LGBT+ Identity in the Time of Mindless Self Indulgence
Mindless Self Indulgence isnât an act that could have flourished at any other time. The emo/pop punk wave was gathering steam; hip hop was still a novelty one could distinguish themselves from the flock by cribbing. âRandomâ Invader Zim-style humor was in the decline, while âedgyâ no-limits humor was skyrocketing. Nerds hadnât become the dominant force they are today, but due to the internet and the rise in manga and anime sales in the United States, they were able to access nerdy content much more easily. Youtube was taking off, music piracy was booming, and reliance on both radio and local record-store gatekeepers was at a low for young music fans.
Perhaps most critically, our national understanding of politics and identity at the time, particularly LGBT+ identities, was in a different stage of development than it is today. âPunching upâ vs. âpunching downâ was not a concept that most people considered in their comedy. âItâs just a jokeâ was more widely accepted as an excuse for transgressive entertainment than it is today. âIâm an equal opportunity haterâ was a common refrain.
Early in their career, the band released multiple tracks where Jimmy Urine, a man who was certainly not black, used the n-word. The âPantyshotâ cassingle was a treasured possession among MSI fans, featuring an early song that supposedly lost them a record deal due to being about lusting over a 5 year-old. Little Jimmy Urine sold kisses for a dollar to fans after shows, including to the teenagers. As a whole, the band made punchlines of racial and sexual slurs, rape and child abuse, school shootings, prostitution, drug use, incest, and just about every other taboo under the sun.
The understanding was that none of it was real and that none of it had any real consequences. Calling someone a faggot didnât matter if we were all in on the joke, that homophobia was stupid. Words were just words. The identity of the speaker didnât matter so long as their ideology was clear. It was something of an inversion of the way we publicly navigate comedy now, in that their identity determines where on the ladder they are to punch up or down, and the contents of their ideology is of minimal consequence compared to the text of their words. The context of a joke is not a matter of what the audience believes, but of the many complexities of hierarchy that society as a whole believes.
âWho cares?â asks 2008. âItâs just words.â
âHow could it not matter?â answers 2018. âWords create culture.â
So LGBT+ identity in the era of Mindless Self Indulgence.
Describing the difference between 2005 and 2018 to young queer people is a source of anxiety for me, because I feel like the old woman talking about how she walked uphill both ways to the library if she wanted to read a book. Itâs difficult, however, to put in perspective how quickly the culture around LGBT+ identities has changed. As dangerous as it is for queer kids today, they have much freer access to information about their resources and history than we did, and far greater representation in all forms of media.
When I was a teenager, I was the first person openly LGBT at my school, and my only point of reference for LGBT identities were Rosie OâDonnell and Elton John. There was no âBorn This Wayâ yet, no Halsey and Hayley Kiyoko and Ellen Page, no Troye Sivan and Adam Lambert and Frank Ocean, no Miley Cyrus, no Laverne Cox. There were no empowerment ballads.
Which was fine, because I didnât want empowerment ballads anyway. I felt disgusting. In reckoning with my LGBT+ identity, I felt small, broken, repulsive, confused, discarded and doomed. I was sickened in my own skin and filled with self-loathing because of my sexual orientation. Sometimes I still am. When I was 15, I drew a map of my heart, and in between the âfields of sexual insecurityâ and âpossibly irreparable damageâ I had written âguilt!â several times and underlined it.
âYouâre beautifulâ didnât only feel false, it felt invalidating. I was fiercely defensive of my self-hatred. I was working so hard at it, spending so much time and energy convincing myself I deserved the beating I was giving myself. To this day the barriers Iâve put up against generic bromides persist, and songs like âScars to Your Beautifulâ or âRoarâ make me cringe. Maybe someone gets something out of them, but I can only think of the teenagers like me who used that sort of sentiment as fuel for their own self-abuse. I remember once bursting into tears at a âJesus Loves Youâ sticker because it served as proof that the whole world was playing a joke on me, telling me that someone so unlovable should have some hope.
It was impossible to internalize that queerness was not dirty, unnatural and loathsome. Any attempt to break that association was drown out by the rest of the messaging we were receiving and our own tried-and-true mental gymnastics. Reassurance could not reach us at the bottom of the well.
