Warning, this will probably only be of interest to old timers :p
This is from Bruce Hellington, formerly known as Bruce Merkle, from 9353, interviewed in the new issue of Stop Smiling, which focuses on DC:
"I gotta hand it to the whole Dischord crew," says Hellington. "They were in the midst of instigating a huge international youth bully culture."
He adds:
"Washington has this really annoying style... it took me years to examine it all. There is a lot of fear and a lot of weird ideas here. The majority of people we've rubbed elbows with in the music scene are offspring of either the government, media, or military. So you have the punk rock scene functioning as some horribly gone wrong political student event, where there is all this hierarchy and snobbery, all of this unnecessary rudeness and just mean-spirited, private-school competition crap."
On a more positive note:
"We came up in a very interesting window that was over by the mid-Eighties. We were so hypercritical of plagiarism... you were absolute shit if you were anything like another band. That was the cool thing. You had all of these bands that were making serious strides to invent their own thing. I'm so happy to have been part of those times."
9353's Myspace
