Mixed Media
MUSIC
PHOTO: HOLDEN BLANCO ‘17
Sunny Singh ’08 began shooting and sharing videos of hardcore punk band performances as a Haverford junior. Now, with his website hate5six.com, he has an international following.
ardcore punk is loud, fast, raw, and primal music—and it has inspired a community built on the passion of its fans. “Hardcore shattered my expectations that art needs to be easily digestible and crafted to have mass appeal,” says Sunny Singh ’08, who is drawn in “by the sounds of a vocalist screaming and the chaos of a show where the line between band and crowd blurs.” Singh isn’t in a band, but via his hate5six website he’s become a key part of the hardcore scene around the world, channeling his passion for the music to help support, expand, and preserve its community. Singh, who is 35 and lives in South Philadelphia, started collecting and trading videotapes of live hardcore punk performances during high school in Marlton, N.J., in the early 1990s. But he wasn’t able to get serious about shooting and
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sharing his own videos until his junior year at Haverford in 2007, when he found a high-definition video camera on eBay and used the then-new platform YouTube to share his work with a wider audience. The idea for hate5six as a centralized repository for his videos came via the Great Recession: “When I graduated in 2008, it was difficult to find a tech job,” says Singh, who majored in math and minored in physics. “I needed to work on a project to keep my mind and skills sharp, so I decided to build the website as a way to learn web development. Soon I’d built a whole content publishing pipeline.” (The name hate5six jokingly refers to the new area code that had come into Singh’s South Jersey town while he was in high school. “It changed from 609 to 856, and I was irrationally upset about it,” he says.) With the website built, he began uploading his SUMMER 2021
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