The Global Costco
The internet was much bigger 20 years ago than it is today. Considering how overwhelming and inescapable “being online” has become since, such a claim seems ludicrous on its face. But this is to confuse size with capacity. The internet today is crowded. It only seems large because the centralizing mentality that dominates it lends a certain vastness to it. But it is the vastness of the warehouse store, not of the village in which the older internet took shape. The old internet seemed smaller because we knew less of its scope. It was more closed off. For instance, mass online communication in 2000 was limited to email and AOL Instant Messenger. If you wanted to reach someone on those platforms you needed their address and screen name, which you had to get by asking them personally. If permission to these items was granted to you they felt like precious trinkets, or if you got them secondhand, like valuable intelligence.
This need-to-know basis rule applied well beyond that. Without the simplifications of a YouTube, a Facebook, a Wikipedia, a Reddit, or a Spotify, extra effort was needed to find what you were looking for. For funny videos there was eBaum’s World and Homestar Runner. For music there was CD Now and Napster. For time-killing games there was Newgrounds. For trading memes and more niche companionship there was any number of message boards. For information, however, you were on your own. For the naturally curious but also naturally solitary like myself, at once entranced and uneasy about “cyberspace,” you had to develop a craft for finding what you wanted to know. Or what you wanted to be.
I wanted to be cool. And I wanted to be a part of something. In 1999 I had become punk, or something approaching it. In 2000 I was immersing myself deeper into the local scene. Not that it was easy meshing with its other members. I was embarrassed of showing too much enthusiasm and afraid of asking stupid questions. I wanted to know without having to show my ignorance. Taking to the internet was the best alternative, and something of a gamble, but one that paid off.
The internet circa 2000 was when bands had “official websites” rather than social media pages. It marked a shift in the accessibility of those bands, allowing you to email or instant message members directly. I took advantage of this more than once. It was to my good fortune that the people on the other end were very gracious, kind, and patient. One such recipient was Ben Weinman of The Dillinger Escape Plan. Dillinger’s members were 25 or so minutes away in the Morristown area, but they cultivated an unusual mystique that allowed for only the most basic information to be available. I emailed them—very presumptuously, I admit—about their lyrics. Weinman replied promptly, offered some generalities before providing two links to interviews he thought would be more helpful. One of them was to a site called Buddyhead. I’d never heard of it before, but once I clicked it was the beginning of a very intense, years-long commitment.
Creatures Like Us
Buddyhead, like most web-based cultural enterprises, became popular in a two-step process. Step one was its modest origins. It was created in 1998 by Los Angeles-based photographer Travis Keller to showcase his work, mostly for skateboarders and bands. It soon evolved into doing interviews, record reviews, merch, an internet radio show (before there were pods from which to cast), and a record label. They did so without trying, or at least seeming as though they were not trying. Step two, then, was its perfect timing.
1998 to 2002 were my high school years. They were, notable exceptions aside, the pinnacle of low-stakes stability and prosperity. At least if you lived in a suburb. Everyone likes to think that their span of high school was the most significant in the history of high school; a sort of decade within a decade. But I think I make no exaggeration for my own span’s uniqueness. Less for any single popular event than because of the abundance of activity. Alternative rock had collapsed. The surviving icons had regressed into some bloated ironic-but-not-really pseudo-glam rock godheadedness. This could be seen in Hole’s Celebrity Skin, Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals, Smashing Pumpkins’ Machina/The Machines of God, Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, and No Doubt’s Return of Saturn. I’m sure you could make some compelling contrarian cases for some of these albums, but at the time they seemed at once exhausted and desperate. This was responded to with a rapid, and seemingly random, succession of trends: boy bands, pop tarts, pop punk, the emo false start of 2000, the rock revival, the Radiohead revival, the swing revival, nü metal, Coldplay. It turns out that social stability makes for cultural chaos.
In fact it would be better to say that it was a period of lasts for old media as a whole. Television, magazines, and record labels were running on the fumes of their economic staying power and cultural influence. Napster was not a death blow, exactly, but the panic was genuine, everyone was caught off-guard and a significant shift in influence was taking shape. And this made a last of something else: the David-and-Goliath conflict between indie and mainstream culture. An old conflict Buddyhead gleefully fought using new media.
Buddyhead coincided with the peak of the post-grunge punk underground, the very scene in which I’d found myself. Any band I listened to at the time, Buddyhead covered or promoted: The Dillinger Escape Plan, Botch, Cave In, Drowningman, The National Acrobat, The Icarus Line, Ink & Dagger, At the Drive-In. Even among the major hip brands like SPIN and Vice there was a dearth of coverage for these passionately followed acts, for which Buddyhead made up the difference. The interviews were not especially deep, being very much in the vein of Arsenio Hall’s casual chumminess spiked with unpredictable doses of irreverence. Their record reviews section was known for its rating system of photos of Axl Rose doing various activities. Their sex advice column was mostly a series of jokes and put-on. They sold a t-shirt that just read “HOMOPHOBIA IS GAY,” while at the same time spray-painting “$uckin’ Dick$” on the side of The Strokes’ tour bus. While playing a SXSW show at a Hard Rock Café, Icarus Line guitarist and Buddyhead cofounder Aaron North broke a case containing a Stevie Ray Vaughn guitar and attempted to play it. I saw it reported on MTV News by an ecstatic Iann Robinson.