At the time, I was obsessed with Mindless Self Indulgence with the kind of all-consuming adoration that only teenagers can possess. I aped frontman Little Jimmy Urineâs fashion, writing slogans across my coats with white tape. âWhat Do They Knowâ and âCocaine and Toupeesâ were my ringtones, much to my motherâs chagrin. I had catalogues of bootlegs, lovingly sorted and pressed to CD. Mindless Self Indulgence populated my artwork, both in classroom doodles and in art pieces for my portfolio that I labored on for weeks. They were the subject of my college application essay. I met my first love on an MSI forum (which I moderated) and lost a few romantic relationships over my inability to talk about anything else. I owned every shirt. When I was hired on at Barnes & Nobleâs music section, I would nominate Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy for the staff recommendation shelf every single week, and whenever it inevitably got recalled to the warehouse for lack of sales, Iâd order it right back.
Sometimes my friends and I would go to the mall parking lot at night and blast Mindless Self Indulgence from my car, dancing around the empty lot with our striped stockings, fingerless gloves and Hot Topic trip pants.
This band kept me from killing myself.
âIâm filthy, disgusting, horrible, irredeemable,â weâd say. âPeople tell us weâre beautiful and we know theyâre lying. Iâm a freak.â
âYeah, youâre fucking ugly,â the music said. âSo what? Soâs everything else. Have some fun with it.â
Despite the fact that Jimmy Urine has never publicly labeled himself with an LGBT identity, we young LGBT MSI fans claimed him as our own. We enshrined the article where he described being sexually attracted to anyone regardless of gender. We imitated and revered his gender fuckery onstage, the skirts, the pink suits and tutus, the eyeliner, his yelping falsetto leaping up from the masculine shouting, the way he danced. We pored over lyrics - that we transcribed ourselves in many cases, through multiple listens and endless debate - for those nuggets of same-sex attraction and gender ambiguity.
âI make a good girl but I make a terrible boy,â went one song. âThese things in my pants that weâre all waiting for, I never really knew what that thing down there was used for,â went another. And the most sacred text of all was âFaggotâ, off Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy, the most beloved record of the vast majority of hardcore MSI fans.
âI played that shit straight / blowing suckas to the side hopinâ I get laid / now everybody knows / no way in hell I can ever live it downâ.
Kitty, the drummer of Mindless Self Indulgence, once said of the bandâs LGBT fans that listening to MSIâs music was like vomiting: it hurts at the time, but then you feel better. You got it out. And the band always cultivated their relationship with their LGBT fans. Gay marriage was one of the few political issues they openly took a stance on, in a time when states like my own were amending constitutions to protect themselves from Massachusettsâ same-sex marriages.
Thus, we had a place where we felt simultaneously seen and valued by the band, and unseen amongst the chaos surrounding us. The irreverent humor of the band created a safe space where homosexuality could be disgusting, but so was everything else. There was no shame at an MSI concert. You were listening to a man famed for drinking his own urine sing about whipping his meat out, who cared if you liked to kiss girls? Thatâs old news. Weâre all freaks down here at the bottom of the well.
Iâm 28 now, and I donât know if the kids these days have an equivalent band. I donât know if thereâs a market for it anymore; Iâm sure there will always be queer kids who have internalized the awful message that they are inherently unlovable, but Iâm not sure if they canât find more accessible and more inherently positive panaceas. I see mutations of the same style of humor in Willam from RuPaulâs Drag Race and in some of the undercurrents of Tumblrâs teen humor. âWeâre goblins, trash, garbage babies.â
âYeah,â my inner child says. âI fucking feel that.â
The paradigm of humor has changed since 2008, at least in my circles, and the reasons for that are manifold, political, social, capitalistic. In many ways, itâs been a good thing: bigotry can be exposed rather than cloaked in excuses. A basic understanding of social inequality is presumed of most audiences. People are responsible for the impact of their words, not the intent. âEqual opportunity haterâ is seem for what it is: intellectually lazy and blinkered, the refuge of white guys who donât want to own up to the fact that some jokes arenât funny.
But Iâll always have a place in my heart for comedy that meets people where theyâre at. Where weâre at isnât always beautiful or acceptable or healthy, but sometimes itâs the place where we need the laugh most.
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