Vietnam heavy music promoters School of Mosh release brief history of Vietnam hardcore article

Before reading the article below, here’s a little background to Vietnam’s passionate collective behind the hugely successful promotional company School of Mosh themselves:

“SCHOOL OF MOSH is an iconic cultural festival dedicated to the young generation of Hanoi. The events are scheduled for a whole day packed with activities such as live music (Rock, Hardcore, Metal, Hiphop), street art performance, skateboarding, BMX, Graffiti and flea market vendors.”

This year’s edition of the festival is scheduled for September 16, 2017 and more info can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/856503597831729

Here’s the article that they released regarding the birth of Vietnam’s hardcore community:

Chapter 2: The intergration of Vietnamese scene to international hardcore scene

How and when did hardcore get to Vietnam? These are hard questions. When making this textbook, we have found many people with their stories and have summarized the way to Hardcore-ism of Vietnam.

Hardcore-without-punk

Hardcore came to Vietnam as a cultural shock. In other countries, it usually grew from punk scene. When punk kids were exposed to hardcore and fell in love with it was when hardcore scene started at its very draft.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, rock music in Vietnam began to show some development. Audience were gradually listening to some subgenres and started to divide into groups of same interests. They found each other on internet forums. Bands at that time also had a clearer orientation about their genre and wrote songs with more signature.

Vietnam have never had a punk scene. There were punk names that were well-known, but it was not enough to form a community. Therefore, hardcore kids in Vietnam mostly not originated from punk, but from subgenres which are influenced by punk and hardcore.

Every way leads to Hardcore

Vietnamese hardcore audience mainly contact to hardcore through 2 main methods:

First, hardcore musicians and audience mostly originated from 80s metal such as metalcore, thrash metal like Pantera, Killswitch Engage, As I Lay Dying or Lamb of God…

Second, people could fell for hardcore music through some more modern of the 90s, essentially alternative rock, emo, nu-metal, pop punk. The famous names we can mention at that time are Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance, Greenday, Blink-182, Limp Bizkit…

All band names above might have little involvement in hardcore, but they were the premise for the young in Vietnam to approach hardcore.

The very first bands

In the middle and late 2000s, there were some first metalcore bands, representatively we had Vertigo, Nuranium, Zigzag (Hanoi), End of road, Multiplex (Saigon). They played at heavy music stages or performed with other bands.

These are the very first bands that put great impression on audience. This generation saw a dip from 2010 to 2013 mainly due to personal reasons. The remaining members of the bands continued to join in afterwards hardcore bands or pursued another metal genre.

Turning point – The Ghost Inside

In May 2013, an very significantly important event happened to the hardcore scene in Vietnam, as The Ghost Inside (USA), a very famous hardcore band came to Saigon to perform. This was a pure hardcore event with a band of international stature, moreover, it was organised by our very hardcore community by crowd funding.

This event was a momentous change to hardcore community. In the meantime, there were also a lot of new hardcore bands with more published original products. Some bands we could mention are Epione (HN), Nemesis (Danang), In Your Eyes (SG)… At the same time, old bands like Multiplex or Nuranium were still playing before they discontinued in 2013.

After The Ghost Inside, there were many new hardcore bands established. Many new hardcore crews and organizers such as Corerior, Hardcore Vietnam, Hanoicore… were found and they are the people that maintain the hardcore scene nationwide. Besides small frequently organised events, the number of international bands who came to Vietnam increased afterwards. The first festivals organised by our very hardcore community like Hardcore United, School of Mosh were also established.

For more info on School of Mosh: https://www.facebook.com/schoolofmosh/