Short Fast and Loud Column
Congratulations to Jeff and Athena (and Chris Dodge before them) for keeping SFL running for a decade. In these times when print media is going rapidly out of style it’s good to see some people still flying the flag high. As useful as the internet can be I find that reading something on a screen and reading something in print are radically different experiences and internet based article longer than 200 words are almost always going to be skim read.
So with that in mind here are four thousand words of personal bridge burning I need to get out of my system.
I Start Bitching About Toyota Here
Ah, Scion shows! It’s like being 18 again and hearing about who is or isn’t a dirty sell out. Several bands whose members I would describe as close friends have either played or are about to play shows promoted by Scion (Toyota). On the whole it’s not really that much of a big deal to me. Some of my friends playing Scion sponsored events isn’t all that strange and with some of them it is. Magrudergrind’s release of a free record that Scion foot the bill for has been very surprising and to me represents a far more dangerous step than playing what amounts to some stupid car promotion.
If I didn’t like Magrudergrind as people then I probably wouldn’t even bother writing this, I could mark it down as another bunch of douchebags doing something I disagree with. I’ve always found them smart guys and sincere people with a real passion for what they do. I hope any mention of them comes across more in the spirit of being perplexed and temporarily disappointed as opposed to outright hostility. That isn’t my intention.
So the issue at hand here is corporate sponsorship and the role it plays in underground culture. I’d love for any debate on this issue to be on a level far and away from the dyad of “corporate sell outs” at one end and “whining jealous elitist know-nothings” at the other. Unfortunately that generally isn’t the case.
Earlier this year (2010) Ryan McKenney of Trap Them wrote an opinion piece defending their choice to play corporate sponsored metal shows. The piece (on metalsucks.net) was refreshingly honest and obviously written after much personal reflection. I now have a newfound respect for the man after reading his words and share similar conclusions regarding some of his points; we’re in this position because the DIY scene has failed to provide a better business model than it has been able to. Where I disagree is when McKenney says (undoubtedly with no small dose of hyperbole) that show prices need to be $25. It’s not my intention to write a column on how to book a show and not fuck anyone over in the process so I’m not going to address that point with much more than a cursory “there’s another way to fix this problem”.
But yes, we have a problem, hell, we have a lot of problems and one of them is that DIY has largely failed on the financial end. It’s been my opinion for a long time now that it isn’t enough for us to just be separate from what we conveniently call “the mainstream”. The back and forth over what the meaning of the word mainstream actually implies can be saved for another day. Along with the separation we have to be able to demonstrate that we have a different way of doing things and it works out better for us.
In reading the discussions about Toyota’s presence in our scene on ye olde internet I find that there are a two key questions that no one seems to asking:
1. What does Toyota want out of this?
2. What are the actual outcomes of Toyota’s involvement in our culture?
I’m not sure I’m even interested in the answer to question one; I suspect it’s impenetrably boring and really just hinges on some new kind of corporate branding experiment.
Question two is something we can’t really know until the future and even then it might be a little murky. But I can hazard an educated guess.
Some (Brief) Thoughts on Power
Although it makes for interesting fiction I don’t believe that the world is run by a shadowy cabal of shape shifting lizards that are trying to keep us enslaved. Yes, power has its centres, but power is also in relationships, be those relationships personal, community, product based or whatever. The idea of an undefeatable conspiracy that controls our lives is something I feel just removes our options from us. We stop considering that power is something we can interact with and change. We start to believe that hidden forces that have been operating long before we were born are controlling our every move. So, no, I’m not that anti-corporations guy that’s basically running on a much nicer, updated script seemingly borrowed from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Fuck that guy.
The word hegemony gets thrown around a lot in activist circles. Generally people seem to be referring to a system of control by one group over another using brute force. I personally see hegemony as something far more nuanced and applicable to daily reality than that. Cultural hegemony is, to put it simply (and you can read many a dry and barely intelligible scholastic book on the subject if you’re a masochist) a subtle shifting of what is considered the norm. Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent is largely built on the foundations that Antonio Gramsci developed, both of whom discuss something similar.
