Thirteen Birds vs. The Record Desk

You hiss and groan and you constantly moan
But you don’t ever go away
That’s because
All you need is me

You roll your eyes up to the skies
Mock horrified
But you’re still here
All you need is me

– Morrissey, “All You Need Is Me”

Morrissey quoting aside, hate is a strangely American virtue. Seems like if folks don’t hate us, we feel we’re only lukewarm. And if we can’t work up a moderate-sized hateball for someone, -thing, or idea — why that’s a failing of the motivating passions. A little yellow bile does a body good. I have some first-hand experience with Hate American Style. Since about 2001 or so I’ve made a public nuisance of myself on an internet message board.

It started out in good faith. I entered the fray mostly to stick up for bands and records I like that certain internet guitar weenies were abusing for various aesthetic and personal reasons. I wasn’t too far removed from my days as an undergraduate English major at the time — arguing about what you liked and why it was a worthy undertaking. I took as well as I gave. I turned a couple sharp phrases and, occasionally, made my points deftly and wittily. At the time I thought I was merely engaging in spirited debate. But slowly dissent and discussion gave way to rancor and petty point scoring. Teams were picked. Lines were drawn. Dodgeballs flew. People got beaned in the head. People enjoyed the smell of napalm in the morning. I think I’d been a member of the forum for about six months.

In the years since all out hate was declared, I’ve wished lethal cancer on people. I’ve mocked peoples’ families, pets, record collections, fashion sense, and pretentions. And I’ve had mine mocked in kind. I adopted and cast aside personae of varying sincerity. I’ve been banned for life more than once. I was a shithead amongst shitheads. I wound up sparking one feud that quit being funny games long ago and seems like it is actually “real world” mean-spirited on both our parts. Ill-tempered Christmastime missives were sent. I reveled in being a hateful fuckface. The pettiness felt good. All the shit I ate at my unfulfilling job could be transmogrified into 101 proof government-bonded spleen juice to be liberally dumped on the unsmart no-counts who couldn’t find it with both hands and a flashlight. I was towering smartipance stomping the duncefields. Those chumps could all go eat a bowl of fuck as far as I was concerned.

Being a self-aware little critter, I knew what I was doing. I even engaged in a good deal of fourth-wall-breaking meta-hate. The whole stupid thing became a joke amongst a group of ill-tempered hatey partisans I became actual “real world” friends with. Of course this winking and nodding didn’t diminish the fact that I spent the bulk of my online time being a bilious meany.

In my defense, my reprehensible online doings aren’t part of some unheard of perversion. America digs this kind of partisan poo slinging. (This is where you throw your hands up and gasp, “Not ME! I want balance and bi-partisanship and CHANGE, damnit! A new era of mother-loving good feelings!”) Rush Limbaugh and his chattering ilk are obviously practitioners of fine American hate, as are the shrieking radicalized hippies from Limbaugh’s hated Sixties. The “culture wars” are a great place to collect samples of genuine American bile — along with the occasional wink and nod. Celebrity gossip vendors also apply the hatesauce liberally. Just think of the scandals surrounding young, attractive people over-indulging. I mean, those people didn’t even EARN their right to behave badly through “talent.” Or so goes the usual complaint. And of course one could consider the regional prejudices (”Lousy white-trash Hoosiers copulating in the Dairy Queen parking lot…”) and nasty sports rivalries. Not to mention America’s proud traditions of racism, sexism, xenophobia, red-baiting, and whatnot. This is the land of freakin’ opportunity, after all. No matter who you are, you can find something that sticks in your craw. And by golly, if you happen to hate *me* — well, obviously you can’t deal with the extent to which I “keep it real” and “tell it like it is.”

There’s certainly a rush in knowing that you’ve gotten under someone’s skin, that you made them lose their shit and hate you. That hated need the haters and vicey versa. And sometimes out-and-out clobbering the object of your hate is cool and refreshing. (Go ahead, feign disbelief again.)

