Name five songs

It is August — school is fast approaching and I am in the front of the TSA line, awaiting instructions. Laptops in the bag. Shoes off. Arms above your head. Wait.

Wait. One last thing — the agent behind the plastic screen eyes my T-shirt.

“Name five songs.” 

Shit. I forgot what I was wearing. I hear my cousin’s friend sneering, I bet you got that Ramones shirt from SHEIN. I could do him one better — it was actually a dollar from the kids section of Salvation Army. A literal baby tee. Still not a song. Havana Affair. Havana Affair. Havana Affair. Havana Affair. Havana Affair.

“I’m more of a Buzzcocks guy,” I said, by way of omission, hoping to trade one set of nasally Brits for another. He got my meaning. He took a pause, collecting, and simply said: do you like Dead Boys?

I scanned my body. The thick black liner, the silver chain, the damned Ramones tee. I was posing; he saw right through it. And in that moment, he chose to hold out his hand. 

***

Somewhere in America, a teenager surveys their options for the future — astronaut, pageant queen, war criminal — and chooses to become something else. Twenty years ago, this meant turning to subculture. Punks, hippies, skater kids — for every new development in American culture, there was a subculture close behind. They were disciples of acid and cosmology or DMT and synthesizers. From the right assemblage of elements, you could become a new kind of person entirely. Thus kids strapped on their knee-high Converse and gathered somewhere — anywhere — seeking communion in a basement near you.

And then there were the wannabes. Droves of them: lingering awkwardly at the skateparks, stoops and record stores. Hoping, as ex-raver Mirellie Silcoff recounts, to be “scooped up by whatever was happening.” Preening. Posing.

The poser has an illustrious history — and no one retells it like Rax King. In the 2021 essay collection “Tacky,” she extols the virtues of everything hammed-up, caked-on and overdrawn. Among her loves — wedged between cloying vanilla perfume and that Creed album with Scott Stapp’s face superimposed onto a tree — is an ode to the ultimate poser Mecca: Hot Topic.

The space was one thing — the coffin-black interior and wall-to-wall band tees represented a veritable megadose of ‘alternative’ culture — but what affected the young Rax King most was the staff. “Sing, goddess, of Ataris T-shirts and Prismacolor hair extensions and tattoos of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac!” she writes with lingering awe. Her reverence was palpable. She did not merely want to befriend the eyelinered, snake-bitten Hot Topic employees — she wanted to become them.

“Tacky,” to King, is “about joyfully becoming,” rather than immediately being. Being tacky is for posers, preteens and the nouveau riche; tacky is wanting to be something you’re not. Rax King’s tackiest moments resemble acts of dress-up. Other girls put on their mom’s high heels; King threw on her neighbor Big Joe’s XXL Bad Brains tee. Through these acts, both became women. Posing is how we come of age. 

Today, there’s nowhere for us to pose. The one-two punch of the housing crisis and the pandemic accelerated mass closures of public spaces, leaving pre-existing subcultures without a home. Nothing’s left of CBGBs but a toilet seat flecked with legendary grime. Even malls have become empty shells — the so-called Cathedral of Consumption has discarded its physical form as the internet made transcendentalists out of mall goths. Where are they supposed to hiss at passerby and praise Satan now? Youtube Shorts?

Meanwhile, the influence of the internet grows ever stronger. Online, you can study up on the canon anytime you want: what to buy, think and watch in order to fit in. You can fill your ears with it, first by choice, then by default as its algorithms pick at your brain to learn what you like — what you want to like, what you want to become. 

We’re not glancing awkwardly at skater kids’ T-shirts anymore. We’re not walking around in store-bought rockabilly regalia, not skimming the cream of Seattle grunge on MTV. No more half-measures: we get the whole thing, everywhere, all the time. Now you can be anything without suffering the indignity of becoming it. 

But the guidance the internet offers is not neutral. In 2018, Damon Krukowski of the soft-rock band Galaxie 500 noticed something peculiar: a random single of theirs (“Strange,” off 1989’s On Fire) was blowing up on Spotify. Fast. After speaking with a “Spotify Alchemist” (their term for ‘data analyst’), the drummer discovered that its sudden popularity was a quirk of pure statistics. “Strange” is Galaxie 500 at their least eccentric — it’s just three chords at 4/4 — but that simplicity makes it powerful and anthemic. That also made it perfect fodder for the Spotify algorithm. Horrified by this encounter, Krukowski would post to his blog: “might an unintended result of Autoplay, then, be the separating out and rewarding of the most ‘normal’ songs in each band’s catalogue…?”

