punk rock and religion usually go together like gasoline and a birthday cake—the entire genre was practically built on yelling at institutions, tearing down dogma, and mocking authority figures
which is why the early-90s rise of krishnacore remains one of the wildest, most earnest mutations in underground music history. the guardian just published a fantastic retrospective on how youth of today’s ray cappo, vic dicara, and a bunch of straight-edge hardcore kids turned eastern spirituality and the bhagavad gita into blistering, heavy-as-lead punk rock
“We had a retired school bus that was converted into a kind of travelling temple… It was wild, and probably the closest thing to the hardcore version of being a Deadhead: the self-sufficient cooking, setting up in parking lots, passing out pamphlets and talking to people.”
imagine sharing festival stages with slayer and the sex pistols while your band consists of celibate monks chanting hare krishna between breakdowns. bands like shelter and 108 didn’t just play shows; they built a travelling ecosystem with prasadam in parking lots and tulasi beads flying in the pit. and when that scene fractured, it directly planted the seeds for 90s emo royalty like texas is the reason
whether it was intense ego-stripping or just the loudest spiritual search ever committed to tape, there’s something deeply admirable about kids who looked at the cynical 90s hardcore scene and decided to bring full-throated devotion into the pit
Source: The Guardian