Wanna talk about something stupid?

I’m about to delve into a type of internet drama I try to avoid, but I’m currently laid up on this beautiful first Sunday of June, 2026, recovering from a pulled back muscle. It’s an absolute kick in the nuts, because I had big plans for the weekend. In fact, barring Labour Day, this was probably the worst conceivable weekend to injure myself. On the docket were some desperately needed post-recording chores, a healthy dose of big-time outdoor chillin’, the return of my buddy Zuke from Latvia(!!!) and two shows.

Friday night’s gig was particularly devastating to miss. It was a stacked lineup top to bottom: Terror, Pain of Truth, End it, Start Today and Sold Short. Every band on the bill was worth seeing in their own right, but I was extra bummed to miss POT, who hadn’t played a proper GTHA hardcore show since 2022, well before their LP Not Through Blood (one of my most listened records this decade) dropped in late 2023.

As if laying supine at home on a beautiful Friday night in late spring wasn’t bad enough, I soon became inundated with Instagram stories from my friends, and boy did the show look fun. I usually try to avoid social media related FOMO. Shit, I don’t even usually have IG installed on my phone, but what else was I gonna do that night? I woke up Saturday morning to a message from a buddy giving me a show recap.

“Did you see the banana thing?” he asked.

“No” I said, “did you get a video?” thinking he was referring to something making the rounds through my greater social circle.

“Nah. It’s some Reddit bs” he replied.

Sure enough, I took a virtual stroll to my favourite online third-space, r/hardcore, and the first thing I saw was this meme.

During End It’s set on Saturday, their vocalist pointed at a guy in the crowd wearing a banana suit and said something to the effect of “hey brother you wanted attention? You got it. First person to come up onstage with this guy’s banana suit gets to keep the giant green poster board we use for a setlist.” The video is here. Check it out. I’m not rewatching that shit to verify the accuracy of my paraphrasing.

I don’t really know or care what happened between then and whenever bananaman went online to post the corniest IG story I’ve ever seen. Suffice to say, though, the hardcore net-o-sphere erupted in a shitstorm once news got out. Which is a huge bummer, primarily because I was not there to witness the inciting event.

What’s odd, in my headcannon anyways, is that we were just talking about mfs in banana suits on the Total Supply Board. During that convo, I thought to myself ‘jeez I sure am glad the only person around here who does that shit is the guy dressed up like Jesus at every procore show and we don’t have to deal with these grown ass fools wearing hot dogs and bananas’. My bad for jinxing this into existence, I guess.

I’m dying at bananaman’s IG post talking about the impact his suit makes on the scene and how what End It inflicted upon him is “exactly the opposite of what hardcore is supposed to be” when I’ve never seen this man before in my fucking life. “Conform or be called out” okay man yeah, because you’re so non-conformist wearing your Spirit Halloween banana suit to a show. That’s never been thought of before in human history, especially not disproportionately over the last five years with the influx of attempted TikTok influencers in hardcore.

Whatever. It’s not that deep. Feel however you want about this. If you don’t know how to feel, here are two prompts to build your opinion from:

A) hardcore shows are supposed to be fun, inclusive, community building events. Regardless of how you feel about a 30 year old man wearing a banana costume in public, he shouldn’t be antagonized and assaulted for doing it.

B) hardcore is supposed to be a safe place for outcasts and maladjusts to let off steam through dangerous, pre-established social norms. In order to protect these norms and the spaces where they happen, outsiders, interlopers and attention seekers should be discouraged from participating until they prove capable of operating within the confines of our subculture.

Okay, you can start with one of those on your next social media post, just be sure to credit me: @spacepope666 on Instagram, please and thank you!

Personally, I don’t give a shit. Dumbass does dumb thing at hardcore show and gets beat up. Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme. Tom from Axe to Grind tells a story sometimes about accidentally wearing a Soundgarden shirt to CBGBs in the 90s and feeling like his life was in danger. Which is comparatively hilarious. Could you imagine a man in a hotdog suit encountering a member of Merauder on the Lower East Side in 1993?

What happened to bro at the End It show, theoretically, shouldn’t even move the needle. Do I love it when grown men wear banana suits to hardcore shows? Take a wild guess. Do I think it’s cool to beat someone up for their clothes? I mean theoretically, in the same way I think it’s cool that [redacted] may have thrown a cinder block through the windshield of [redacted]’s moving tour van in the 80s, but not really.

Here’s the thing though — in the past, this shit became mythos. The stuff of legends. A broken game of telephone that would morph into Akil from End It ripping the banana suit in half with his bare hands before launching a cappella into some fucking Temptations song, kicking off the wildest set in history where everyone stood up and clapped and the kid in the banana suit grew up to be Albert Einstein. In reality, the aggrieved (read: beat up) party would either never return to a show, or come back in normal clothes and receive knowing head nods from the same hardened criminals who gleefully landed kidney shots on his writhing body a week earlier.

