No Echo contributor Anthony Allen Begnal has been interviewing hardcore musicians for the site since 2019, but earlier this year, he decided to take those conversations into a different format.
In May, Begnal—who also plays guitar in Chesty Malone and the Slice 'em Ups—launched A Hardcore Conversation, a YouTube channel devoted to interviews, records, opinions, and stories from old-school hardcore and the people who helped shape it.
“I started doing these interviews on No Echo back in 2019, and I started the YouTube channel in May of 2026,” Begnal tells me. “My first interview for you was with Chris OP Moore from Negative Approach. I started doing this because I wanted to talk to people that maybe haven’t been talked to as much as some other people in the scene.”
That doesn't mean he's avoiding the bigger names. Keith Morris has appeared on the channel, but Begnal's goal was to steer the conversation away from stories Morris has undoubtedly been asked about countless times.
“I really try to make it about things that they haven’t talked about a million times already. I asked Keith about ’60s garage punk stuff, and I also asked him who his favorite Black Flag singer is. I asked the infamous Ron Rancid from the Nihilistics what he was like as a child, stuff like that.”
The move to video wasn't because Begnal had grown tired of written interviews. In fact, he still loves the format. But after years of transcribing conversations, he began noticing how much could disappear between the recording and the finished article.
“One thing I started noticing when I would transcribe the interviews is that some of the humor or emphasis would be lost, so I thought a YouTube version would be cool,” he explains. “Basically, I’m the Dick Cavett of hardcore [laughs]!”
Underneath the humor is a pretty straightforward reason for doing all of this: Begnal wants to document hardcore history by talking directly with the people who lived it.
“I just want to document this scene and the people who made the music and art and all that stuff,” he says. “Someone commented on YouTube that we’re the ‘C-SPAN of punk’ [laughs].”
Dick Cavett of hardcore or C-SPAN of punk—either description works. More importantly, A Hardcore Conversation gives Begnal another way to continue the work he started here years ago, preserving the personalities and stories behind hardcore while there are still plenty of questions left to ask.
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Follow A Hardcore Conversation on YouTube.
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Tagged: a hardcore conversation
