When music defines your social circle, the world shrinks.
We all know that music helps people cross barriers. It can also mimic our ugliest tribal instincts. The choice is ours to make.
Note: the specific genres, artists, and albums I reference below are more or less beside the point. I point to them only to illustrate some universal aspects of our relationship with music. I’d encourage you to swap them out with examples from your own life that are comparable or carry a similar kind of weight. I mean, it’s no fun hearing someone rattle-off a bunch of stuff they like without relating it to you.
In 2011, I interviewed musician Matthew Widener — a bassist/multi-instrumentalist, classical composer, fiction writer, former U.S. Marine, one-time anarchist, and one of two driving forces behind the grindcore/extreme heavy metal band Cretin alongside frontwoman/co-founder Marissa Martinez-Hoadley. Widener is also known for his one-person solo projects The County Medical Examiners and Liberteer, as well as his early-era stint in the legendary goregrind outfit Exhumed. I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Widener three times, and I’ve covered Cretin here and here.
(Widener also wrote the classical charts for Exhumed’s 2017 album Death Revenge, which I reviewed here, and his second Liberteer album was a “grindcore opera” in something of a literal sense, which I blurbed here.)
I’m usually uptight when bands go out of their way to be provocative, but for my money Cretin is one of the most riotously entertaining grindcore bands out there, and that’s saying a lot considering how creatively fertile (and provocative) the genre still is after three and half decades. Cretin’s 2006 debut full-length Freakery still makes me crack up. I find their brand of gross-out shock titillating — and witty — in a way that’s unique to them. Even the artwork for their second (rather more cerebral) album, 2014’s Stranger, was grounds for a story by itself, which I wrote here.
Suffice it to say that Martinez-Hoadley and Widener are really interesting people — real characters in a genre filled with them. And Widener is nothing if not insightful in a way that always makes for a great read. To scratch the surface, I’d recommend reading Brandon Stosuy’s 2012 interview with him, Angry Metal Guy’s interview from the same year, Decibel’s interview with him from earlier this year, and his pick for favorite horror film from a 2012 Paste roundup that’s immediately followed by a pick from Martinez-Hoadley.
Her description of the part of California she and Widener grew up in gives a nice snapshot of where the inspiration for the band came from:
I grew up in the Santa Cruz mountains. There were secluded towns out there, which we all understood, through urban legend, to be very “backwoods” and frightening. Widener and I often imagined that these places played host to characters straight out of movies like Deliverance or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So, whenever we were out late at night driving through the mountains, our pulses would beat a little faster than usual. Our senses would be on alert as we feared for that inevitable moment where we were booby trapped by a cackling, feral, miscreant, and his gigantic, lumbering, friend.
I would really recommend, um… listening for yourself. When I interviewed Martinez-Hoadley and Widener together in 2014, both of them burst into laughter when I told them that, to my ear, Freakery sounds like it was recorded with a microphone placed in a garbage can 20 feet away from the band. I meant that in the best possible way. You can stream the whole album on Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, etc. And trust me, you won’t get the full effect if you don’t follow-along with the lyrics.
Despite whatever heavy metal stereotypes still persist, Widener and Martinez-Hoadley are very lucid when talking about their work. The truth is that metal has never actually lacked for intellects like Widener’s or insights like Martinez-Hoadley’s. But it’s also true that stereotypes about metal have been aggressively propagated by metalheads themselves. For every example like Widener’s (or, Liam Wilson of The Dillinger Escape Plan/John Frum, Richard Hoak of Brutal Truth, JR Hayes of Pig Destroyer, the late Martin Eric Ain of Celtic Frost, etc), you can always find artists — and fans — who are all too eager to cough-up the same old mindless pablum about why they’re attracted to the extremity of this music. Widener provides a welcome alternative to that stereotype.
At one point during our 2011 interview, though — while expressing his delight over the fact that metal fans had mostly been very welcoming after Martinez-Hoadley’s gender reassignment process — Widener told me that it wasn’t so much the music that drew him to the genre at first:
“When I was in junior high,” he said, “I felt like an outsider. I didn’t fit in. I fuckin’ sucked at sports. So I started listening to Judas Priest and Ozzy. I think I wore that as an identity. I did it to show outwardly that I was different, and that I wasn’t afraid of being different. It was empowering. I was claiming my difference and my not fitting-in with the school culture and the other kids. And then from that, I started to appreciate the music, but I think the image is what brought me in at first. Maybe the two went very closely hand-in-hand, but I know that being a metalhead was very important at first.”
This took me aback. What Widener described was in such direct contrast to my experience that I had to push back a little. Some context, though is necessary in order to appreciate the situation that he and Martinez-Hoadley were in as the only two kids in their high school who were into death metal:
You have to understand that when bands like Death, Autopsy, Obituary, and Morbid Angel first emerged in the ’80s, the music they played genuinely threatened people. We can laugh about it now, but around the time that Widener was first discovering this stuff, you were really making a statement and going out on a limb when you embraced this music — setting yourself up to be scorned by peers, parents, educators, and just about anyone you might encounter, save for a handful of other outcasts who shared your appreciation for what was then widely thought to be a guttural form of music too crude and abrasive even for many metalheads.
If you lived in a deeply religious and/or socially conservative place, wearing death metal on your sleeve was more than just a fashion statement. It was a heretical act of renunciation against the prevailing social order. I would imagine that many people who embraced death metal during that period ended up alienating themselves by default, which kind of forced them into a kinship with one another. Naturally, bonding over underground music that was so extreme, with such forbidden-fruit cachet, created the conditions for a peer group to form.
By the time this documentary segment aired in 1993, that brand of metal had established a significant (if still marginal) foothold in mainstream pop culture, to the point where it wasn’t quite as dangerous anymore:
The following year, Cannibal Corpse made a cameo appearance in, of all places, the Jim Carrey comedy Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. (To this day, the song featured in the film, “Hammer Smashed Face,” remains one of the band’s most requested concert staples.) Carrey became an avid fan at a time where the most fringe extreme of metal was still shrouded in controversy, but clearly things were changing. Ace Ventura was a crucial turning point on the genre’s way towards being subsumed into mass culture — just as all “dangerous” artforms inevitably end up.
