The casualisation of fandom

Friction free consumption, product driven lifestyles, and gatekeeping bogeymen

The slow erosion of the public realm forces us to define our identities by our purchasing habits. Our sense of self foregrounds hobbies and culture because these are malleable marketing demographics, fluid and susceptible to persuasion compared to identities defined by place, community, and class.    

On paper this is nothing new, even for “extreme” metal. The ‘Scum’ jigsaw puzzles, the festivals resembling theme parks more than gigs, the merch subscription services and unboxing videos, the holiday cruises, the musicals, the branded homeware, all are just extensions of what bands like Kiss have done for decades. What’s insidiously novel here is not that metalheads now command enough buying power to attract the attention of major banks, but that they are simultaneously subject to highly bespoke underground forms of branding facilitated by sites like Etsy. The resulting synergy between the macro and the micro creates a marketing model that marries the naked cynicism of traditional advertising with highly configurable lifestyle porn encouraged by platform capitalism designed to sell things to very specific populations within metal.  

This means that everyone from fans, to indie labels, to major magazines play a role in opening up new areas of branding potential. This extends far beyond band merch and imagery, reaching into one’s cultural philosophy. Are you true to the underground spirit? Are you in favour of professional studio mixes and arena shows? Is a DIY aesthetic important to you? Are you in favour of the “new” ideas entering your subculture or fiercely opposed to them? Answers to these questions have a corresponding product or service someone wants to sell you.

This is not simply a case of plying a social media feed with relevant ads based on a death metal fan’s likes. It matters what kind of death metal fan you are. This is one reason why genre tags have become so prolific. They serve a useful linguistic function certainly, but so often the grouping of bands into tags blurs the line between dry descriptors and value judgements. OSDM, tech-death, melodeath, deathcore, brutal death metal, all come with negative or positive connotations depending on one’s outlook. And anyone looking to enter the market knows this, and knows how to manipulate these words to reach an intended audience.

We assimilate culture through the filter of branding lingo, creating genre tags to delineate a particular choose-your-own-adventure metal lifestyle. A process we mistake for genuine artistic features of the music. Otherwise intelligent commentators begin parroting the terminology, leading to a casualisation of fandom, where everything is negotiable, everyone is entitled to access their brand free of friction, dissent is dismissed as elitism, incoherent tweets about gatekeeping bogeymen are championed as cutting discourse.  

One feature of this casualisation of fandom is the foregrounding of musical “vibes”. An imprecise set of moods, signifiers, and facsimiles designed to slot into a predetermined cultural stream, or market. Vibe is distinct from genre, the latter of which – despite often porous borders – are clearly defined by real things one can literally point to within the music itself. Key and time signatures, intervals, chord sequences, guitar effects, tempo, timbre, vocal technique, and any number of cross pollination between these facets. Vibe is an emergent property of genres.

The exponential rise in marketing jargon posing as genre tags is partly born of the conflation of the two. It should be noted that as far as the end user is concerned, there’s nothing inherently wrong with foregrounding vibes. They are benign features of casual fandom. Listeners unwilling or unable to take deep dives into the mechanics of music tend to be interested in vibe. Treating music as a soundtrack to daily life requires a vibe, not a technical analysis of Azagthothian tonality.  

But when vibes get mistaken for genre it fudges the boundaries between commodification and genuine artistic insight. Vibes tend to be packaged in the language of marketing hyperbole, hence the need to write off vibe-sceptics as elitist. These are people that would seek to disrupt the free flow of goods by shining a light on the mechanics of advertising lingo and its tenuous connection to musical ontology. Dismissing them as elitists paints their opinions as being motivated by a need for purity and personal status, thus precluding the need to meaningfully engage with them.

We could blame the Spotify playlist here. This model – now an industry standard for music consumption – trades on curating moods and feelings as paramount to musical experience. This diminishes the need for any intimacy with the complexity, negotiation, and evolution of artistic forms. Aborted vibe fabrications like voidgaze indicate that Spotify is not always successful in this regard. But the reduction of music to a buffet of pre-packaged, vaguely defined moods to be browsed at leisure is something metal has well and truly succumbed to in the streaming age.

