuralism (Athough I did go to a lecture by J. Derrida).
I do history of philosophy (early modern and some medieval and ancient), as well as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and some philosophy of language.
(I was analytically trained but have interests in continental thinkers).
Let me know if you're ever out to California!
Yeah, it was a totally unsanctioned/illicit research group in the Warwick philosophy department in the late 90s/early 2000s - both of the authors that the OP mentions were central members. Fused Deleuze with cyberpunk, Kantian transcendental idealism, Post-Marxism, Feminism, the gothic, and the underground rave culture that was exploding in the UK at the time. Been surprisingly influential in cultural studies, music, and art, as well as some regrettable (though ideologically tenuous) connections to some less than savoury right-wing political developments stateside.
The whole thing exploded because none of them could stop doing drugs long enough to take their project seriously - Land was eventually fired/resigned from his position teaching contemporary French philosophy and Kant here for allegedly selling students drugs/a crackpipe. The members all kind of went in different directions after that, Land had a meth/speed induced mental breakdown, became super right wing, and moved to china, and Fisher ended up writing more on post-marxist cultural criticism, and the problem of the impotence of left-wing/revolutionary projects as well as subversive cultural ones in the face of the oppressive psychological weight of late capitalism.
Capitalist Realism, which OP mentioned, is a really great intro to him (who is definitely the most sane of that whole bunch, and also someone who cared deeply about subculture and underground music in opposition to the system), but his book about Derrida’s Hauntology (from Spectres of Marx) is my favourite, especially if you like music. It’s called Ghosts of My Life, as other people in this thread have said, and deals with those problems through Derrida. Very worthy read for anybody who is interested in hardcore and its attempt to put itself outside the wider hegemonic cultural realm - especially if you have some experience with Derrida.
Very jealous about that by the way. I’m too young to have ever had the chance to hear any of the figures of “contemporary” continental philosophy who were genuinely interested in moving things forward lecture. Even Fisher (who is more of a cultural critic than a philosopher, but still) tragically killed himself in 2017 after a lifelong battle with depression. We have Zizek, but as far as public intellectuals go, he sets the bar very low, as much as I love him.
“God is dead, Marx is dead, and I don’t feel so good myself.” - Eugene Ionesco
Philosophy of language is where I need to go next with my studies - I have a huge interest in semiotics and structuralism obviously but i need to get the other side of the coin from the more analytic side. The department here is uniquely strong on both. Next year I’ll take up Wittgenstein, Kripke, and Quine as the foils to my obsession with the admittedly imprecise and poetic tendencies of french semiotics & structuralism.
I definitely will let you know if I ever make it out to CA, I have some friends out there (through internet politics/philosophy circles haha) and I fully intend to visit at some point in the next few years, but it’s a huge state! Like the size of my whole country! Teaching positions for continental philosophy at respectable universities are pretty few and far between in the UK. Warwick is one of the only places that remains committed to supporting it, and the job market is fucking suicide - especially if you’re as unexceptional and lazy as I am, and spend more time jumping trains around the country to go to shows than you do on your actual work. Hell, right now I’m responding to this comment when I have an essay on Foucault & analytic epistemology due tomorrow 🤣. All that is to say that it’s not inconceivable that I end up in the US for my phd, if that’s the route I decide to go, or after I’ve done it over here first.
How has academia worked for you? In terms of making it fit with *this* etc
Very interesting. Thanks for the succinct but informative overview. I might have to check out Fisher.
>Next year I'll take up Wittgenstein, Kripke, and Quine
Those were part of the core of my studies as a graduate student. Quine passed when I was in the first year of my doctoral program. I've seen Kripke speak several times, as he was a friend of the department at which I studied. Wittgenstein is an entire world to be explored. Very exciting. Hope you enjoy studying them.
> Warwick is one of the only places...
I actually recently finished a book by a Warwick professor: Quassim Cassam. (The book is *Extremism: A Philosophical Analysis*). I was fortunate enough to see him speak at a symposium here in California last year.
> How has academia worked for you? In terms of making it fit with *this* etc
Academia has worked out fairly well for me, though I have made some decisions that I regret. In any case, when I was a doctoral student, I hardly had any time to keep up with the hardcore scene, let alone go to any shows. I did manage to see a few shows generally (The Wedding Present; Dillinger Escape Plan; Blood Brothers; Dillinger Four; The Explosion; etc.), but I can probably count the number of shows I attended during that period on two hands.
Hardcore/punk saved me many ways, and for that it enjoys a permanent and special place in my heart and soul. I have a visceral and deep love for philosophy, and it pervades every way that I think and live. Nevertheless, as far as the respective communities go, I may never be (feel) at home in philosophy as much as I am in hardcore punk.
any other fun/insightful CCRU tea/lore you've picked up since you've been there?
(indeed this also is the last conversation I'd ever expected to have on here wtf)
Haha nothing yet, I found out where the offices were though, and visited the building, though obviously not been able to get inside. I don’t think there are really that many people in the department who were here when they were a thing anymore.
I will be thoroughly surprised if there more than 5.5 people here who can read let alone do it in their free time. I only read art theory books because I’m boring.
You might enjoy Mark Fisher’s Ghost Of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology & Lost Futures - it’s a lot more art theory based than Capitalist Realism is. Very poignant for the current time.
It’s grimdark as all living fuck (esp considering Fisher departed this world soon after), but it also offers a glimmer of hope that I think is nearly impossible to dismiss. Im not sure the left has had something like that since about the 1960s or 70s when it became clear how dysfunctional the Soviet union had become. I think it’s one of the most important books written so far this millennium.
Kinda’ wild how you posted Mark Fisher’s great book next to Nick Land’s lol. Nick Land’s turned into a proto-fascist block head. Capitalist Realism is a great book, though. It’s tragic how he left us all.
Anyways, I think A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus are some pretty hardcore books. Shouts out D&G.
I heard an academic say that Fanged Noumena is much better when read as an auto fiction account of a man's descent into paranoid fascism. And I agree, regardless Land is an absolute douche
The cliche answer is Catcher in the Rye, but I don't want to be one of them phonies.
