Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (30 page)

Joe Escalante
. He’s not just a bass player for the Vandals; he’s also a part-time judge, a lawyer, a member of a Smiths tribute band, and, of all things, a do-it-yourself bullfighter. A deeply rooted Catholic and an unapologetic pro-lifer, he makes the description “punk rocker” richer for it. He is truly punk, for he punks all the tame posers around him, simply by showing up. He’s a Renaissance man, but you’d never know it by talking to him. A true Renaissance hombre.

The
South Park
guys
. They could start a movement if they wanted to. But instead, they convey moral messages through their work that no one would touch. Sure, they poke fun at Mormonism, but they also make fun of the religions that might kill you—and they’ve paid for that. Hell, their work resulted in a terror plot in Times Square. When you inspire that, you know you’re doing the right thing. I just wish I could remember their names.

Mike Judge
. If you don’t believe that Beavis and Butthead were the sages of a generation, then you were not listening. Crude, primitive, and simple, Judge’s creations helped expose a vacuous culture consumed by cool. But his crowning achievement might in fact be the movie
Idiocracy
, which chillingly predicts where an obsession with material cool ends up. In the film, which came and went faster than a skittish cockroach, Judge attacks the death of thinking. He envisioned a future where society brutalizes anyone who ventures a coherent thought. Essentially, America two years from now. It’s hilarious and harrowing, and it sticks with you whenever you happen
to find yourself roaming a mall, quietly wishing you were dead.

Margaret Thatcher
. A gray-haired, middle-aged woman who rocked the world, and even scared Reagan a bit. She had so much spine inside her, she was able to lend it to other leaders of the free world. I never saw the movie about her because I find Meryl Streep to be a poor man’s Stella Stevens.

Gavin McInnes
. As a young, scummy Scottish-Canadian punk, he founded a lurid piece of trash called
Vice
, a magazine that soon grew to a massive worldwide brand. Sure, his look (beard, tattoos, trucker hats) has been copied by every ad agency to make a buck. Underneath it all is a deeply religious family man who realized that true rebellion is a rebellion against the cool’s predictable assumptions. He is still vile, rude, unpredictable, and at times a full-on asshole. But he’s also a rare breed: an honest, fearless jerk. And funnier than 99 percent of the comedians who call themselves comedians.

John Yoo
. Vilified by the left for authoring papers legally justifying the use of torture, he’s never backed down in reaction to his detractors. To this day, he still makes a cohesive argument as to why his stance will save America from its enemies. You can hate him all you want, but every foreign policy success President Obama can claim (which is perhaps one—the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden) can be traced back to Yoo. He also came out strongly against the lenient sentence received by that traitorous scum Bradley Manning. His Harvard cocktail
party days are over. I’m sure he couldn’t give a shit. He’s the lawyer Obama wishes he was.

Fred Armisen
. If you only know him from his tame, paltry impressions of Obama on
Saturday Night Live
, you’re missing something. His IFC show,
Portlandia
, is a gentle thumb in the eye of all progressives. But his work rises above stereotypical condemnations because hipsters are his people. Only a person in tune with the naive left could create such a magnificent parody of the lifestyle. When you watch
Portlandia
, you realize that he actually loves the people he mocks. And that’s instructive, at least for me, a jerk who is quick to dismiss such folks as predictable, narrow-minded fools. It’s nice to see that even if I can’t stand some people, they’re still people. Well, barely.

Penn Jillette
. One half of Penn and Teller, he might be the free-est radical of them all, a nondrinking, nondrugging atheist genius who operates without a mean bone in his body. He inspired this book, somehow. I owe him for allowing me the privilege of his friendship. I just hope he never falls on me.

Ben Carson
. A black conservative doctor who pisses the hell out of the left because he is a black conservative doctor. He may be soft-spoken, but his words weigh heavy on the mind. I’d fake a seizure just so I could get an appointment to talk to him.

