Musical metapolitics and the Alt-Right

Abstract

With some notable exceptions, research on the far-right and music has historically focused on rock-derived genres such as punk and metal. As the far-right have shifted political emphasis and sought to mainstream their political views, so, too, has research into the contemporary far-right demonstrated a distancing among political ideologues and parties as well as groups from both extreme lyrics and ‘harsher’ sounding elements. This has gone hand-in-hand with an embracing of a wider range of musical styles. Focusing on the music associated with the Alt-Right, a broad movement which sought to mainstream far-right politics, this article suggests that a cultural shift within the far-right went hand-in-hand with a mode of aesthetic appreciation among Alt-Right adherents, which has implications for the mainstreaming of far-right politics in relation to musical cultures and aesthetics. This form of musical metapolitics emphasized dissonant principles of irony and aesthetic pluralism as a form of strategic ambiguity, but still retained notions of racial superiority at its core despite an avowed openness to genre-based pluralism. Importantly, this process has implications for the mainstreaming of far-right messaging today using a wide variety of musical aesthetics.

Introduction

Those researching the far-right in relation to music in the post-Second World War period have often chosen to focus on music styles which can be broadly categorized under rock-derived genres like punk and metal. Aesthetically, these build on traditions characterized by extensive use of blues-derived harmony, distortion, amplified instrumentation, high volumes, relatively fast tempos and lyrical as well as vocal machismo. There has been a particularly heavy emphasis on ‘hate-rock’, with Nazi punk and national socialist Black metal or ‘National Socialist Black metal’ (NSBM) featuring heavily in studies on music and the far-right (Copsey and Worley, 2016; Dyck, 2017; Futrell et al., 2006; Grosholz and Pieri, 2023; Olson, 2012). This is despite the term ‘white power music’ connotating a wider range of explicitly white-nationalist artists across genres (Dyck, 2017: 2017; Teitelbaum, 2021). There are good reasons for focusing on NSBM and Nazi punk, as these have been the most visible musical aesthetics associated with far-right street movements, and have financed networks since the 1980s. However, there is evidence that as far-right groups and parties have tried to ‘mainstream’ their ideas (see Miller-Idriss, 2018; Mondon and Winter, 2020), there has been a corresponding distancing from more obviously extremist musical symbolism. Furthermore, recent work has called into question whether punk and metal are even popular among far-right movements at large (Teitelbaum, 2021). Crucially, given the way that they sound, as well as the cultivation of outsider identities within these musics’ scenes (Duncombe and Tremblay, 2011), endorsing musical styles that either sound aggressive or express biological racism directly clearly marks out associated movements’ politics as extreme. Instead, moves towards a more widely ‘tolerable’ musical aesthetics become a means of mainstreaming a politics of intolerance, the significance of which is that it shifts the terrain from inwardly facing subcultures based around music, outward towards mainstream audiences, using music with widespread appeal to reach them.

This article explores the appeal of music within what became known as the so-called ‘Alt-Right’. The term has been attributed to Paul Gottfried though it was popularized by Richard Spencer in 2008 (Hawley, 2017: 51–53), with the prefix ‘Alt’ added to make it appear more ‘alternative’, both in the sense of being ‘cooler’, and different from previous incarnations of white nationalism (p. 53). The Alt-Right has been understood as a faction within the contemporary far-right (see Mudde, 2019). However, while there are those that insist that it should be defined in originalist terms as a white-nationalist project (Hawley, 2017), it became a movement linked together by a ‘collection of lots of separate tendencies that grew semi-independently but which were joined under the banner of a bursting forth of anti-PC cultural politics’ (Nagle, 2017: 19). Much like the ‘New Right’ before it (Mondon and Winter, 2020), the term was originally concocted by far-right elites. What was unique, though, was the way it morphed into an online movement whose successes were largely due to its amorphous character and attempts to build broad appeal. Indeed, as Hawley (2017: 140) notes, many groups and individuals came to identify themselves as Alt-Right, without espousing explicitly white-nationalist views and even Spencer commented that this ideological porosity enhanced white-nationalist aims, without personally agreeing with the term’s expansion (Hawley, 2017: 150–151). This means that while it started out as an explicitly top-down ideological faction, the Alt-Right’s subsequent fragmentation meant that it became increasingly difficult to draw boundaries around it and this was key to its successes. Its influence today has been severely diminished. Yet it is still important to understand the Alt-Right, given the legacy of its influence and that many of the tactics, from trolling to doxxing and ironic distancing, popularized by its adherents, have been adopted by contemporary far-right actors and groups.