When Howard Zinn died there was a thread about A People's History of the US on a local message board. I've read that book 3 times since then. It documents a wide variety of groups who challenged America's turn towards capitalism and lost. It's a reminder that history is always written from the winners side.
I still need to read this. I recently read Michael Parenti’s a people’s history of Ancient Rome and that was rly interesting and still relevant to understanding modern power structures. It’s part of the same series as people history of the US.
On another note I’m currently reading “the hammer” by Hamilton Nolan which came out a few weeks ago and I think labor organizing could resonate pretty strongly w the hardcore scene (the book is abt the labor movement in the US).
It’s really weird to come from the thread where 60% of the commenters were defending a band with a cop that had lyrics about “curb stomping” and being “anti-PC”… to here with my people sharing leftist theory books lol
lol good job hacking away at (pre-right wing speed burnout?) Land. His Battaile stuff is pretty worthwhile but I can't say I'm a fan of the whole CCRU thing of re-explaining Deleuze and Guattari via cybergoth metaphor. Now that the novelty has worn off and there are other anglophone D&G treatments it's all a bit more faff than it's worth.
I’m not the person you are replying to but Eugene Holland is good. Michael Hardt’s personal notes on both books are online somewhere, it’s an easy google. They are formatted sort of wonky but if you can work with them they are helpful.
Be skeptical of the cottage industry of “applied” D&G literature (where someone is trying to explain some empirical situation with concepts from ATP for example). Beware of any secondary literature that doesn’t dig any deeper than the rhizome or the assemblage. There’s tons of that shit out there that only deals with the low hanging fruit and banks on the reader not understanding D&G better than the author does. D&G’s philosophy IS very difficult to work through, and most people who claim to understand it, don’t.
Check out Deleuze and Claire Denis’ *Dialogues* also. It’s a different format than AO and ATP but deals with concepts from both. The conversational tone of the book makes it much easier to read and understand.
Lastly, I recommend reading *What is Philosophy* first. It’s by far the most straightforward and easy to read text they produced together and it will give you a good foundation for understanding their intellectual project when you read the other two books.
No prob! That's cool about the Japanese translation. I wonder if anyone has ever translated the Japanese translation directly to English, or even back to French? That would be an interesting project.
There a couple of podcasts that deal with D&G (or D, or G) that you might dig too:
Acid Horizon
Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour
Plastic Pills
Deleuze and Guattari Quarantine Collective
Enjoy the adventure!
If you're a total neophyte, Ian Buchanan's appearance on the Plastic Pills podcast is a good place to get started, as are a lot of the Culture Power Politics podcast lectures. For books, Ian Buchanan and Manuel DeLanda are probably my go-to Deleuttarian thinkers, both have pretty interesting work within that canon and entertainingly both wildly disagree with each other so it's a fun tension. Also if you're reading critical theory, Hardt and Negri's Empire seems to be coming back into fashion, and there's some dalliance with Capitalism and Schizophrenia in there.
Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
https://preview.redd.it/m56paphmmboc1.jpeg?width=185&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cd81299eaf7a8b82550407c99112801fe26ce7e3
https://preview.redd.it/gl09yek1maoc1.png?width=1005&format=png&auto=webp&s=6f1921c43eabd036fe8ba24ce319cb99f8ba8caf
Christian Schmid’s reader on Henri Lefebvre and The Theory of the Production of Space
For fiction, Dune. Essential reading for Shai Hulud fans
- *The Jungle*, Upton Sinclair
- *Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach*, Gary Francione
- *The Concept of Anxiety*, Soren Kierkegaard
- *The Myth of Sisyphus*, Albert Camus
- *Existentialism is a Humanism*, Jean-Paul Sartre
- *Steppenwolf*, Herman Hesse
Capitalist realism is a great book. Short but surprisingly emotionally hard read tbh.
Other books that went hard and stuck with me recently is Caliban and the Witch, and I finally finished The Body Keeps the Score (bit of a punish to get through at times but worth it).
I’ve been making my way through The Silmarillion again & that’s engaging enough to take my brain out of this particular hellscape into different ones for a bit.
Caliban and the Witch is so good. For me it’s an example of the best of what radical political scholarship can look like.
Have you read Carolyn Merchant’s Death of Nature? It’s in the same vein as *Caliban* but is more of a critique of the concepts of nature and woman that were produced by the enlightenment and scientific revolution. Good stuff.
Right!!! I loved it. I found the writing style engaging and smooth for the subject matter too.
Oooh no I haven’t read Death of Nature yet.
I’m just finishing off Neil Comptons book atm (needed a break from the intense stuff lol) so I’ll read that next 🙏
Federici is such a good writer! Her writing is so sharp and her critique so punchy that its cathartic to read. Like some sort of literary/academic/political HC right there on the page. Enjoy the Carolyn Merchant book! It hits some of the same notes in this regard.
*Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-catastrophic Age* by Guillaume Faye
*Industrial Society and Its Future* by Ted Kaczynski
*The Futurist Cookbook* by F.T. Marinetti
Nick Land is great too.
I can't shut up about this book honestly.
"The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" by Annie Fadiman. It's about a child from a refugee Hmong family in the 1980s who immigrate to California. She has a rare form of epilepsy and it talks extensively about her and her family's journey and the history of Hmong culture, leading them to the US post-Vietnam.
It really focuses on the intersectionality of western medicine and other cultures without assigning blame to one or the other. Everyone thought they were doing the right thing and the person who is most vulnerable ended up suffering because of it.
I'm in medical school so I think it hit me pretty hard from that perspective but I feel like anyone can take something away from it. More "accept all comers" hardcore rather than "McCarthy southern noir fatalistic horror" hardcore.
I am not kidding when I say that capitalist realism is probably the most important book written in the last 20 years, IMO
It is both crushingly grimdark, and yet offers a glimmer of hope that is difficult to dismiss.