Lupe Fiasco
. A gifted mind with a gift for language, he spends his Sundays on Twitter, posing philosophical questions that evade most pop star minds. He’s genuinely interested in the world around him rather than how the
world fits around him. He says things that anger his fans and confuse his critics. He’s a human Rubik’s Cube that very few, if anyone, actually solve.

Roger Ailes
. He’s not in here because he’s my boss. He’s in here because he suffers for his work. And refuses to waver. The more you attack, the more he presses on. Vitriol from adversaries becomes a fuel—the mark of a true rebel, and one who understands the fragility of freedom more than most of his critics are willing to admit.

Andy Levy
. Perhaps the strangest normal person you might meet, or the most normal oddball you might meet. Either way, I can almost never predict what might come out of his mouth at any given time. Which keeps me on my toes and pushes me to work harder at being clever, when the alternative—kicking back and accepting certain assumptions about the world—would have been far easier.

Andrew WK
. A creator of relentlessly positive, addictive music, he is a one-man Queen, with the ego of a pine nut. Anyone who has worked with Andrew knows this: He enters every adventure with the energy of a dervish and the good-natured sensibility of a care-free Eagle Scout. Built within his party ethos is a singular desire to bring joy to this earth, which he does wherever he goes. I never know what he’s thinking, perhaps because he’s eight steps ahead of me at all times.

Skunk Baxter
. A guitarist for two seminal bands from the 1970s—Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers—and a star on one particularly classic episode of
What’s Happening!!
(the one about bootlegging), he’s also an expert in missile
defense systems. Self-taught, he wrote a paper on how to convert ship-based anti-aircraft missiles into some sort of defense system (he explained this to me at a bar, three times, and it still didn’t absorb), which landed him on the Civilian Advisory Board for Ballistic Missile Defense. He roams the Pentagon and consults with the intel community and is so frighteningly smart I wonder if he has three brains instead of one. Amazingly, all of his ideas about fighting terror came from his music past. He’s also a sheriff and carries a gun in a fanny pack. When he tells you why, it makes so much sense that I went out and bought a fanny pack.

King Buzzo
. The guitarist for perhaps the most unpredictable metal band in history, The Melvins, he is responsible for the heaviest music this side of Pluto. I’ve yet to understand the lyrics to any of the songs—songs, mind you, that I’ve listened to thousands of times. He could have been content to create structured, easy-to-follow hard rock, but that’s not his style. He makes devious metal, the kind that hints at awesomeness, because hitting you over the head with it would be too easy. He’s wicked smart, a ball of mirth, and truly open-minded. But he’s open-minded in a way that scares those who only pretend to be. His brain makes me nervous, as his guitar playing makes me shiver. “Honeybucket” remains the best heavy metal song ever, and maybe my favorite song of all time.

Tom Fec
. Also known as Tobacco, Fec fronts Black Moth Super Rainbow, the first real electronic answer to heavy metal. He may not even be aware of it, but he somehow is able to create the heaviest music on the planet using the
lightest of instruments. “Maniac Meat” will go down as a record so far ahead of its time that as newer bands emulate it they will get the credit reserved for him—and only him. He is shy to a fault, and the moment he decides to own his place in music, he will be bigger than those who command the spotlight now. I am fairly certain he doesn’t worry about such things, but that’s what obsessive fans like me are for.

Torche
. This band is cool because it defies categorization. You can call it metal. Or doom. Or pop. All I know is, its members are so immensely talented, and so pure in conviction, that they are the closest in approximating early U2’s promise. It would be a crime if they aren’t owning arenas in eighteen months. Their music demands a producer that sees this promise and desires to treat them like the arena band they already are, even if they don’t see it themselves.

Ginger Wildheart
. A furious workaholic who creates riffladen gems at the pace of a maniacal chord-bending conveyor belt, Ginger was one of the first artists to drag his fans along with him into the new world. Seeing the world change, and possibilities for survival dwindle in the traditional musical environment, he’s now on the forefront of a new kind of movement: a musical concierge who creates songs especially for those who love them.

