If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. John 15:19
“Have you heard there’s people now identifying as vapor-gender?”
Something ugly crashed down on our workplace small talk. “What is that? Identifying as an e-cigarette?” I asked. “No, it’s identifying as an actual gaseous vapor” he said with humor and disgust. My coworker was extending this talk as an olive branch of sort. As curious acquaintances, we both were assuring each other of our manhood. However, I didn’t like dogging on the vapor people without giving them their chance to speak. I sidestepped the expected incredulity. “What are the practical implications of that?” I asked. In the Midwest, casually outing yourself as a SJW isn’t conducive to workplace harmony or always even worth the effort. I tried to maintain some ironic distance while slyly affirming that the proposition could at least be examined. All for naught though. “It means they’re fucking stupid” was his analysis as we parted ways.
Altogether, the talk had been rather tame fare. The snowflake apparitions we’d been shit-talking would probably billow away like so much fog with a cursory Google search. But I felt our straw-man could conceivably become tinder to light real people. Just what the hell were we talking about?
Like any pejorative, the term’s amorphous. For MAGA-ers, anyone left of Fox News is suspect. Their snowflake exemplars are the young women photographed on 11/8/16 crying over HRC’s loss. The left conjures its own image. Angela Nagle’s 2017 “Kill All Normies” is the account of record for much of the left. It placed blame for 2016 partly on these snowflakes. In her telling, the alt-right and radical identarian left play a game of extremist dialectical leapfrog. It was a “bad people on both sides” take. For her, the fascists kind of had a point when combating over-zealous SJWs. For her, white nationalists and my vapor-gender comrades are like two drowners pulling each other under. Somehow, America went down with them.
Nagle’s book touches on some powerful truths. I recognized my own psychohistory in her discussions of useless transgression and its devolution into edgelord culture. Nagle looked past the latest news outrage, synthesizing something like a creditable cultural history of where we are. The ecstatic reviews proved she had an answer all desperately craved. Other writers were endlessly flitting out various, conflicting explanations. “Kill All Normies” transcended that—it was the alt-think-piece to end all others.
Her empathy extended only so far. I’m not the only one to notice her discussions of the Tumblr left feel curiously tacked on—an appendage to give her tale of dead-eyed young men a tangible villain and, more importantly, “dialectics.” For a Jacobin writer, her analysis was remarkably centrist—and in a bad way, a sort of know-nothing centrism. When the SJWs are not just glossed over, voices are only given to the most laughable, inconsequential positions. Nagle starts at the pejorative snowflake and works backwards into condemning various subcultures. Hysteria aside, “snowflake” pops up as insult in describing some groups more than others. The most common are Millennials frequenting “liberal” social media platforms like Tumblr and Pinterest, and claiming some commitment to social justice. But it’s also a zeitgeist. Some of the energies fueling specific snowflake cultures have surprisingly mainstream spiritual roots. I want to think inductively about their energies and spiritual figureheads. I want to reclaim the term “snowflake.”
It Gets More Blue
Alt-rock in the twentyteens occasionally yearns for a 90s-era slacker bohemia. But our underground energies, refracted through similar lenses, shed a sadder light. Melancholy infuses everything—explored sometimes realistically like in Dev Hyne’s fractured miniatures, or romanticized a la Beach House’s soprano schmoozings. On a sociological level, young people’s anxiety/depression has skyrocketed since 2012—variously attributed to changing tech or a more insidious generational “coddling.” I’m partial to the iPhone explanation. Under parents’ noses, Silicon Valley has reinvented the meaning of human connection and youth through the prism of the smartphone. It’s apparent that a Gutenberg-sized revolution has occurred. Millennials absorbed the initial impact—often in bedrooms, face aglow with blue-light, with unfettered capitalism as their only companion.
Over-sensitivity, linked ideologically to PC-ness, is a prime target for anti-snowflake haters. The brokenness, though, extends beyond ideology. The mainstream’s post-Trump malaise isn’t anything new to Millennials. And it’s not an intersection of one self-absorbed sadness with another. It’s a spreading grief over an unrecognizable world. Fascists see the change in bloodlines and demographics. But I think that’s a chicken-shit denial of something bigger.
In 2017, Los Angeles-based Girpool gave fullest expression to that melancholy on their sophomore album Powerplant. Their debut left me unmoved—it seemed quirkiness for its own sake from two Portlandia-esque ladies. But Powerplant drives home a forlornness too immediate to be artifice. “123” begins in the hushed whisper of their debut—something about feeling sorry and weird in a “jubilation dream.” Then the guitars rise, drums come in—the song explodes. Hearing that first beat of those (new) drums is hearing a band come to its full potential in the span of bars. That explosion expands the sadness’s scope. It’s no longer for its own sake; the melancholy is blown up into kaleidoscopic vision of broken ego.