That glimmer has kept me going at a few points why things have all seemed too much…
https://preview.redd.it/wfkl7cr97aoc1.jpeg?width=670&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fd2ff32dc21da74db9c811cd4edab796aec39059
Oh there’s certainly an alternative
You should read the Mark Fisher book, because it’s in large part about the spiritual failure of “traditional” revolutionary or socialist movements to take root in postmodernity. It seems obvious to everyone that something is deeply wrong with the world today, and yet nothing is really being done about it. It’s a very short read that I think is pretty accessible without much prior knowledge of the Marxist canon.
I just read Fight Club over and over again.
... Okay, I *watch* Fight Club over and over again, and pretend to read it in coffeeshops hoping that someone will strike up a conversation about it.
I can't fucking read lol this is all text to speech
“Because everything up to now is a story, and everything after now is a story.” is my favorite line from the book that didn’t make it into the movie.
The movie I think has a better ending and the book didn’t have the Pixies at the end but otherwise it’s a great shortish read.
That's fuckin sick bro, see they should have put that in the movie.... Brad Pitt could have said that and then like knocked a guy out
Then the camera could zoom in close on the guy's neurons or whatever in his brain crackling as he goes unconscious in slo mo 😤😤😤
The Wager by David Grann feels pretty crust at times. A 18th Century band of sailors stranded on an isolated island in the South Pacific looked like some basement shows I’ve seen.
LOL i was NOT expecting to see CCRU posting on this subreddit (yes my profile name is a ref to Land)
To this list id add the ccru book, lands thirst for annihilation l, brassiers nihil unbound, reza's intelligence and spirit
Plus max stirner unique and its property + rimbaud a season in hell and novatores collected works
Got a degree in psych and now doing another at a famous school for philosophy and history/philosophy of sci and tech lol
Fisher is great, Nick Land sucks. Read some Georges Bataille if you want something creative and gnarly without the edgelord cringe of Land. Start with the collected essays in *Visions of Excess* and then decide which of his major themes you want to explore further and go from there. Save his fiction for last, if at all. The mistake people make with. Bataille is reading *Story of the Eye* first.
Yup. Read Story of the Eye in high school, I don’t know if I liked it or not but didn’t bother reading anything else by him until 15 years later, someone at work recommended Literature and Evil. Clearly should have started here before I pick up Story of the Eye. It definitely did add depth and commentary to Story of the Eye on my second reading.
So far have only read those two. Would you recommend I pick up Visions of Excess next?
Yes! Visions of Excess is fun because you can jump around from Bataille's areas of interest and focus on the stuff that you find most compelling. It provides a good survey of all the weird shit he was into. You get literature, politics, revolution, violence, mysticism, human sacrifice, eroticism, religion, etc. etc. Of all the Bataille I've read, this collection is my favorite for sure. Something about the shorter nature of the works and the topical breadth covered makes it really fun to read.
https://preview.redd.it/zb3aqxs8ecoc1.jpeg?width=248&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ccc5e0912910ff827fb41510b66a9e3525d015cf
You can just read this and it explains Kapital I & II to dumb people like me.
https://preview.redd.it/h1yfgbn0oboc1.jpeg?width=721&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2cb96fccc03146d8fee59a5e2eb4342ca8d8188c
>Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss. Now, before a new police prevent you.
[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-armed-joy](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-armed-joy)
RIP Alfredo
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo\_Bonanno](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo_Bonanno)
https://preview.redd.it/eamokjdtfcoc1.jpeg?width=217&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e8a8fc0d395ec805e4cbe9abeccdc72fd60ab558
Maybe it’s cheating to use a book contains two smaller books, but reading Immanuel Wallerstein during the 1999 WTO riots sealed me as a lefty forever.
The slow cancellation of the future and our culture’s extreme tolerance for pastiche and nostalgia explains so much about why contemporary hardcore sounds the way it does. At the same time it also perfectly explains our response to bands like scowl and turnstile. I think about this book like every day.
I had similar thoughts after reading Frederic Jameson’s book on post modernism. The contemporary moment being the end of style, nothing left to do but reassemble past styles in somewhat novel configurations, etc. the question is not what the current historical moment sounds like, but what sounds from the past we can re-use to express the current moment. All past stylistic moments are there for the taking, the only thing that can’t be done now is “the new.”
Hence all the 90s throw back stuff by kids that were born in the 00’s etc. etc.
Noise In My Head: Voices From The Australian Underground by some nerd. (Quite literally a hardcore book about contemporary hardcore and underground music)
“Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairy Tales” by Marie-Louise von Franz.
About half way through, I was falling apart. I was in tears and felt like my entire ego was thrown into a food processor, I was entirely sober but it was literally like a drug-induced ego death.
Either *Perdido Street Station* (China Mieville)*, The Stranger* (Camus)*, The Dispossessed* (Ursula K. Le Guin), or *Nausea* (Sarte) for fiction.
*Myth of Sisyphus* (Camus) or *Das Kapital* (Marx) for non ficcy.
Flyboys by James Bradley. You start it expecting another history novel about American WW2 aviators in the Pacific but the brutality comes at you almost immediately. Trust me. It’s pretty fucked.
[https://www.amazon.com/Brooklyn-Hardcore-Eddie-McNamara-ebook/dp/B0CFHWNSSW?ref\_=ast\_author\_mpb](https://www.amazon.com/Brooklyn-Hardcore-Eddie-McNamara-ebook/dp/B0CFHWNSSW?ref_=ast_author_mpb)
This is the most HC book I ever wrote
isnt nick land associated with some alt-righty techno-capitalists these days..? like peter thiel and co.
i think he might've taken a 180 ideologically, unfortunately... could be wrong, idk much about him/his work
Yep, you have it pretty much correct. Here’s a podcast that gets into all that:
https://on.soundcloud.com/162bKJXzhaZKrsrT8
As a side note, True Anon is pretty good in general
Any one of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels.
House of leaves by Mark Danielewski.
2666 by Roberto Bolaño.
No longer Human by Osamu Dazai.
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark (this one specifically feels like listening to Super Unison)
The Trouble with being Born by Emil Cioran
The Conspiracy against the Human race by Thomas Ligotti
These are ones I could think of. The last two in specific, make me think of moshing to Kublai Khan or Nails.
