#39, “Too Hardcore,” The Malcontent Party (2002)

150 Favorite Songs: #39, “Too Hardcore,” The Malcontent Party (2002)

Unless you lived in the Rio Grande Valley between 1998 and 2001, you don’t know this song. Even then, unless you were somewhere between fifteen and twenty-three years old, or thereabouts, and went to punk shows at Trenton Point, or spent your time on the Union message board or ValleyScenesters.com, you don’t know it. If you didn’t see Marc pull out a standard-issue Yard Sale sign with an H replacing the Y and a COR replacing the SAL from the stage, you don’t know this song. The number of people whose lives were touched by “Too Hardcore” by The Malcontent Party (who for most of the time they performed this song went by the name We Suck) is small, probably maxes out at a couple hundred, tops.

But for those couple-hundred people, god damn. If you’re me, or Fernando, or Senia, or Charlie, or Lindsay, or any of the other young punks of the RGV who needed an anthem in our teen years? “Too Hardcore” is “Anarchy in the UK” meets “London Calling” meets “Blitzkrieg Bop” meets “Rise Above.” It’s Patti Smith doing “Gloria” and Iggy Pop doing “Search and Destroy,” it’s “I Against I” and “Big a, Little A” and “Holiday in Cambodia” and “Staring at the Rude Boys” all at once. “Too Hardcore” is a singalong song that became scripture, as the Hold Steady once said, something that perfectly captured the spirit of youth and the thrill of seeing your friends do something perfect, the inspiration that comes from seeing somebody just like you get up on stage and make a quinciñera hall or a VFW the most thrilling place in the entire world on a Saturday night. It’s three minutes that last forever, an expression of rage and defiance and unity and hope that speaks to that part of life when those things are the only things that matter at all.

“Too Hardcore” opens with Chris Martinez’s guitar sounding menacing, with a bassline rumbling beneath it that warns you about what’s coming next: Drums, frenetically played by Andrew Villareal, an aerobic rhythm that can not possibly imagine slowing down, and then his brother Marc’s eruption on vocals, screaming a manifesto so frantically that you can barely understand him. i’m a passionate threat, what are you? he screams, i’m educated, what are you? Then the song goes into its next movement, a classic punk-rock riff that leads into a chorus that’s undeniably catchy, as Marc sings about being a passionate threat once more, “too hardcore for you.”

It sounds like a boast, like walling off the song from anybody who doesn’t fit the band’s idea of what “hardcore” is, but that’s not it. It was never exclusionary. I know what it meant to Marc because I talked with him about it a lot—“hardcore,” to him, meant unyielding, meant dedicated to living on your own terms—but the reason “Too Hardcore” meant so much to so many of us in that place at that time is because Marc would have been the first to say that it doesn’t matter what it meant to him, it’s what it meant to the people listening to it. For me, it was a challenge and a call to arms—could I match that intensity?

I tried. I tried in the Valley, then I moved to San Antonio and I tried there. I moved to Austin and I tried, and then Marc and the rest of the band moved up there and we went on the road together and I tried it everywhere, tried it in hostile environments across the South and in basement shows in the Northeast, in haunted houses in Arkansas and anarchist spaces in the Midwest. “Too Hardcore” felt like a responsibility to me as I grew from teenager to young adult, something I internalized specifically because it came from a peer rather than someone famous, somebody legendary I could only know from a record.

I don’t know what “Too Hardcore” meant to everyone else who was at those shows, but I know that we all knew the words. We all felt it when Marc would throw his arm around one of us and hold the mic in our faces to scream the chorus with him, we all knew that it was our song, too. Now it’s yours, too, if you want it.