I am not as hip as I used to be.
Perhaps I never was (strike that, I know I never was), but I at least had an “in” with cool, indie, college-radio tunes as a DJ and reviewer for what was used to be an institution of cool – in a cold, snobbish-but-smart way. It’s not what it used to be, either, but it remains one of the best college radio stations in the country.
Regardless, I say this to caveat my eventual point with the following: Perhaps I’m just out of the loop.
Perhaps I’m out of the loop as to what the cool kids are listening to these days, but from my perspective, I can’t help but be sad to see the death of genderqueer in the alternative music scene.
Where are the Stephin Merritts? Is there no legacy to Riot Grrrl? What ever happened to those oh-so-cute gender benders of twee? Poly Styrene, sadly, is literally dead.
Perhaps it’s as I’ve seen posited elsewhere that the battle is over — in an age in which our greatest trash pop culture hero blends boundaries, it’s no longer cool & 'alt' to be weird.
I'd like to take the more positive slant that the alt scene, like the wider world, truly is different these days — that culture is nearing a post-gender existence in which we no longer need a hetero-appearing man to sing a lovesong to his boy walking down the street because, well, acceptance is overall high.
Pitchfork (not exactly a bastion of cultural capital at the moment, but I enjoyed this piece) recently took this stance, slightly, with Riot Grrrl, opening an extended essay with an anecdote on girls too young to have been alive to see the release of Pussy Whipped (full disclosure: I was 5) enjoying proto-all-girl-group Dum Dum Girls. Enjoying and, we should note, reveling in the "coolness" of both their rocker status and unabashed (would ballsy be too weird an adjective? no) femininity.
I'd like to say this "is it even a big deal anymore?" is where we are not just with feminism but also with the related vein of overt gender-bending as a stick in the eye to the normative. But that's not the case.
The genderqueer issue brings up a larger one in alternative music today. Instead of subcultures and scenes, we're beyond fractured into a million tiny blogs, with a lack of sharing between them that stunts the kind of swapping growth that always used to exist in the music underground.
There is no culture of rebellion, because there is no one culture to rebel against.
I'm assured the genderqueer tunes are out there, but they're more about niche markets related to identity than the they are about the quality of music. (Translation: It's a lot of club music, which is fine, just not my thing.)
I realize fully that at 23 and having never been a scenester, I'm not qualified, really, to make this sweeping damnation. But it's hard not to feel that, outside of a few covers here and there, the true stars of the field don't have the courage or interest (cajones?) to do it.
And though I stick to my guns like the grumpy old spinster I'll always be that alt music has declined in originality and quality since the late 1990s, I'm happy with what I think is part of the "problem": It really isn't shocking to be androgynous anymore. Where did all the cool genderqueer music go? Good heavens, I might have to be optimistic and say it's a victim of its own success.
Just don't mind me when I still sneak off to disconnect with the big scary interwebs to enjoy my Au Pairs 45s.
cross-posted: needmorefriends
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