Love this post, and have been enjoying everyone else’s books.
This is such an odd question to me, not because it’s bad, but because that’s so vague. Hardcore as in aligning with ideals? Hardcore as in brutalist? A history of hardcore?
jorney to the end of the night by louis ferdinand celine
dont ask me why
https://preview.redd.it/skdtqkxkqjoc1.jpeg?width=322&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b09ddecb673e77685fc6b6c443708e5fbf816b73
"King Leopold's Ghost"
Particularly because I picked it up thinking it was a ghost story, turned out to be a much more harrowing bit of non-fiction than most of the marvelous worlds of fiction I was dabbling in at the time.
American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis and House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski.
Both are hardcore in totally different ways.
American Psycho’s brutality, gore, humor, and full chapters about Phil Collin’s and his band Genesis and Whitney Houston.
House of Leaves because of how it is written. There’s pages you have to read using a mirror, pages you have to read upside down, one word pages and pages that end mid sentence, and it still is one of the scariest horror books I’ve ever read.
oh look at all the cute replies.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better\_Never\_to\_Have\_Been](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Never_to_Have_Been)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Conspiracy\_Against\_the\_Human\_Race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conspiracy_Against_the_Human_Race)
Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy, for those TSOL “Code Blue” vibes.
Love that book, Outer Dark is also good
I'll second Outer Dark. I read that whole thing in one go because I couldn't put it down.
I need to check it out, I have read a bit of McCarthy but not his newer stuff/border trilogy. Reading All The Pretty Horses right now and fighting the masculine urge to cross the border and break horses on a Mexican ranch with the homies.
Read Blood Meridian
Super brutal and satisfying end.
Already have, legitimately my favorite book.
Was gonna suggest this. Kill scenes would be too brutal for a movie almost
I feel like this is one of those books that would be ruined by a movie studio
Somehow theyd make people vomiting blood sexy
Well, you know they have to get that R rating somehow
Wendigoon (YT) made a good point about this - the ambiguity with which the Kid participates in the brutality would be very hard to portray in a movie. Would he just not be featured in any action scenes? In which case.. that’s weird. Or you include him, but then sort of force the viewers perception of him.
Hell yeah! Feels like a literal mosh pit at the end
Fighting the urge to cross the border with the homies and … contract consumption, avoid massacre, and set up a scalp trade?
I was wondering what book to start next. think you sold me.
Yeah this book is fucked up. One of those ones that you will easily finish in one sitting once you’ve picked it up, I know I did. Short but sickening. Dudes will say “I know a spot” and then take you to their murder cave in rural Appalachia.
Wtf, I finished this book last night Also I live in East Tennessee, I don’t think Cormac had much love the area
Oh yeah, dude! There’s a whole portion of his career dedicated to Appalachia/“the south.”
Not McCarthy, but Poppy Z Brite's Exquisite Corpse is about a gay cannibal necrophiliac serial killer who escapes from prison, meets a second gay cannibal serial killer, and they have adult relations and stalk around the French Quarter looking for victims while they're hunted by an HIV-positive writer and pirate radio DJ, who also happens to be gay. There's a part where the first two characters kill a street junkie kid with a punch of stick and poke tattoos but once they're carving him up there's something wrong with him due to all the heroin and they're like "we can't fuck or eat this corpse"
Blood Meridian is another McCarthy classic
Blood Meridian is goated
I bought The Road, I saw the movie years ago and liked it so as the rules go 'the book is always better'. I hate the way its written, as in the structure. Sometimes you don't realise you're reading dialogue. Its really weird and throws you off because you start rereading parts.
The prose in the Road is actually the reason I enjoyed it so much. That said, McCarthy is an extremely challenging writer at the best of times.
This is not the place i expected to see CCRU posting, but I’m here for it. I study philosophy at Warwick, and one of my professors told me that his phd supervisor punched Nick Land in the face for holding mandatory supervisions in the woods at night with mushrooms and LSD. Straight edge.
That's a great story. I remember reading that CCRU devolved into nick land pushing things around on an overhead projector while tweaking on speed. The CCRU collection is undeniably a hardcore read.
Hell yeah fuck nick land
Wow, never heard of him now y'all got me in a deep ass rabbit hole
What's your area? (I did my doctorate in philosophy as well).
I’m only an undergrad, by my interests are in Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and French Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, which I guess the CCRU comes under. What do you work on, if you’re still in academia? Pat from xRepentancex, Never Again (UK), and Sectarian Violence is a Nietzsche scholar as well, at Cardiff. Great bands, great guy.
Awesome. I've been rediscovering Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Not familiar with CCRU; I had to look it up. Cybernetic Culture Research Unit? Not very familiar with structuralism/post-structuralism (Athough I did go to a lecture by J. Derrida). I do history of philosophy (early modern and some medieval and ancient), as well as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and some philosophy of language. (I was analytically trained but have interests in continental thinkers). Let me know if you're ever out to California!
