36 — Socio-Cultural
The Harsh Noise Gene: On Women and Music Fandom Jaimee Cachia
When I first found myself in the graffiti-plastered high school bathroom stall that is internet music fandom, all I was looking for was a new means through which to expand my library. Instead, I was met with a grotesque breed of elitism that derived pride from its enjoyment of music considered to be beyond the general public’s realm of understanding. Hugely aggressive walls of sound referred to as “harsh noise” are heralded as classical music’s modern-day renaissance, while its sceptics are deemed evolutionary inferiors. Online subcultures requiring specialised knowledge are not exactly known for their inclusivity. In music fandom, being asked to “name three songs” of a given band is the standard welcome newcomers receive. For women, this territorialism is magnified tenfold — a truth exhibited to a comic degree in the internet’s dustiest corners. When a man wants badly enough to believe that his sexist delusions are based in objective fact, the absurd speech that ensues may very well find itself popping up
Art — Lily Partridge | #LilyJaneCreative
far and wide as copypasta — that’s a text-based meme to you and me, or a passage dispersed through online discussion forums and social networking sites via copy and paste. The internet has no shortage of wild claims made under the guise of “science”, so it says a lot about my past experiences with male music nerds that I took this clearly ludicrous piece of text seriously the first time I stumbled upon it: Actually, it’s been proven that male born people have a predisposition to liking harsh noise. I’m not saying girls can’t or don’t, but they are the biological exception to the rule. The copypasta held a mirror up to this bizarre community I had found myself on the fringe of. It was the bastard child of male fandom’s intellectual superiority complex and the notion of female aversion to musical genres deemed too “complex” for them to comprehend. While its exact origin is not known, the music board of the internet’s famed sewer known as 4chan is the likely culprit.