Back in October Steve Albini, ex-frontman of the somewhat infamous punk band Big Black, posted a series of Tweets which included the phrase: “I'm overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring ‘edgelord’ shit.”
I’m a Big Black fan from back then. In fact I’m a big Big Black fan. So let’s ask the question out loud, just why did we think it was so punk to listen to those lyrics? “I would like to wrap your hair around your neck like a noose.” Or “she's wearing his bootprint on her forehead”?
At the time, I knew the answer. Misogyny was rife, domestic violence not just widespread but unstated. (The police then had an openly stated policy of not involving themselves in “domestic” cases.) And the saccharine cutie-pie world of pop songs, with all that “I love you true” and “moon in June” business, seemed just a pretty painted screen being unfurled in front of a pretty ugly reality. Providing everything stayed shiny on the surface, things were supposedly fine. We wanted to kick that screen down, in its feelgood hypocrisy, to make ugly music for ugly times.
More widely the nature of our society effectively determined stuff like that was going to happen. This wasn’t just something to oppose, it was a signifier of all that was wrong. We lived in a society based around violence, which encouraged you to use that violence, expending yourself anywhere that wasn’t against the powers that be.
Albini himself said: “If things like this remain unspoken, the thinking doesn’t die, it spreads sub-cutaneous like a fungus, making everything sick. To exorcise this kind of thinking it has to be stated plainly.” Thomas Hardy had said many years earlier, “if a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.” And I still think both are right.
Big Black songs often employed the old Velvet Underground device of using a first-person protagonist, throwing the listener into an extreme situation with no guides or hand-holds as to how they’re supposed to be reacting. Which inevitably led to many not getting it, of thinking these songs encouraged such behaviour.
And if questioned, we would respond with derision. The same derision you’d use for a clueless know-nothing who didn’t know who the Velvet Underground were.
And in one way, it did all make more sense back then. Back then, subcultures more occupied their own spheres, like conceptual neighbourhoods whose bounds you stayed within. Which meant you weren’t likely to encounter Big Black without encountering Punk subculture, which gave the content a context. It wasn’t the situation where, for example, the lyrics would get pinned up on the internet divorced from the music. And it was partly the context of music, which made it clear those words were supposed to sound not triumphalist but fucked up.
Let’s look at this from another angle, just for a second. At the time, I was equally involved in comics fandom. A subculture which had little-to-no interest in shock and provocation, which if anything was rather desperate to ingratiate its chosen medium into respectability as an artistic form.
At one point I wrote a piece for the fanzine ’Vicious’ in which I recounted my reading my first Marvel comic. The villain, a Fu Manchu knock-off called the Mandarin, I described as a “scheming oriental”. Something I couldn’t have meant any less as a swastika armband. I was assuming two things; that even if I didn’t know personally everyone who would read it I knew comic fans, knew the sort of people they were, knew they were (broadly speaking) my sort of people. And that the whole Yellow Peril trope was, when stood up in the modern world, patently absurd. To the degree that shining a light on it was clearly enough to knock it down. And no-one ever questioned me about that at the time.
And that’s the thing. We were… ahem… somewhat over-optimisitic about a marginal music movement’s capacity to deliver social change. But in many ways I’m the person I am today largely because of the person I was then. What I question in retrospect… partly, it’s the certainty.
Back then, I blithely assumed that as soon as the sign was hung on the squat centre door, the one which decried racism, sexism and homophobia, it exuded a talismanic power to banish those things. I noted that I’d never experienced any of them, not thinking there may have been a rather obvious reason for that. I was young and excited to find myself amidst this radical counter-culture. It was a gift horse to me, and I wasn’t keen to start poking it about in the mouth. So those provocative songs, designed to make people stop and think, didn’t actually make us stop and think very much. We just figured they had messages for other people, even as they played to our scene.
