Alt-Rock, Lads, and Club Culture: A Reconsideration

Recently in Noisey (Vice Magazine’s music-focused offshoot) an article was published, entitled “Britain’s Alt-Rock Scene Is Misogynistic and Keeping Lad Culture Alive.” The general outline of this article by Hannah Ewans runs that Uprawr and Facedown, two of the UK’s biggest alt-rock nights, as well as the widespread alt-rock publication Front, are misogynistic, exploiting the female body for the pleasure of male consumers, and that they keep the macho, objectifying, and generally dislikeable revival of Lad culture going from strength to strength.
As a general rule, my opinion of Noisey (and to a greater or lesser extent, Vice) veers from suspecting that it is all a massive trolling exercise, to thinking that it is attempting to be serious and that it has the journalistic integrity of a bran flake.

I will acknowledge that the promotional materials for Uprawr and Facedown do little to distance these nights from Lad culture, and that what goes on in these clubs does frequently stray into the territory of sexualised male-centric hedonism, which is where Lad culture thrives like a pathogen in a moist petri dish. Furthermore, Ewans is right in pointing out that Front is for all intents and purposes FHM with more piercings and tattoos.
So, does this mean that Britain’s alt-rock scene is sexist and keeping lad culture alive?

No. For several reasons, I do not agree with what Ewns argues in her article. I believe that there is a problematic rise of Lad culture afoot right now, but I believe that this is a problem that is not restricted to alt-rock, or even symptomatic of the alt-rock scene in general. It is a much bigger issue, and one for which I propose actions very different to Ewans’ solution.

First and foremost, we need to look at the term “alt-rock.” Short for “alternative rock,” this term is variably used as an umbrella term for grunge, pop-punk, late-80s/90s US ska-punk, “skater” music, nu-metal, and a whole host of other things that sprung up in the 90s, mostly in America, that went against the grain of the L.A. scene. So immediately, we are faced with a term that is utterly vague and in no way homogenous enough to address in its entirety.
Is the pop-punk student night Uprawr infiltrated by Lad culture? Arguably yes.
Is the underground heavy rock night New Heavy Sounds infiltrated by Lad culture? No.
Yet, you could easily put forth the case that both are equally at home under the “alt-rock” banner. So, right from the start, the Noisey article tars with the same brush entire swathes of music culture that have absolutely nothing to do with one another, other than being, either by virtue of their marketing or by virtue of their detachment from the mainstream zeitgeist, “alternative” rock. For thesake of argument, I’m going to assume that by “alternative rock,” Ewans is referring to the pop-punk-dominated movement that existed in the late 90s and throughout the 00s.

My second issue is that Ewans is basing her argument not on the music scene, but on two club nights and a magazine. This, to me, seems a very small segment of a scene, and very under-representative. Having been to a lot of gigs that would come under the “alt-rock” definition used here (Alkaline Trio, Billy Talent, Green Day, AFI, etc), I would venture forth the statement that the gigs have an entirely different gender politics from the clubs and magazines that Ewans discusses.
Now, there are some pretty solid reasons for this. Amongst people my age (or thereabouts) there is still, in general, a very strong undercurrent, or occasionally even overcurrent, of Lad culture. So, we can say that Lad culture is still “in” in a fairly mainstream way amongst young people from 18 through to their early 30s. Now, look at the promotional materials for Uprawr and Facedown. There is surprisingly little differentiating them from most mainstream clubs of a similar demographic, i.e.: people in their late teens to very early 30s. They all feature bangin’ choons, cheap(ish) alcohol, and the age-old adage that sex sells. The alt-rock elements really are little more than lip service and a USP, in the same way an “I less-than-three the eighties” night or an ABBA night might work. Or, indeed, a TOWIE-themed alt-rock night.

In fact, Uprawr doesn’t even contain any live music. It is a national clubbing outfit in the vein of Ministry of Sound. With that in mind, is it little wonder that they would deploy tactics such as bikini-clad Jägermeister-ladies or sharing articles from the reprehensible Return of Kings blog? Not really. Uprawr are a brand, advised by brand advisors, and presumably have a roughly-sketched caricature or a key demographic to work from. They are one of the UK’s biggest rock-themed clubbing institutions. In other words, they are pretty mainstream. And what is the mainstream’s branding caricature of rock? Macho, oversexed, hedonistic. And they angle their marketing and club events accordingly. Resultingly, the macho, oversexed, hedonistic Lads jump on board, to show off how hardcore they are, and take advantage of the previously more level gender playing field in the alt-rock scene. And you know what? Any big company, be it Uprawr, Facedown, or Front, won’t actually care. Lads come in, and Lads spend money. So, to keep the easy cash flow, they’re not about to make a U-turn and make their products less appealing to Lads. Instead, they’ll play fairly mainstream levels of alt-rock (everything from a late-90s/00s school leavers’ party, plus newer guitar-based chart material and some stuff too racy or sweary for a school do), and research into what other clubs do to retain their clientele. And act accordingly.

