SOULS ON FIRE #128 | Hare Krishna and Hard Core
Interview with Mark Langstone
In this issue of SOULS ON FIRE I interview Mark Langstone about Hare Krsna and hardcore. Mark created Krsnacore.com - Sounds of Liberation and knows lots of stuff about Krishnacore as a genre and subculture within Gaudia Vaishnavism.
SOF: How did you discover bhakti?
Mark: Well I first really discovered bhakti via Raghunath from Shelter just prior to him taking that route. I was a big fan of his band Youth of Today which inspired me to live drug and alcohol free and turn vegetarian at the age of 15. In the summer of 1989 I went to purchase the American punk zine Maximum rock n roll as I usually did, and this issue had Raghunath (then Ray Cappo) on the front cover and title of 'Ray Cappo and the Krishna's'. I was intrigued and knew very little but respected this new path he'd chosen, even though the interviewer was trying his utmost to discredit Krishna bhakti as another religion - something which most thought was the very antithesis of punk. He held his ground well and I was left with a strong impression and it inspired me to start to read some of Prabhupada's books I'd come across on the street or from a good friend, though that took many years from initial intrigue to wanting to practice the path of bhakti. Only when I came to Australia from the UK in 1997 and found my material life becoming quite exhausted, did I take it much more seriously and soon afterwards found myself living in the ashram and practicing full time. That's a very short version of what happened although along the way we're many amazing synchronicities!
SOF: Tell me more...
So that's the part where my puny efforts to come to bhakti came into the picture, but another thing was happening which can only be seen as some Divine intervention. When I was about 14 a guy stopped me and friend in the street in Manchester and put headphones on us, told us to buy his cassette which I thought was a demo tape, which was called Gouranga Hey! Into heavy metal at the time nevertheless we bought one each to help this guy out and didn't think much of it.later through the years I used to see posters around the city saying Call out Gouranga and be happy. I thought to myself gee that small band is still trying to get their word out! Little did I know at the time what it meant.... Anyway fast forward a few years I find myself travelling to Sydney and in the meantime had read a couple of Prabhupada's books and started to visit the north Sydney temple. After a couple of visits there I saw a poster in the shop of Lord Chaitanya, who i was familiar with from the books, but only by that name. Somehow I'd never read the name Gauranga, but the poster had at the bottom 'Sri Gauranga' and I had an epiphany - all the times I'd seen that name and not made the connection. To top it off, some years after practicing and living in the ashram I took disksha initiation, not having told this story to my Guru, and received the name Vijaya-Gauranga das. So all these incidents really increased my faith in being looked after and ushered onto the path of bhakti and make me appreciative of those who assisted me along the way.
SOF: Awesome tell us more about hardcore Krsna music and the website you made.
Another long story, but mainly revolved around the band Shelter for me who formed in NYC around 1990 after the demise of straightedge band Youth of Today. Taking a much more spiritual direction than before when they sang about abstinence from drugs alcohol and meat, frontman Ray (now Raghunath) had discovered bhakti and wrote all the songs in relation to that path. Some bands had gone before in a similar vein but not quite as overtly Krishna conscious, which was quite a brave step in a punk scene that was almost totally atheistic and it did divide people in a sense of those that appreciated it and those who adamantly opposed spiritual topics being sung by punk bands. I thought it was amazing, revolutionary, and everything punk should be about in terms of pushing boundaries. Because it had a large impact on me taking up the path a little later in the 90s, I wanted to at homage to all the bands and zines that had introduced Krishna bhakti into hardcore punk, and at that time in the mid 2000s there wasn't anywhere you could access all the info in one place so I spent a lot of time researching the genre and myself discovering so much deeper of an influence than I'd first thought, in so many parts of the world. It fairly quickly gained a following amongst straightedge and hardcore enthusiasts with a leaning towards the spiritual, initially from some people in the Philippines then from people all over the world. I maintained the website for perhaps the best part of a decade then when social media took over I moved over to just managing the Facebook group Krishnacore Sounds of Liberation, a title borrowed from my friend Madhu in Prague who did a Spanish based blog of the same name. That grew to a few thousand members fairly quickly and pretty much runs itself these days with myself Madhu and Dharmavit from the band Safe. There's lots of input from all sorts of people to this day, and though my direction has moved away more from hardcore music to promoting direct methods of kirtan and Prasadam distribution through my restaurant in Sydney named Ojas Ayurvedic, I still stay in touch with what's known as Krishnacore and still amazed how it's constantly bringing new kids to Krishna all these years and decades later. The website is long since gone but much of it can be accessed in this archive.
SOF: Thanks brother
An awesome interview that opens up the whole world of Hare Krsna and hardcore.
If you appreciate this zine and want to support me please consider buying me some spray paint as a gift. I will put your name by my next piece 😊