Here’s the full story (worth checking out and cue’d to the spot:)
In any case, I point to Widener’s example not to criticize him at all — his story isn’t all that unusual, and I understand where he was coming from. Plus, to be precise, he was talking about a different strain of metal than the one that had a life-changing impact on me, which made our circumstances very different. Yes, there was an element of danger around the stuff I liked, but it didn’t reach nearly the same level. I got onboard with a particular (slightly less harsh/extreme) subset of metal when it was on its ascendance as a left-of-center but still commercially-promising phenomenon — a rising power in pop culture — so there wasn’t nearly as dire of a price to pay in terms of social consequence.
Liking the stuff I liked didn’t really cut me off from people or stigmatize me as a brain-damaged cretin likely to become a murderer. Not to mention that I was attracted to the cerebral acuity and emotional pitch of the heavy music I liked, not so much the violence. I loved the sonic violence of it, but it wasn’t really the lyrical violence that drew me in (Slayer’s Reign in Blood being a notable exception). I mean, just to put this in perspective, there was a moment when my mom, suspicious and looking for signs of trouble, started to poke around in my music. I handed her the cassette inlay card for Anthrax’s 1987 album Among The Living so she could read the lyrics.
She was impressed!
Her approval didn’t surprise me — Anthrax guitarist/lyricist Scott Ian clearly put a great deal of thought into those lyrics, which is why I showed them to her in the first place. He, along with his peers in bands like Nuclear Assault, Voivod, Celtic Frost, Sacred Reich, Flotsam And Jetsam, Death Angel, D.R.I., COC, Prong and, of course, Metallica were operating on a completely different trip than, say, Death’s Scream Bloody Gore or Cannibal Corpse’s Tomb Of The Mutilated. And though I can’t speak to how much confidence my mom had in my judgment back then, if she actually understood who I was on a fundamental level, she would’ve had at least some sense that I was drawn to things that engaged me on more than a superficial level.
I’m not sure how clear it was to her at the time, but even at 14 I had a strong attraction to depth. For sure, I listened to Van Halen and Motley Crue and Eazy E too, but I wasn’t nearly impressionable enough that I’d act out based what I heard in a song. I probably earned some credibility with my my mom just by showing her those lyrics, because I don’t remember being hassled or interrogated much after that. Honestly, there was no reason for her to worry. Gory lyrics for their own sake mostly struck me as distasteful — not to mention stupid and empty.
I also had an inherent aversion to gore, though I’ve always enjoyed well-crafted horror and music that could scare you because the atmosphere was so thick and intense you couldn’t help but be pulled-in. But when Widener used the term “metal,” he was almost talking about a different artform altogether than the metal that had made such a difference in my life. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to interject. I told him that I’d been drawn to this music for the opposite reason: for me, I explained, the music functioned as a refuge from the social expectations of a peer group.
Widener’s response: “I really respect that.”
As a young person at the onset of my teens, I felt uncomfortably stifled by a machismo that I felt I couldn’t live up to. Being of both Latin and South Asian descent, I was the living product of two vastly divergent cultures. I also grew up in an inner-city neighborhood in the South Bronx but went to an exclusive private school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. If you plot those domains out on an x-y axis, you end up with four different quadrants of social standards. In two of those quadrants — Latin culture and the ‘hood — the expectation that you had to be tough was omnipresent.
So the last thing I was about to do was jump into yet another social structure that came with a similarly suffocating set of rules, another scaffolding to hang around my outward presentation when I already felt restricted in my sense of movement. “Care for another set of requirements that you be more ‘masculine’ in a very strictly delineated way?” Hell no.
Now, to be clear, there are aspects of machismo that I appreciate — and that I willingly subscribe to at this point. The casual ease with which we’ve come to toss-around the term “toxic masculinity” strikes me as woefully misguided and unhelpful. From my perspective, that term signals a fundamental lack of understanding — both a willful and unintentional ignorance — of the many aspects that make up what we call “masculinity.” I find most evocations of the “toxic masculinity” concept to be imprecise, skin-deep, and facile. And I think it’s dangerous to just reflexively demonize a complex array of qualities without fully examining them first.
For both better and worse, the full range of “masculinity” (in the myriad ways we might define what that even means) needs to be understood before we can begin to correct for whatever pathological excesses lurk therein. In many ways, so-called masculinity needs to be validated and embraced first in order to be properly healed (or nudged into some kind of evolution). We also need to leave open for debate the possibility that certain aspects don’t actually need to be healed or corrected-for at all. Either way, none of these traits can be nullified or swept under the rug, because they’re bound to wreak more havoc the more we deny them.
Not to mention that the brute-vs-wimp polarity isn’t really accurate anyway: both those archetypes, I would argue, reside in all men (and by “men,” I mean people who are born male). I would also offer that when men tilt too much to one side or the other, it’s because they haven’t integrated those two polarities, so they project them onto other people, allowing other men to embody the under-expressed shadow aspects of their “maleness.”
Some guys walk around unable to show vulnerability, while others haven’t activated their own “toughness.” All of them have a messy gray area sloshing around within. And since those archetypes exist in women too — as somewhat un-realized aspects of the self (along with a whole other set of polarities, which men in turn share as well) — the messy slush pretty much exists in everyone. And if you really want to throw another layer of confusion and complexity into the mix, consider what Valerie Solanas argued in her game-changing 1967 SCUM Manifesto, which is that so many of the valiant qualities we attribute to men are actually qualities that women are under-recognized for.
So if we want to talk about unexamined masculinity, I’m all ears. But blanketing aggression — and male aggression in particular — as “toxic” is a fool’s errand. If aggression wasn’t a part of us that needed to be given voice and form, metal music and sports wouldn’t exist. And, for so many reasons, metal is almost perfectly built for the wrenching friction between the individual and the organized social systems we all have to find a way to navigate in order to survive as social creatures.
