I've Got a Bone to Pick with "Mathcore"

People like to categorize things, plain and simple. When left in the hands of scientists, we get properly organized lists such as the periodic table of elements and the taxonomic ranking system. When left up to children with an internet connection, we get a collection of totally made-up musical genres such as mathcore. This article also features a special guest appearance by the proverbial fourteen-year-old dude.


Ask any fourteen-year-old dude what mathcore is, and he will regurgitate the same list of bands in your face that any other fourteen-year-old dude would: "Um, bra, mathcore is like totally bands like Converge, Botch, The Dillinger Escape Plan and Coalesce."


Now, I like to think I'm fairly intelligent. When someone lists off bands for me, that really only scratches the surface of what mathcore IS. If I asked you what red is, would you tell me red is apples and firetrucks? I would sincerely hope not. I'm seeking a definition of mathcore. So I'll ask the proverbial fourteen-year-old dude again, what actually DEFINES mathcore? He will respond: "Um, bra, mathcore is like totally when you mix math rock with metalcore, and have, like, changing time signatures and stuff." 

Botch's "Transitions from Persona to Object" from their

critically acclaimed final album 'We Are the Romans'.

It's technical and unconventional, sure, but is it mathcore?

I don't know about you, but I for one do not buy that definition. In fact, I'd prefer if we just stuck with the list of bands instead--this definition is horribly flawed and has a very narrow scope. For one, no mathcore band has ever in the history of ever cited a math rock band as an influence. Converge, who are sometimes dubbed the kings of the genre, always cite Slayer as their biggest influence along with Black Flag, Rorschach and Starkweather. Second, changing and/or complex time signatures is also a key element found in: progressive metal, avant-garde metal, technical metal and experimental metal. I can only attribute the narrow-minded niche-seeking mindset of the average fourteen-year-old dude for why it's widely believed in the hardcore scene that "mathcore" is the only genre with unusual time signatures. Radiohead are also known for their use of odd time signatures. Are they mathcore? No. Are there any professional journalists that have referred to them as math rock? I sure haven't seen any.


Also, when you proclaim that this genre blends with metalcore, you're pretty much shooting yourself in the foot right there. All of the aforementioned bands are NOT, in fact, metalcore. Metal and punk have been fused together for 30+ years now yielding completely different results each time. There's been sludge metal, crossover thrash, grindcore, grunge, crust--the list goes on for a while. So while I do acknowledge bands like Converge and Dillinger do play a mix of punk and metal, I don't believe it's quite metalcore. Metalcore is the more commercially friendly and melodic child of punkmetal, often times featuring a catchy sung chorus along with a little more harsher parts. Bands like Converge and Dillinger still retain the DIY ethics of their "-core" suffix and are more open to experimentation.

Meshuggah's "Shed" from their album 'Catch Thirtythree'.

It's technical and complex and features similar start/stop 

dynamics to Botch. There are some sources that call them mathcore,

but the vast majority call them experimental or progressive.

Let's recap so we're all on the same page. When you try to use time signatures as part of your definition of mathcore, you're ignoring the fact that there's a handful of other genres that are also defined by this way. When you try to tell me mathcore is a mix of math rock and metalcore, the artists you list had better actually perform metalcore that's influenced directly by math rock. In other words: the commonly accepted definition of mathcore completely fails.

In fact, ask the artists themselves. None of them woke up one morning and decided, "I'll play in a mathcore band today." Quite the opposite in fact. In an interview with NewYorkPress, Jacob Bannon of Converge stated, "I really don't know what mathcore is. Converge is an aggressive band." In an interview with Decibel magazine (whip out your copy of issue 62 from December 2009) when asked about his complex song writing, Kurt Ballou also of Converge, stated, "All the heavy riffs that are that simple are already taken. So, you've gotta find new riffs, and as more of those become taken, there's fewer places to go." And in an old-ass interview with The Gauntlet from 2005, Ben Weinman of Dillinger had this to say about mathcore: "I couldn't multiply two numbers if you paid me. Music is all broken down into numbers, into timing and counting. Even the simplest 4/4 music is still broken up into mathematical terms. [Math rock] just seems like a limited way of thinking."

These artists write music that they enjoy simply because they enjoy it. And because it's not at all a commercially successful sound, and they're not signed to major labels, they have the freedom to do exactly that. Giving them a title that implies they might be going out of their way to sound complex seems dumb and pointless to me.

Noise rock band Rapeman's "Monobrow" from their 

1988 album 'Two Nuns and a Pack Mule.' Can you hear 

a little Coalesce or Botch in this piece?

Math rock band Don Caballero's "From the Desk of

Elsewhere Go" from their 1998 album 'What Burns

Never Returns.' Does it sound like Converge or Dillinger?

Maybe a little if you squint your ears, but Rapeman's

song is far closer despite being released a decade prior,

in my opinion.

My investigations into this genre have turned up something interesting: the term mathcore doesn't seem to have existed before around 2005ish. Before this time, mathcore bands were actually referred to as "noisecore"--implying a hybrid of hardcore and noise rock. To me this seems to be a far more accurate term for these bands. Noise rock is better known for its experimentations and unconventional song structures. Not to mention a denser sound all together.

Personally, I would have been fine with simply "metallic hardcore"-- does a genre really need to spell out for you exactly what the music is going to sound like?

(The following is written as someone who has been a Wikipedia editor for four years) So this is how genres are formed in the year 2011: first, someone says a word. It could be any word at all. Let's say someone says the word mathcore, for example. It's a word without any real definition at all, and it's just as meaningless as calling Converge and Dillinger soundcore. Then, said word will get plastered all over the internet on forums and blogs and such until it becomes a "real" word, just like LOL has done. The genre will also become heavily tagged on the website Last.FM, which is created mostly by fourteen-year-old dudes. And here's where the sad part comes in: a crappy poorly written Wikipedia article will simply exist. If a crappy poorly written Wiki article sits in cyberspace there long enough, even if it's entirely false and unverified, it becomes FACT. All of a sudden, professional journalists start publishing stories about mathcore.

So my question to my two weekly visitors is this: Why do people feel so compelled to lump bands into categories and even go so far as to invent entirely new categories just for a small handful of bands? Why can't "metal" be enough?