So I’ve been seeing two opposing arguments about the role of Toyota in our community that are basically being acted out in the same way. Neither position is trying to advance any sense of debate. Both are trying to state that the ground they occupy is basically the norm and there doesn’t need to be any discussion.
So back to question two again; cause and effect doesn’t always happen immediately. My concern is that precedents are being set that change the field of debate. That corporate sponsorship of art and culture is going to be unquestionably A-OK and considered normal and a part of life. In doing so we are allowing the language of advertising to filter into every aspect of our lives and whether you chose to buy the messages and products being sold to you or not is beside the point. We are beginning to become complacent about it and the language of advertising is everywhere; it’s even on grindcore records now.
My beef is not really that three of my friends have made a decision that I wouldn’t personally have anything to do with, this happens all the time. My beef is that I believe this is a harbinger of much worse to come and my real fear is that most people won’t notice it and those that do will be shouted down as irrational weirdoes. Thus endeth the quick lesson on cultural hegemony.
I’ll play nice and give some conclusions at the end, but first I need to take some of the excuses I’ve been seeing over and over again recently to task. Some of this has been said by bands, some hasn’t. Feel free to skip this part, there’s a lot of mean spirited acrimony involved.
A List of Some of the Typical Excuses for Why Corporate Sponsorship Isn’t Really a Big Deal
• They didn’t ask us to change anything!
I mean, perhaps I’m the only one that caught wind of this teensy tiny little thing that happened in February of 2009 but wasn’t there something about black metal band Nachtmystium being dropped at the last minute from a Scion showcase? Maybe I’m wrong because clearly no one in internetland and particularly not singer Blake Judd had anything at all to say about this whatsoever.
OK, sarcasm over for a paragraph, you get it. In the fallout of the whole Nachtmystium Vs Scion thing there was a bunch of grumbling from Blake Judd that they’re not a political band so they’re definitely not Nazis, you guys just don’t get it and that’s just how black metal is.
In our scene it’s easy not to care about this (and I personally don’t). It’s easy to see the word Nazi leaping off the screen at you and not care. For the record I don’t think Nachtmystium were ever Nazis but that’s not the point here. The point is that there was a small hint that one of the bands on Scion’s precious car promotion was perhaps even tangentially related to something distinctly not cool for the sale of Toyotas. Jeez, do you think that’s something not easily translatable to our scene? It’d just take one kid breaking a window at a G20 protest in a Magrudergrind shirt or a cursory scan of a lyric sheet and there’s an airborne screaming baby surrounded by bathwater in the house.
Wait, did I say lyric sheet? Here’s one I prepared earlier:
“Stomp out hate monger scum
Extremity through offense
Will get you murdered in the end”
Oh, hey look everybody, Magrudergrind is advocating murder of people they disagree with. This is not something I have any problem with, but how is this any different from a sudden cold shoulder Nachtmystium received over the fear that the connection might damage car sales? I’ll tell you how it’s different. IT ISN’T. NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT.
I could drive the point into the ground with other Magrudergrind lyrics by quoting, amongst others, the anti-Christian lyrics of Heretics but I won’t. At this point it’s worth looking at what happened in Australia recently with Black Mass Festival being cancelled due to worldwide Christian protest. Black Mass Festival is quite clearly a music event and not some Litanies of Satan (mores’ the pity), but that doesn’t matter; fundamentalist Christians love to complain about shit they find offensive. Even many non- fundamentalist Christians, in a spectacular display of inverse reality, will mutter about how they’re discriminated against by society.
In October 2009 Toxic Holocaust had negative press drawn on them from the Christians over a show they played in Nashville. The show went ahead and sanity prevailed. I keep hearing the argument “as if Toyota really cares about us anyway, our bands won’t affect anything over sales of Scion cars”, an aspect of this statement is true. But do you think Scion wouldn’t instantly succumb to pressure if the fundamentalists took it upon themselves to organise a protest against some of the bands on their car promotions? Again, for the record I don’t care if this happens, in fact I’d probably relish it, but I’m using this to illustrate that the argument that “as long as no one is asked to compromise their band politics” is utter bullshit and doesn’t hold water. Scion will drop bands and ask them to censor their politics in a heartbeat if it has to.