Still, as much as the music of the aforementioned bands utterly gripped my attention at that age — as much as their music gave a focal point to the emotions that defined and dominated my teenaged existence — I wasn’t going to reduce the music to just another social orthodoxy. And I wasn’t remotely interested in wearing some kind of uniform consisting of bullet belts and leather jackets. I caught enough flak where I lived for not dressing like other people, so I was like “fuck the idea of dressing to please another set of people just because we like the same music.”
I wore metal t-shirts, of course (and still do, from time to time), and I had long hair for years, but other than that I’ve never felt the need to externally mark myself as a member of that specific musical tribe. I still take a lot of satisfaction in the fact that you wouldn’t know by looking at me how deep my love for that music goes. I mean, by high school I felt like I’d been married to the genre on some level. I say “like I’d been married” as if some ritual had taken place where the gods of music sanctified this bond with this particular set of sounds. I suppose I could get a “divorce” or “separation” or “grow apart” from the relationship as time goes on — and, like a marriage, there are ebbs and flows, but nothing’s ever going to diminish what might as well be a brand that this music left on my being at a critical stage.
Oh, to be 14 years old and consumed with unhealthy (even alarming!) levels of distress, walking the streets feeling protected, sealed-in and spoken-to — by the roar in my headphones. To be swept-up in the glorious, momentous rush of that music… wow!! I’ve often compared the sensation to the way scientist and prominent autism/animal-rights awareness activist Dr. Temple Grandin described what it was like sitting in the “hug box” that was custom-designed to give her a sense of reassurance and comfort as a child so she could be better equipped to regulate her emotions.
But why should I advertise a love that deep via clothing choices, tattoos, and other outward markings? I love that music for the music, not for the accessorizing and extraneous visual baggage that comes with it. As far as I’m concerned, that aspect might as well be the same as drag culture — and what I mean by that is: to engage in it is to engage in conscious self-parody, in a way. Drag shows are fun because they’re simultaneously a tribute and a lampoon of feminine tropes. You’re supposed to laugh.
Likewise, far too many metalheads kind of wink at the audience as they dress the part, like they know it’s funny, and they know they’re astute enough to recognize that it’s funny and you’re astute enough to recognize that it’s funny, so they go ahead and play the role as if they’re a character from pro wrestling. I never understood the appeal of that. As a counterpoint, I could see where a person would respond with near-spoofing something almost as a defense mechanism, because some of the clothing and hairstyles from the ‘80s are so silly that if you want to enjoy the music, you have to find a way of bypassing how silly it is, so you might as well have a laugh at it all.
But to me, focusing on those surface qualities at the periphery of the music actually demeans the power of the music, which speaks for itself — and speaks to people regardless of whether they look the part. So despite (or perhaps because of) my deep, abiding love for this music, I’ve always chafed at the idea that I was part of some “worldwide community” or “global brotherhood” of people “bonded by metal.” Blech. I still want to gag every time I hear clichés like that, as if heavy metal were some big drum circle of shared ideals spanning the whole globe. Most of the time, I’m like “GTFOH with that noise.”
There was plenty of that kind of talk when I went to see the bands Death Angel, Exodus and Testament recently, and I must say it was a relief to see a venue full of people unified by something other than these hot-button issues that have polarized Western civilization to an inescapable degree, where in the United States in particular it feels like things are heaving on the brink of coming apart. So, if musical tribalism can help offset political tribalism, then I’m gonna have to reconsider much of what I’m saying here. The problem is that I don’t think it does. It would be like trying to stop a fire by lighting candles and dripping wax on the fire — you’d still be playing with fire.
Even barely into my teens, the feeling that I was being conscripted into someone’s army, a blob of people who all wore music on the outside of their body as a uniform was unacceptable to me. The group’s characteristics were being decided-on by both people in the group and outside the group. Neither one of those parties was me — and that made me profoundly uncomfortable. Most crucially, I was never inclined to pick friends based on their love of the same music. Of course, I’ve made friends because we have this stuff in-common. But you didn’t have to like that music, or any music I liked — or even music at all! — for me to relate to you as a person or to be interested in being your friend.
Check out my playlist!
By the time I was speared through the heart by Among The Living, I’d already developed an affinity for several other genres: I loved slick ‘70s R&B/soul as a kid thanks to my mom, Devo was the first band I got into on my own as an 8 year-old, I was big into classic rock, a bunch of L.A.-style hair rock struck a chord with me as well, there was a ton of ‘80s pop that really moved me, and rap music connected with me around ‘86.
In fact, one of the first songs I can remember having a transcendent response to was the doo-wop classic “I Only Have Eyes For You” by The Flamingos. The experience was totally divorced from the style the music belonged to — I didn’t have the slightest clue what doo-wop music even was and, although I had a vague mental picture, I couldn’t really have imagined the clothing styles, the fashion aesthetic, or social sphere that it occupied. None of those things took center stage where the sound was. To me, that’s the way music is supposed to connect with you — it’s supposed to cut through all the window-dressing.
I knew “I Only Have Eyes” was old because I could tell from the warm, vintage ambience of the recording, and also because it was featured in a scene during the film The Right Stuff. But I couldn’t explain what it was about the song that caused such a reaction. It was kind of like being in a dream and being underwater and having an out-of-body experience all at once. It made my skin tingle, and there was something blissful about it and… the only word that comes to mind is “delicious,” but way more potent than that.
At the time, I had no idea what reverb was, and I couldn’t pick apart the individual elements of the music. The different voices, the harmonies they created together, that vintage plate reverb effect, and the guitar all kind of blurred into one sensory wave that was at once hyper-vivid and hard to decipher. Even the sound shoo-bop, shoo-bop that underscores the hook didn’t quite register to me as human vocal phonetics.
So all of those mystical encounters with music happened before thrash metal really grabbed me. And then, once thrash swept me off my feet, it wasn’t long before Jane’s Addiction changed my life. When I left home for college at the end of the summer in 1990, the “alternative revolution” was already underway. I was mere months away from discovering jambands, The Meters, jazz, alternative metal, extreme metal, experimental music, etc, etc.
