Tynan's Anger

Image via WikipediaSo after the success of my "You Really Got Me" at the DNC feature awhile back, I have decided to make that kind of analysis a running column on this here Tynan's Anger blog. I'm calling that feature Rock 'N' Roll Case Studies. Here's the description:

Rock 'N' Roll Case Studies is a series on the Tynan's Anger blog that looks at specific songs or bands in the pop music world and places them in terms of their larger cultural significance. If you're a subscriber to the TL;DR mindset, please leave now. This column is for those who think seriously about music's place in larger contemporary culture, and believe music has an ability to expose trends in our society long before we become aware of them.

In the second Case Study, we discuss, mallternative, irony, Adorno, Le Tigre, and the nerd rapper MC Lars. Sound interesting? Read on.

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Any self-respecting music snob hates Hot Topic. It’s as easy as making fun of emo kids. It’s probably too easy. Hot Topic and its “mallternative” movement have created a gigantic market off turning punk against its own principles. The ethos of defiance and fighting conformity has been turned into a marketing scheme for the unenlightened. If you’ve got half a brain to you, you know not to take the bait. The problem is, most people lack half a brain.

As much as indie/punk/hardcore/whatever fans don’t like to admit it, there exists an enormous segment of the population that has never heard of Pavement, Archers of Loaf, Les Savy Fav, The Buzzcocks, The Slits, The Jam, The Minutemen, Mission of Burma, or The Urinals. That same segment, however, not only listens to Good Charlotte, Hoobastank, and Chevelle, but actually swears by those bands. This demographic even uses terms like “hardcore,” “old school punk,” and “real rock and roll,” terms the music snob knows how to use correctly after years of training. But in this other sphere, all three of those terms could refer to Blink 182.

Are these people crazy? Who actually listens to this shit? In reality, it’s a group that outnumbers the so-called enlightened fans. This segment is usually from lower- and lower-middle class income brackets, go to second-rate public and community colleges (if they go to college at all), and will usually end up in blue-collar jobs. This is the demographic Hot Topic swears by, and keeps crappy merchandise alive in malls across America.

You’ve almost certainly heard this argument before, and you’ve probably mocked it, been infuriated by it, an eventually ignored it. But as much of a cliché it is to say this, the main problem that keeps this culture alive is the utter obliviousness to liberal arts college and elite university students to anyone in this group. This is the same mindset where Paulene Kael couldn’t believe Nixon won, because no one she knew voted for him. Except, as I hope recent current events would prove, not all lower class mall shoppers voted for Bush or McCain.

That’s what makes fighting Hot Topic pointless for this group: the store is not meant for people who know better. Yet, at a certain level, the existence of Hot Topic is still an egregious, outrageous violation of the punk spirit, a violation not even the most embittered liberal arts student can ever truly resolve. Multiple dead punk rockers are spinning in their graves, and all that. Don’t be fooled by some of the founders of punk like Johnny Rotten, Iggy Pop and Joey Ramone (when he was alive), who have been fully aware and unapologetic of violating their original ethos.

The convenient justification that music snobs use to keep themselves from slitting throats comes from Theodor Adorno. Adorno, the cultural critic behind all contemporary uses of the terms “commodification” and “fetishization” in relation to music, argued that mass culture has turned all art into commodity. When I posted an objection to TV On the Radio being played in Urban Outfitters on the Prefix Forums, I got a response that I think is a pretty typical reflection of a lot of music snobs of this generation:

Not sure how it’s a question of ethics... but I remember how heartbroken I was when I saw urban outfitters selling Banksy books. An artistic hero of mine had officially lost his subversive importance. But as I age and get more jaded I’ve come to a comfortable acceptance about art in our culture. As soon as your “art” gets put on the market it ceases to be art. It’s now product, for consumption. That outlook has freed me from my younger naive and idealistic thinking. There is a market for everything, especially political subversion. I try to just enjoy the messages and appreciate the vehicles that bring them. But I know that in the end, the vehicle is just another brand for you to buy, no matter what the content is.

Whether or not that commenter knew he was repeating the Adorno party line almost verbatim, it didn’t answer my question. While that may be the realistic way of thinking about it, there is still the ethical problem that gnaws at your conscience no matter how hard you try to explain it away. TV On The Radio, a band who has been praise for its fiery political rage, is being used to peddled overpriced, crappy quality, morally debased fashion. Our generation has largely sublimated the instinct to get pissed off about this, but an ethic is an emotional quality, not an intellectual one. Things “feel” right or wrong more than we “think” they are right and wrong, no matter how absolute or arbitrary you believe ethics to be. That’s why even in the upper elite of music fans, no one can ever truly abandon his or her disdain for mallternative and Hot Topic.