The music is despairingly brutal in a way reminiscent of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer.” Some say depression is repressed anger—you can believe it here. This Alice in Wonderland suicide-pact sounds heavy enough to overcome resistance to the album’s doomy ambition. It’s best in whole rather than song-by-song, washing over like some snowless winter day when the brown enormity of nature hints at sublimity beneath. But my pastoral ears reflect my pastoral environ. Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker presumably hang more in the city. Their Durer-worthy melancholia evokes collapsed meaning and will. Other people exist at perpendicular funhouse angles in their songs. Regardless of biographical detail, the music’s universal—sounds from the margins the 2010s have taught people to hear.
Harvmony Tividad’s Oove is Rare is a solo sketchbook of sorts. Fans will recognize a few demos that later got full Girpool orchestration. The freak-folk aesthetic—“Knitted Scars of Cheeto Holiness” is a sample title—suggest a Robitussin chugging adolescence reminiscent of early Harmony Korine flicks. Korine has since shown himself to be an enemy of the working class (if he was ever anything else). Tividad’s diaristic approach avoids that, and occasionally stumbles onto fertile psychic soil. “Pretty Wrecking Girl (Supercute),” in its five minutes alternates between sections of chugging blue notes and Bach-like benediction. I hear the song as a forbidden gay tryst between the beer-swilling narrator and the trailer-park neighborhood bully. Your mileage may vary. But gender is constantly shifting, affirmations of toughness are laid aside, love might be possible. Tividad’s (and Girlpool’s) most resonant couplets mix intimate near non-sequiturs with social collapse. Tividad runs through her meager chances for fun and opportunity until the kicker—“It’s some lust-life (?)—poverty/ Wall Street crashed on me.” Remarkably, the rhymes don’t smack of self-pity. She’s tapped into and personalized a generational trauma.
“It Gets More Blue,”the most radio-friendly song from Powerplant, employs a similar approach. “The nihilist tells you that nothing is true/I said, ‘I faked global warming just to get close to you.’” It feels like you’re eavesdropping on some lovers’ quarrel or the codependent come-on of some trickster demiurge. Tucker and Tividad blend the personal and politi cal into a cosmic stew of ecological/interpersonal meltdown.
Their melancholy isn’t maudlin like 80s masters of misery–the Cure, say, or Sisters of Mercy. Their alienation catches a particular moment on the wing. It reminds me of Lil Wayne’s great album title I Am Not a Human Being. Wayne’s expansive heart ensures that line reaches beyond rap’s sometime dehumanization of blacks. Instead, Wayne speaks deeply to the downtrodden across the color divide as a fellow alien. Though working in more rarified spheres, Girlpool work sort of like that.
Powerplant got deeper as months went by; I occasionally checked for news of the follow-up. I read that Cleo Tucker was transitioning to male. For this fan, that struck an enigmatic, bittersweet chord. I viscerally felt that behind the music are thinking, blinking, feeling human beings. My closest imaginative reference points were the frayed nerves and unrelenting sense of dread from adolescent’s blackest days. I hate to metaphorize so I’ll go for empathy—gender dysphoria signifies for this cis listener an alienation so absolute the body itself becomes locus of estrangement. The article mentioned Girlpool were altering their harmonies in live shows to suit Tucker’s changing vocal range. That career risk broke my heart in a way. But from an aesthetic vantage, Girlpool changing sound righteously defies “manic pixie girl” fetishization. They mean to ferociously rock into the abyss. You hear the bridges burning, and you know they’re on to something real.
Somewhere in Between
The night of November 8, 2016, I got drunk. I’d felt a black, nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach for the last month or two that it could actually happen. I realized that for white men, even avowed liberals, in the privacy of the voting booth there’d be a demonic urge to tick the lower box. On election night, the anxiety got to me—I tried to knock myself insensate. I woke up with racing thoughts around the time of 99 per cent certain Trump victory. Those lady snowflake’s tears were presumably being snapped at the same time. The hangover hasn’t really gone away since.
How to paint the mood of those following weeks? You’d need devil’s laughter to burn through the icy layers of denial into the emotional core. Seeing the blood on its hand, the Right reacted with glee or silent sorrow. Woke leftists collapsed into despair. The hard left looked down and took heart in its intact prosthetic hardness. Dull centrists began to espy in broken visions some Russian ladder away from it all. And Natalie Wynn pounced.
On ContraPoints, her Youtube channel, she’d been riposting the growing alt-right, but also some of the trickier and more puritanical corners of social justice. She later marveled at her early audacity. “I made in retrospect some really reckless videos. Like, ‘Hello, Nazi 4chan! Let’s talk about how wrong you are!’” She wasn’t just a talking head. Her videos argued with their style as much as their substance. As an ex-philosophy grad student stifled by academia, she found in Youtube the perfect medium for her acerbic wit and surreal sensibility.