Along the way, I didn’t discard previous musical styles I liked — my tastes just grew, wider and wider as a I went along. And, while I certainly appreciated the feeling of living through a moment as it was happening, I didn’t have to understand the social context for something to connect with me. In fact, I often preferred to stay in the dark as long as I could. Perfect example: I saw a cassette of Alice Cooper’s 1973 classic Billion Dollar Babies at the bookstore as a freshman at the University of Rochester. Something about that tape intrigued me and, for some reason, I knew I needed to have it.
(I use the term “freshman” loosely, as in: someone who was matriculated but who spent most of his time smoking pot, cutting class, hanging out at the university radio station, racking-up a ton of credit card debt, and coming ever so slowly to the dim realization that I lacked the organizational skills to function not only as a student but also, you know, to live.)
I didn’t know the first thing about Detroit’s glam/proto-punk scene that also included Iggy and the Stooges and The MC-5. I still know very little about that scene, and I still don’t hear Billion Dollar Babies in that context. Of course, that album was a product of that place and time, but to me it was just a wonderfully disorienting work of art. I listened to it over and over, at first not even sure whether I liked it. I felt similarly lost listening to jazz, which initially felt like watching a foreign-language film or broadcast without the benefit of subtitles. That feeling of being lost is part of what I love about jazz — along with the slow, gradual sense that I’m beginning to “get it” as a clearer understanding of the music slowly comes into view in my mind’s eye.
Sure, albums like 1963’s Monk’s Dream by Thelonious Monk somehow conveyed a sense of those wonderful black and white photos of jazz musicians from that period. My point, though, is that the Manhattan jazz club Minton’s Playhouse wasn’t my world — and it didn’t have to be. Feeling like a visitor, through the same eyes that one might view an unfamiliar country, landscape or planet, was most definitely part of the thrill. There are some music listeners — and certainly analysts — who feel the need to absorb every bit of detail about music before being able to connect with it. I’m talking about the kind of listener who values encyclopedic knowledge, like music is something they study as they listen.
That’s fine, but that’s not me. I like the sensory experience, and I like to just take-in what the art communicates on its own. If I go to a museum or art gallery, I prefer to walk around looking at the paintings before listening to the audio narration. I like to have the experience directly with the art first and then go back and dig for background info. I like the fact that art speaks across barriers — which means that the idea of being a card-carrying member of some group and advertising your membership to everyone within 500 yards, so that they can tell “this person is GOTH” or “this person is a B-BOY” or “this person is a RAVER” or “this person is a DEADHEAD” strikes me not only as silly and shallow but also antithetical to what art actually is.
I was also lucky in that I had a peer group of older Puerto Rican kids in The Bronx who had eclectic tastes in music. They introduced me to a ton of stuff — Rush, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Genesis, The Sex Pistols, Blue Oyster Cult, Level 42, UB40, Public Enemy, Steely Dan, Max Roach, Eddie Palmieri, Depeche Mode, Motley Crue, N.W.A., and even Spinal Tap. On the other hand, I went to an exclusive Manhattan private school with mostly white kids from wealthy families. Several of those kids at school were into hip hop and punk.
There was some musical overlap between the two groups, but the dynamic was somewhat flipped from what you might immediately expect — some (but not all) of the most enthusiastic hip hop heads I knew were white, and my older Puerto Rican friends back on the block were huge into rock music.
As an aside, the 2010 Rush documentary Beyond The Lighted Stage paints the prog-rock icons as an underdog cult act that had to push through all this derision to establish themselves. Sorry, but that’s a myth — when you’ve achieved enough market penetration to earn the fanatical following of a half-dozen Puerto Rican kids in the South Bronx who are rocking ‘70s prog classics like A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres and 2112 a decade after the fact, you’re not an underdog cult act at all. That’s a fairy tale. (Also, it’s a real shame that no one thought to interview bass monster and multi-instrumentalist Meshell Ndegeocello for that film, but that’s another story.)
I was extremely fortunate because my friends at home were like an oasis from the rampant conformity that defined life in neighborhoods like mine, where you were expected to be up on the latest hip hop and house music singles — not albums or artists, but the flavor of the month as dictated by radio and what your peers had elected as “in.” You were supposed to wear the latest fashions and fall in line with the latest slang, and that was that. Summer after summer, you were expected to march in lock-step with what everyone else was doing or be subject to ridicule that sometimes verged on open hostility.
I detested that, and I detest it to this day.
In fact, I think that brand of conformity is an under-discussed aspect of what life in the inner-city is like, particularly for mixed-race people who stand out there. In a neighborhood like mine, for example, it seemed to me that the children of immigrants — kids who weren’t African American, Puerto Rican, or Dominican — had it particularly rough. Swap-in whatever ethnic groups you like and I suspect one can experience that same friction pretty much everywhere. Let me also be clear: I didn’t have it all that hard either, and I can’t get up here and front like my block was all that hardscrabble of a place.
Plus you’d walk out your door and hear this:
Even in the thick of the crack epidemic, with a crack hotspot just a few blocks away and an obscene citywide murder rate, I only ever saw a gun twice. Once was an older kid asking a few of us at the candy store if we wanted to see it as we huddled around a bootleg Donkey Kong arcade game (named — get this — Donkey King). The other time I ever saw a gun was when a female relative of mine pulled her small pistol out on a neighbor lady over something so trivial between me and another kid in my building that I’m embarrassed to say what it was. (Also because I kinda started it.) Amazingly, everyone just chalked it up as flaring tempers and no one ever spoke of it again, other than me and the kid mentioning it once just to put it past us. If I were to show up back on my block today, all involved parties would happily greet each other.
I’m also not in any way suggesting that black Americans don’t feel an inherent sense of pressure as white-American mainstream culture bears down on them and sends them mixed messages in so many ways. (i.e: Hey! We LOVE your music, entertainers and athletes, but we still don’t know how to value YOU.)
What I’m saying is that the pressure to adhere to the expectations of a group is an imprisoning force that takes root in any group where one finds affiliation. This kind of pressure doesn’t sit well with me at all — and I really don’t like what it does to other people either — so I feel like it’s something we have to try to keep in check. Because the parallels between bona-fide hatred and what looks like harmless tensions between fans of different music are just way too obvious to ignore.
