i wanna be all the way & unafraid to be

Written by Jen Mogila. Graphic by Laura Cross. 

Since this is my first piece written for Girls Behind the Rock Show, I figured that I should introduce myself; hi, my name is Jennifer, but most people call me Jen. I live on Long Island in New York, and my favorite things include my cats, the color pink, giving gifts to my Animal Crossing villagers, and watching sports. Above all else, however, I love music.

I frequently refer to music as the love of my life. It somehow plays a role in everything that I do. I got my first iPod when I was five years old, stacked with everything from Miranda Cosgrove and Avril Lavigne to Tool and Deftones. Some of my favorite memories growing up are sitting in my pink and purple bedroom singing and dancing along to Paramore’s crushcrushcrush and Fall Out Boy’s Thnks Fr Th Mmrs on the local alternative radio station. I danced for 12 years, played cello for seven, and am currently a wannabe ukulele rockstar after buying one on impulse and starting to teach myself how to play four years ago. Even on the simplest, barely noticeable levels, music has been everywhere in my life for as long as I can remember; even now, I can’t complete a basic task without a song playing in my headphones.

Music became an even bigger part of my life when I started attending live shows. I went to my first concerts at age 10, seeing my two favorite artists - Nickelodeon boy band Big Time Rush and classic progressive rock band Rush - within one month of each other. By the time I was 15, I had been to my fair share of arena/seated shows with one or both of my parents, from Fifth Harmony to Fitz and the Tantrums to Alice in Chains. My first general admission show was seeing the Foo Fighters at Citi Field with both my mom and dad when I was 12, but my first pop-punk general admission show (yes, they’re different) came a few years later. I had the typical list of favorite bands that you would expect from a young teenager getting into alternative music: Neck Deep, Knuckle Puck, Real Friends, and State Champs. 

In late 2018, I was able to see all four of these bands for the first time, and I am a firm believer that it changed the course of my life. I met, cried-during, and eventually got the setlist for Neck Deep at Stereo Garden on Long Island in September. I sang all of “Untitled” at the barricade for Knuckle Puck at SI Hall at the Fairgrounds in Syracuse in October. I had my first minor concussion scare (yay!) before Real Friends’ set at Irving Plaza in New York City in November. Finally, I crowd surfed for the first time during State Champs’ anniversary show for The Finer Things at House of Independents in Asbury Park in December. After just a few shows, I had fallen in love with this new brand of live music that I had just been introduced too. There was something so magical to me about skin covered in sweat and Sharpie marks, feet hurting from dancing in the pit all night, and meeting strangers on line outside the venue who would become your best friends and know your deepest secrets by the end of the night.

After making some friends at all of the pop-punk shows I was going to, they started to tell me that I should get into hardcore music. I was hesitant at first - the heaviest thing I had listened to at that point was nowhere near the snippets of hardcore that my friends had played for me - but, eventually, I decided to give it a chance. I was bored and home alone with nothing to do one night over the summer of 2019 when I listened to my first hardcore album, Laugh Tracks by Knocked Loose. Immediately, I got that gut feeling that you have when you know you’ve heard one of your favorite bands for the first time. I knew that this was something special that I was meant to find at this point in my life. For the rest of the summer, I worked my way through the rest of my friends’ hardcore and hardcore-adjacent recommendations, with Cost of Living by Incendiary, Stage Four by Touche Amore, You’re Not You Anymore by Counterparts, Time & Space by Turnstile, Springtime and Blind by Fiddlehead, Smile! Aren’t You Happy by Absence of Mine, Bad to my World by Backtrack, and Reality Approaches by Harms Way being some of my favorites. By the time the next school year started, I was hooked, and I already had tickets to my first few hardcore shows in the fall.

My first hardcore show was in November 2019, seeing Knocked Loose at Webster Hall in New York City - fitting, right? They were on tour supporting their new record A Different Shade of Blue, which I had become obsessed with the minute I heard it for the first time. Although I was ridiculously scared of getting stepped on and breaking all my bones (yes, that was an actual fear of mine), I had the time of my life at that show. There was something about this newer kind of live music that prompted a cathartic release, one that I hadn’t found anywhere else before. As soon as the show was over, I was counting the days until my next one.