I don’t pretend to authority in the occasionally esoteric leftist doctrines she explicates. But, for this viewer, the intellectual pleasure of her raps takes in the heart and body. Many Youtubers work through intellectual flattery of their audience and point-by-point TAKEDOWNS!!!(.) Wynn makes that smugness feel as dull as reading the minutes of your local Onanists’ Society. Her talking heads (all characters played by herself) debate each other, have private breakdowns, say more than they mean to. Wynn channels the whole national conversation and breaks American discourse down to a private/political schizophrenia. Taking in the crazy whole, she knows that silencing a voice without dispensation of justice means inevitable return of the repressed. No doubt she’s derided as a centrist (albeit a genderqueer, radical feminist one) in tankie-er quadrants of Twitter. But I place her in the tradition one freedom fighter deemed (albeit ambiguously) “Luciferian communist.” Her dark, human pride shines fiercer light than the critical theorizing of dry intellectuals.
Her post-election video now seems a Janus-like moment in her career. She was in the thick of her own gender transition. In her early period, she came with an androgynous slacker vibe (albeit male-leaning, cross-dressing). Now she started turning towards the almost baroquely feminine for her “real” self. Flicking between videos past and present, watching her evolving mannerism and intonations takes on a charged hypnotic, almost erotic vibe. Here, with all cylinders firing, her various personas both embryonic and dying are summoned to give account for Disaster. Within a week she offered a synthesis and summation of analyses that the mainstream and left media were parroting around in isolation a year later as WHY TRUMP WON. She lays out faults of the Dems and the guilt of Trump voters while slowly draining her malt liquor 40 oz. The 40 is ironic, but the self-medication signifies feeling that coexists with rigorous intellect. With our left you usually get one or the other. ContraPoints suggests a radical middle way.
We thought that pre-Trump, wokeness had peaked. But in retrospect 2016 was when the left was jarred into reality, through both ideological and physical conflict with actual fascists. Remember that Charlottesville was barely a year ago and you get a sense of how hyper-accelerated our education has been. In my mind, Wynn’s rapid changes (both physical and stylistic) mirror our sudden, compressed life lessons. When called upon, Wynn responded in the fullest sense as a public intellectual. She had an answer—not a ready-made one meant to squeeze reality into some Chomskian or Marxist cookie-cutter. She had something fresh—born out of years of nose-to-the-grindstone thinking and feeling.
In her Nazi Punching video, she’s debating her radical insurrectionist alter-ego. “We agree on almost everything. The difference is that you’re a leftist with all your heart. I’m only three quarters of the way there. I have this one quadrant of my heart that’s like a little fascist heart—and it makes me able to feel right-wing emotions. That’s why I can talk to the right… People like you refuse to have their ideological purity tainted by the ambiguity and subtlety of the world.” Acknowledging those impure feelings allows a praxis unbound by ideological blinders. It enables her to lead her viewers into strange and wonderful thoughtscapes.
The alphabet soup’s more outré fringes serve as perennial stereotypes of snowflake fragility. Wynn proves instead that Millennial consciousness, with sensitivity as its strength, bodies forth new ways of seeing/being. Her discourse offers something of a snowflake Pilgrim’s Progress. The onslaught of subjectivity, rather than shattering the will, provides a tutorship in sussing out novel ills.
In her recent video on “incels,” a violently misogynistic subculture of men who rail against a rigged sexual pecking order. The video’s first half points out logical fallacies in their theories of the case. Then, crossing the aisle, she opens up about herself. She recognizes incels’ self-loathing and obsession with anatomical structure in her own experiences as a trans woman. She details cult-like internet subcultures devoted to tearing down one’s hopes of ever being taken for a woman. Like with a Reddit devoted to never getting laid, Wynn had to step away to imagine other possibilities. Wynn doesn’t confirm Nagle’s sordid equivalence of radical left and right. She blows open the distinction, laying bare the human condition behind: “But by way of a closing remark I guess I simply invite you to consider that you don’t even need a warm body or a sex robot to satisfy the erotic longing. Think about eroticism of a rainstorm, the clap of thunder, the rustle of the leaves, the steam rising off the warm pavement. And whether you’re a Chad, a Stacy, an incel, or a hon, you can always return to the caress of our dark mother, the sea, whose salty embrace envelops every contour of your naked body.”
By turns ironic and grave, Wynn offers paths out of our impasse.
O please let me join your cult
Will Toledo loves a good paradox. He’s both a romantic and curmudgeon. He’s something of an indie superstar while still responding in detail to his fan’s lengthy Tumblr posts. He records under the alias Carseat Headrest, after where he made his earliest recordings. Without a label, he uploaded his work to the internet and prayed—a reminder that Soundcloud doesn’t just mean mumble rap. His big break came with 2016’s Teens of Denial. The album’s opening chorus served as mantra: “You have no right to be depressed/ You haven’t tried hard enough to like it/ Haven’t seen enough of this world yet.” This visionary earns the right to reprove. He socializes with lost twenty-somethings, sees Jesus on mushrooms (who calls him a piece of shit).
