Indie Music’s Not Immune to Fascism
A little over nine years ago, I stood in now-shuttered Brooklyn DIY venue 285 Kent watching a man flail around onstage, punching himself in the face and pulling out his hair while performing a song called “Cop Killer.” Loosely inspired by Body Count’s incendiary song of the same name, the cold, gauzy track opts for broad strokes in place of Ice-T’s pinpointed rage: “cop killer / let’s kill the cops tonight / kill them, cop killer / let’s kill every cop in sight.” John Maus, the self-flagellating man on the 285 Kent stage that night, has said that the obviously exaggerated song is more about overthrowing the “status quo” than protesting the police, but nevertheless, Maus’ set, which also included a song called “Rights For Gays,” was in line with the anti-establishment leftism I expected to see at an all-ages indie venue in 2011.
On Wednesday, Maus, along with fellow acclaimed indie musician Ariel Pink, attended the Washington DC Trump rally that escalated into a violent coup attempt when the Capitol Police opened the gates and the President’s supporters stormed the Capitol building. Filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer shared a photo of herself with Maus and Pink in a DC hotel room (above), captioned, “the day we almost died but instead had a great time,” as well as a video of Maus outside the Capitol. Moyer, who notably directed last year’s incel-sympathizing documentary TFW No GF, said in an email to Pitchfork that she, Maus, and Pink were meeting to discuss an unrelated project and, as a journalist, she “felt obliged to record what was happening” in DC. Pink was more forthright about his involvement:
On Twitter, Pink has been consistently outspoken in his support for Trump, calling him and his team “THE geniuses of our time,” sharing election conspiracy theories, and questioning COVID lockdown measures. Maus, on the other hand, has only responded to Wednesday’s accusations by tweeting a link to a 1937 statement by Pope Pius XI condemning Nazism, perhaps intended to distance himself from the domestic terrorists who occupied the Capitol. If you peruse his recently liked tweets though, you’ll find him digitally high-fiving pretty much anyone rushing to his defense. He has never publicly expressed support for Trump, but as VICE pointed out yesterday, Pink said last year that “John is one thousand and one percent Team Trump” during an interview on alt-right podcast Wrong Opinion.
Is this surprising? There’s certainly enough of a breadcrumb trail to trace Pink’s incremental journey from hypnagogic ironist to bitter contrarian to full-blown rightwing nutjob. He’s been spouting off controversial soundbites ever since he began attracting media attention in the late 2000s, and now has enough under his belt that a commonplace quip about Trump, “there’s always a tweet,” could almost apply to him. “I got maced by a feminist”; “It’s not illegal to be racist”; “Does it make me a pedophile to love pedophiles”; “The media lies to us all the time”; “Everybody’s a victim, except for small, white, nice guys who just want to make their moms proud and touch some boobies” — his brand of offensive verbal diarrhea was enough to prompt a “Who Said It, Ariel Pink or Glenn Beck?” quiz from Pitchfork all the way back in 2014.
Maus’ case is a little more muddled. In 2017, he was called out for appearing on Adult Swim’s Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, a show created by an avowed white supremacist, but in a semi-apologetic interview after the fact, Maus stated that he’s always considered his own politics “left of left of left of left.” He’s previously vilified white supremacy (“structural inequalities based on race and blood is beneath contempt”), but he’s also rushed to his buddy Pink’s defense when the latter was accused of misogyny.
Pink and Maus, who first met as students at California Institute of the Arts and have seemed to remain friends ever since, both rose to prominence amid an era of Peak Irony that gained traction in the late 2000s thanks to sites like Hipster Runoff and musical movements like chillwave and hypnagogic pop. In his 2019 postmortem examination of chillwave, Ian Cohen dubbed Hipster Runoff founder Carles’ tone “so-ironic-it-might-actually-be-sincere,” and I think that accurately describes how Pink’s stumbled from “guy who says offensive things” to “guy with dangerous ideology.” In a way, he parallels Alex Jones, who director Richard Linklater remembered as “this hyper guy we’d all make fun of” when he cast the then-public access TV host in his 2001 film Waking Life. Flash forward 20 years and Jones is one of the few people that Twitter’s deemed threatening enough to permanently ban.