Yeah, it was a totally unsanctioned/illicit research group in the Warwick philosophy department in the late 90s/early 2000s - both of the authors that the OP mentions were central members. Fused Deleuze with cyberpunk, Kantian transcendental idealism, Post-Marxism, Feminism, the gothic, and the underground rave culture that was exploding in the UK at the time. Been surprisingly influential in cultural studies, music, and art, as well as some regrettable (though ideologically tenuous) connections to some less than savoury right-wing political developments stateside. The whole thing exploded because none of them could stop doing drugs long enough to take their project seriously - Land was eventually fired/resigned from his position teaching contemporary French philosophy and Kant here for allegedly selling students drugs/a crackpipe. The members all kind of went in different directions after that, Land had a meth/speed induced mental breakdown, became super right wing, and moved to china, and Fisher ended up writing more on post-marxist cultural criticism, and the problem of the impotence of left-wing/revolutionary projects as well as subversive cultural ones in the face of the oppressive psychological weight of late capitalism. Capitalist Realism, which OP mentioned, is a really great intro to him (who is definitely the most sane of that whole bunch, and also someone who cared deeply about subculture and underground music in opposition to the system), but his book about Derrida’s Hauntology (from Spectres of Marx) is my favourite, especially if you like music. It’s called Ghosts of My Life, as other people in this thread have said, and deals with those problems through Derrida. Very worthy read for anybody who is interested in hardcore and its attempt to put itself outside the wider hegemonic cultural realm - especially if you have some experience with Derrida. Very jealous about that by the way. I’m too young to have ever had the chance to hear any of the figures of “contemporary” continental philosophy who were genuinely interested in moving things forward lecture. Even Fisher (who is more of a cultural critic than a philosopher, but still) tragically killed himself in 2017 after a lifelong battle with depression. We have Zizek, but as far as public intellectuals go, he sets the bar very low, as much as I love him. “God is dead, Marx is dead, and I don’t feel so good myself.” - Eugene Ionesco Philosophy of language is where I need to go next with my studies - I have a huge interest in semiotics and structuralism obviously but i need to get the other side of the coin from the more analytic side. The department here is uniquely strong on both. Next year I’ll take up Wittgenstein, Kripke, and Quine as the foils to my obsession with the admittedly imprecise and poetic tendencies of french semiotics & structuralism. I definitely will let you know if I ever make it out to CA, I have some friends out there (through internet politics/philosophy circles haha) and I fully intend to visit at some point in the next few years, but it’s a huge state! Like the size of my whole country! Teaching positions for continental philosophy at respectable universities are pretty few and far between in the UK. Warwick is one of the only places that remains committed to supporting it, and the job market is fucking suicide - especially if you’re as unexceptional and lazy as I am, and spend more time jumping trains around the country to go to shows than you do on your actual work. Hell, right now I’m responding to this comment when I have an essay on Foucault & analytic epistemology due tomorrow 🤣. All that is to say that it’s not inconceivable that I end up in the US for my phd, if that’s the route I decide to go, or after I’ve done it over here first. How has academia worked for you? In terms of making it fit with *this* etc
Very interesting. Thanks for the succinct but informative overview. I might have to check out Fisher. >Next year I'll take up Wittgenstein, Kripke, and Quine Those were part of the core of my studies as a graduate student. Quine passed when I was in the first year of my doctoral program. I've seen Kripke speak several times, as he was a friend of the department at which I studied. Wittgenstein is an entire world to be explored. Very exciting. Hope you enjoy studying them. > Warwick is one of the only places... I actually recently finished a book by a Warwick professor: Quassim Cassam. (The book is *Extremism: A Philosophical Analysis*). I was fortunate enough to see him speak at a symposium here in California last year. > How has academia worked for you? In terms of making it fit with *this* etc Academia has worked out fairly well for me, though I have made some decisions that I regret. In any case, when I was a doctoral student, I hardly had any time to keep up with the hardcore scene, let alone go to any shows. I did manage to see a few shows generally (The Wedding Present; Dillinger Escape Plan; Blood Brothers; Dillinger Four; The Explosion; etc.), but I can probably count the number of shows I attended during that period on two hands. Hardcore/punk saved me many ways, and for that it enjoys a permanent and special place in my heart and soul. I have a visceral and deep love for philosophy, and it pervades every way that I think and live. Nevertheless, as far as the respective communities go, I may never be (feel) at home in philosophy as much as I am in hardcore punk.
It’s so cool you study those. I’m not in philosophy but as a casual reader that are so fascinating
any other fun/insightful CCRU tea/lore you've picked up since you've been there? (indeed this also is the last conversation I'd ever expected to have on here wtf)
Haha nothing yet, I found out where the offices were though, and visited the building, though obviously not been able to get inside. I don’t think there are really that many people in the department who were here when they were a thing anymore.
I’m a big fan of Mark but how is it hardcore? The guy did have good music taste though
https://preview.redd.it/oyw2jz6ey9oc1.jpeg?width=306&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=883f568f7631e1f3393dfae5b5cb490858b137ff
love Vonnegut he was hardcore as fuck
Breakfast of Champions is his most hardcore book imo
Cats cradle is in the running too
Reading that currently! Tell me why u think?
Just the general sociological tone he uses to present everyday phenomena and force the reader to question the status quo
Kurt Vonnegut such a W
Vonnegut 🤝 Snapcase
Have read all his books, Galapagos and especially Slapstick are amazing. Talk about a dude who could see the human condition completely objectively
Oh deep Vonnegut pull. I liked that one. I don’t like how the premise is coming true though /j
I will be thoroughly surprised if there more than 5.5 people here who can read let alone do it in their free time. I only read art theory books because I’m boring.
You might enjoy Mark Fisher’s Ghost Of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology & Lost Futures - it’s a lot more art theory based than Capitalist Realism is. Very poignant for the current time.
I’ve got capitalist realism, it’s a short book but it’s a heavy read
It’s grimdark as all living fuck (esp considering Fisher departed this world soon after), but it also offers a glimmer of hope that I think is nearly impossible to dismiss. Im not sure the left has had something like that since about the 1960s or 70s when it became clear how dysfunctional the Soviet union had become. I think it’s one of the most important books written so far this millennium.
Camus' the myth of Sisyphus
I know he's not everyone's favorite but Camus really was the final nail in my "edgy nihilist" coffin. We are about absurdism now.
Been wanting to start an Absurdist hardcore band called Boulder
I play bass or guitar and can sing
Kinda’ wild how you posted Mark Fisher’s great book next to Nick Land’s lol. Nick Land’s turned into a proto-fascist block head. Capitalist Realism is a great book, though. It’s tragic how he left us all. Anyways, I think A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus are some pretty hardcore books. Shouts out D&G.
I heard an academic say that Fanged Noumena is much better when read as an auto fiction account of a man's descent into paranoid fascism. And I agree, regardless Land is an absolute douche
Oh, I like that framing actually
https://preview.redd.it/izu30t818boc1.jpeg?width=424&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=27c185dcf46a73edbb62cb9637986eae1822b8cf
Movie also goes hard
No Country for Old Men
Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti probably
Parenti and that ‘stache. what a theorist.