Krukowski’s words struck terror into me — and humiliation. I loved “Strange.” I loved it like an iPad kid loves The Finger Family. Now, its presence on my playlists felt like contamination. When the algorithms through which we discover people, art and ideas refuse to cooperate — when they instead point to the bland, to the reactionary and to themselves — we too are distorted into bland, reactionary, platform-dependent versions of ourselves. The self-making project is streamlined and watered down. Now, every interest has its pipeline, its furrow in the digital sludge. I simply walked the path of least resistance.

Last week, I caught the end of a Public Memory set at Trans-Pecos. I’d heard his brand of undulating trip-hop before, almost definitely through Spotify’s Autoplay. I didn’t even know Public Memory was one guy. The crowd swayed, casting black-clad shadows on the fog, and watched Robert Toher wail tinnily into a juiced-up landline phone. 

Our joy felt cheap. I kept looking around, wondering how many of these people were like me — summoned here by the machine. Like a swarm of locusts. Or drones. 

Something gathered us at Trans-Pecos that night, the same something that primed us to follow the Venus Twins and do Siouxsie eyeliner. For the new crop of show-organizing teenagers, this something destabilizes their twentieth-century model of subculture. Confronted with the average Instagram user, their blueprint falls apart. 

Faced with this predicament, many scene kids double down on exclusivity. In an interview for Rambler magazine, the New York DIY band Nonequator delivered a State of the Scene address. Guitarist Mitch Owens doesn’t have much kind to say: to him, online flyer-trawlers are “desperately uninteresting people trying to sanitize themselves.” He levels the quintessential poser charge: some people are just “not here for the music.” 

In the very same interview, though, Owens admits that he himself first discovered shows through algorithm-driven platforms. Today, there are plenty of kids in the position he was back then: Kids who might’ve liked the wrong things in the wrong way, and without the sense to know any better. 

The band’s hypocritical distaste towards the modern poser — the guy who found out about your Cool Underground Show by looking up “goth bands in NYC tonight” — reveals a fundamental truth: We’re all flattening out. The same thing that slithered into my brain at the Public Memory show is what guides your hand at a jam session. 

Owens’ position, as is the position of the subculture orthodoxy, is to close the circle tighter. Looking to the “historical ideology of punk communities,” he wants to invest in “word-of-mouth underground networks”: ask-a-punk venues and the like. Promising as this sounds, I don’t think revivalism is the whole answer — or even possible. For one, the scenes of yesteryear wielded that secrecy like a racist, sexist cudgel; it’s what inspired proto-punk Poly Styrene to declare herself a poser. Anyway, the last thing Boston hardcore needs is more excuses to beat up teenagers. 

Still, I won’t deny the need Owens expresses — to insulate his community against mechanization. The project of resistance, though, will require more than just (forgive the word) gatekeeping against “bozos.” During Rax King’s days as a Hot Topic-trawling, Sex Pistols-repping poser, she had made a friend. Big Joe, the same elder punk who gave King her Bad Brains T-shirt, also provided her scene education. She wanted to buy Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols at Barnes & Noble, so he burned the CD for her. She wanted to buy a GG Allin shirt, so he lent his own. 

This is an act of care — and a stake in the ground. Big Joe valued human connection over mass production; through his kindness, he steered King away from the flattened, consumerist version of subcultural participation Hot Topic encourages. It is here King’s ode to Hot Topic transforms into a eulogy of Big Joe. “I miss the generosity he showed me, his desire to share with the next generation,” she laments. If posing is a kind of coming-of-age, it is also when we are most susceptible to influence — when we are most able to guide each other, CD by burned CD, towards a new worldview. We live in a world that transforms us like data: the topography of our faces, the dimensions of our interests. We are at once demographics to be sold to and threats to be neutralized. As tech-spawn wunderkinds threaten to synthesize all our earthly relationships, we must abandon their platforms, turn to each other and strike a pose.

Statement Contributor Amina Cattaui can be reached at aminacat@umich.edu. 

The post Name five songs appeared first on The Michigan Daily.


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