Of course, in 2026, this shit is going to be plastered all across the internet and debated six ways to Sunday. Nothing good will come of it except the vital clicks, traffic and engagement that drive the shareholder value of your favourite social media spaces. This will escape containment in the next twelve hours and then normshit internet Karens will be screaming for blood. End It and Flatspot might be forced to save face with some canned PR apology. The promoter and venue may be dragged into it, putting two of the most important institutions in our local scene (AKA 85% OF MY SOCIAL LIFE) under a microscope. Even worse shit could conceivably happen, but I don’t wanna give Feddit any ideas. All because some dude I’ve literally never seen wanted the hardcore show to be about him.

I’m not even here to point the finger (although if anything happens to Lithuanian House I may very well do something super chill and responsible). Blame bananaman for being terminally addicted to attention. Blame End It for becoming a procore band then inciting violence against the typical procore fan. Blame mfs for filming and putting the fiasco on the internet. Blame the same cruel God who decided I should sprain my back a day before the show. It doesn’t matter. The cat was already out of the bag. It was bound to happen. In fact, I literally told you so.

My purpose here isn’t to lay some sort of heavy-handed, sanctimonious screed upon you for choosing to participate in our deep-fried modern monoculture. It’s to lament how irl enshittification is seeping into every facet of modern life. Last night I recorded a stream of consciousness rant on my phone about a similarly main character-coded phenomenon in the dating world — dudes wearing Meta Glasses to scam on chicks then posting their “game footage” on the internet.

I might put that rant on my Patreon channel. Click here and subscribe for $1 a month to see if I do. The premise of my argument though, went something like this:

When I was a young man going to bars in the 2010s, there were dudes called “Pick Up Artists” who would try and use “Game” to meet and sleep with women. Usually you could spot these fools from a million miles away because they looked like straight men trying to dress like gay hairstylists, acted really strange, and interloped on every conversation in the room. Did that shit actually get people laid? I have no idea. What it undoubtedly did was piss off a whole lot of women, to the point where when #MeToo happened in 2016, one of the main rallying cries was “please stop approaching and trying to have sex with us in public.”

I was too young to be “outside” before pick up “artistry” was a widespread social phenomenon, but I assume at some point before the advent of DMs and Facebook Pokes it was relatively normal and well-received to approach members of the opposite sex in semi-social situations and start a conversation in hopes of getting to know them. I’m certain it could also be punishing and frightening, but I feel like the PUA craze probably ramped up the negativity, to where women finally put their foot down in 2016 and said “cut that shit out.”

For a while, the only consistent place for a down-bad single mf such as I to meet women was on the internet. Then I got into a long-term relationship for five years. Now I’m single again, and it seems like women are more amenable to polite public conversation than they were in 2017. Except I’ve noticed the PUA shit is back with a vengeance, only this time dudes are literally walking around their college campuses with Google Glasses on, skeeving shorties out, and then posting it on the internet. Approaches that get a positive response from women often get re-posted with commentary from other random dudes breaking down the situation like Gronk and Bill Cowher on NFL Live.

This is absolutely fucking psychotic and it needs to stop. Obviously it goes far beyond wearing a banana suit to a hardcore show when someone else’s privacy/sexual autonomy is violated, but there’s a thread between those two things. In an attempt to impress other men online, these dumbasses are about to dodo bird the concept of talking to women in public. Much like some fruit in a fruit suit and a bunch of karma-hungry Redditoids could (hypothetically) dodo bird the only decent, reliable mid-sized hardcore venue in a city of three million people for the sake of online arguing and “memes”. I say hypothetically, Father God! I don’t need any more bad luck to prove my point.

I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but just in case I’m not: these things (dating, live music, subculture) are supposed to be social, enriching human connections enjoyed among those present. Social media was supposed to help facilitate said connections, not serve as a window for nerdarios to live vicariously through a screen.

For a while, the utility of corporate social was arguably worth the cost, but the scales have tipped. The settings you enjoy among friends and likeminded strangers are now content farms for dudes wearing hotdog suits and spy goggles. Your favourite fun pastimes-turned-life affirming human interactions, be they flirting or head walking on your homies, are at constant risk of being recorded, reposted, and argued about by people who use ChatGPT or Reddit as a substitute for their brain.

On some real shit, slimes, this needs to be nuked. I doubt we can stop it entirely, but it all gets much less prescient the second you put your phone down. We can’t change at a global level, but maybe we can at a subculture one. Let’s try and find out. The faster we all step back and divest from this reverse-funnel attention economy where 10,000 bananamen get paid in Reddit karma while Peter Thiel pockets a couple hundred million to sell your location to the US State Department, the better off we’ll be. Women and hardcore shows existed well before losers started posting cellphone footage of them on Instagram. Both things will still be there after you delete the app. I promise.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE SUBSTACK BELOW