And if we’re going to make a genuine effort to get past racial/ethnic, inter-denominational and, now, political strife, I’d suggest: 1) that we’ve got to be honest with ourselves and admit that there are certain aspects of group behavior that are universal 2) that we can learn a lot from music! Music offers us a window into our tribalistic impulses. It also gives us an opportunity to figure out how we might integrate or at least manage them.
As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has explained, humans are “so desperate” to re-create the feelings of affiliation that inter-tribal conflict creates, that when we don’t actually have real conflict, we seek to replace it by other means — via sports, for example.
Haidt:
“If you think about it for a moment, who are we? What is our species? We evolved in small-scale societies that were locked in struggle with other small-scale societies. Human nature is really, really finely-tailored for inter-group conflict and tribal warfare. This is the way our ancestors lived for a long time. Now that we’ve transcended it, we’re so desperate for it that we’ve invented team sports, fraternities, etc. We love these sorts of competition. Our brains our made for it. It can be fun, or it can get dark. It can lead to racism and all kinds of bigotry.”
In another clip, Haidt elaborates on that point by saying that “we’ve invented all sorts of fun ways of playing war. You have to see our tribalism as something that goes up and down. It’s not like we’re doomed to always be fighting each other.” FYI, Haidt has grim predictions for the hyper-polarization that only appears to be growing worse in places like the U.S. and the UK:
The great thing about music is that it can bring so many contours to our understanding of how we relate to one another — and how we don’t. Let’s take my experience as an example — my white classmates were always quite welcoming to me. Many of them were also embracing of street-level artforms too. I mean, I had classmates who were into Sonic Youth and Killing Joke and Yellowman and Fishbone and Eric B. & Rakim (and The Red Hot Chili Peppers when they were still an underground band who were welcomed by the same punks and hardcore kids who’d listen to, like, Murphy’s Law).
So there’s an immediate sense of misalignment I feel towards the now-entrenched view that positions whiteness as a predatory cultural scourge, with white people almost genetically inclined to do nothing but exploit and devour and suppress. If you’ve bought into the notion that your whiteness inherently makes you a cultural marauder by default, I say: examine that possibility if you need to, but then do us all a favor and re-examine it too.
Not only does that representation not jibe with what I’ve lived, but I also don’t like how it has a smothering effect on the ability of people from neighborhoods like mine to express ambivalence about their own home. As far as I’m concerned, it’s only natural for people from those neighborhoods to have mixed feelings about them. I mean, some of the most pointed stereotypes about ghetto life come from the people who actually live there. Who is anyone to silence them?
And why should the millions of kids like me — kids who either “acted white” or gravitated to things that were considered foreign or out-there — not be able to voice appreciation for their feelings of being welcomed in other domains, if that’s their experience (or part of their experience)? Is that not part of the fabric of the American story too? I mean, alongside all the atrocities. I’m all for being blunt and truthful about the atrocities, but why shouldn’t we tell the story in as much granular detail as we can? And why should we pass-up a golden opportunity to use music as a window into both our ability to exclude one another and bond with one another?
The fact is, for decades, if a rap artist achieved platinum sales, it was because white kids from the suburbs were buying their music. (Ice-T himself once said so.) Granted, I don’t think we should just leave it as that — I’m all for grappling with what it means when art is born out of conditions that are foreign to your own. That makes all the sense in the world, but we also have to remember that music crosses barriers regardless of where we choose to put them up.
To re-segregate music along racial lines — as if, say, a Queens native like Awkwafina, who obviously grew up on hip hop like millions of kids of her generation, is now suddenly engaging in some kind of theft because she’s absorbed mannerisms that have been so widely disseminated that they effectively belong to everyone… there’s something deeply disturbed and tragic about this way of thinking. This PBS clip, for example, goes so far as to put Awkwafina on the same continuum as old blackface performers like Al Jolson, as if there weren’t a massive degree of difference in the intent between the two examples.
I find this hyper-vigilant peddling of ethnic difference, oddly, brings us full-circle back to the same exact point as we would have stood in the 1800s, when ideas of racial essentialism were widespread. The fact that media outlets like PBS and The New York Times are so pathologically fixated on these differences is, in itself, a revival of colonialist attitudes. And I find it disgraceful, frankly. It doesn’t speak for me or my experience, and it does so much damage when we collapse entire peoples into what we have to admit are just poorly-considered stereotypes.
And just because it’s a black person on PBS instructing us to limit the range of how we see black people — and to police how freely black culture might spread and be enjoyed — doesn’t make it any more virtuous than a stereotype coming from a more mean-spirited place.
There’s also a strange Puritan aversion to sensory pleasure running through this mindset — combined with an OCD-level preoccupation with racial purity, almost the same way a germophobe struggles in vain in a battle against invisible bacteria that are always going to win. At the end of the day, music — like cuisine, crops and fabrics — has flowed freely between people since trade was first established. This is never going to be stopped. And to try and do so is an act of desecration against our differences, not a defense of them — not to mention a mis-use of art.
I’ve never felt like music was enough to propel people past their differences, but sound is going to travel because that’s what sound does. It’s always going to reach people far and away from where it originated. And if it’s sound that at least gets you through the door and gives you some cursory exposure to someone else’s circumstances, then why should we invest that process with so much guilt? For all those hip-hop loving kids from the suburbs who were weaned on MTV, is their connection with the art any less meaningful? Is their love for the music less legitimate?
What about, say, the listener from South Africa who’s grappling with the residual legacy of apartheid? Or a child soldier (like Emmanuel Jal, for example) from war-torn South Sudan? What happens when all three — and millions of others from just about every inhabited place on earth — idealize rap music as the soundtrack to revolution and a catalyst for social change? What happens when their black-skinned African parents discourage them from adopting urban American mannerisms they feel wary of? What about when North African/Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar channels Van Halen and ZZ Top in his playing? (My review of Moctar’s latest here.)
