Hardcore Community at Furnace Fest: Nostalgia, Belongingness, and Vulnerability

Punk Scholars Network

PSN USA/Canada, Las Vegas, Nevada, March 3, 3035.

Abstract

Punk nostalgia is big business, particularly at festivals: Long-standing events such as Riot Fest (in Chicago, IL since 2005) and The Fest (in Gainesville, FL since 2002) book legacy acts in part to increase the age range of their target audiences (as do mainstream festivals such as Bonnaroo, Coachella, and Lollapalooza). In Las Vegas (since 2022), When We Were Young has successfully capitalized on “elder emo” nostalgia for commercially successful 3rd wave bands, while the Best Friends Forever festival (new in 2024) focuses on late 90s/early 00s indie bands (including many 2nd wave emo bands); both events book contemporary hardcore, indie, and 5th wave emo bands. And Furnace Fest (in Birmingham, AL), which ran for four years at the turn of the century, returned in 2021 with a lineup of punk, hardcore, emo, and metal bands both nostalgic and contemporary whose knowing acknowledgement of their 20-year hiatus quickly became a key selling point.

But what role, if any, does nostalgia play beyond a marketing ploy? For the Furnace Fest Community, whose official Facebook group is very active year-round, nostalgia provides both a gateway to social cohesion and a foundation on which meaningful interpersonal bonds have been built. As with most online communities, the nature of these bonds varies according to individuals’ comfort and facility with the platform’s technological affordances. And yet, most respondents report a significant sense of belongingness to this specific community, one that enhances (and is enhanced by) their connection to punk, hardcore, and emo music.

In this paper I reflect on the meaningfulness of that community to individual participants. My findings are based on four sequential years of fieldwork at Furnace Fest (2021–24) with ever-growing research teams, hundreds of survey responses, and dozens of hours of semi-structured interviews with organizers, community members, and random attendees (around 50 conducted at the 2024 event alone). I argue that nostalgia at Furnace Fest is generative as much as it is reflective, affirming participants’ identities while also empowering them to take risks and be vulnerably transparent in relative safety.