And that unquestioning seems in retrospect a little too reminiscent of the over-familiar cry “but I’m a nice guy”. The problem with which is obvious – everyone likes to imagine they’re a nice guy rather than a horrific monster, and cognitive dissonance usually aids them in believing it. Harvey Weinstein still seems to believe a short stay in a de luxe clinic gives him the right to a “second chance”. Harvey... guys... you want a handy hint? You really want to know if you’re a ”nice guy”? Maybe ask those who have to interact with you.
But, and this is both the bigger and the bitterer part of the picture… Those people who would freak out at my listening to Big Black, sure I’d argue back at them. But at the same time they were giving me precisely what I wanted. There are lots of things driving you when you’re young, but the drive to not be understood is some way out in front.
When others don’t get you, that must mean you are smarter than them, ahead of them, brimming over with fascinating depth. Our scene was outwardly aggressive and nihilistic, wearing it’s positivity very much on the inside. I doubt that was entirely co-incidental.
Which brings us to politics…
Big Black might not be the best example, but radical subculture frequently spilt over into radical politics. Back then, truth to tell, for many of us it was the one path there was to follow. Like Henry Ford’s cars, you could have any politics you wanted provided they were black. Labour were the Tories’ mini-me, Trot groups like the Socialist Workers Party a cross between a cadet force and a cult, marching in line to a gulag. Anarchism was the only show in town you could bear to sit through.
And central to politics, surely, is winning others over to your point of view. It may not matter much if not everyone gets the record you put out, you may even want them not to. Whereas you might think a political magazine would work differently. Not so, it seemed. In fact it was the very the opposite – our politics was more tied to shock tactics than our subculture.
True, it was less about exposing domestic abuse than stressing the necessity of political violence. But the same game was being played. Anarchist magazines paraded titles such as ’Boot ‘em’, ‘Attack’ or – our local example – ’Brighton Bomber’, and traded in confrontational imagery often with the thinnest of ties to any context. To the point that today edgelordery is often seen as central to Anarchism, if not the very essence of it. Whereas for much of Anarchist history it wasn’t a significant feature at all.
After seeing Shellac, Albini’s current band, I commented on the difference twixt then and now: “Big Black were rooted in their Eighties era, holding a truth-telling mirror to Reagan America’s dark underbelly. Whereas Trump’s America wears that dark underbelly on its face, and the last thing it needs is further exposure.”
And Albini himself tweeted: “For myself and many of my peers, we miscalculated. We thought the major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won, and society would eventually express that, so we were not harming anything with contrarianism, shock, sarcasm or irony.”
Whereas these days, there might as well be ‘How’s My Edgelording?’ bumper stickers. In the famous saying, in our times it’s now the bourgeoisie who shock the avant-garde. When someone as mainstream as a Guardian art critic, that total fuckwit Jonathan Jones, goes in for it you’d think folk would finally wise up that edgelordery isn’t really that edgy any more. But it seems not.
Now it would be nice to be able to argue that once the alt.right started using our tricks, we wised up. But that wouldn’t really be true. Certainly when I was still at school my classmates (using the term in the loosest definition) included fascism-fanciers. And part of its appeal to them was clearly that it seemed thrillingly too cool for school. Their edgelordery always mirrored ours, theirs has just gone more mainstream now.
So here we are, with Gamergate, Comicsgate and those other similarly festering piles of shit. I simply can’t imagine writing a line like “scheming Oriental” on the internet today, and blithely expecting it to be seen as an expose of racism. Not because the world has moved on. But precisely because it has moved backwards.
Significantly, back in those days we didn’t even have a term for edgelordery. Just as the Ancient Greeks didn’t have one for religion, because they assumed it to be all-pervasive. Spotting and defining the disease is normally part of the cure.
It may scarcely need saying that now is not the time for these antics. It may be more important to explain how it ever was. But just in case - now is not the time for these antics. From now on, we can be pinning our own colours to our own mast. How about we say we don’t think that society should be run to further enrich a few billionaires? That probably counts as edgy nowadays.
Post-Script: The role of edgelordery in the Industrial music scene is still more entangled, with some bands becoming direct precursors of the alt.right. But, less involved in that scene, I’d have less to say. This piece by John Eden is interesting…
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