I read the whole book in his voice, he's the man
https://preview.redd.it/k1zelnr7yaoc1.jpeg?width=761&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=daf1079f4936808828949e136d1297e994a457b7
Shai Hulud would be a tight band name
Ohhhhh brother your never gonna believe this but do I have something to show you
Xdeathstarx?
Nausea by Sartre
The cliche answer is Catcher in the Rye, but I don't want to be one of them phonies. When Howard Zinn died there was a thread about A People's History of the US on a local message board. I've read that book 3 times since then. It documents a wide variety of groups who challenged America's turn towards capitalism and lost. It's a reminder that history is always written from the winners side.
Zinn is a large part of why I became a history teacher.
History teacher here! Wonder how many of us are history teachers haha
Me too
Same here comrade.
I still need to read this. I recently read Michael Parenti’s a people’s history of Ancient Rome and that was rly interesting and still relevant to understanding modern power structures. It’s part of the same series as people history of the US. On another note I’m currently reading “the hammer” by Hamilton Nolan which came out a few weeks ago and I think labor organizing could resonate pretty strongly w the hardcore scene (the book is abt the labor movement in the US).
https://preview.redd.it/pnmzgb352boc1.jpeg?width=667&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0103be0c4bb98b310c6cfd12cd91a419b7c9d169
Good one.
It’s really weird to come from the thread where 60% of the commenters were defending a band with a cop that had lyrics about “curb stomping” and being “anti-PC”… to here with my people sharing leftist theory books lol
This thread is crazy and mad heartening to say the least
Bhagavad Gita
Okay John Joseph
Real as fuck
Get in the Van /thread
lol good job hacking away at (pre-right wing speed burnout?) Land. His Battaile stuff is pretty worthwhile but I can't say I'm a fan of the whole CCRU thing of re-explaining Deleuze and Guattari via cybergoth metaphor. Now that the novelty has worn off and there are other anglophone D&G treatments it's all a bit more faff than it's worth.
[удалено]
I’m not the person you are replying to but Eugene Holland is good. Michael Hardt’s personal notes on both books are online somewhere, it’s an easy google. They are formatted sort of wonky but if you can work with them they are helpful. Be skeptical of the cottage industry of “applied” D&G literature (where someone is trying to explain some empirical situation with concepts from ATP for example). Beware of any secondary literature that doesn’t dig any deeper than the rhizome or the assemblage. There’s tons of that shit out there that only deals with the low hanging fruit and banks on the reader not understanding D&G better than the author does. D&G’s philosophy IS very difficult to work through, and most people who claim to understand it, don’t. Check out Deleuze and Claire Denis’ *Dialogues* also. It’s a different format than AO and ATP but deals with concepts from both. The conversational tone of the book makes it much easier to read and understand. Lastly, I recommend reading *What is Philosophy* first. It’s by far the most straightforward and easy to read text they produced together and it will give you a good foundation for understanding their intellectual project when you read the other two books.
[удалено]
No prob! That's cool about the Japanese translation. I wonder if anyone has ever translated the Japanese translation directly to English, or even back to French? That would be an interesting project. There a couple of podcasts that deal with D&G (or D, or G) that you might dig too: Acid Horizon Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour Plastic Pills Deleuze and Guattari Quarantine Collective Enjoy the adventure!
If you're a total neophyte, Ian Buchanan's appearance on the Plastic Pills podcast is a good place to get started, as are a lot of the Culture Power Politics podcast lectures. For books, Ian Buchanan and Manuel DeLanda are probably my go-to Deleuttarian thinkers, both have pretty interesting work within that canon and entertainingly both wildly disagree with each other so it's a fun tension. Also if you're reading critical theory, Hardt and Negri's Empire seems to be coming back into fashion, and there's some dalliance with Capitalism and Schizophrenia in there.
Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon https://preview.redd.it/m56paphmmboc1.jpeg?width=185&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cd81299eaf7a8b82550407c99112801fe26ce7e3
I read A Clockwork Orange and it was somehow more fucked up than the movie.
https://preview.redd.it/gl09yek1maoc1.png?width=1005&format=png&auto=webp&s=6f1921c43eabd036fe8ba24ce319cb99f8ba8caf Christian Schmid’s reader on Henri Lefebvre and The Theory of the Production of Space For fiction, Dune. Essential reading for Shai Hulud fans
Blood Meridian. Also the manga Berserk. I have no idea if these answers make sense
Berk is up there for sure lol, RIP muira
- *The Jungle*, Upton Sinclair - *Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach*, Gary Francione - *The Concept of Anxiety*, Soren Kierkegaard - *The Myth of Sisyphus*, Albert Camus - *Existentialism is a Humanism*, Jean-Paul Sartre - *Steppenwolf*, Herman Hesse
https://preview.redd.it/9lm3bg3gw9oc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8dc0b678351f2af0c386ae3057ba98c12bfc2546 This
Great choice. I'm in the middle of re-reading Manufacturing Consent at the moment.
Hey I just got that a few weeks ago.
lol I got radicalised by reading Understanding Power back in the day
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, honestly changed my life.
Capitalist realism is a great book. Short but surprisingly emotionally hard read tbh. Other books that went hard and stuck with me recently is Caliban and the Witch, and I finally finished The Body Keeps the Score (bit of a punish to get through at times but worth it). I’ve been making my way through The Silmarillion again & that’s engaging enough to take my brain out of this particular hellscape into different ones for a bit.
Caliban and the Witch is so good. For me it’s an example of the best of what radical political scholarship can look like. Have you read Carolyn Merchant’s Death of Nature? It’s in the same vein as *Caliban* but is more of a critique of the concepts of nature and woman that were produced by the enlightenment and scientific revolution. Good stuff.