That being said, the symptoms can be traced well beyond streaming and social media platforms. It is also rampant within the calibre of modern journalism. And with clever manipulation, it can even decide who gets the right to speak from a place of legitimacy or objectivity.

“Brainy” publications such as Louder, Vice, The Quietus, and Invisible Oranges are rife with journalists posing as dispassionate sociologists documenting the flow of culture within a scene. Yet in the process they casually throw around the language of marketing without subjecting it to any scrutiny. Thus the cycle of covert branding is perpetuated. Unanchored eclecticism is championed, discernment denigrated as “gatekeeping”. A whole host of metal meme-lore celebrates the breadth of quirky listening (consumption) habits. Popular voices such Antony Fantano define themselves as jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none critics. Fantano’s unassuming reviews – on metal albums at least – may look insightful, but are often nothing more than sugar-coated vibe chats rarely broaching beyond the superficial.

Their wholesale adoration for master vibesmiths such as Liturgy, Deafheaven, Alcest, Blut Aus Nord, and Deathspell Omega provides them with endless column inches to stake a claim on the narrative of metal, in turn deciding what counts as reasonable discourse and what counts as shrill protectionism.

But whilst these artists create the “vibe” of black metal, they are chiefly concerned with applying this vibe to the mechanics of other genres. Liturgy may work as experimental arthouse music, Deafheaven as Californian indie/alternative, Alcest as drippingly tedious post rock. Using a black metal sheen to package these genres is a legitimate move that clearly has an audience. But in the process they gut their music of any appeal it may hold for black metal fans preoccupied with concrete compositional forms at the level of genre. This is the reason a non-Nordic interpretation of black metal such as the elegantly austere melodicism of early Rotting Christ is a more authentic iteration of black metal than anything Liturgy have put out, regardless of the fact that the latter is closer to the vibe of black metal as it is narrowly conceived in the minds of contemporary commentators.

These artists are also the beneficiaries of ruthlessly slick marketing campaigns. One that has no truck with the off-brand ramblings of genre scholars. The latter days saints of metal journalism have staked their credibility on the vibe these bands create. Too much now rests on pushing them as the experimental yin to some fabricated traditionalist yang. The substantive musical mechanics at play behind this simple binary is too complex and unsexy to package within the language of marketing hyperbole.

To take a converse example, the fixation on vibe can lead commentators such as Jeff Wagner to make silly claims such as the following: “Where Morbid Angel sometimes offered organ segues and moments of arty diversion (as on their Heretic album)”, they “blasted and bludgeoned more than they experimented” (Mean Deviation, 2010). Wagner is often regarded as one of metal’s more cerebral journalists. But in referring to the unfocused and incoherent ‘Heretic’ as experimental and the rest of Morbid Angel’s catalogue as “blasting and bludgeoning”, he betrays a troubling lack of insight into the death metal artform, and Morbid Angel’s unique contributions to it.

Ultimately, the confluence of vibe marketing and the casualisation of fandom engenders the same degree of entitlement that one might feel towards a consumer product. We have been conditioned to believe that we have a right to purchase free of friction. Which is literally true for consumer goods. The companies that sell us things want our transactions to be as smooth and regular as possible. But art is not a product, even if its emergent vibes are. Hence the generation of terms like “elitist”, “gatekeeper”, and “purist” to cloak a complete lack of insight into the complexity and nuance of genre mechanics. We feel entitled to purchase and consume a vibe free of friction, free of dissent, free of critical thinking.

Ultimately, the space inhabited by intellectually grounded engagement with music stemming from a multidimensional dialog between artist and audience is being squeezed out, reduced to a consumer/product model. This creates a process of atomisation. Music becomes a sandbox of disconnected artefacts for individuals to stitch together into whatever chimerical form they choose. An individualist expression of personal identity. Equally the “identity” being expressed is more often than not a superficial cluster of consumer lifestyle modes nurtured by various brands to generate another targetable audience. To question the artistic merit of this is “elitist” grandstanding.