Much of my serious thinking on hate is prompted by reading Rick Perlstein’s excellent Nixonland. As any fan of Record Desk patron saint Hunter S. Thompson can tell you, Richard Nixon makes for some good hatin’. He is — short-sighted Bush-baiting aside — likely the most hated president of all time. Heck, the nastiest taunts hurled at W. usually include the words “worse than Nixon.” And Nixon just didn’t set the bar for being hated; he could dish it, too. Nixon was hated because Nixon could and did hate with both frequency and intensity. One of the main points of Nixonland is that Nixon helped us, as a nation, learn how to hate. He taught us to channel our resentments and our fears.

In many ways, Nixon gave us the culture wars. He gave us our convenient labels so that we could easily form raiding parties and rush off under cover of darkness to menace enemy trenches. He was also over-concerned with his public image. He wanted to be hated in the right way, so that he could be loved all the more by his side. As we all know, Nixon’s preoccupation with his enemies and his image ultimately caused everyone to lose sight of why he was president in the first place. In a hatespasm for the ages, he was run out of government. The bile in his wake was so great that even poor affable Gerry Ford got sunk by it.

Poor Courtney Love seems to have suffered a similar fate to that of poor dead “Tricky” Dick Nixon. In general, people have forgotten what Courtney Love was before she was someone you just hated reflexively. Her own hate/hate relationship with everyone/-thing defines her as a public creature. What started out as simple provocateering has swallowed her alive. Heck, she is so hated that the tinfoil hat sector has managed to convince some of the people some of the time that she was actively involved in the death of beloved lunchbox icon Kurt Cobain. Of course many of Love’s critics pile on unfairly. My gut feel is that sexism plays a big part in the whole “Let’s hate Courtney” impulse. Sure, she’s been a public drunkard/junkie who’s made questionable artistic and fashion choices, but those same “crimes” made folks like Keith Richards, Johnny Thunders, and Love’s late husband Kurt Cobain into culture heroes. The whole “rock star as positive role model” expectation is a crock anyway. Respectable rock stars make lousy records like All That You Can’t Leave Behind and front Coldplay. No thank you.

Still, the fact that Courtney Love has been treated harshly by a sexist, group-thinky rock media doesn’t erase the fact that she achieved fame in some measure by daring people to hate her. Her outspoken, consciously bratty behavior is part of her charm. Deep down she’s a rock critic herself, her critiques coming in the form of her own songs and her snarky interview soundbites. Her 2004 “comeback” record America’s Sweetheart is equal parts invitation to hate and rock criticism. When the record was released, much of it was swallowed up by soap opera summaries of Love’s supposed bad behavior.

If we’re to indulge Rolling Stone’s pretentions as the “paper of record” for matters of rock and roll, consider the tabloid concerns voiced by their review of America’s Sweetheart. (If you read the full review, you’ll also notice a certain stuffy disapproval regarding the sort of broke-down, outsized debauchery that used to be RS’s stock in trade.)

You’d have to go back to Sticky Fingers to find a major-label album so saturated in the slow-motion drug ambience of the sleazy rock underworld. It will surprise anybody who expected Love to clean up her act after so many years as a tabloid spectacle.

So she settles for the role of a hapless circus act staggering down the red carpet — and Paris Hilton does it better.

Such prudish tut-tutting is par for the course when discussing Courtney Love. Her legendary naughtiness seems overmuch in these times of nice guy “approachable” musicians. I’d wager that people hate the idea of Courtney Love more than they hate her records, because America’s Sweetheart ain’t a bad little rock and roll album. Sure, it’s a big time glossy affair. But there’s some real heart and pain there too. A few songs are prime examples of Love’s ability to smartly engage with the ideas and arguments that are so often ignored by rock and roll as the medium continues playing at its primal savant act.

Take for instance her swipe at “the future of rock and roll circa 2003″ Julian Casablancas, “But Julian, I’m A Little Bit Older Than You” —

The track begins with a sassy pop-punk chant in the best tradition of school yard mockery. The song is loosely structured, touching on several standard retro punk tropes, eventually making its diss explicit with the snarky “Hey gabba gabba, baby. I’m a little bit older than you.”