Are we not being foolish — horrendously ignorant and even racist — by lumping the vast differences between the people in these examples under all the assumptions we make when we call them, simply, “black and brown”?
What about when DJ/producer Wax Tailor discovers rap music and breakdancing as a young kid in a small town in France? (You can read about that in a piece I wrote on Wax Tailor here.) Is that somehow worse than a wealthy kid of Arabic descent connecting with the same stuff?
What about when the Dutch band Urban Dance Squad captures the feelings of pain and tragedy underscoring hip hop’s earliest days — maybe more convincingly than anyone who was actually there?
What about the fact that hip hop has been one of American culture’s primary exports to the rest of the world? Is that not a form of imperialism — even if it is, in fact, an African-American cultural export? Going in the other direction, what about when listeners project their own native struggles and experiences of oppression onto black-American struggle? Should they not be more cautious when they do that? Isn’t everyone projecting something onto music in a way that threatens to distort its meaning (certainly, its original social context) to some degree or another?
I could entertain myself asking these questions forever, and I don’t say that to trivialize them. I think these questions are all worthy of serious, prolonged consideration. But at the end of the day, we’re talking about open-ness to sound. Young children — before anyone saddles their experience of music with all these layers of social expectation — are especially receptive to sound. Point to a random kid anywhere on the globe and expose that kid to music from a different time and place and there’s a good chance that music is going to connect with that kid. Children have a way of being open to sound as if it had already been a part of them somehow. They don’t need to claim the right to let a particular sound in.
I remember as a 9 year-old sharing Devo’s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo with another kid from my building. Can you imagine! Even to my ears today — ears that have been exposed to boundary-pushing music for decades at this point — that album just sounds plain fucking weird. And I love Devo! But your guess is as good as mine as to what it was in songs like “Gut Feeling” and “Joko Homo” that spoke to me at that age. I honestly have no idea.
To this day, I can’t put my finger on what attracted me to them as an 8 year-old. I now hear Devo and get the same kind of sense that I do with certain punks, metalheads and rappers — that these are people who would’ve been in serious trouble if they hadn’t found an outlet in music. To me, they represent a nihilistic suburban intellect, too aware for its own good and teetering toward the edge of something really dark. Like they'd have been involved in some gnarly shit like making bombs or something. And I actually love that Devo’s music oozes with a certain strain of Midwestern whiteness that verges on menacing.
That said, I’m sure tons of white parents across the USA uttered the words “what in god’s name are you listening to?” when their kids played that album close enough for them to be horrified and confounded and maybe a little worried. Where I lived, though, I might as well have been walking around with something I’d gotten off a Martian spaceship that crashed in the back lot behind my building. To be fair, I didn’t catch a lot of grief for listening to Devo, but it’s probably because I was still too young. Had I been a bit older and not fallen-in with the aforementioned group of older boys on my block, that might not have been a pretty picture.
I was fortunate beyond words that I grew up among friends with a willingness to explore music outside the things we were all expected to identify with simply by virtue of where we were from. Though one of us was hugely into rap, he was also hugely into rock and pop. (I mean, the guy loved Tears For Fears as much as Above The Law.) We were all surrounded by rap music — it was literally in the air — so we kind of took it for granted, at least at first. We also took Latin music for granted because we were surrounded by that too. Our attitude towards Latin Music was “that’s our parents’ shit.”
All of us, I would say, felt some inner gravitational push to seek things out on our own. When my older friend Wilson Rodriguez, for example, introduced me to Latin percussion icon Eddie Palmieri, he’d gone out on his own to find it. He was coming at it from the perspective of someone who was deeply moved by the music, not just someone who was falling in line with what you were “supposed” to do. I can assure you that there were no other Puerto Rican kids our age within miles of us who were rockin' with Eddie Palmieri.
Rodriguez, by the way, was an amazing drummer with a natural gift for rhythm. I mean the guy was born with it. And yet he couldn’t dance for shit! Not being able to dance as a Puerto Rican is — no exaggeration — looked at as one hair shy of being handicapped. (I’ve thought about starting a club, but it would have so few members.) My friend since first grade, the amazing abstract painter Luis Pagan isn’t much of a dancer either, but that doesn’t stop him from moshing like crazy to the industrial/synth music he loves like Ministry, Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode — or the traditional hibaro music he also loves, a style that hails from the mountains of Puerto Rico that your average Nuyoriquan doesn’t even know about.
In any case, for me and my friends from the block, the hit parade of merengue and reggaeton pumping out of people’s cars wasn’t to our liking. Neither was house music or anything that felt compulsory. All of which is to say that I’ve always been surrounded by broad-minded listeners who plotted their own path through music. They didn’t identify as being part of just one musical tribe. And when I got to college, I met more and more people like that. If anything, my “tribe” of music lovers consists of people who just dig the shit out of a lot of different stuff.
And I don’t even need people to like music to the same degree I do for me to feel kinship. I’ve always said: I don’t have to like the same stuff as you do — I only have to appreciate how you like what you like. And even then, it doesn’t so much matter. If there’s something in your life that you appreciate on the same level that I appreciate music, then we’ll have some common ground somewhere, and it’s my job as your friend — or just someone who happens to be talking to you and wants to dignify your presence — to find that common ground.
I’ve also said this a lot: If I end up sitting on a plane next to someone wearing a Celtic Frost or Napalm Death t-shirt, of course I’m probably gonna chitchat with that person about it. But I’m going to be just as interested if I see that that person’s reading a copy of a book by an author I’ve never heard of. Or if they somehow reveal that they’re into something outside my realm like architecture or chemistry or whatever. I mean, it doesn’t take much at all to hold my interest.
Meeting people halfway — tuning-in to their preferences and being amenable to hearing about them — is, I believe, an innate survival mechanism that people develop early when their physical appearance marks them as someone who can’t truly fit-in anywhere. I’m not suggesting that you feel bad for me — while it would certainly be a relief to not stand out for a change, and while I’d probably have to admit, if I were being honest, that I envy it on some level (because how could you not), the other side of it is that if you have the luxury of being among people who look just like you, I kinda feel bad for you.