I will now refer to two songs that have addressed the Adorno problem as it relates to Hot Topic: Le Tigre’s “Hot Topic” and MC Lars’ “Hot Topic is Not Punk Rock.” Both these songs have titles that sound pretty straightforward, but as we will see, their significance is anything but.

How Le Tigre’s “Hot Topic” turns the snob into the fool

If you have taken the minimal amount of effort and looked up the lyrics to Le Tigre’s “Hot Topic,” you’ll question why I’m referring to the song at all. A quick Google search finds that the song is not about the store at all, but rather it’s an ode to feminist and queer artists and thinkers who have influenced the far-left feminist members of Le Tigre. You won’t find Butchies albums or Getrude Stein essays at Hot Topic. In fact, the song’s title probably simply refers to feminism as a hot topic, with nothing to do with the store.

If you have googled the song, or even if you’ve just read the above description, congratulations! You are now in the demographic who has not only heard the Le Tigre song, but knows what it’s about. It’s an elite of elites: of the relatively few who have heard of Le Tigre, let alone listened to them (it’s a smaller group than you think), even fewer have looked into the significance of this particular Le Tigre song. Once you’re in this group, it’s hard to get out of it. It’s so obvious what the song’s about, all you have to do is read the fucking lyrics!

Notice how the lament at the end of the previous graph mirrors the lament of the music snob against the Good Charlotte fan. But let’s try to go back into the cave here. If you casually listen to the song without paying attention, as I did for months, you’ll think it’s a simple parody of mallternative. From a musical standpoint, the song sounds like something you’d hear as background music in a Hot Topic. The lyric “Hot Topic is the way that we rhyme” sounds to an inattentive ear like “Hot Topic is the way that we rock.” And Kathleen Hanna throws in some actual lyrics in between the name-dropping, just to throw the inattentive fan off the scent.

So to an untrained ear, it just sounds like ironic satire. It’s fun, cheeky, and silly. You can even play it at a party, and I have, in fact, been to more than one hipster parties with Le Tigre playing.

Of course, Kathleen Hanna is no hipster. A two second background check reveals her to be sincere and righteous in her politics, without any sense of cynicism or entitlement, and from an era when it still seemed to the angry young left that things mattered (In fact, I write this on her 40th birthday.). Even if Sleater-Kinney was the most enduring riot grrl band, Bikini Kill spearheaded the movement in the same way Nirvana spearheaded grunge, and Hanna was the riot grrl answer to Kurt Cobain.

After that band split, Hanna turned to post-punk and electronica to spread her message. She was ahead of her time in making this switch, but because she was from a different era, today Le Tigre has the unfortunate problem of being one of the most misunderstood bands of the past 10 years, misunderstood in the same way Devo was misunderstood 20 years earlier. Le Tigre’s self-titled debut album, not coincidentally released in 1999, was the last gasp of the sincere use of irony.

Today’s music snobs can’t connect to the spirit behind the 1999 version of Le Tigre, even if they listen to the songs because they are catchy, fun, and ironic. Do hipsters hear “Deceptacon” as an attack on the exact kind of de-politicization of rock that they are seemingly embracing (the song even announces that it’s deceiving you in the freaking title!). Do they see “My Metrocard” as an attack on Giuliani-era gentrification? Or do they just the music’s catchy and fun, with a couple of lyrics that have obscure references they get?

The effect of this condition is that Le Tigre’s first album makes most of the elite music fans look really dumb. It’s probably perfected in “Deceptacon,” but it’s most on target in “Hot Topic.” Just as most plebian fans refer to “real rock” without knowing what it actually means, most Le Tigre listeners listen to “Hot Topic” as a fun satire of the stupid without realizing that it’s a sharp ode to radical feminist thought. As soon as you find out, you, the music snob, looks even more stupid. You are as bad as a freakin’ Hot Topic shopper! Just be glad if you catch yourself before someone else catches you.

MC Lars and the Sincerity Dilemma

By his very premise, MC Lars seems like a joke. There’s something inherently jokey and ironic about white rappers in general, but the joke factor goes up exponentially when the white rapper is not a part of hip hop culture. Eminem was a high school dropout from the slums of Detroit, and the Beastie Boys, Jewish Yeshiva graduates, got away with it by coming from New York in hip-hop’s Golden Age era and producing Paul’s Boutique.

