In a recent Seattle Weekly article, Mike Seely does a nice job of breaking down what’s behind the rift between the perception and reality of “frat boy” culture and it’s relationship with popular “indie rock” culture in Seattle. Seely himself was a pledge at a UW fraternity some years ago, and tends to believe that the similarities between the two subcultures overshadow the differences that send them to opposite sides of the room.

As stereogum posted about it yesterday, but I have a personal relationship with the topic of the story involved, so I thought I would chime in a bit. In his article, Seely interviews some local record executives, Bobby Bare Jr., John Roderick of the Long Winters, and an anonymous former fraternity member (aliased as Johnny Utah) who feared that should his identity become known he might lose credibility within the “indie” community. But, this anecdote by Roderick near the end of the article seems to capture the tension, the meaning, and irony of it all astutely:

“The insult was the equivalent of slapping my face with a white calfskin glove,” Roderick goes on. “The term ‘frat boy,’ as he intended it, had all the connotations of beer-swilling, date-raping, jock, macho crap. I laughed, because to me, a fraternity boy was someone who sneered insults at people with sarcastic WASPy smugness. His knotted-sweater, white-collar disapproval was everything I associated with the Greeks.

“So here we stood, two indie rockers, faced off across a gaping cavern of American culture as defined by the term ‘frat boy.’ He dismissed my car-wreckin’, prank-pullin’, fire-startin’, gun-shootin’, whoop-it-up, call-the-cops American party-makin’ with one word: frat. And I saw his sniffing, eye-rolling, weak-assed, big-vocabulary-but-not-quite-used-correctly tsk-tsking as more or less the same thing: fraternity boy. But in fact, we were both limp-wristed, lit-major indie rockers.”

The operative words in Roderick’s diatribe: “gaping cavern.” The stigma associated with frat boys is not a one-size-fits-all-proposition, but has rather been expanded over time to signify anything that anyone might find remotely annoying about white heterosexual males.

While the story is amusing, seely hits the nail on the head with his analysis in that last paragraph (bolding mine). I would take his criticism a bit further though. My thoughts are below the fold.

I cannot defend the indefensible. Having been a member of the Greek System at U-Dub myself I know all too well the depths to which young men getting their first taste of freedom can fall. Much of the reputation is earned and renewed year after year. Within the fraternity I myself was labeled a “dirty hippie” despite being one of the few in the house with a real job and a duds that didn’t match up to that at all (I suspect it was the Ultimate Frisbee playing). With those who weren’t a part of the Greek System, I constantly had to contend with being pigeonholed as a typical frat boy. Needless to say, I never quite felt comfortable that most people were able to see beyond these labels and still shy away from talking about my Fraternity life.

I will say this though: the second you denigrate me as a “frat boy,” because I don’t sufficiently and outwardly display my “indie cred” with tattoo’s, piercings, tight pants or any other easily definable characteristic, you become no better than that which you are accusing me of being, a nameless predictable non-thinker that hides behind other people’s ideas instead of developing your own based on actually experiencing a person. Deciding to put people into boxes, without knowing where  they’re coming from is something we do without thinking every moment of every day. But the moment you succumb to the ease of applying stereotypes and stop thinking for yourself and letting that effect your actions or what you say, is the moment you lose your “indie cred” in my eyes.

In my experience, people will ask about what the Greek System is like, but often in the end they only seem interested in validating their preconceived notions about what “it” is and how “bad” “it” is. Trying to explain what something is to someone who isn’t interested in making an effort to further their understanding will always be a losing battle, and that is what I’m afraid is going on here. It’s just so easy and convenient to rely on stereotypes instead of developing our own points of reference. And expecting it to continue to happen at about the same rate is probably realistic. So life will go on.

Frat boys will continue to appropriate “indie” acts, and those who proclaim themselves “indie” will continue to hate them for liking that which they themselves like. Which of course means that officially they can’t like this band anymore. Because someone else they don’t like, does like this band. Makes sense to me.