Bane has seen it all in the hardcore music scene since forming in 1995, some good and some bad. The band’s singer Aaron Bedard has noticed the cycles that the music goes through and attributes it to the fan base’s changing tastes. “Kids grown up and move on,” Bedard said. “New bands come and young kids get hyped on them, someone starts putting on shows in their town and it creates a snowball effect.” Conversely he said that things also die down and shows get smaller in cities that once had big scenes. Even for Bedard, the future of hardcore music is uncertain. The waning and waxing of the music’s popularity lays in the hands of the fans, something that is hard to get a pulse on. “If it gets more mainstream and accessible there will be others pulling it into basements and keeping it fiercely anti-corporate,” Bedard explained, adding: “If it becomes less personal and more about focusing on social or political issues, there will be a movement to assure it does the exact opposite.” Accessibility to new music is something he sees as a being much easier now. With the internet and recording gear becoming more affordable it is much simpler for a band to come out of no where, create a lot of buzz, get signed to a label and be on tour in a relatively short time, so long as they chose the right channels, according to Bedard. “It just feels like the world has become a smaller more easily manageable place.” This small world, close knit atmosphere is something that the hardcore scene is notorious for. This stems for the idea of people coming together who share a similar passion for something to the point where it transcends music and becomes a way of like. This belief in something so deeply that it becomes a part of someone is what Berdard seems to love most about the hardcore scene. This phenomenon of devotion isn’t simply a American happening, the band has witnessed similar scenes across the globe while on tour. “Everywhere we’ve gone our experience with the hardcore scene has been similar in that it acts as a very strong rallying point for kids to feel connected with each other,” Bedard said. “It comes ready made for somebody looking for something that is intense and loud and defiant and just more interesting and passionate than what your average high school jock idiot is into.” While Bedard’s love for hardcore is obvious, it is not the end all be all for his passion of music. Besides singing in Bane, in the past he has played drums for more indie rock type bands. What some fans may not know this, Bedard also has a strong interest in drum n’ bass and dubstep. He has even performs DJ sets, though he seems a bit disenchanted with the differences he sees in the electronic music scene when compared with hardcore. “It doesn’t matter how much you love the music, how much you want to help out and be a part of things,” Bedard explained of the electronic scene, adding: “If you’re not down with the right people, or otherwise deeply engrained in the scene you’re just left to flounder on your own.” This alienation is something that both Bedard personally and Bane as a whole are familiar with. In the band’s early days they had aligned themselves with the straight edge movement, but as the band members got older some of them drifted away from the scene, “breaking X.” In someways this was symbolic, breaking away from some fans or more precisely, vice versa. While the band still performs songs from their back catalog that reference the straight edge movement, such as “Count Me Out,” they also have more recent outputs that question people’s devotions to that idea. The band’s song “Wasted On the Young,” off their “The Note” record has been interpreted as the band’s way of questioning people’s devotion to a life of clean living when they are still too young to really make that type of decision. Despite any hurt feelings or loss of a few fans, the band continues to be met by engaging hardcore scenes all over the world. They will be embracing these devoted fans on their up coming tour with Defeater, Dead End Path and Miles Away, which will be making a stop at Cleveland’s Now That’s Class on October 15.