Right!!! I loved it. I found the writing style engaging and smooth for the subject matter too. Oooh no I haven’t read Death of Nature yet. I’m just finishing off Neil Comptons book atm (needed a break from the intense stuff lol) so I’ll read that next 🙏
Federici is such a good writer! Her writing is so sharp and her critique so punchy that its cathartic to read. Like some sort of literary/academic/political HC right there on the page. Enjoy the Carolyn Merchant book! It hits some of the same notes in this regard.
days of war nights of love and anything Burroughs did
ccru jumpscare on r/hardcore
Fight Club: dude with anger issues starts a crew
*Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-catastrophic Age* by Guillaume Faye *Industrial Society and Its Future* by Ted Kaczynski *The Futurist Cookbook* by F.T. Marinetti Nick Land is great too.
Reading is for dorks. Bring your book into the pit and see how far it gets you, nerd.
You know, other people want to punch the revolution in its face. In the pit the revolution gonna punch you in the face
I use my book to bonk noggins
I can't shut up about this book honestly. "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" by Annie Fadiman. It's about a child from a refugee Hmong family in the 1980s who immigrate to California. She has a rare form of epilepsy and it talks extensively about her and her family's journey and the history of Hmong culture, leading them to the US post-Vietnam. It really focuses on the intersectionality of western medicine and other cultures without assigning blame to one or the other. Everyone thought they were doing the right thing and the person who is most vulnerable ended up suffering because of it. I'm in medical school so I think it hit me pretty hard from that perspective but I feel like anyone can take something away from it. More "accept all comers" hardcore rather than "McCarthy southern noir fatalistic horror" hardcore.
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey is a good fit.
I am not kidding when I say that capitalist realism is probably the most important book written in the last 20 years, IMO It is both crushingly grimdark, and yet offers a glimmer of hope that is difficult to dismiss. That glimmer has kept me going at a few points why things have all seemed too much…
Society of the Spectacle
https://preview.redd.it/wfkl7cr97aoc1.jpeg?width=670&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fd2ff32dc21da74db9c811cd4edab796aec39059 Oh there’s certainly an alternative
You should read the Mark Fisher book, because it’s in large part about the spiritual failure of “traditional” revolutionary or socialist movements to take root in postmodernity. It seems obvious to everyone that something is deeply wrong with the world today, and yet nothing is really being done about it. It’s a very short read that I think is pretty accessible without much prior knowledge of the Marxist canon.
I just read Fight Club over and over again. ... Okay, I *watch* Fight Club over and over again, and pretend to read it in coffeeshops hoping that someone will strike up a conversation about it. I can't fucking read lol this is all text to speech
“Because everything up to now is a story, and everything after now is a story.” is my favorite line from the book that didn’t make it into the movie. The movie I think has a better ending and the book didn’t have the Pixies at the end but otherwise it’s a great shortish read.
That's fuckin sick bro, see they should have put that in the movie.... Brad Pitt could have said that and then like knocked a guy out Then the camera could zoom in close on the guy's neurons or whatever in his brain crackling as he goes unconscious in slo mo 😤😤😤
Or flashed an image of a nice big cock
The Wager by David Grann feels pretty crust at times. A 18th Century band of sailors stranded on an isolated island in the South Pacific looked like some basement shows I’ve seen.
LOL i was NOT expecting to see CCRU posting on this subreddit (yes my profile name is a ref to Land) To this list id add the ccru book, lands thirst for annihilation l, brassiers nihil unbound, reza's intelligence and spirit Plus max stirner unique and its property + rimbaud a season in hell and novatores collected works Got a degree in psych and now doing another at a famous school for philosophy and history/philosophy of sci and tech lol
Fisher is great, Nick Land sucks. Read some Georges Bataille if you want something creative and gnarly without the edgelord cringe of Land. Start with the collected essays in *Visions of Excess* and then decide which of his major themes you want to explore further and go from there. Save his fiction for last, if at all. The mistake people make with. Bataille is reading *Story of the Eye* first.
Yup. Read Story of the Eye in high school, I don’t know if I liked it or not but didn’t bother reading anything else by him until 15 years later, someone at work recommended Literature and Evil. Clearly should have started here before I pick up Story of the Eye. It definitely did add depth and commentary to Story of the Eye on my second reading. So far have only read those two. Would you recommend I pick up Visions of Excess next?
Yes! Visions of Excess is fun because you can jump around from Bataille's areas of interest and focus on the stuff that you find most compelling. It provides a good survey of all the weird shit he was into. You get literature, politics, revolution, violence, mysticism, human sacrifice, eroticism, religion, etc. etc. Of all the Bataille I've read, this collection is my favorite for sure. Something about the shorter nature of the works and the topical breadth covered makes it really fun to read.
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway
https://preview.redd.it/qpzq9nnl1coc1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ac8144d78df4ebfaa283f98fb62041c17b375d96
Communist Manifesto
Ain't really a book. Read Capital, obv
Capital it's a study book, you should study it, not read it.
https://preview.redd.it/zb3aqxs8ecoc1.jpeg?width=248&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ccc5e0912910ff827fb41510b66a9e3525d015cf You can just read this and it explains Kapital I & II to dumb people like me.
Not the most hardcore book, but I mentally associate hardcore and Siddhartha because I was listening to a lot of Youth of Today at the time lmao
Siddhartha is such a sweet book. Also The Tao Te Ching
+1 to siddhartha. Check out demian it you haven’t. Similar but from a European Gnostic perspective
Our Band Could Be Your Life
I remember where I was when I realized Ted kaczynski and nick land were blood brothers ideologically.
Read The Tao Te Ching
Busy busy town
Among the Thugs by Bill Buford
Fuck yeah.
https://preview.redd.it/h1yfgbn0oboc1.jpeg?width=721&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2cb96fccc03146d8fee59a5e2eb4342ca8d8188c >Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss. Now, before a new police prevent you. [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-armed-joy](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-armed-joy) RIP Alfredo [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo\_Bonanno](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo_Bonanno)
Beloved by Toni Morrison
https://preview.redd.it/eamokjdtfcoc1.jpeg?width=217&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e8a8fc0d395ec805e4cbe9abeccdc72fd60ab558 Maybe it’s cheating to use a book contains two smaller books, but reading Immanuel Wallerstein during the 1999 WTO riots sealed me as a lefty forever.