Basically, Love is well aware what game the hype of the moment is playing. She’s seen it (even been a part of it) before. Not that the song is mere celeb-on-celeb trash talking. It’s a knowing riff on the contradictions of life in the mainstream underground.

I’m overrated, desecrated
Still somehow illuminated
I know I’ve got a screw loose
Just meet me in the bedroom
I know you did this, what a punk
You would never sell out
Just like I did in Playboy
That was art, it didn’t count

Sex and drugs and integrity — none of them have any fixed value.

Love, like most alternative-era acts, made her name by turning the confessional into the political. Rock and roll was an article of faith and a means of transcending hurt and awkwardness. And when fame and reality and other grown-up concerns soured the whole thing, “alternative nation” collapsed upon itself — retreating to the fringes, succumbing to indulgence, or making peace with showbiz.

“Mono” is a little bit of Love struggling to recapture the spark. Note the confrontational “Did you miss me?” taunt.

HeY, yeah we had everything
Vinyl and mono
And we looked the other way
Man, we were so dumb
Is this the part in the book that you wrote
Where I’ve gotta come and save the day?
Did you miss me?
Did you miss me?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Three chords in your pocket tonight
Are you, you the one
With the spark to bring my punk rock back?
I don’t think so.

I recognize that I’m focusing heavily on Love’s lyrics. However, they’re the one part of Love’s songs that are 95%-100% her own. She’s no tunesmith. She’s a writer. Her strength is her ability to make her own concerns and musings into something relatable. Her primary subjects are rock and roll and herself. One reason she’s such a hatable celebrity is that so much of herself is in what she does. You can’t approach her music without coming to terms with her persona. Of course many of her contemporaries (Eddie Vedder, Rivers Cuomo, Kurt Cobain) employed a similar approach and were likewise hated as a result. The difference seems to be that Love hasn’t atoned for her egotism by retreating into sensible do-goodery, charming eccentricity, or sainthood. People don’t like folks who overstay their welcome unrepentantly. The pitfall is that being hated at length can turn you into a caricature of yourself, a campy object of “their” ire.

I used to think that the big problem with the internet (and other forms of mass media, really) is that it fostered easy consensus and suppressed dissent. This self-serving analysis explained how I could become an object of public hate on an internet message board. I thought I’d also figured out why outsized artists like Courtney Love got a universally raw deal. Everyone could quickly come to the same snap judgment and mock away any disagreements. Then I realized that my beef with the internet was little different than Nixon’s spiteful war with/on the news media.

I suppose that the way in which the internet (or media in general) fosters hate is that it exposes you to ideas/images/people/etc. that you might not otherwise encounter and provides you with a set of ready-made labels that you’re invited to apply to yourself and others. The expansion of niche media outlets on the internet allows you to quickly find your “us” and set up shop against a million “thems.” Smart cookies like Nixon and Courtney love recognize that tribalism and snarkiness are fun. They use these impulses as a means of self-expression. Of course nothing but a steady diet of insular snarkiness will harden your heart and convince you of your own virtue over time. Oversized examples of “the other side” will seem particularly hatable (while these same big time hatable qualities make them heroes in their own camp). Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I think the need to be liked, loved even, leads us to adopt hatedness as protective coating. Hatedness is an effective defensive position. “Let them hate me for my [whatever]. I’m simply too grand for them to stand.” Problem is that after years of defining yourself by what you hate and who hates you, you wind up incapable of setting your own course without other people’s hate as a guide — lost in your own museum.

That’s why I resolved to quit being a jerk on the internet. At first I thought I could just behave myself, but the hate habit was strong. I had to go cold turkey. I quit. I just stopped doing it. Baby and bathwater together. They won’t have me to kick around anymore.

I’m already seeing results. I’ve started to reconnect with my love of rock and roll. No longer is what I listen to part of some elaborate social duel. I like Courtney Love. It’s totally fine if other people don’t. My taste is no longer a cudgel for whacking my “enemies.” It’s like I was waging my own little version of the culture wars. I was ignoring my real needs and goals and values and desires to feel superior to others on petty matters of taste and style.

I ain’t totally reformed though. I hope they miss me now that I’m gone. I’m a native son of Nixonland, after all.