On the prospect of “joylessness”

Hey y’all, we are deep inside “TERF Wizard Blood Libel Game” discourse territory, a place we collectively get to revisit two more times this year since the game comes out on April 4 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and July 25 for Nintendo Switch. Aren’t we so happy about that? The discourse wheel spins ever faster! Never before have I cursed this website’s name this sincerely!! But I’ve been thinking about a particular line of argumentation that has popped up in the days since the TERF Wizard Game’s reviews went live. It started with IGN’s review, specifically the sidebar that said, “As critics, our job is to answer the question of whether or not we find Hogwarts Legacy to be fun to play and why” — direct quote — and has popped up in other forms elsewhere.

It goes like this: Boycotting media/cultural objects is not only ineffective^[1]I agree with this, but it’s also not that simple. I think that while it’s ineffective in pure economic terms, it can still be effective in complicating prevailing narratives around a … Continue reading, it’s a slippery slope to becoming a killjoy. Starting with the TERF Wizard Game, you will eventually run out of things to like because everything has been canceled for being too problematic. You will become nothing but a hateful shell of a human being yourself.

I am a major proponent of living deliciously. I love rich, flavorful, aromatic foods; big, overwhelming sounds; spectacular, gorgeous views. More specifically, I am a music sicko: if you give me the opportunity I will systematically go through a band’s discography with you and talk about the band’s history and my own relationship to the music. (Ask the people in the No Escape Discord server. I just inflicted Chumbawamba on them. And I’ll fuckin do it again, don’t think I won’t. [update 5/23/2023: I just did it again with the crust punk/metal output of Alex CF from Fall of Efrafa]) I have been obsessively downloading and listening to new and “new” punk and hardcore since I was fucking 15. I can tell you about mysterious guy hardcore, burning spirits, the two separate movements of American powerviolence, and why I still cry listening to “Gainesville” by Dillinger Four.

I don’t tend to focus on this as much in my writing here, because practically, No Escape is mostly about video games even with the “digital culture” rebrand last year. If I did, I know I’d mostly want to share with you the stuff that I’ve found that I like, rather than act as a music critic. Being a music critic seems like the hardest job in the fucking world to me. As opposed, you know, to video games. That being said, being a participant-fan in punk and hardcore has not always been easy. Ever so often you find out (usually right when you’re first waking up) that a member of a band you’ve loved for years has done something shitty and/or horrendous, and the rest of the band has been covering for them or even agrees with what they did or sees nothing wrong with their behavior. You can insert a whole gamut of reprehensible things a rock musician might or could do and it would fit here, ranging from allegations of sexual assault to straight up just being a Nazi.

What do you do as a fan at that point? Well, there are two paths (three, at most): your first path is to take the attitude that, well, you can “separate the art from the artist,” you can still listen to their old shit, you can even go to see them, because the whole band’s not that one shithead, right? This attitude will typically not earn you many friends in the scene, but it’s also not as uncommon as one might think or expect given punk’s (misbegotten) rep as a “woke” genre.

The other attitude you could take is to kill your idols. You can’t be hurt by a band or musician you looked up to being terrible if you don’t look up to any band or musician, right? Artists are just people, they do shit that sucks sometimes, and you’re not under any moral obligation to sign the umpteenth “solid dude backed hard” petition or reactively financially support them anymore if they turn out to do shit that sucks. You can call this cancel culture if you want, but this is typically the tack I’ve taken over the years. If a band or musician or other person within a particular scene I’ve been a part of turns out to be a shitbag, it costs me nothing to simply not hang out with or around that shitbag or otherwise materially support them anymore.

(The third attitude is to simply ignore the situation and pretend you’ve been living under a fucking rock every time it’s brought up… like the first path, this will not make you many quality friends.)

I’ve been actively participating in punk rock since 2007, when I was like 15 or 16. I’ve had to employ kill your idols a fair few times since then. There are too many instances for me to succinctly list them all off here, but the general way it’s gone has been: “oh I just heard this heinous shit about [insert band here], the allegations look credible. *deletes music off MP3 player, moves on with day.*” A couple times it’s happened very close to home, and I’ve had to do more to advocate for the survivor in those instances. But if I have absolutely no other connection to an artist who sucks shit than “oh I have your albums,” that problem can be rectified with literally no lost sleep on my end.

Is this fair? Shouldn’t I give an artist (writer/filmmaker/painter/actor/game developer) more of a chance? Don’t they deserve to make their case as to why they’re not shitbags? As a participant-fan, I am neither responsible for accepting their apology or interested in participating in their accountability process. It has nothing to do with me. They hurt someone else, they chose to drape themselves in fashy bullshit, they chose to act a certain way, and whether they like the social consequences or not is not my problem.

Incidentally, my favorite kinda whiny “anti-cancel culture” song from a punk band again comes from Dillinger Four, with “Wrecktheplacefantastic” off the 2000 album Versus God.

Hooray for the gun, hooray for the chair
Hooray for the prisons and poisonous air
Maybe it matters and maybe it don’t, I think it matters to me
And if there’s one thing we learn today, it’s watch what you say

Raise a glass to years gone past
And smash it on the floor
Destroy all the yesterdays, too little too late
They’re nothing anymore.

Dillinger Four is, I think, genuinely one of the best US-based pop-punk bands, and one reason is because their lyrics were always rhetorically a cut above the crowd. In the context Versus God came out in, the quoted verses could be about anything from the culture of fear and paranoia of near-9/11 America to sanctimonious infighting scene kids who used the pretense of ideology to make each other look bad. There’s just a kind of artistry to this song that’s missing in other reactive screeds against people not just slavishly signing onto a band’s, uh, wagon.

To my knowledge, Dillinger Four has also never been embroiled in a single controversy, lmao.

But anyway. Back to our friends who make the argument that kill your idols leads to a joyless life devoid of culture. I like to think I’m still doing pretty well for myself in this regard all these years later; I’m still finding joy in new music, and I pretty regularly go back to listen to things that I loved over a decade ago. Sometimes the contexts for why I love a particular thing change, and sometimes I find new interpretations that complicate my enjoyment of something in interesting ways. Hell, sometimes I find that my taste preferences have magically flipped and things I didn’t like, I now enjoy (and vice versa). But the process of cultural consumption has never been linear, at least for me. The steps aren’t clearly defined, and often lead to messy results.

The fact of the matter is, I have been constantly, perpetually blessed with being able to experience great new shit made by wonderful people. There is an avalanche of good media out there right now that vastly outpaces the volume of things that shitbags can produce. The fact that I haven’t listened to, say, the Casualties since 2011, or Screeching Weasel since Ben Weasel punched a woman onstage several years ago, doesn’t actually do anything to dim the shine coming from the work I get to immerse myself in every day. This is as true in video games as it is in music. As a fan of games, why would I play a mediocre third-person action-adventure game whose progenitor supports intensely bigoted causes when I can play dozens, hundreds of other things that make me happier and aren’t actively contributing to harm?

No, to me, it seems much more like a joyless life to constantly shape my media consumption around whether or not I’m owning the libs or whatever. To constantly stick myself with shittier products and media just because I think it’s gonna set off people I don’t like, or because Tuckkker Carlson told me I need to like it. Eating shit and insisting it’s good when there’s an abundance of delicious food nearby feels like such an own-goal that instead of feeling any kind of “outrage” over your media consumption habits (which again have nothing to do with me otherwise), I just pity y’all.

It’s like a shot when you realize
Destroying yourself is not a compromise
Cut off your nose to spite your face
There are somethings in life
That time can’t erase, you know
We all choose paths that we know are wrong
And live with ourselves
When the meaning is gone
It could be you, me, anyone
But I don’t need to feel another’s under my thumb

Dillinger Four, “¡¡Noble Stabbing!!” (Situationist Comedy [2002])