Horsecore 2008 File

You wouldn’t read about it in the Wall Street Journal , but a quiet subculture was galloping through the dying days of the Bush era. They called it .

But like all things in 2008, Horsecore buckled under its own weight. horsecore 2008

Within weeks, there were copycats. Horsecore wasn’t about animal cruelty—God, no. It was about . The manifesto, scrawled on a Tractor Supply receipt and posted to a GeoCities page titled “HORSE ANARCHY 2008,” read: “You put your faith in leveraged ETFs. We put ours in oats. You trust the Fed. We trust the farrier. You ride the bull market. We ride the horse market. Saddle up or shut up.” The aesthetic was brutalist agrarian: welding masks, muddy Carhartt bibs, horses draped in shredded American flags. The music—when there was music—was slowed-down sludge metal played on banjos and a single distorted kick drum made from a barrel. Bands with names like Haybale Holocaust , Mane Against the Machine , and Equine Genocide (ironic, they insisted) played shows in abandoned Tractor Supply stores and bankrupt dairy barns. You wouldn’t read about it in the Wall

He rode Dolly into the town square of Honesdale at 2 a.m., screaming about fiat currency and the Federal Reserve. The police tried to box him in, but Dolly kicked a Crown Vic’s headlight into the next century. Clay was arrested, but not before a freelance photographer for Vice got the shot: a bearded man in Carhartt, holding a hay hook in one hand and a foreclosure notice in the other, tears frozen on his cheeks in the flash. Within weeks, there were copycats