Dance or Die: A History of Hardcore

What is hardcore? It means many things to many people, and they're all correct. It's best described as a feeling, an attitude, and a way of life. Hardcore is niche, schismatic, and a global phenomenon that refuses to die. Because hardcore will never die. Its symbols have been tattooed onto millions of bodies and its relics passed down through the generations, as its sounds resound worldwide.

Dance or Die is the first critical and expansive study of hardcore as a music, a subculture and an enduring "phuture" rave movement, full of colourful anecdotes and first person accounts from artists, fans and the core of hardcore.

This diehard anthology tracks the outsiders and outcasts who banded together to party, in protest, over more than 30 years of obnoxious rebellion, in ecstasy and escape, as a nighttime community more family than family, who need this hard, loud, fast/slow, aggressive, noisy, occasionally silly, kick drum or breakbeat-driven dance music, to connect with people, to survive the world, and to get through the week.

Hardcore: Either you're in, or you're out. And if you're in, you're in all the way, diehard and dancing to the death. Dance or Die!

Author: Holly Dicker
Publisher: Velocity Press
Published: 09/10/2025
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.57lbs
Size: 5.14h x 7.79w x 0.89d
ISBN: 9781913231859

About the Author
Dicker, Holly: - Holly Dicker is a club culture journalist, independent radio broadcaster and author of Dance or Die: A History of Hardcore, the first critical and expansive study of hardcore as a music, subculture and way of life. Holly has bylines in The Wire, The Guardian, Mixmag, Electronic Beats, DJ Mag and Resident Advisor, where she was a former staff writer. She has written long form pieces on historic techno and rave institutions such as Tresor and Thunderdome and is an authority on Dutch gabber subculture as curator of the multimedia exhibition A Brief History of Gabber for Google Arts & Culture.