Billy Zoom
. The coolest looking guitarist in history, minus the pretensions that come from being the coolest looking guitarist in history. Taciturn, calm, and agreeable, he unleashes riffs effortlessly—as a member of X—and
outcools peers who feel the need to express themselves in ways that merit, at best, a shrug. He’s the Clint Eastwood of guitar slingers—everyone else, by comparison, are Matt Damons.

Devin Townsend
. A gentle genius with a bottomless voice and a vicious guitar. If you come across one of his fans and see the manic devotion in their eye, it’s not unwarranted. He’s a rarity, the cult leader who never intended to run a cult. But there it is. I would urge you to pick up
Epicloud
. If you don’t like it, I would urge you to seek counseling.

Ariel Pink
. A purveyor of twisted psychedelic pop, he is as unpredictable as he is smart. Every song is a go-cart raceway of hairpin turns and beautiful melodies that defy interpretation. When I listen to his records, I feel like I discovered a radio station transmitting great pop from a lost city at the bottom of the ocean.

Tom Hazelmyer
. Tom might be the only punk rocker who quit a band to join the Marines. And then, after the Marines, he started his own record label, the legendary Amphetamine Reptile. A member of the band Halo of Flies, he’s also an insanely talented artist, whose concert posters and album covers are as disturbing as they are appealing. This is how he describes the benefit of joining the military:

It helped me pull my shit together and focus on what I wanted to do. I doubt that would have happened had I gone the route of my friends from the
neighborhood who wound up being short-order cooks and getting wasted. Nothing like being stranded in a barracks with no money and a guitar to make you knuckle down. It was also helpful in being forced to live and deal with folks from every strata of life, as we all tend to become isolated in our own clique/world. In general, eating a mountain of shit for four years helped keep me grounded and my ego in check when shit was taking off.

I met Tom when King Buzzo brought him along to a
Red Eye
taping. He’s a tough mofo, literally. He’s the only person I know who survived a coma. The more I read about this guy, the more I realize how much I’d like to be like him. He’s about as punk rock a mind you will find, without the pretension of the pretenders.

Gregg Turkington
. I came across his alias, the comedian Neil Hamburger, years ago, along with the fearlessness of his antagonistic anti-comedy. I hired him immediately to write for
Maxim
UK. His jokes are pockets of bravery, in that the punch line is often on people who are shocked to find it refutes their expectations. His gag on George Bush is such a brutal prank on the confused audience, it bears telling here:

“Hey is it just me, is it just me, or is George Bush the worst president in the history of the United States, huh. Am I right?”

(
The crowd, usually full of young hipsters, would roar with approval after that line
.)

“Which makes it all the harder to understand why his son, George W., is the best president we’ve had in the United States.”

Confused silence would follow that joke. And “Neil” would pause and let the confusion linger. And then he would move on to a joke that merely states the nature of our lives
.

“Why does Britney Spears sell so many millions of albums?

“Because the public is horny and depressed.”

Felix Dennis
. Granted, Felix was my boss for a good part of my career, but he also fired me … twice. But I’ll be damned if you can find a former crack addict who, in his later stages of life, became one of the best damn poets on the planet. What makes Felix a radical is not the creation of
Maxim
or
Stuff
or
The Week
, it’s his poetry. In that realm, he adheres to one particular rule: it must rhyme. And it does so, beautifully. His writing adheres to a discipline, long forgotten, which makes it ultimately rebellious. Years ago, he gave me this poem, for he felt it best summarized my own erratic, bizarre career.

T
HE
F
OOL

My friend would ask me, curious
,

When we were lads in school
,

‘You know it makes ’em furious
,

Why play the bloody fool?’

My mother she would scold me

Or lecture me in tears;

How many times she told me

To emulate my peers
.

When I was one and twenty
,

My editor would say:

‘You’ve talent here aplenty
,

Why play the fool all day?’