Subculture and Gatekeeping

This mornings post is going to be a bit of an odd one but please bear with me. First off I feel like I need to start this with a disclaimer. Gatekeeping is awful full stop. Please don’t do it. Gatekeeping leads to toxicity in communities and it just isn’t cool to try and keep someone out because they don’t align to your lofty ideals for what being part of that community means. All of that said… as a fortysomething geek I understand all too well why it continues to persist in spite of all attempts to remove it. So I feel like I have to start with the inspiration behind this… well whatever it ends up being.

This friends is Emma Langevin a name I only know how to pronounce because she did a Q/A video where she started off pronouncing it. She is a 21 year old TikToker and YouTuber and also is funny as hell. In her videos she occasionally wears assorted Nirvana T-Shirts and has apparently caught shit for doing so. There are of course the ever so creative “were you even alive” comments and the answer to that is no. However fandom doesn’t exactly have an expiration date to it and I figure Emma has just as much right to put on Lithium on a bad day as I do. While I don’t condone this behavior, on some level I still get it because I probably would have been one of these assholes were it not for a series of friends who called me out on my shit.

So the positive is that we live in a time when it is much easier to be into weird shit than it used to be. While boomers were ultimately the first to step out of line against the 1950s Nuclear family, they nonetheless created their own social hierarchy of order and conformity. The 1980s were in many ways about figuring out which template you belonged to and then attempting to conform your desires to fit that mold. If you didn’t necessarily fit into one of those predetermined roles, it could be extremely lonely. Diversity was not a thing that was celebrated in any form and least of which was Diversity of thought.

So many of us desperately sought signs of being part of a larger community. So various pieces of apparel, mannerisms, or activities became a sort of social shorthand for finding someone that might be a kindred soul. You saw someone walking through the mall wearing a Vampire the Masquerade T-Shirt and chances are as a Pen and Paper Dork you were going to find some common ground and maybe even strike up a conversation. In a land filled with polo shirts with popped collars… these folks stood out and were magnetically drawn to each other. The jean jacket often times became the cultural currency emblazoned arcane sigils that would let anyone else you encounter know that you were one of them. Mine changed a lot over the years but for at least one period of it I had a giant Powell Peralta Ripper on the back… which I got because I thought was cool even though never actually owned a single Powell Peralta skateboard. I had more from Santa Cruz than pretty much any other single brand.

Another common currency of “belonging” was the concert tee. Growing up we traded crappy recordings of all of these bands that were then underground. I first got clued into Nirvana because they were the backing soundtrack for a skate tape. Truthfully most of the musical was desperately lifted from the credits of a skate video. I’ve talked before about Santa Cruz Skateboards Streets on Fire movie and how important its soundtrack ultimately became to me. The thing is growing up in flyover country you sorta had to import your culture from somewhere else because it most certainly wasn’t happening natively. In truth we were all a bunch of posers… because we had to invent our way of life based on the clippings and footnotes found in smuggled media.

I cannot understate just how damned hard it was to get anything “good” in the small town I grew up in. We had been listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers for years and only knew of them because they played in the background of some movie we watched. Then we sorta went on a crusade to try and find as much of their music as we could. I cannot fully explain how excited I was when I saw this cassette single sitting near the electronics department check out at a Walmart. Something “WE” cared about actually getting noticed and becoming significantly more easily available. That excitement turned to frustration however as this thing that we felt ownership over… because we had to struggle so hard to get it in the first place… became something that the jocks were listening to.

So this rapid succession of being excited because the accessibility and then getting frustrated at the popularity was a cycle that I absolutely remember going through for several things. The thing is that I now recognize the sheer amount of nonsense that was involved in this reaction. That said I remember going through it all the same because RHCP had sorta been one of those arcane signals of belonging that helped us find more members of our tribe. Even though that “tribe” was contorted as fuck because none of us actually had the exact same ideals or believes or even hobbies. There was overlap obviously but everyone sorta had their own thing going on and we couldn’t really understand at the time that it wasn’t necessarily the shared experiences alone that bound us together.

This wanting to belong and trying to self sort yourself into a container that was easily recognizable was so strong that the very first thing I did when I got a laptop for college… is slap a NIN sticker on the back. Still to this day I have to resist the urge to go over and talk to anyone that has a Horde or N7 logo sticker on the back of their vehicle because that desire to find my people still exists somewhere buried deep inside. Where it turns sour and becomes toxic however is when belonging isn’t enough and you feel like you need to exclude others from finding the thing that you thought was special and unique. I am not exactly sure how to combat that instinct because I too understand it. I was annoyed at how easy folks had it when they found out RHCP existed with Blood Sugar Sex Magic or started listening to Nine Inch Nails after Downward Spiral. They didn’t have to find some seedy tape shop in a town 2 hours away to find the latest concert bootleg of the band. All they had to do was walk into Walmart and make a purchase.

I personally have learned the hard fought lesson that more access to good things is infinitely better for everyone involved. You get access to the things I love and in turn I get better access to the things that you love that I maybe also will love as well. So yeah Emma Langevin was born some six years after the death of Kurt Cobain, but that shouldn’t grant her any less access to being a Nirvana fan. I personally “discovered” Led Zeppelin some eight to ten years after the band broke up, and I didn’t feel like not being there when they were initially relevant was any hamper on my enjoyment of the music. I first listened to Rush in 1990 when a friend loaned me their Chronicles double CD set, and have been a diehard fan of the band ever since. Yet I am certain there is someone waiting in the wings to tell me I am a poser for not being able to conform to some artificial litmus test for fandom.

There used to be a part of me that was a little bummed that the age of instant friendship because of some shared ideal was gone. Then I realized that pretty much my entire twitter feed is populated by random strangers that I happened across because of some shared interest and then decided to strike up a friendship as a result. The act of Gatekeeping was not the social structure that allowed you to make life long friendships. In fact it probably limited your horizons to the point to where you could only see a handful of people. I wish I could spread that message to more people, that you don’t need to carefully guard these things that you love because once they spread they end up becoming far cooler as a result. To be honest one of the best experiences ever is watching someone experience something for the first time that you yourself love. I personally experience this almost contact high of reliving those same emotions that I went through when I discovered the thing in the first place.

Ultimately sharing something is how you keep it alive. Each time you can ignite the fire in someone else’s heart, it allows those really good things to transcend generations. I mean sure it is weird that going down the toy isle is a greatest hits collection of the toys that I grew up with… but it also means that things like the newest rendition of Duck Tales exist for a whole new generation. As a grizzled old man I get to experience being a kid once again as I view these favorite things in a new light.