At the end of the day, if you go to a product that paddles in the mainstream, you will get either mainstream attitudes in their purest form (such as Lad culture), or mainstream assumptions of what a particular subculture indulges in. And this is precisely what has occurred with Ewans’ article. Front was created, not as an alternative rockers’ magazine, but as a rival to Loaded. Furthermore, until earlier this year, it was owned by Kane Corporation Ltd, who were not exactly bastions of the alternative music scene. So, despite what its marketing claims may be, Front was, and is, first and foremost a lads’ mag marketed to the “alternative scene” rather than a publication stemming from the “alternative scene” to serve the scene. So to judge Britain’s alt-rock scene on that grounds would be like using Suicide Girls to argue that goth is a misogynistic subculture. And no one would really be prepared to do that.
As for Uprawr, it markets itself for its “its extravert and over top LA style parties” (www.totaluprawr.com/about-us/london/), which in the case of Birmingham is “Located at the ASYLUM a well known venue in the alternative scene for bands [sic]” (https://www.totaluprawr.com/about-us/birmingham/). So, it is more along the lines of a partying experience in venues known to be part of the alternative scene. And let us not forget that the alt-rock scene, or at least parts of it, were intended to go against the L.A. scene, rather than ape it in the way Uprawr does. As for Facedown, it is arguably more to do with the alt-rock scene proper, by virtue of its inclusion of live music by “alt-rock” bands. However, they also have a dubstep room and are advertised as “London’s biggest rock night” (https://www.facebook.com/facedownrockclub/info), rather than “London’s biggest alternative night.” So, again we find ourselves in the sea of mainstream caricatures of rock culture, and lowest-common-denominator club-fillers, by the admission of these very nights themselves.

In all honesty, the “alternative” scene isn’t always the best place as regards gender politics. Pop-punk has a strong foundations in songs that raged about ex-girlfriends, and bands such as Emmure and BrokeNcyde have crawled from what could well be the worst stuff imaginable that lurks within the subculture, in its utterly diverse and almost indefinable vastness. But what Ewans is targeting here is not so much the misogyny and Lad culture coming from within the scene, as the way in which mainstream Lad culture has infiltrated the more mainstream, capital-focused elements that have until now leeched from the scene and given very little in return other than clothing labels and cheap shots of Sourz and Jäger. The bottom line is that if radical feminism was fashionable in the mainstream, you’d need to be carrying the SCUM manifesto to get into Uprawr, as they would see that as the new big moneymaker. But that is not the case. So, to cash in on what´s big in the mainstream, we have Lad culture in all its putrid glory. It’s that simple.

But what galls me perhaps more than the black-and-white flattening of a vast umbrella term, more than the frankly baffling sampling techniques used to make a case in Ewans’ article, is the end statement, where she points the finger firmly at bands to fix all this.
This is not right.
Bands are a small part of a subculture, once a subculture gains autonomy and strength. Take a look at the black metal scene: in the beginning, if the big-name bands had said something (like “burn churches”), the fifty or so core adherents of the subculture would have obeyed. But could Varg Vikernes truly and honestly have any say in what the entirety of black metal subculture do with itself? No. What if Mayhem, Vikernes, Dimmu Borgir, Satyricon, and Watain all said something in collective statement? I still think it would have very minimal impact on the lives of many black metallers.
Alt-rock is an even bigger, even more nebulous scene than black metal, and so it is not squarely on the artists to make the change. It is squarely on everybody in the scene. Full stop. Each member of the alt-rock scene is a perfectly functional person capable of making their own decisions and creating their own contributions to the scene. To say that it is the responsibility of the bands (and implicitly no one else) would be like saying that it is not only the right of Russell Brand to carry on with his Che Guevara antics, but that these antics are his primary responsibility as an entertainer. To say that it is up to Russell Brand and his fellow comedians, artists, and assorted others, to stand up and make our socio-political choices for us.
This statement, or course, is ridiculous.
Of course artists should take part in a progressive movement – if they wish to save their subculture from being taken over by Lad culture, that is their prerogative and they can and should do all they can to aid the cause. But that should never be at the cost of allowing everyone else to be lazy. The subculture is, at the end of the day, an aggregate of all those within it, from clothes designers, to writers, to promoters, to people who just want a night out. A united movement from all those segments of the subculture will effect a change far greater and far quicker than anything bands could ever do to change the state of things. In the case of Uprawr, bands have an utterly minimal input into the night, and therefore to argue that bands must effect change in there is bizarre. Confronting Uprawr must be done by simply not attending. Just make a club night that has a better atmosphere.
There are pockets of resistance, of the alternative that has not been eaten by the mainstream. But these are areas that the mainstream just is not interested in, where equal gender politics and other positive elements are not statements of rebellion or reactionary gestures, but simply a naturalised state of how things are regardless of exterior mainstream phenomena such as Lad culture. That is what the rest of the subculture should aim for. But that means that alt-rock in Ewans’ definition must put on its own nights and print its own zines, free from the interference of national clubbing organisations or the input of corporations. If there truly is a pop-punk fan subculture worthy of the title left in Britain, it needs to stir itself into action and redefine itself as its own positive entity, rather than just a dead scene that is used as a marketing ploy by people selling stuff to the 18-34 demographic.

As a parting shot, just remember: alt-rock is a massive term, and there are vast swathes of it that have good gender politics, whereas some pockets are atrocious. It is with entities such as BrokeNcyde and Emmure that the true problems within alt-rock lie. With the problems that Ewans outlines, it seems to me that it is a case of mainstream clubbing culture using the skin of alternative culture to leech money out of it.
The lessons learned from here are pretty important, and the biggest that I can think of is not to generalise such a diverse subculture by tarring it with the sins of the few simply for the sake of a sensationalist headline.