On his follow-up, he used his newfound fame to curious end. He rerecorded his 2011 album Twin Fantasy in its entirety. It’s not note-for-note, though. Rather, along with fuller orchestration, he fleshes out elements and themes only hinted in the original. He insists he’ll never make anything better. It’s the sound of a man returning to the site of some buried trauma.
He sets the scene with “My Boy.” Atop a muted soul beat he sings: “My boy, we don’t see each other much/ It’ll take some time, but somewhere down the line/ We won’t be alone.” Toledo’s homosexuality is of that universal, almost Platonic sort that speaks across orientation to the basic human need for love. It’s melancholy, and sweet, and offers no warning of what’s coming…
“Beach Life-in-Death”, Twin Fantasy’s ballsy, long-ass 12-minute second track, opens with what I take to be Toledo tearing into a can of Red Bull. Then he revs into a manic exploration of an impossible, almost mystical teenage love. Toledo narrates specifics, but his frantic voice, along with his guitar’s tone, make every detail hint at something bigger. “And when the train came it was so big and powerful/ When it came into my little station I wanted to put my arms around it/ But the conductor looked at me funny.” The guitars keep swelling like some Wagnerian ocean of power-chords—and indeed the love smacks of Tristan und Isolde. Or maybe more to the alt point, Toledo rocks as hard and sad as “Cowgirl in the Sand.” Where Neil plowed mythic Americana, Toledo treats his own diary as the base for his blast-off into the stratosphere. The fever-pitch excitement cracks and peaks with the hysterical plea “I DON’T WANT TO GO INSANE/ I DON’T WANT TO HAVE SCHIZOPHRENIA.”
Toledo’s immense love seeks to remake nature in its own image. “It’s not enough to love the unreal/ I am inseparable from the impossible/ I want gravity to stop for me/ My soul yearns for a fugitive from the laws of nature.” I’m reminded of a story of a generation of German idealists circa Goethe who vowed suicide if the grass did not sprout pink. Toledo builds the tension then lets it break. He mourns atop a choral veil of tears—
Do you have any crimes
We can use to pass the time?
I am running out of drugs to try
But he’s still opening doors of perception:
We said we hated human
We wanted to be human
That insight comes like the lifting of a curse. A melancholy mood changes its hue to introspected hope. Toledo dies here, but he gains another life. Halfway through, the song kicks up again into the faster, manic tempo. As if Toledo is trying to sublate that past love, which might be the only way for it to survive?
Racing to the finish, he seems out to integrate what’s happened into a meaningful whole.
The ancients saw it coming
You can see that they tried to warn us
in the tales that they told to their children
But they fell out of their heads in the morning
They said “Sex can be frightening”
But the children were not listening
And the children cut out everything
Except for the kissing and the singing
Then they finally found their home
At Walt Disney Studios
And then everyone grew up
With their fundamental schemas fucked
But there are lots of fish left in the sea
There are lots of fish in business suits
That talk and walk on human feet
And visit doctors, have week knees
Oh please let me join your cult
It seems he’s discovered something like the reality principle.
His ender also sounds like a reaction against sexual revolution. But that’s too idea-ridden. It’s probably more about the felt moment in a young adult’s progress when he/she realize that life’s contours are hard and can bump against your head. Toledo hints at a moral or spiritual rebirth. Later in the album, “Nervous Young Inhumans” has a lengthy monologue outro. Semi-ironic, Toledo comes on like some stoner talking low-key about chem-trails:
Do you know about Jesus? Do you really know? All you know is what you’ve been told. Listen with your heart, sing with your heart. You’ve just been singing about girls. What do you know about girls? Fuck. Why are you so tense? You’ve gotta start singing with love in your heart. Is this on?
It’s that New Sincerity where he says what he means though it might conceal further depths. Given such expressions of true faith, it seems some kind of lower-case christianity might speak to the snowflake identity. Girlpool’s cosmic melancholy, Contrapoint’s searching inner voices, Toledo’s psychodramas of extremes—all point to a new social orientation. These humans are out for something higher, but shy away from the older routes up. They mean to explore new paths to personhood. One of my favorite memories from church was the weekly promises of a New Woman and a New Man. Secular Millennials I think want the same thing. Their quest feels more spiritual than scientific. Semiotic collapse has made us nomads in search of a method. But that trip is all we have; it’s holy even. You hear “snowflake” and think of sheltered Millennials afraid of debate. I think of a generation confronted with a barbaric choice—fascism or stasis—and thinking its way through.