I feel fairly confident that bands like Magrudergrind won’t compromise their politics and will say “thanks for the money suckers”. Then there’s bands like Nachtmystium that seem to have fallen down the rabbit hole of telling the world they’re not Nazis, even going as far as to produce the unbelievably childish t shirt with the grim reaper snorting coke off a coffin and the slogan “White Powder not White Power”. Nice one boys, keep on sticking it to the man.
Which hardcore band worth anything hasn’t had songs criticising the government, the cops or religious types? Did I miss something and our scene is now primarily about how awesome everything is and how everyone is special? Wasn’t there a time when we said “we reject your values and know we can do things a better way”? Don’t mistake that last part for the ramblings of a confused old man lamenting the days gone by when the scene was all anarcho-syndicalism and pay no more than 50p (“PS please return my stamps”).
• Hey, everybody wins here!
They do? How? People don’t go to Municipal Waste, Iron Age, Brutal Truth or Mammoth Grinder shows anyway? When you don’t want to pay for a Magrudergrind record you wouldn’t just download it for free? Magrudergrind don’t have releases on Willowtip, Bones Brigade, Six Weeks and a shit ton of other labels already and are having a hard time getting their music out? I don’t understand any aspect of this argument. It just sounds like some dumb meaningless shit said by someone surprised to find themselves on the defensive.
• Free records!!!!!!
Free records, oh great, yeah, cuz it isn’t becoming hard enough to sell them right now, why not give people another reason not to want to spend their money on music. Let’s become dependent on corporations to do this for us.
As McKenney said “Everyone still wants something for nothing, regardless of free, corporate sponsored events. They want everything fast, cheap and easy. You can’t have all three.” So apparently we give them what they want instead of trying to figure out how to operate so we don’t compromise ourselves and fuck ourselves completely in the future.
I’m not the first person to have said this; selling records and shirts is pretty much the only thing keeping touring bands going now. It’s certainly not the $5 shows bands were complaining about fifteen years ago as being ridiculously stuck in the past. Sure a $5 show in a venue that costs nothing to hire and has 200 kids show up is great. But that isn’t reality.
So if too many people’s expectations are that shows cost $5 for the rest of time, do we really want to start going down the road of free records as well? It all starts somewhere…
• These people are helping our scene
Again, you don’t go to shows anyway? You don’t buy Magrudergrind records (if you like them)? If the issue is the finances involved in getting a band to a show or the fact that people are more reluctant to buy music then let’s address those and not expect handouts. And if that’s not the issue that people are talking about then to repeat myself, this sounds like some dumb meaningless shit said by someone surprised to find themselves on the defensive.
When anything in this world relies on charity of any kind it does not fix the underlying problem, it just exacerbates it when the charity goes away because the problem was never solved in the first place. If the problem is that DIY shows and tours are poorly organised and audiences have expectations that rely on the bands to take a hit on finances to meet those expectations then we need to say “enough” and tackle those problems. Charity is disempowering, we don’t need to replicate it in our scene.
• You’re just over reacting
This could be true, but after investing so much time and effort into this shit I’d rather it was done in a way that didn’t encourage a lack of sustainability for future endeavours.
• You’re just an elitist prick, fuck you (or the even less compelling variant “you’re an asshole, shut up”)
I am an elitist. I want to keep the morons out from the things that I love and cherish. I hate having to deal with them in my neighbourhood, on the bus, at the store, in bars and at my job. If I participate in an identity based culture like hardcore I’d love it if part of that identity was a simple “try not to be an idiot”.
Calling me an elitist doesn’t actually address much. If anything it probably shows that the person calling me out is exactly the kind of person I don’t care about because they’re probably unable to rank the validity of one experience over another. “Hey man, what’s your favourite kind of food?” “I dunno, I’ve trained myself to believe everything tastes the same because to favour one thing over another would make me an elitist prick. Or a Nazi.”