Methodologically, the article draws on a combination of systematic analysis of music discussions in Alt-Right-linked forums, comment pieces and reviews on websites linked to the Alt-Right, and documentary analysis of its ideologues’ rhetoric. It develops analytical themes both through an engagement with the existing literature on Alt-Right strategy (see Hawley, 2017; Nagle, 2017) and more inductively through the exploration of discourses within these spaces. The article argues that Alt-Right media and its proponents simultaneously encouraged ironic consumption of mainstream musics and advocated an aesthetic pluralism, the latter of which has been historically anathema to the ideology of far-right groups which preached separatism. These trends are a form of strategic ambiguity pursued by extreme-right ideologues under the guise of ‘metapolitics’, in order to mainstream extreme-right ideas, as well as being representative of the movement’s broad coalition. Yet, far from advocating any kind of genuine democratic pluralism, appeals to aesthetic pluralism obfuscate the political impact of far-right messaging and there is still an insistence on the superiority of a singular, dominant ‘Western culture’, which is portrayed as fundamentally white. Crucially, despite changes in tone, the core message underlying aesthetic reception remained at its heart, and its extremist conception of racial supremacy, and it is this legacy to which it is important to be attentive.

Music and the far-right: 1980s–2000s

As noted above, in the post WWII period, much research on music and the far-right has focused on punk and particularly skinhead, Nazi punk (Teitelbaum, 2021). The pan-European Blood & Honour network, ¹ which sprang up during the 1980s to professionalize and monetize the activities of predominantly Nazi punk bands, has been the most commonly name-checked (Copsey and Worley, 2016; Dyck, 2017; Lööw, 1998) owing to its centrality in establishing financial and political support for white-nationalist activities in Europe and beyond. It is important to note, however, that it is not just Nazi punk which has supported far-right movements. A range of authors have consistently problematized punk’s wider relation to racial politics, despite an ostensibly antiracist ethos. Hebdige (1979: 66–67) already demonstrated how punk appropriated imagery, aesthetics and style associated with West Indian Rudeboy fashion even though the genre was dominated by white musicians and fans in the United Kingdom and the United States. Duncombe and Tremblay’s (2011) collection also points specifically to the fact that despite punk’s distancing from whiteness along lines of racial solidarity (p. 10), identification with the music on the grounds of its outsider status meant that it could be interpreted by the extreme-right as confirming their own subcultural identity.

During the 1990s, NSBM also developed alongside the more theatrical and anti-Christian, though not obviously racist, Black metal scenes. Given Black metal’s roots in Norway, an overwhelmingly majority ethnically white country which features in Norse mythology, it is unsurprising that the music has come to be seen as a symbol of Nordic purity by some of its supporters (Olson, 2012), as did Wagner’s music, which became central to Nazi cultural politics (Viereck, 2003). As with punk, other metal-derived sub-genres – particularly Viking Metal – have attracted large white-nationalist followings for their stress on imagery which links to some kind of ‘ethnically pure’ Ur-folk and even mainstream metal bands have embraced elements of white nationalism and Nazism. ² Nevertheless, there are few metal sub-genres which so openly flirt with far-right iconography and ideology as Black metal. Varg Vikernes, a founding member of influential Black metal band Burzum, has openly proclaimed affinity with National Socialism while other influential Black metal bands such as Gorgoroth and Nokturnal Mortum are explicitly Nazi, and Norwegian Black metal pioneer Gaahl was explicitly linked to far-right networks in the 1990s. ³

Among studies on music within the far-right, punk and metal have tended to dominate. The question of why these two genres have lent themselves to ideologies which emphasize violence against minority populations is perhaps easy. Both musics’ refusal to conform to stylistic norms attached to easy or pleasant listening imbue them with the audible qualities of rage against the sensibilities of polite, liberal society, particularly among those who regard themselves as being on the fringes and who advocate direct confrontation. As Duncombe and Tremblay (2011) note, the outsider status conferred on punk subcultures through members’ abrasive style also means that participants could position themselves in opposition to mainstream society. The sounding aspects of the music contribute to this interpretation. Rock-derived genres like punk and metal both emphasize fast tempos, growling, snarling, screamed or shrieked vocals, non-tonal or modal use of harmony, discordance, repetitive rhythms and stress on volume. This, it could be argued, might be seen to externalize the logic of and desire for power in the face of repressed rage against a perceived status quo. Dyck (2017: 125) has made this link explicit when she states that:

the loud volume and stage-centric nature of standard rock concerts . . . suit authoritarian political movements particularly well . . . the sheer volume of the concert hinders audience participation in or real-time feedback on the sound or the message of the music . . .

The implicit invocation of ‘mass hysteria’ and crowd psychology, here, chimes with Frankfurt School analyses of fascist movements as irrationally sentimental and, relatedly, the music’s ability to convey aggression as core to its political utility. The musician–audience dynamic is reminiscent of the staged-spectacle so favoured by authoritarian leaders. However, Dyck also suggests that it is the sonic properties of rock specifically, and by extension rock-derived sub-genres, which contribute to this appeal because volume confounds the senses, confuses rational thought and forces audience members to pay attention to musicians’ message rather than critically interpreting it.

