A New York City Hardcore Punk Label Est. 1989

A few months ago, a friend sent me a link to to a thread on a message board. The main topic was “why does Blackout! suck now?” At first, I got angry and tried to track down the phone numbers of the offenders. After a few minutes on this little tirade, I cooled off and took it for what it was- armchair quarterbacking from irrelevant faces. But I also realized that they were, in a way, on the money.

It’s true. We hit our “adult crash.” On one level, the label business is very different than it ever was. Running an indie music company has become a fast moving treadmill that becomes incrementally faster every day - so it’s harder than ever to make a real adult living. It’s also different on a personal level. Jim and I first started Blackout! as an outlet for our friends’ bands back in 1988. But now? Bands look at the label as simply as a means to an end, and the naive adolescence and pie-eyed enthusiasm that made it special isn’t there. Work and other responsibilities have replaced it.

So now it’s been a few years since our last (official) release of The Fire Still Burns EP and we gotta find something to do with whatever legacy we have left. So Blackout! is going to be a blog. A blog about our past - where our extended family can relate some of their memories, and keep the catalog alive. A blog about the future- where we may find new ways to expose new punk and hardcore that still make us want to sing along the way it was.