Date:    Mon, 18 May 1998 11:24:22 -0500
<br>From:    Grant Barrett <gbarrett[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]DFJP.COM>
<br>Subject: -core, Plus Veering Tangents
<br>
<br>"Core" as a multi-purpose music suffix has been in my personal vocabulary since
<br> about 1989 when I began working in college radio. It's kind of like -gate from
<br> Watergate, but instead of implying political wrong-doing when tacked onto any
<br> other word, -core implies a level of intensity and/or ferocity in a particular
<br> form of music.
<br>
<br>Its source, as far as I could ever tell, would be from "hardcore," the first of
<br> the "-cores." Hardcore described the New Punk: strident, screaming, mostly
<br> unintelligible lyrics; thrashing discordant guitars; hammering staccato drums,
<br> usually in short, tight songs. Hardcore came about, I believe, in the mid to
<br> late Eighties, as a lot of the posing and farcical attitudes were stripped away
<br> from punk and "fuck you" wasn't enough to offend people any more. The music
<br> began to be perceived as a valid form, and separate from its antecedent.
<br>
<br>At some point "hardcore" became kind of like "acid rock": a word misused by
<br> people outside the scene to apply to rock they didn't like because they
<br> couldn't find a melody in it. The -core suffix caught on because the
<br> diversification of popular music had marketers, disk jockeys and bands looking
<br> for way to define the emerging scenes. Bands have always hated defining
<br> themselves by saying something like, "We sound like the Hank Williams crossed
<br> with Husker Du" so the new vocabulary was quickly embraced. There are now a
<br> dozen major branches of dance, a half dozen kinds of hip-hop, six or seven
<br> kinds of straight up rock, three or four kinds of country, "pop" versions of
<br> all of them, and more, and the stuff sells. Check out Billboard's top 100: it
<br> hasn't been purely rock/pop in more than a decade.
<br>
<br>Anyway, I think you'll find that many of the -core words can be attributed to
<br> failed coinage attempts. I bet most of the -core words would turn up in a
<br> Lexis-Nexis search a handful of times, each during from its own short period,
<br> never to be never heard from again.
<br>
<br>Grant Barrett
<br>gbarrett[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]dfjp.com
<br>
<br>--------------------------------------
<br>From: Yongwei Gao
<br>1. Jonathon Green (Neologisms: New Words since 1960) 1991  s definition
<br>for "-core" is  an all-purpose rock music suffix: it includes
<br>thrashcore, grindcore and grunge core  which, of course, means nothing
<br>in this case:
<br>
<br>-core        In 1987, G.B. Jones, guitarist for the all-female low-fi
<br>pioneers Fifth Column, coined the term homocore in J.D.s, a Toronto
<br>fanzine, just as queer-punk scenes began to emerge in reaction to the
<br>prevalence of racist and homophobic skinheads within punk. (95/5/18
<br>Rolling Stone p38)           Like its nearest American rap equivalent,
<br>horrorcore#-a ungenre that includes Gravediggaz and Jeru the
<br>Damaja#-trip-hop soaks up the dread and uncertainty of the 90 s and
<br>musically conjures up a kind of paranoiascape: an aural simulation of
<br>the urban environment. (95/5/29 NYT H26)            Another category,
<br>known as Loungecore, consists of orchestral covers of rock songs from
<br>the late sixties and early seventies. (97/4 Esquire p75)
<br>