Metapolitics and mainstreaming

The contemporary far-right is a heterogenous entity consisting of political parties, groups and individuals which advocate both democratic and anti-democratic, politically violent means to achieve segregated, unequally stratified societies (Mudde, 2019: 30). While some draw a distinction in terms of the radical- and extreme-right, the former’s ideal society being an ethnostate (Mudde, 2019: 30) means that it pursues similarly extreme goals using the language of culture rather than biological race (see also Bonilla-Silva, 2017). This is no accident. Since the 1990s, newer far-right groups, parties and movements have consciously shifted strategy, with many attempting to ‘professionalise’ their image by publicly disavowing violent actors and groups, toning down overtly white-nationalist rhetoric and adopting a more socially conservative attire and fashion sense closer to that expected of ‘traditional’ politicians, as a deliberate strategy to gain political power and to mainstream far-right ideas (Mondon and Winter, 2020). Mainstreaming, generally, has meant a top-down reframing of political arguments and attempts to build a broad coalition which has seen a shift in everything from the language of its ideologues to the style and consumption of rank and file movement members (see Miller-Idriss, 2018).

Mainstreaming was a strategy consciously advocated by a range of far-right groups post-1968, in response to calls from French ‘New Right’ thinkers (Mudde, 2019; Spektorowski, 2000) who argued that, in order to make white-nationalist narratives more acceptable, it was important to use the language of multicultural, liberal democracy (Mondon and Winter, 2020). The focus on the wide dissemination of more ‘palatable’ ethnocratic messages meant focusing primarily on cultural issues, which was a tactic adopted as part of a wider metapolitical strategy among the contemporary far-right. The term metapolitics, referring to an attempt to instil a particular worldview through a focus on culture (Viereck, 2003: 3), was originally coined by Wagner’s inner circle in the 1800s, pointing to the importance particularly of operatic music in building support for ethnonationalist projects. The idea was adopted by the Alt-Right via French ‘New Right’ intellectual de Benoist who, in turn, adopted it from Gramsci’s analysis of how intellectual and cultural hegemony shape political discourse (Spektorowski, 2000; Teitelbaum, 2017). Richard Spencer borrowed heavily from de Benoist while Steve Bannon, architect of Trump’s 2016 success, claims to be a ‘Gramscian of the right’ through his emphasis on metapolitical strategy (Nagle, 2017). de Benoist, however, combined both Gramsci’s insights with 1900s blood and soil German nationalism, which itself was heavily influenced by Wagner’s ‘Bayreuth circle’ (Viereck, 2003).

This move towards mainstreaming a publicly palatable image has already had an impact to which far-right political parties, particularly, associate themselves. As Shekhovtsov (2012) argues, since the early-2000s, party and movement leaders of groups with undeniably white-nationalist roots, have sought to distance themselves from both skinhead punk and metal (see also Teitelbaum, 2017). Dunkel and Schiller (2022), particularly, note that pop musicians have been used by contemporary authoritarian leaders across the globe because the contemporary far-right depends on an appeal to ‘the popular’, broadly defined, in order to garner mass support. The problem is that while punk and metal build on popular music traditions, they themselves are not very popular and are actively alienating in many cases, even, sometimes, within the broader movements themselves (Teitelbaum, 2021). The music is too sonically aggressive, and too obviously extreme, to attract mass support. Partly, this stems from the confrontational and often violent language in the lyrics but it also relates to aesthetic questions of how the music sounds, who it appeals to and how the culture associated with the music appears to the wider public. The same sonic qualities that conferred outsider status on punk and metal mean that they are not conducive to mainstream messaging; mainstreaming entails distancing from music which conveys a politics of seemingly irrational anger and which sound aggressive to the uninitiated.

The existence of far-right music styles beyond punk and metal is not entirely historically unprecedented. Child country-folk group Prussian Blue – a pseudonym for the Zyklon-B gas used during the holocaust – were heavily promoted among white-nationalist circles in the United States during the 2000s although they do not appear to have been overly popular with committed neo-Nazi listeners, owing to the recordings’ low production values and the singers’ young age (Dyck, 2017: 120). ‘Hate country’, which had a wider audience, has existed in the United States since the 1960s (Lööw, 1998), with Reb Rebel and Reb Time records popular in former slave-owning states, though less so outside of the United States. Lööw also notes the (albeit minimal) championing of Euroclassical composers – specifically Wagner because of Hitler’s love of his work and his well-documented antisemitism – among neo-Nazis in Sweden during the 1990s (Lööw, 1998: 180) but, again, this sentiment was not shared widely. What is new, today, is that ideologues and party leaders have, en masse, turned to supporting musical forms which have a wider appeal among the general public but which still advance, either implicitly or explicitly, ethnonationalist messaging.

Ironic appropriation and strategic ambiguity

Central to the Alt-Right’s success and appeal has been a culture of ‘trolling’ and a juvenile aesthetic of crudely drawn cartoon characters and ironic memes (DeCook, 2020), reflecting the user-culture associated with the gaming forums and ