MY ROOTS: SILENT MAJORITY

Last week, I came across another New York City DJ's website and bio that fabricates his origins as some mixture between European and native New Yorker (she omits her many years in Kansas). While I'm not one to brag about growing up on Long Island—a suburb of New York City which, really, if you've been there or are from there, is a world of it's own—it'd be hard for me to ignore my roots.

Locally, teenage live music was almost completely based around a scene known as Long Island Hardcore (LIHC). Many years later, this scene grew more popularly as emo, though back then, the word emo did not exist. Friends I used to hang out with would find success in such bands as Brand New and Glassjaw, which later became Head Automatica. Even my sister did a short stint as a drummer in a local band called Epileptic Fish.

LIHC was as much about a lifestyle as the music. Being vegan and getting tattoos about being vegan and not drinking alcohol were the cool things to do. Musically, the scene sounded like a mix between rock and punk. It was also very very very dude oriented and straight dude oriented at that. One of my favorite dude bands (though if you really wanna hear the best of riot grrrl-like Long Island band, check out Dahlia Seed) was called Silent Majority. I never knew them personally but I had a cassette and seven inch record of theirs which always sounded catchier than what the other boys were playing at the time.

There's not too much out there on the web or in discogs about Silent Majority but apparently they put out a discography not too long ago with this gem on it. The cassette demo version had cool movie quotes interspersed with the song but this official version still sounds as good as it did when I first heard it in 1997.

Silent Majority - Knew Song