MEDIA: “MGK wants to collab with the $uicideboy$ (2024)”

EVENT: A potential MGK/$uicideboy$ collab would unite mainstream American subculture in a very twisted punk/goth way. 

For most people, “subculture” is not something that happens online. It feels like it does, that’s probably because you are the kind of person who spends too much time on the internet. Most likely, you have the luxury of having a job where you’re on your computer all day; many of those jobs are patently fake or involve knowing about culture (via being on the internet). “Internet culture” as we comprehend it is largely a product of the “bullshit job” — if you’re getting paid to fuck around all day it’s going to lead to a detached, irony-poisoned worldview, as well as the time and inclination to both produce and consume text- and static image-based internet content. 

It’s really hard for people in this position to fully comprehend that YouTube is actually the main driver of culture on the internet. A lot of what garners a significant audience on that particular platform are podcasts with a video element — things you can listen to in your AirPods while you’re performing manual labor, doing gig work, delivering packages/mail etc. One reason why it’s hard for the media class to fathom the rise of YouTube, I’d imagine, is that as a format it doesn’t lend itself to our preferred mode of screwing around on the job: looking busy typing on your computer while you’re actually just tweeting or redditing. Although I’d guess that the media class caught up to the power of YouTube during the pandemic, when they could watch videos without their bosses knowing, which coincided with the hegemony of the smart TV, which turns all of our TVs into YouTube machines. But we’re behind, and we may never catch up.

All of which is to say that the subcultures we read about on the internet, which are produced by and for a cohort who are very into the internet — to the point that you’ll sometimes see a job listing for a “Slate staff writer” or whatever declaring that candidates must be “terminally online” — are not always reflective of subculture as it actually exists, especially in Middle America. It’s not that the teens vaping outside a Harris Teeter in whereversville aren’t as sophisticated as the ones vaping on St. Marks Place (or do they vape on Bedford Avenue or in Dime Square now?), it’s just that they have different priorities — namely, high school sports and/or opposition to them. 

When I was in high school in rural North Carolina, my school’s social identities could be broken down into a few buckets: Jocks/preps, kids whose families did farm work, nerds, skaters, Christians, potheads, band kids, and punks/goths. (I was the lone aspiring hipster.) My school was small enough that there was a lot of overlap between these groups: kids were constantly arranging themselves in various configurations. There were a lot of skaters/potheads on my soccer team, a lot of the farm kids were Christian football players, I had a couple friends who’d quit band to become potheads, and a few nerds also considered themselves “dark.” 

The only identity that I’d peg as superseding any other strain of kid you might also have identified as, however, was punk/goth. Beyond that MTV2 was playing a bunch of Good Charlotte at the time, I think that this all had to do with how, as long as they weren’t too precious about authenticity/consistency, punk/goth kids had a wealth of super strong symbols to choose from if they were trying to assemble a visually distinct “personal brand.” Here is a list of things you could have incorporated into your outfit at my rural North Carolina high school that would have outwardly signaled your allegiance with the punk/goth subculture. 

• Coffins
• Clash t-shirts
• Sex Pistols t-shirts
• Misfits skull logo t-shirts
• Skulls
• Anything with the Red Hot Chili Peppers asterisk-lookin logo on it
• Patches of Jack Skellington’s head
• Actually, anything Nightmare Before Christmas
• T-Shirts with the Blink 182 Logo, post-2003 rebrand
• Black Flag T-shirts
• Beetlejuice
• Wallet chains
• Big baggy black cargo pants
• Non-normative piercings
• Dark makeup
• Nirvana stuff
• Horizontally striped long-sleeve t-shirts
• Black backpacks with a shitload of patches
• Military-style baseball caps, also with patches

I’m sure there were more, I just can’t think of them right now. Please note that, while I am well aware that there are large differences between punks and goths, I’m using them as a singular term here because they truly were interchangeable as far as how the teenagers in my milieu, including me, understood them at the time. This is important, because I suspect that none of that has really changed for a lot of young people out there. If you’ve got some shit with a coffin on it, you’re probably doing it to indicate that you are punk/goth. Same goes for a Nirvana t-shirt (still). 

