Dance Or Die: A History of Hardcore

What is hardcore? It means many things to many people, and they’re all correct. It’s best described as a feeling, an attitude, and a way of life. Hardcore is niche, schismatic, and a global phenomenon that refuses to die. Because hardcore will never die. Its symbols have been tattooed onto millions of bodies and its relics passed down through the generations, as its sounds resound worldwide.

Dance or Die is the first critical and expansive study of hardcore as a music, a subculture and an enduring “phuture” rave movement, full of colourful anecdotes and first person accounts from artists, fans and the core of hardcore.

This diehard anthology tracks the outsiders and outcasts who banded together to party, in protest, over more than 30 years of obnoxious rebellion, in ecstasy and escape, as a nighttime community more family than family, who need this hard, loud, fast/slow, aggressive, noisy, occasionally silly, kick drum or breakbeat-driven dance music, to connect with people, to survive the world, and to get through the week.

Hardcore: Either you’re in, or you’re out. And if you’re in, you’re in all the way, diehard and dancing to the death. Dance or Die!