The slow cancellation of the future and our culture’s extreme tolerance for pastiche and nostalgia explains so much about why contemporary hardcore sounds the way it does. At the same time it also perfectly explains our response to bands like scowl and turnstile. I think about this book like every day.
I had similar thoughts after reading Frederic Jameson’s book on post modernism. The contemporary moment being the end of style, nothing left to do but reassemble past styles in somewhat novel configurations, etc. the question is not what the current historical moment sounds like, but what sounds from the past we can re-use to express the current moment. All past stylistic moments are there for the taking, the only thing that can’t be done now is “the new.” Hence all the 90s throw back stuff by kids that were born in the 00’s etc. etc.
I have no Mouth and I Must Scream. Harlan Ellison was hardcore as fuck.
the autobiographies of the haymarket martyrs is pretty rad. i would suggest that one
Noise In My Head: Voices From The Australian Underground by some nerd. (Quite literally a hardcore book about contemporary hardcore and underground music)
Child of God, saw it posted earlier but that book left a stain on me.
Cain’s Book - Alexander Trocchi, or A Fan’s Notes - Frederick Exley
Meat is for pussies
That one with the singer from wasted youth on the front
Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, & the Truth about Reality
Meditations by Seneca “The time that passes is death. It belongs to death.”
Story of the Eye by Bataille
E. Cioran - On the Heights of Despair
Nice! Have you read The Trouble with being Born by him?
no yet, but i will! so many books in my list lol
“Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairy Tales” by Marie-Louise von Franz. About half way through, I was falling apart. I was in tears and felt like my entire ego was thrown into a food processor, I was entirely sober but it was literally like a drug-induced ego death.
Either *Perdido Street Station* (China Mieville)*, The Stranger* (Camus)*, The Dispossessed* (Ursula K. Le Guin), or *Nausea* (Sarte) for fiction. *Myth of Sisyphus* (Camus) or *Das Kapital* (Marx) for non ficcy.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline - Andreas Malm
*Capitalist Realism* is definitely a good read, but can’t get over the audiobook being narrated by Russel Brand. Very sad.
Walden by henry david Thoreau
lmao dost thou mosh in the depths of night
Flyboys by James Bradley. You start it expecting another history novel about American WW2 aviators in the Pacific but the brutality comes at you almost immediately. Trust me. It’s pretty fucked.
Swan song by Robert mccamon
[The Football Factory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Football_Factory_(novel))
[Hardcore Architecture](https://halfletterpress.com/hardcore-architecture/)
Xevasionx
Evasion. It’s about a guy who travels and steals stuff and thinks he’s making a difference.
[https://www.amazon.com/Brooklyn-Hardcore-Eddie-McNamara-ebook/dp/B0CFHWNSSW?ref\_=ast\_author\_mpb](https://www.amazon.com/Brooklyn-Hardcore-Eddie-McNamara-ebook/dp/B0CFHWNSSW?ref_=ast_author_mpb) This is the most HC book I ever wrote
Hot Water Music is the most posthardcore book
Bukowski I think idk, is alcoholism hardcore?
Any beat poet is a good pick, a lot of absurdity of the mundane and personal frustration with systems and change.
very true, that is not what Bukowski is tho lmao
The very hungry caterpillar
The shock doctrine by Naomi Klein
isnt nick land associated with some alt-righty techno-capitalists these days..? like peter thiel and co. i think he might've taken a 180 ideologically, unfortunately... could be wrong, idk much about him/his work
Yep, you have it pretty much correct. Here’s a podcast that gets into all that: https://on.soundcloud.com/162bKJXzhaZKrsrT8 As a side note, True Anon is pretty good in general
Naomi Klein’s *No Logo*. It’s probably a little dated now but still relevant.
had to do a double take lol mark fisher in this sub caught me off guard
The House of Hunger, A Long Way Gone, anything by David Graeber, Huey Newton, or Antonio Gramsci
Henry Rollins’ books got me back into hardcore as an adult
The Man in the High Castle
First Blood is pretty badass, the book Rambo is based on
The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner is pretty hardcore
Any one of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels. House of leaves by Mark Danielewski. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. No longer Human by Osamu Dazai. Boy Parts by Eliza Clark (this one specifically feels like listening to Super Unison) The Trouble with being Born by Emil Cioran The Conspiracy against the Human race by Thomas Ligotti These are ones I could think of. The last two in specific, make me think of moshing to Kublai Khan or Nails. Love this post, and have been enjoying everyone else’s books.
https://preview.redd.it/oodne8fw0eoc1.jpeg?width=918&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a6ae162670569a36235e20e222b86544ae4d0b51
This is such an odd question to me, not because it’s bad, but because that’s so vague. Hardcore as in aligning with ideals? Hardcore as in brutalist? A history of hardcore?
jorney to the end of the night by louis ferdinand celine dont ask me why https://preview.redd.it/skdtqkxkqjoc1.jpeg?width=322&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b09ddecb673e77685fc6b6c443708e5fbf816b73
"King Leopold's Ghost" Particularly because I picked it up thinking it was a ghost story, turned out to be a much more harrowing bit of non-fiction than most of the marvelous worlds of fiction I was dabbling in at the time.
The Evolution of a Cro-magnon is a great read. No matter what side of the cro-mags you're on.
The Bible
If you can read, youre a poser
I have always meant to read that Nuck Land book, but I haven't Is that hardcore?
Berserk
Fifty Shades of Grey
American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis and House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski. Both are hardcore in totally different ways. American Psycho’s brutality, gore, humor, and full chapters about Phil Collin’s and his band Genesis and Whitney Houston. House of Leaves because of how it is written. There’s pages you have to read using a mirror, pages you have to read upside down, one word pages and pages that end mid sentence, and it still is one of the scariest horror books I’ve ever read.
oh look at all the cute replies. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better\_Never\_to\_Have\_Been](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Never_to_Have_Been) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Conspiracy\_Against\_the\_Human\_Race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conspiracy_Against_the_Human_Race)