The best celebrity case study here is Machine Gun Kelly, who paints his nails, wears goth-y bondage-lite jewelry, has the Red Hot Chili Peppers logo tattooed on his elbow, and likes Blink 182 so much he started making albums with Travis Barker. Their first one together, Tickets to My Downfall, contained songs titled “Bloody Valentine” and “Jawbreaker,” while their second one had this cover:

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the more suburban parts of Lancaster County, PA in the last couple of years, and my time there has helped me realize that a second, perhaps even more important mainstream American subculture has arisen — the “kinda twisted” style person. If the mainstream punk/goth is walking around with a coffin-shaped purse, the kinda twisted youth has a wallet chain-style chain around their neck with a razor-blade pendant hanging from it. From my observation of the kinda twisted individual in various strip mall parking lots, they’re the types of people who are playing some crazy-ass video games, specifically on a console. They’re watching Death Note. They fuck with Deadpool as a concept. They’re working at Kroger. They are entirely apolitical. 

With all due respect to Deadpool, Mr. Too Damn Twisted Marvel Superhero himself, I’d argue that the kinda twisted archetype can be traced back to the mainstreaming of ICP and the Juggalos, a movement which harnessed the power of millions who felt like outsiders but still needed a common reference point to rally around. Things evolved with the rise of The Joker as a significant pop-cultural figure (i.e., Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight). It’s also a product of growing up in places where your cultural reference points are mostly limited to what’s available on TV and at the mall, Mass entertainment in the 2010s and early 2020s was defined by the logic of franchises and IP: Batman. The Avengers. Star Wars. Fast and the Furious. Marvel. Minions. Taylor Swift. Drake. And for a group of people who want to differentiate themselves from their peers in some way but whose frames of reference are all Mass, their models of Very Twisted Shit are going to be very limited. The most obvious one is going to be the damn Joker, take your pick. Ledger, Phoenix (game six). If you’ve ever seen a family member on Facebook post that their favorite holiday is Halloween, then I’ve got news for you: That motherfucker is twisted as hell. People who want to be different will work with whatever they have. 

To be clear, I’m speaking about the genesis point of Twisticity, which came to life circa, I don’t know, 2012 maybe. The internet has obviously made it way easier to seek out specialized knowledge, but even still, using the internet to become a member of an Actually Existing Scene, and sometimes even an online one, takes a heroic amount of immersion before you can even figure out which part of the internet you should be looking for.

At this point, we all know that things in culture can become ubiquitous among millions-strong segments of the population, while the rest of the world has no idea that they even exist. Such is the case of the official house band of the “kinda twisted” lifestyle, $UICIDEBOY$, the New Orleans rappers who kinda sound like old Three 6 Mafia and rap about ODing on drugs and unaliving themselves. And despite the Coastal Elite Media rarely acknowledging their existence — or maybe because of it — they are secretly one of the most popular groups in America. 

According to Songstats, their shit has been viewed 3.29 billion times on YouTube and over 4.21 billion times on TikTok. And despite me having just said that the media never covers them, Friend of Media Events Larry Fitzmaurice just profiled them in an article for The New York Times*,  where he noted that their annual Grey Day tour pulled in $42 million last year. By sheer numbers, $UICIDEBOY$ is mass culture—arguably more so than Charli xcx, even if their lyrics are super dark and they’re a pair of 35-year-old ex-Soundcloud rappers with face tattoos. 

The big thing that keeps them Dark Forested is that they have “$uicide” in their name. A lot of algorithms freak out and redirect you to a link to a helpline if you search them and forget to toss in the dollar sign, and I’m wary of typing it out even in this context out of concern that I might somehow get dinged on Google. But think about what brilliant anti-SEO it is for a group that positions themselves as inherently underground. Their very name is so unpalatable, so sick, so twisted that the architecture of the internet simply cannot handle it. By accidentally putting themselves at risk of getting 86’d from the internet, though, they seem to have transcended it. 

One final note: These are not the only mainstream American subcultures, of course. There are also adults who read super woke YA books for therapeutic reasons, Marvel movie people, Star Wars people, MAGA people, Warhammer people, YouTubers, DIY home repair people, fishing and hunting people, academics, people who own hearses for fun, church people, conspiracy theorists, craft beer people, car people, people who keep pet bugs, antiques people, Disney Adults, Parrotheads, etc. Nobody talks about any of them, and they outnumber us all. Just something to think about next time you fall into the trap of believing that Everyone Is Talking About Polyamory. I assure you, they are not.

HIGH-LEVEL TAKEAWAY: Tim Walz should get a face tattoo.

*I would usually refer to it as “The Failing New York Times.” However, whenever the Times hires one of my friends to write something, it is temporarily no longer failing.