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.
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