OK, you’ll be glad to know that the stupidest point with the stupidest response was saved for the last. But to get serious again, this is exactly what I’m talking about regarding cultural hegemony; arguments are reduced to easy ad hominem insults in an attempt to display that one side or another occupies the hallowed ground that can’t be questioned.
I’m Dispensing with Sarcasm and Concluding Things Here
As I said earlier, I’m pretty attached to the part of our culture that is essentially saying “we reject your values and know we can do things a better way”. Having a car manufacturer as an occasional and uneasy bedfellow unfortunately does little to push this way of thinking.
Toyota’s current interest in our scene could go away over night; I don’t think anyone would really care if that happened and no one’s relying on their money yet. I hope this does come to pass. I hope that people can look back on all the words in this column and say a patronising “ah, remember when people were all het up over cars and hardcore bands?” I hope I look it at it in the same way as I do when I remember that at one point Hare Krishnas were the focus of debate in hardcore. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about be very grateful; it was all so deeply stupid.
There doesn’t seem to be much reflection in our scene. We do things well and then we seem to stop thinking about it and they go to shit. I wish we could reflect upon our strengths and how our identity as a community is tied into those strengths. Look closely at what works, what doesn’t and what needs to change. And I wish this was a continual process, though one free from all the endless navel gazing that the 90s gave us.
The bottom line is that touring, as fun as it usually is, sometimes sucks. You get fucked for money constantly; you get sick because you’re forever sleeping on the floor; you get cranky because you never have five minutes away from people.
Being offered three grand to play a show and to have flights and hotel rooms thrown in sounds amazing. Fuck, if I wasn’t so stuck in my ways I’d be all over that shit. This is why I’m not actually that critical (despite how it might read above) of bands that play Scion shows. Even if I do think some of them should know better.
If your van breaks down on tour you can bet that touring won’t pay for the repairs; this is why Scion’s offers are so attractive. You can tour and tour all you like but the sad reality is that you will never get above a certain level if you play this style of music. Scion gives certain bands a temporary reprieve from that.
But everything that is stupid about hardcore started somewhere. Nothing exists in a vacuum. The Christian infiltration in some sectors happened for a reason. Part of it was because either defenses were laughably simplistic (sheep like re-iteration of Amebix slogans) or people just thought it was fine, “hey, I thought hardcore was supposed to be open minded” and all that bullshit. Notice any parallels with the debate around Scion?
The financial side of DIY hardcore is often abhorrent, I keep saying this, but it’s true. In order to counter this bands have become reliant on selling merch at shows. As distribution models (like Ebullition) got better and rendered record stores and distro boxes all over North America the punk version of Starbucks mono-culture (hey, here’s that same DS13 record again 15 cities in a row) as bands we had to come up with more creative ways to force the hand of the consumer. So we started relying on limited editions and weird variants only available at shows. And then labels started doing it too so they could get direct sales. And then guess what? Oh awesome! Large aspects of our scene are now about consumer goods!
We’re becoming a scene based on the production of objects and not ideas. And the debate that stems from this? Kids bitch that bands make limited editions and variants and they can’t buy them. So more people turn to downloading and that’s seen as totally OK because you can’t find these records anywhere. And now a significant amount of people refuse to pay for any music and will strangely enough play the “you’re an elitist” card if someone calls them on it on the comments page of a download blog (I started noticing this when Prank Records began requesting links to downloads be taken down).
It’s getting harder and harder to tour and audiences want more for less. Then along comes Scion offering to give you money to do what you would do anyway. Of course it looks like a great deal and you can use that money for some good; paying your rent whilst you go on a money losing tour, pay to press a record on your own so you get to keep all the profits, or fix your money pit of a van.
We didn’t just arrive at any of these problems overnight, in much the same way that the real fallout from Toyota’s involvement in our scene (if there ever is a real fall out) probably won’t be seen for a long time.
I would rather be involved in a scene that was sustainable and celebrated its identity and ideologies. I would rather that scene excluded itself from as much of the stupidity in world as possible and proved that not only are there other options but that those options are better and have applications in other areas of our lives.
As ever I’m contactable at
theendlessblockade@gmail.com I welcome differing points of view if they’re not just “omg u suck, u no nuffink”