In my experience, people who can take it for granted that they can blend — that they can find other people who look just like them — tend to be lazy by default. They don’t need to explore outside the group they’re a part of. They know where their “home” is. They don’t have to stretch. They don’t have to adapt — or, if they live in a two-tier society that organizes by race, they at least have one realm that doesn’t require them to stretch beyond their comfort zone. A person who has that luxury to fall back on can’t help but be lazy. It makes them rely on the knowing that they can always go back to where they’re just like everyone else.
This, as far as I’m concerned, becomes a crutch and a hindrance that people don’t even notice because it’s too easy not to. It actually cripples people. And this is where, I would offer, the current tenor of the discussion around race would benefit from the perspective of people who have to live with their feet in two worlds. Because inherently, we understand group behavior. On a gut level, we understand that certain tendencies are universal. We know that groups — and group membership — brings out the worst in people, because we see the way all groups dangle acceptance as their form of currency and rejection as their form of power over their members.
People who have to navigate among different groups in order to live — and who, for whatever reason, don’t have a “home” group where their membership is a given — have a bird’s eye view of racism. To us, understanding racism is like reading a topographical map. We understand tribalistic impulses from the perspective of someone who’s had to spend time learning how the engine works. Almost innately, it becomes clear to us that group membership — what separates those in the in-group from the “other” — is almost arbitrary.
Which is to say that, if people can conveniently separate from one another by racial differences, they will. But in the absence of immediately-visible racial distinctions, groups of people will organize around other kinds of differences. Anyone who’s stuck between worlds (and forced to exist and travel between them) can immediately pick-up on the way division between musical or other social cliques mimics deeper hostilities.
Sometimes, of course, those hostilities are fueled by differences that are hard to separate from racial animosity. Take, the infamous Disco Demolition Night that took place as a promotional event at a Chicago baseball game on July 12, 1979. With rock and disco fanbases at the time separating fairly neatly along racial lines, it isn’t hard to see how the ostensibly anti-disco sentiments unleashed at that game might ignite more deep-seeded undercurrents of hatefulness that had little to do with musical preferences. Perhaps predictably, the game resulted in a riot.
I’m dismayed, though, that it was hard to find a contemporary media report that didn’t portray the event as if it were one hair shy of a KKK rally. And, while I think it would be naive to ignore the racial undercurrents of that story, time and place, I also think it doesn’t serve anyone to paint those circumstances with one gigantic brush that ultimately robs it of its detail — and robs us of understanding what was going on. It’s as if we’ve chosen to look at a super-high resolution, 50,000-dpi image at the lowest-possible resolution, thus pixellating the finer points beyond recognition.
Here’s the thing: my older Puerto Rican friends and I didn’t like disco either. Some of us probably hated it. Would we have gone as far as burning disco records? No, but could I go back in time and find young African-American and Latin men who loved rock music and hated disco? I bet I could. Were there gay men in 1979 who loved Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and hated disco because they didn’t like being lumped into an idea of “gay culture” that didn’t align with who they were? I would bet money it.
I, for one, have had multiple gay roommates who’ve explicitly expressed a strong dislike and alienation from “gay culture.” What if they’d been around in 1979 and didn’t like disco, didn’t like dancing, didn’t liked dancing in tight pants, and didn’t like the feeling that their gay identity was being prescribed for them by people in clothing they found ugly and silly and an affront to their sense of good taste? Could there have been people at that park that day who didn’t fit the racist-homophobe stereotype and hated disco for their own reasons? Why should they be silenced and forgotten?
We have to be careful when we retroactively paint all the fans who showed up at that baseball stadium with a lust to burn records along such cartoonish lines. Racism, as far as I’m concerned, is a proxy mechanism for something way deeper and more insidious that resides within all of us. I’m not suggesting that the race factor isn’t crucial. What I’m suggesting is that to focus strictly on the race element is to miss the bigger picture. There are other layers that give us the keys to neutralizing all the ugly things that racism breeds. And where can we look for these keys? Why, to music of course!
I’ll be blunt: if you harbor the instinct to cluster with people who like the same music as you and shun people who don’t, then you have the same instinct that inclines people towards racism (and pretty much any other form of discrimination). But here’s the good news: so does everyone — it just expresses differently in each of us. I mean, I personally can’t understand the motivation to organize my life around people who reflect the things I like, but I also know that I’m willing to shut people out in other domains.
When we allow this separate-and-cluster instinct to guide us with music, the effects are essentially harmless — other than, maybe, the occasional gang-type violence at shows and a riot at a baseball game after a terribly ill-considered promotion. Decades later, by the way, disco and rock became happy bedfellows, with every Brooklyn-based indie rock band and their mother incorporating heavy dance elements into their sound. Which goes to show how ephemeral these types of divisions actually are.
Change the context, fast-forward the clock a couple of decades and all of a sudden once-separated groups don’t have reason to view each other as mortal enemies anymore. Yes, it’s shallow and close-minded and unbecoming of anyone past high-school age to only associate with people based on their musical tastes — I thought it was lame as far back as middle school — but it’s not necessarily malicious. It’s more of an unconscious expression of a reflex that, unchecked, can lead to extreme forms of malice.
I live in a small city with about a million people in the entire metropolitan area. A friend of mine once very wisely observed the following on returning from a trip to Portland, Oregon: “In a place like that, there are enough people who are into a given activity — motorcycles, thrift-store chic, rockabilly, role-playing games, whatever — that they can form social groups around that activity. Where we live, for the most part, there aren’t enough people in any one of those groups to depend solely on those who have the same interests as you. So we all have to kind of tolerate one another.”
So true! I mean, like I said, this reflex is mostly harmless — but if you indulge it (because you can afford to), you’re keeping yourself stuck in a kind of tunnel vision and depriving yourself of a real opportunity to be free of it. Embrace this opportunity and you just might find that the valve to be more receptive to people who live differently than you might stay open once you’ve had some practice. It’s not foolproof, and I’m certainly not perfect at it, but I can at least tell you that it’s worth the effort.