So if you’re familiar with the backstory, then no, Pink and Maus’ participation in one of the most alarming criminal actions of our time isn’t that out of character. But if you house them both under the large, poorly defined umbrella of “indie music,” it is a bit surprising to see this from artists whose work has been exhaustively covered by ostensibly left-sympathizing press outlets and released on ostensibly left-sympathizing record labels like 4AD, Mexican Summer, and Ribbon Music. (Note: a rep from Ribbon Music, the label that has released Maus’ last three albums, declined to comment, and Mexican Summer, the label that released Pink’s last album and is scheduled to release his Sit ‘n Spin compilation later this month, could not be reached for comment.) It’s not like we’re talking about Varg Vikernes, or Skrewdriver, or Iced Earth — whose frontman actually did storm the Capitol — here. Metal and punk have had white supremacist subgenres for years, and therefore those communities have experience with kicking Nazis out of bands, off labels, and out of venues. Despite having just as many problems with inclusion and POC representation, indie music doesn’t often have to confront far-right ideology in its own house.
Lately though, conservative beliefs have seemed to be knocking on — or perhaps seeping underneath — the door. I’m not talking full-throated Nazisim here, but in the past few years, we’ve seen Grimes defending Elon Musk from accusations of union busting, Wavves lashing out at the “woke warriors’’ who gave him flack for being a landlord, and Angel Olsen sharing COVID-19 disinformation on Instagram. It wasn’t that long ago that DIIV kicked out a member for his racist, mysoginist, and homophobic comments on 4chan, or that White Lung’s Mish Barber-Way took the reins as Penthouse’s executive editor and began steering the publication towards alt-rightdom, or that indie music YouTube personality Anthony Fantano was called out for running an alt-right-adjacent channel on the side. I’m sure I’m forgetting some glaring examples, but the above should be enough to convince any millennial indie fans that once saw the genre as a leftist utopia that the tides may be turning.
Famous white musicians, just like plenty of regular white people, are highly liable to get more conservative with age. As far as past generations of indie and indie-adjacent rockers go, John Lydon’s now full-on MAGA, X’s Exene Cervenka is a neoconservative conspiracy theorizer, Melvins’ Buzz Osborne thinks the left is comprised of fascists, and Morrissey… gets more Morrissey by the day. So maybe it’s just that — millennial indie musicians gradually aging into the backwards-minded rockstars they used to read about in SPIN and Rolling Stone — but especially when it concerns the most extreme beliefs, it often seems like these ideologies are borne by various online channels and communities more than they are by age.
In short, fascism infiltrated indie music the same way that we’ve seen it infiltrate seemingly every other institution or scene in the past five years. A VICE founder supports Trump; Lil Wayne supports Trump; hell, the actress who played Anna on The OC supports Trump — why would we expect this vast genre of music to be immune? If it’s startling to see Pink and Maus standing alongside white nationalists, that says more about our naive misconceptions of underground music communities than it does about our previously-held opinions and knowledge of two chillwave-era icons. White men control white supremacy and white men dominate indie music, so it shouldn’t be unthinkable that the two would brush up against each other at some point.
Pink, Maus, and their loyal supporters will chalk this up to “cancel culture” or the “thought police” or whatever tired term the right is currently using to describe getting called out for abhorrent behavior. But despite their protestations, no one’s demanding a homogenous scene of rank-and-file drones. If anything, indie music needs more voices, more opinions, more political debates — just ones that, perhaps, stop short of enabling a violent mob to overthrow the government. For too long white artists and writers within this genre (myself included) have coasted without confronting the realities of the modern world. A review of a white musician’s indie album doesn’t necessarily have to note what the album is “about” or gesture to “these turbulent times,” but a review of a Black musician’s indie album always does.
The vast majority of responses to Pink and Maus’ antics this week have made it clear that this genre is not a safe space for bigotry, and that’s heartening. It’d be great if we saw more bands come out and say something like, in the words of Riley Gale, the late, great frontman of thrash metal rippers Power Trip, “We try to make it pretty clear that we might all be white males, but this is not a band for white males to enjoy and be dumb rednecks.” Pink and Maus may not look or sound like your hick uncle whose Facebook profile picture includes Oakley shades and a Thin Blue Line flag overlay, but this week, they showed their true colors. The next time you see someone in a privileged position justifying sketchy irony by calling it art, remember where that path leads before you grant them your time, attention, and affection.