MC Lars is not just outside the hip-hop culture demographic; he’s in the Stuff White People Like demographic. A Stanford grad who did time in Oxford (which is pretty much the polar opposite of what 99.9% of other rappers refer to when they refer to “doing time”), Lars (real life Andrew Nielsson) is a computer nerd who majored in English and named his act after a character in the movie Heavyweights. His primary appeal has always been to nerds at elite colleges and universities. He was a natural fit when I attended the University of Chicago, where many of my friends embraced him as a god. Recently, with the rise of nerd rap and hipster rap, Lars is beginning to gain acceptance in the larger hip hop scene, against all odds. He also has brilliant beats and lyrical flow, which helps. But his main appeal has and always will be to University of Chicago nerds and their spiritual brethren and competitive elite colleges .

Thus, MC Lars is a member of the aforementioned music snob elite, even if his style of music is still defiantly unique. On his breakthrough album The Graduate, “Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock” comes after tracks that sample Iggy Pop and Tetris. The song takes a generic sounding Hot Topic punk sample and raps about all the items Hot Topic sells that are not punk rock (listing, for instance, Slipknot binder paper or books about Evanescence) The refrain is a spoken word, straight-faced delivery of the following screed:

Hot Topic uses contrived identification with youth sub-cultures to manufacture an antiauthoritarian identity and make millions. That $8 you paid for the Mudvayne poster would be better spent used for seeing your brother's friend's band. DIY ethics are punk rock! Starting your own label is punk rock! GG Allin was punk rock! (ed’s note: debatable). But when a crass corporate vulture feeds on mass consumer culture, then spending Mommy's money is not punk rock!

This assessment rings entirely true, and just about all of Lars’ audience will agree with it. When you read the text, it sounds like an angry but fair rant on the Hot Topic problem that we’ve heard a million times. The problem is, of course, that when it’s delivered by Lars it seems like a joke. In fact, there’s no way to accept the fact that he’s not joking.

That’s partly based on Lars’ premise. It’s partly based on the jokey sampling of general Hot Topic punk. It’s partly based on Lars’ nasally voice. But the real source of the joke factor is not anything about Lars’ delivery; it’s precisely the fact that we’ve heard this rant a million times before. Lars presents a topic (zing!) that’s been around for years and treats it as new. That seems ridiculous and laughable. Lars is too smart for this. He’s not naïve enough to treat this as a serious concern. This has to be a joke.

Lars could very well have meant the song as a joke; some would say that that explanation is even probable. But there’s one factor keeping me from reducing the song to pure joke status: our old foe, the nagging, gnawing termite known as ethics. The rage at Hot Topic and mallternative, which we’ve overcome and submerged in our conscious, has never fully deserted us. Even if the song is a joke, it’s true enough and speaks to a hurtful enough issue that it hits pretty hard. It may even be an emotionally charged song. Or maybe that’s the generic power punk sample speaking.

What I suspect, however, is that Lars is smarter than just being smart enough to recognize the cliché of the Hot Topic rant. He knows his audience, and knows he can’t use just any old double entendre or name check to get inside their heads. See, for example, the song “Space Game.” After initially calling himself a “postmodern player/ sample-tastic,” he concludes the final verse with the punch line: “Did I say postmodern?/ Well, that was a lie!/ I've been post-postmodern since junior high” and proceeds to name check a bunch of modernist authors. If he’s a true post-post-modernist, Lars knows that the only way to get through to the postmodernist generation by using pure blunt force in his rhetoric.

Going back to “Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock,” the only way Lars can fully convey the rage of mallternative is to put it in its purest, most unfiltered form. If taken as a joke, “Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock” is funny. If taken as a sincere statement, the song is difficult, even painful to hear for a postmodernist. Lars is past the point of naïvete, but he’s also passed cynical irony. While Le Tigre used irony at the tail end of the sincere era, I fully believe MC Lars will be judged to be ahead of his time because he uses sincerity at the tail end of the ironic era. Completely separately of Lars, hardcore and indie rock are beginning to re-converge, a move that is 20 years overdue. The rise of bands like Fucked Up, The Black Lips, and The Pissed Jeans is signaling the hipster’s return to a sincere, honest conscience. This is the biggest threat Hot Topic, because it means people will actually give a shit again. Adorno, who was actually enraged at commodification, would have angina if he saw his successors use his theory as a justification for submission. That old school rage, never fully evaporated, is looking to break out in full force in the Obama presidency. Time to burn your Evanescence books.

Labels: Good Charlotte, Hot Topic, irony, Joey Ramone, le tigre, mallternative, mc lars, punk rock