My love for live hardcore music (and live music and hardcore music in general) has only grown since then, and that story sort of ends there. However, I want to go back to that first hardcore band that I listened to, Knocked Loose, and the album they put out that first summer that stole my heart. I was taken by storm as soon as the first notes of A Different Shade of Blue rang through my headphones, but something was different about the third track, A Serpent’s Touch, particularly the ending; I heard a voice that sounded a little bit more like my own.

This song features Emma Boster, who does vocals for one of my favorite hardcore bands right now, Dying Wish. When I heard A Serpent’s Touch for the first time, though, I had no idea who she was. I was used to the aggressive vocal delivery of frontmen in hardcore, particularly that of Knocked Loose’s Bryan Garris, but hearing it come from her changed my perspective on a lot of things. It’s not like the song was super angry and changed its tune to be lighter once the token girl came along; in her verse, Boster sings, “I watched the venom / Overcome your spirit / Jealousy holds you now / Distorting your appearance / Bleed out.” These were lyrics that held the same intensity that the lines screamed by the men held, and they sounded just as cool coming out of her mouth. As cheesy as it sounds, it had never even occurred to me that women had a place in this new world that I had discovered. The audiences in the live videos I watched (and eventually at the shows I attended) were made up of mostly men who looked bigger and older than me. When I did start going to shows, most of the non-man population consisted of my friends and I. Emma Boster, along with so many others, began to open my eyes to the fact that a place for people like me existed in this community. It didn’t matter that I had bright red hair or liked butterflies or wore pink - I was just as much a part of this magic as the men multiple feet taller than me with tattoo-covered arms, and I belonged there just as much as they did.

As time went on and I got more involved in the genre’s music and community, I discovered more bands with women in them, and it only fueled this fire of empowerment inside of me. When I felt insecure, I’d watch live sets from Krimewatch, a hardcore band from New York City, just half an hour away from my hometown. They have multiple women as members, including their energetic badass of a vocalist, Rhylli Ogiura. Year of the Knife became one of my all-time favorites, and their bassist Madison Watkins became a serious inspiration to me; the way that she can balance killing it on stage and running the cutest, most pink apparel brand I’ve ever seen (aptly titled Candy Corpse) amazes me. Even some of the bands I’ve found more recently have had an impact on me. I started listening to Initiate last year when their EP Lavender came out, and their beautifully colorful cover art caught my eye before I had heard any of their songs. Their vocalist, Crystal Pak, is also a woman, and she’s insanely talented. Discovering this kind of representation in this new universe that I had come to feel so at home in introduced me to a world of confidence and determination that I had never known before.

When people ask me why I love hardcore so much, I often give the easy answer; “the music sounds good.” If the person allows me to ramble on for a little longer, the answer becomes much more emotional and cheesy. Hardcore taught me that speaking up for what I believe in is important, and if there’s something I’m passionate about, it’s worth shouting about. I became familiar with this when listening to one of my favorite bands ever, Incendiary (the second hardcore band I ever checked out), before quickly realizing that politics are a pretty common topic within the genre - it’s what this music was practically built on. The first time I heard their vocalist Brendan Garrone singing about police brutality and injustice on songs like Force of Neglect and Sell Your Cause, I realized that there is so much more to music than just sounding good.

However, at its core, the thing I love so much about hardcore is what it taught me about being a woman. Growing up, I was the loud girl with the personality bigger than the room who always had something to say and had a never ending supply of excitement about just about everything. As I got older, I was taught that this was not okay. People didn’t like how enthusiastic I was about everything, or that I constantly had new ideas and new discoveries I wanted to talk about. As cliche as it sounds, I felt like everyone around me was trying to dull my sparkle, especially some of the men that I was encountering on a day-to-day basis. Even when I started to come to terms with my big and bright personality, in turn also coming to terms with my own femininity, I was told that this wasn’t how girls acted. I had to pick one - I could watch Disney princess movies and wear Hello Kitty hair clips, or I could be outspoken about my beliefs; but never both. The women that I mentioned earlier, along with so, so many more, helped me unlearn these toxic mindsets. Seeing someone like Emma Boster take the stage and scream ferociously for a full set helped me see that I could be a girl and still be a powerhouse. Following Madi Watkins around on social media showed me that I could love bands like Year of the Knife and also love heart-shaped purses and wear pink from head to toe. My aggression and passion didn’t make me any less of a woman, and my femininity didn’t make me any less of a force to be reckoned with.