Alt Rock to Alt Right: The “Alternative Revolution” and its Ironic Aftermath
Chair(s): S. Alexander Reed (Ithaca College)
In their televised 2023 New Years Eve performance, Green Day updated an “American Idiot” lyric to declare, “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.” The band drew media outrage for taking what some pundits and listeners incorrectly perceived to be an unprecedented swerve leftward. As The Advocate reports, “Elon Musk wrote that the band had gone ‘from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it.’" Here Musk understands 1990s alt rock as inherently part of his alt-right culture, and is not alone in doing so. In 2012, House Speaker Paul Ryan had mistakenly assumed the famously leftist group Rage Against the Machine was ideologically aligned with his conservative values. If “Gen X is the most Republican of the generations,” (as NPR reported last year, quoting Jean Twenge), then how do we reconcile that with their anti-establishment soundtrack?
Our panel considers the peculiar semiotic and material conditions that connect pre-2000 alternative music to post-2000 neo-reactionary culture. Across three presentations, we chart an historical argument. First, we demonstrate uses of politicized irony in alternative rock’s early years. Then we document the ways that modern far-right movements repurpose alternative songs in public declarations of identity, frequently contravening the music makers’ explicitly progressive politics. This repurposing relies not on specific or intentional ironic reversal, but instead on the subcultural preconditions of generalized irony—outlined in the panel’s first paper—where political content and meaning are secondary to identity and discursive tone. Finally, our third paper indicates historical events that led to demonstrable changes in alternative music’s economics, function, and audience. Watershed moments including the 1996 Telecommunications Act reoriented the genre’s distribution channels, pathways to popularity, and listening contexts, such that artist’s grievances in song came gradually to function more as personal venting than political critique.
Changes such as these (to say nothing of America’s 9/11 rightward shift and its post-2008 austerity) significantly stripped Gen X-coded alternative music of its nominally progressive colors. In this aftermath, we may now ask whether the conservative potential of alternative music in 2024 is really a reversal of early-1990s idealism, or if these regressive meanings lay always latent.
Presentations of the Symposium
“Play Free Bird!” Communal Sarcasm and Alternative Rock in the 1990s
Theo Cateforis
Syracuse University
“Play Free Bird!” While the practice of jokingly shouting for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s famed 1970s classic rock song at live musical performances has a long history, it was during the early 1990s with the rise of American alternative rock that it truly became a ubiquitous phenomenon. Through an examination of various archived performance videos and contemporary reviews and accounts, this paper situates the ritualized shouting of “Free Bird” and other similar gestures as part of a larger sarcastic streak within alternative, and one that specifically emphasized the live music setting as a highly masculinized space. As numerous gender, communication, and humor studies have shown, sarcasm can serve as a form of male communal bonding and solidarity. At alternative rock shows, these sarcastic exchanges thrived in an affectively charged environment, where musicians engaged in loose audience banter, playful misdirection, and irreverent classic rock deconstructions that encouraged male audience members to signal their participation and belonging through performative ironic joking.
Beyond these live settings, this paper contextualizes the “Free Bird” request as part of alternative’s larger tendency towards sarcasm as a rhetorical strategy employed to secure one’s outsider status via insider humor—a tactic that dominated everything from deadpan quips in artist interviews to Nirvana’s self-deprecating insistence that their signing with Geffen Records had rendered them as “corporate rock whores.” As the Generation X author Douglas Coupland noted in 1995, in instances such as these, where a formerly obscure independent label band was suddenly thrust into a blindingly bright pop culture spotlight, irony could be a device to help “make ludicrous situations palatable.” At a time when alternative was undergoing an identity crisis—as major labels, inspired by Nirvana’s massive success, were seeking to extract and exploit alternative’s rebellious cultural cachet—sarcastic rituals like shouting “Free Bird” potentially offered a form of unifying resistance, a way of solidifying alternative’s underground roots and sense of marginalization in the face of its new commercial, mainstream reality.