In 2007, I interviewed Tommy Victor, leader of the band Prong, whose sound Victor described as “vulnerable,” a term I’ve never heard cross the lips of another metal musician when describing their own work.
For my money, nothing reflects the near-constant discomfort, claustrophobia, intrusion, and stress of life in New York — at least as I experienced it as a teen growing up there — better than Prong’s 1989 album Beg To Differ. Their music is aggressive, uneasy, and serrated by an almost misanthropic vitriol. But I completely understood why Victor would describe it the way he did. The vulnerability’s in there, and that’s part of what spoke to me about their work. (I said as much here, and interviewed Victor again in 2019 for a piece here, where he spoke about the importance of his meditation practice.)
Around the time Beg To Differ was just out, I read an interview with Victor where he said that the good thing about living in New York was that, for better or worse, you had no choice but to be in constant contact with people who were different than you. If only such an environment existed for musical taste as well, then I think we might finally get somewhere.
Get this, though — at one point when I spoke to Victor in 2007 he said “Invariably, there’s a guy with glasses who looks like an English major standing in the front row scrutinizing everything I’m doing on the guitar.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, “you’re describing me!”
TL/DR — you can sum-up this entire post with this song:
So don’t be an ignorant fool /
There’s so much music for you to choose /
Don’t just be a metal dude /
It’s cool, fool.
Ha!
<3 SRK
Hey Saby. I hope you are doing well. It has been a long time since we first talked about this article. I have been thinking about it the whole time. This is such a big piece and there are many things I could imagine you and I digging into as a topic from this piece, but since I don't want to write a comment as long as your original article, I will talk about one thing. Music fashion.
I will start in the 80s with hip-hop because for me that was where I first realized that I wanted to wear certain things that my mom would never pick for me on her own. I had to say I wanted something and I needed her to agree that it was ok for me to have it and wear it. My parents were a bit strict in that way. I could convince them a fair amount of time that I wanted something but there were times that they would give me the hard "No" and there didn't often seem to be rhyme or reason to it outside of if something would be too expensive. Jordan's back in the day? No way. Not because someone may jump me for my shoes - I doubt they knew that certain styles were more likely to get you jacked than others - but why on Earth would they spend $100 on a pair of shoes for a kid? I could understand that.
Well, I am a very young kid in the 80s - ten years old in 1985 - and I love hip-hop. I love the music. I love break dancing. I love the idea of a DJ and scratching. And I love the fashion. It was colorful and creative and just so different than most people I was around. I never really saw myself as a rapper. I wanted to be a DJ but I knew my parents weren't going to spring for DJ equipment. They would have seen it as too expensive and why would I need two turntables? There's already one in the basement. Just play the records on that. I wanted to do graffiti but I am not even a teenager and my parents were not giving me an abundance of freedom for me to find a moment to do something like that.
So my option to be a part of hip-hop was breakdancing, and luckily I loved dancing. Watching what breakdancers were able to do was like watching magic. I wanted to do it, and got fairly good at it. But another thing I noticed was that the best breakdancers had a style of dress. So I wanted to dress similarly. Thus began my obsession with hip-hop fashion. I wanted the sweet shoes and fat laces, the name belt buckle, the track jacket, the Kangol, etc. I could convince them to buy some of it and it was enough to make me feel good and feel like I was a part of this thing I so enjoyed.
And that's really the thing about music fashion. Some of us aren't great artists and can't do the things we are experiencing through sound, performance, or artistic talent.. The only real way we can participate is to dress in the style. And there is an art to fashion. When you can put your own spin on what you wear it becomes active participation in this musical culture.
I agree that it also hits a point for a lot of people where you are just imitating what you see and there is no real art in that. However, as I got older the style of dress became a signifier. If see someone in sneakers with fat laces and a Run-DMC shirt, I can be assured that we can find common ground in hip-hop or at least starting with the group. If I see a punk rocker, I can talk about Bad Brains, Black Flag, Dead Milkmen. And sometimes music fashion may have told me to keep my distance, which is fine. At least I knew where I stood. But for me and I am sure for others, there was an excitement to getting a new piece that reaffirmed my love for this music and all these things around the music that I don't directly participate in, especially as breakdancing began to fall out of style in the area I lived in.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that there are folks who used this fashion in an intimidating way and that's a shame. When a style of dress develops in this sense, that means that there is a tribe forming for sure. And if someone is not dressed as part of the tribe then they can be misidentified as "them" instead of "us." It often feels like the ones pushing this narrative are the people who are often far removed from making the art. These are people who, similarly to me, find that their only way to participate is to dress the part. And if that person feels like they need to prove that they really are a part of the culture. It can lead to them "punching down" on someone who may be more involved in a different way. Maybe they could have connected over something else they have in common but the opportunity was missed because the focus was too narrow. Fashion alone isn't the only way to connect and identify with someone in this case, it's just the easiest.
Then you look at today. None of these signifiers mean anything anymore. Seeing someone in a Run-DMC shirt doesn't always mean they are a fan. You can buy that shirt at Target. You can buy it online. You can buy a used one at a thrift store. There used to be a time that you only got a band's shirt if you went to a concert. Now bands are brands and you can get it all over the place. Artists lend their sense of style to a major designer and anyone can dress like Pharrell Williams now. You don't even have to really know anything about his music. And I am not mad at that. He is still being creative and hey, make that money.
But, now you can see the styles from around the world in every subculture and we imitate people who are imitating. But instead of just dressing how we like, we are still holding on to the idea that certain brands and styles mean something, when in truth it rarely does anymore. The biggest thing fashion shows now a days is how much money we spent to look the way we do.
So I don't hate music fashion. I think there is something fun, creative, and to a certain extent, inclusive about being able to dress the part of something you love. The flip side is that it feels more and more like a rarity that the styles that subcultures take on are genuine. Instead it often feels like forced imitations and money grabs by brands, instead of the grass roots sense of style that has grown alongside almost every genre of music since music started being made in the United States.
I hope that made some sense. More importantly, I hope all is well with you and yours. Talk to you soon!
Roger