RIP Lou Koller, a Hardcore Punk Hero and Free Speech Champion

Lou Koller, the lead singer and co-founder of the iconic New York hardcore punk band Sick of It All, died on Friday at age 59 after a long battle with cancer. You may not know it, but this newsletter was named after his band’s signature song.

I first encountered Sick of It All’s music when I was around 14 years old, and it changed my life. I loved heavy metal, punk rock, and hip-hop in those days (still do), and Sick of It All somehow fused elements from each genre together into a furious and killer style all their own.

Here was a band who played a totally stripped-down, no-frills kind of punk, yet their sound was sometimes as heavy as anything I heard coming out of the amps of my thrash metal favorites. Here was a band who went out on tour with Sepultura and Napalm Death while their first album featured a guest vocal appearance by rap master KRS-One. Sick of It All broke down barriers and brought the sometimes-warring musical tribes together. Can you dig it?

I count myself lucky that I was able to see Koller and his band perform live so many times throughout the 1990s, when they were still at the absolute pinnacle of their powers. It was all packed-beyond-capacity little clubs, stage divers and slam dancers flying around in every direction, and half the audience clambering on stage whenever the next big sing-along song came along. Not everybody’s cup of tea, I know; but I sure lived for it back in the day.

In 1992, Sick of It All received the kind of national media attention that most artists dread when they found themselves in the middle of a raging political controversy over gun violence, “violent” music, and freedom of expression.

It started on December 14 of that year when an 18-year-old student named Wayne Lo shot six people at Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, killing two. A day later, Lo arrived in court wearing a Sick of It All shirt.

“When his music changed, Wayne Lo changed, and in time two people lay dead, four others were wounded and a sheltering place had become a killing field.” That’s how reporter Anthony DePalma characterized matters in his front-page New York Times article about the shooting. “Only Mr. Lo knows what led him to turn away from the classical music he once loved and instead embrace the violent, discordant music known as hardcore, and a surly group of students who were equally entranced by it.”

To cast blame on an artist for the vile deeds committed by somebody else is a reprehensible form of scapegoating that should offend every principled supporter of freedom of speech and expression.

To their credit, the members of Sick of It All met this attack on their music and reputation head-on by penning an eloquent rebuttal that correctly faulted DePalma and the Times for publishing such a cheap smear job. “You draw facile connections between Wayne Lo’s fondness for hard-core punk music and whatever psychological collapse led him to the acts of violence he committed,” wrote Lou Koller, along with his guitarist brother Pete Koller and drummer Armand Majidi, in a letter to the editor that ran in the Times on January 15, 1993. “Mr. Lo’s wardrobe decisions are his own affair; maybe he thought the name of our band expressed his feelings that day, but to link, as you do, our band to senseless violence and reported ‘fascist attitudes’ is shoddy reporting combined with an overeagerness to demonize musicians.”

I remember cheering aloud when I first read those words long ago, and they still impress me now. Koller and his bandmates were never looking to be free speech champions or to be the public faces of some kind of culture war. But they recognized the attack on them for what it was and acted accordingly.

So here’s to Lou Koller, whose music played such a key role in the soundtrack to my younger life, and who set such a worthy example for other artists to follow. Rest in peace.