Homegrown Filth
The juvenility was very audience-appropriate, but so was its appeal to the sense of injustice at being overlooked coupled with the detached cool of being unacceptable anyway. This was never more passionately expressed than on the site’s erratically updated but always anticipated gossip section. The actual gossip related to the LA scene and the wider music industry—who was getting signed, who was getting dropped, whose ticket sales were slumping, etc.—was trivial compared to the interspersed invective and rants against Buddyhead’s declared enemies, all that were overhyped, inescapable, and appallingly mediocre: Courtney Love, Papa Roach, Dashboard Confessional, The Strokes, Interpol, Alien Ant Farm probably. I believe, but cannot confirm conclusively, that it was Buddyhead who always referred to the White Stripes as the “incest twins.”
But there was no greater foil for Buddyhead’s mockery than Fred Durst. At the time, the Limp Bizkit frontman was at the peak of his fame, and the most overexposed pop musician aside from Britney Spears. In the eyes of adults, he had ascended to the role of a spokesman for disaffected youth. This made Durst a routine magnet for mockery and censure. The problem was that that seemed part of his appeal. He had what today is called “meme magic,” where every insult and criticism could be deflected or made to enhance his notoriety while the critics came off poorly. Like Marilyn Manson at the same time, Fred Durst made an easy scapegoat for anything that went wrong in society. Op-eds writers, to say nothing of its opportunistic organizers, laid most of the chaos of Woodstock ’99 at his behavior before a more complex picture became accepted two decades later. His macho posturing and unshakable self-confidence in his own greatness could send the artists he was ostensibly overtaking into conniption fits. And for every shot, Durst returned fire.
Buddyhead took the shrewder yet nobler road in choosing not to take Durst seriously. Indeed, all the scolding and mudslinging could not compare to the time Keller and North gained access to Durst’s office at Interscope to take a photo with his gold records and steal from his supply of red baseball caps. These provocations validated my innate belief that popularity did not confer invincibility. And they also reinforced my resolve to never lower my aesthetic standards or to settle for what was being handed to me by people who, by virtue of their sales figures and marketing budgets, thought they knew what was good for me. Durst was bad not just because he was a vulgar sexist butt rocker, but because he was a savvy businessman building a butt rock fiefdom with protégés like Staind and Puddle of Mudd. The mainstream flooded content into the suburbs as if it was a trough and its residents were pigs. Buddyhead showed us that pigs are capable of making and consuming their own filth. I must have visited Buddyhead every day while I was in high school. Unlike most of my generation at the time, this was not about being a part of an online community, but about clarifying a worldview.
The Trough and the Compass
But that worldview had an underside. I had adopted a bogus stance, rooted in negative territory cordoned off by people whose hatred of clout and mediocrity betrayed an obsession with clout and mediocrity, and who felt that hoarding the former defended them from being stained by the latter. Buddyhead was less Sub Pop Records and more Check Out This Fucking Hipster or Vice’s “Dos and Don’ts.” I had only myself to blame, though the affectation is not unique and lives on today. There is always a podcast you must listen to and a scene you must be a part of, and if you can’t be a part of it you must follow its dictates. Outwardly, they carry all the same attractions as Buddyhead did: the irreverence, the unflappability, the lack of pretension, the sharp reading of the zeitgeist, the sense of being for the right things and against the wrong things. They are credited for not taking things too seriously, though adhering to them implies a certain seriousness, of being tuned in to how society really looks.
Scenes endure because they give you something. They package cultural perfection in such a way as to make acquiring it seem effortless. All the better that they confirm those prejudices you already know to be true. And maybe they are true. Maybe there is some substance to the self-conscious bricolage of art damage aesthetics, mystical theory, and reactionary politics that Dimes Square has adopted. But scenes fade just as easily if all they do is provide and all you do is accept. A trough is no less a trough if it’s smaller and filled with gourmet ingredients.
It’s a mistake to think of a scene only in terms of schematics, whether in person or online. By that standard, there is no distinction between Stonehenge and a food court. Culture is not contained easily within a place, nor upheld consistently by the dominant clique within it. Scenes are at once starting points and compasses: a foundation on which a shared history is built and a guide for adherents as they build out from it. A difference in lifestyle and philosophy one scene member has from another does not rend the connection between them. If it all builds back to the same context, each is bound to respect the other. Otherwise they degrade everything. Worse, they acquiesce to the simplistic, unthinking forces from which the scene was a refuge. Culture war, once it reduces social life to the level of checkers and leaves each side blaming the other for helping reduce it the most, is waged against nothing less than context itself.
I don’t disdain people who saw the scene and refused it on its terms; but I feel pity for those who felt excluded from it, and who nurtured that exclusion to force new scenes into being on shallow premises compared to the scenes that are well-rooted and continuously branching out. It took many more years of maturity to realize what my own mistake was. I was never going to get on with others in a scene if we were at cross purposes. There is no common context between those who want a fraternity and those in search of a moral alternative.
Moreover, I was never going to be cool. What we call “cool” is not attained through acquiring goods but through refining judgment. It is where self-possession and autonomy intersect, something you apply or withdraw as your liberty and sense of responsibility see fit. But confusing coolness with consumption patterns or counter-consumption patterns is a great human failing with no mild remedy. So far as I know, pigs are contentedly oblivious to it, and I am sorry for ever dragging them into this.