A Sad Pattern Emerges

Looking at the current front page of Pitchfork, I see that a member of the Mac DeMarco band has been arrested for sexual assault, while a rapper named Young Dolph has been shot and killed.

It occurs to me that these days, it seems like the first time I even hear of way too many indie rockers is when they've been exposed as sexual predators, and the first time I hear of way too many rappers is when their murder is reported.

Maybe that just goes with not being young and in the know anymore.

Marilyn Manson openly claimed he sexually assaulted a woman in his 1998 memoir, and there were no real consequences for such behavior till this year. I think it's a sign of progress that it's no longer swept under the rug. (The emo/pop-punk scene seems particularly predatory.)

After opioids became popular in the hip-hop scene during the 2010s, we've also had a string of rappers' tragic drug overdoses in the last few years.

Are emo musicians shittier as a rule or are their fans just more sensitive to improper behavior than, say, metal fans?

The fan base for emo includes a huge number of teenage girls. The metal scene might contain an equal number of shitty people, but it's a much smaller niche with a mostly male audience. If you go to a death or black metal concert, the audience will contain few 15-year-old girls.

So much of this behavior is the same garbage male rockers have been pulling since the 60s and 70s. But punk/emo/indie was supposed to be, for lack of a better term, more highly evolved than hard rock or metal (or hip hop), and a safer space for women. I've read articles where some of the young women who'd been assaulted talked about how they felt far more accepted and ostenibly safer in that arena, only to find that it was just as sexist and potentially dangerous as any other musical arena. That includes women musicians as well as fans. (You've all seen the stories from female rockers on the Warped tour, I'm sure.) To your point, Ira, I think there's an extra level of betrayal there.

While the gender disparity isn't as stark at the metal shows I've been to in Austin (especially amongst extreme metal bands with large Latino audiences, which are often made up of couples and thus on even ground gender-wise), I usually don't see any teenagers at these shows at all, let alone teenage girls. But that says more about the shows I go to, which tend to appeal to an older metal audience.

There's plenty of terrible behavior in the metal world, though. There've been a few instances with nu-metal/deathcore/whatever the hell bands like Motionless in White are acts where members have been caught being predatory assholes. (Funny thing about a lot of the Avenged Sevenfold generation of metal bands: they seemed to take the late 80s hair metal bands as their models for offstage behavior.) Not to mention the unapologetic pedophilia of the Lostprophets dude, the As I Lay Dying dude trying to hire a hitman to kill his wife, the Nachtmystium leader scamming his fans in order to buy heroin, the far right flagwavig of folks like Dave Mustaine and the various accusations of white power/Nazi sympathies aimed at some of the black metal bands, often quite accurately. Metal is populated by plenty of shitbags.

But I think people expect metalheads to be assholes, weirdos and extremists, and while their behavior isn't condoned (at least by the mainstream), it's understood. The emo/punk/indie/alternative folks aren't supposed to be degenerate monsters, unless it's their brand (a la Marilyn Manson, who's finally facing the music for his own predatory behavior, or the late GG Allin).

Alternative and punk haven't been progressive nor ideological since the 80s. After the early 90s it just became a normie thing where Father John Misty's and Mac Demarco douches hit on sorority chicks. They ain't reading trouser press.