Protest Song as Empty Vessel: The Leftist Anthems of the Alt Right
S. Alexander Reed
Ithaca College
In August 2017, the neofascist National Policy Institute and its chairman Richard Spencer took center stage at the lethal “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA. The hate group drew national attention and helped popularize “alt right” as an ideological brand. For their October followups at the University of Florida and beyond, Spencer assembled a pre-speech mixtape to introduce his organization. The 13-song “College Tour playlist” is remarkable in its misreading of openly socialist and anticolonial songs by alternative rock mainstays.
Two examples are illustrative. Midnight Oil’s strident “The Dead Heart” aims to represent the plight of aboriginal peoples amid Australian settler colonialism: “We carry in our hearts the true country… We follow in the steps of our ancestry.” But when this appears in the rally’s white supremacist frame, the anti-European lyric becomes fealty to “‘a secret Europe’… beyond “the ‘deadly’ liberal democratic order and [beyond] ‘homogenizing’ multicultural society,” as scholar of extremism Anton Shekhovtsov writes (455). Likewise, Depeche Mode’s “Where’s the Revolution” functioned for the NPI as walk-on music, despite the band’s literal donning of Karl Marx cosplay in the song's video, and despite their specific, forceful denouncement of Richard Spencer.
By way of such nominally leftist politics on a far-right playlist, this paper asks how alternative music’s historical frameworks of membership and interpretation availed this seemingly unexpected space to neoethnic conservatism. It asks whether such allowances are a bug of 1990s progressive culture, or an insidious feature for its sizeable white male base. It asks what musical features make a song most susceptible to political reversal. Central in the discussion is the 1990s’ genre-wide project of ironically decoupling political claims from political commitments. The paper argues that such ironization heightened the risk of audiences’ perceiving the mere formal stance of “protest” above and in lieu of a given protest song’s literal content. Ultimately it illustrates ways that listeners—certainly by 2017—felt license (or plausible deniability) to replace the crux of their favorite song with any political or personal cause.
[Shekhovtsov, Anton. "Apoliteic Music: Neo-Folk, Martial Industrial and 'Metapolitical Fascism,'" Patterns of Prejudice, 43:5 (December 2009) 431–57.]
“No, You Can’t Take That Away from Me!”: Wounded Entitlement, 1990s Alt Rock, and Financialized Media Industries Then and Now
Robin James
Palgrave Macmillan
From incels raging about women owing them sex to Moms for Liberty griping that the presence of LGBTQ+ people and media infringes on their property rights over their children, contemporary alt-right movements use claims of personal injury to go viral and create media spectacles drawing disproportionate attention to their causes. This paper traces the genealogy of this affect of wounded entitlement backwards from 2020s alt-right media to 1990s alternative rock. In Daphne Carr’s 33 ⅓ book on Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, she argues its songs “focus almost exclusively on the personal tragedy of the people and institutions that fail one individual: Trent Reznor. NIN’s lyrics explore the repressions of religion, family, and society, but only as they pertain to one life” (21). Whereas industrial music traditionally rages against the machine both literally and figuratively, Carr argues that Reznor reframes industrial’s heaviness as an expression of private individual aggrievement.
By the end of the 1990s, this wounded entitlement would come to dominate alt rock radio and Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart. After the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the radio business grew increasingly financialized as huge companies such as Clear Channel gobbled up stations across the country. In a financialized media industry, the main audience a company addresses is not consumers but investors, who want to believe their investments are capable of exponential growth. Building upon Robin James’s work on resilience, gender, and neoliberalism, this paper argues that the performance of wounded entitlement is a way for people with otherwise privileged identities (i.e. cishetero nondisabled white men) to tap into resilience discourse and perform damage that can then be overcome in the sort of spectacular and exponential enclosure of value expected in a financialized market. Though media industries are widely financialized today, financialization hit alt rock radio early due specifically to the Telecommunications Act. In this respect, 1990s alt rock is a harbinger of what would come as financialization spread across media industries. The growth of alt-right media and the prevalence of performances of wounded entitlement are connected responses to the financialization of media industries.
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