In the late 90s, Racetraitor were a hardcore phenomenon in Chicago and beyond, famous at least as much for their aggressively radical onstage political stance as for their records. That said, their lone full-length, 1998’s manic and blastbeat-ridden Burn the Idol of the White Messiah, still strikes like a white-hot fire iron. Metal-tinged guitar squeals and Mani Mostofi’s tortured yowls curdle inside a nonstop series of towering double-kick breakdowns, challenging you to push through. It’s a difficult record because it’s meant to be a difficult record—as far as Racetraitor are concerned, you shouldn’t have a choice about whether to be aware of the issues they raise, and your path to enlightenment needs to take some fucking labor.
Mani Mostofi: We chatted on and off over the years about doing something again. We even practiced once, ten years ago, at the height of Fall Out Boy’s TRL days. But it never came together. Our enthusiasm for reliving the past was never enough to tear us away from the present. You know what I mean? Jobs, school, family—we had all moved on. Andy was a full-on rock star, Dan [Binaei] was a social worker, I was doing human-rights law, Brent [Decker] was running antiviolence projects, Eric [Bartholomae] was a professional martial artist.
What about the band’s message—as it has inevitably evolved over 17 years—makes you most excited to play the show? No doubt a lot of Racetraitor’s character and sociopolitical ideals from the days of yore have been retained, but how have you grown in the interim that makes this reunion feel personally vital?
Whatever our reputation was, we helped create it and consciously so.
The assumption we challenged was whether punk was part of the solution. Was punk and hardcore a place really free of racism in the revolutionary way the scene thinks it is? We said no. You can beat the skinheads out of the scene, but those skins aren’t the source of real racism or white power—the white power that lines pockets, that packs prisons, creates ghettos, builds border walls, bombs foreign countries, or stands by and lets it happen. If punk and hardcore is a rebellion, we thought, then those things should be our targets. And a scene that’s content with its place in the world is a target also.
One person that really encouraged us to do new music was Clint [Billington] from Organized Crime. I doubt in a million years he thought he would be putting out a Racetraitor record, but he just felt a need to help spark some conversation in hardcore. He felt the scene needed to react to the times, and we were one band that could maybe contribute to the conversation.
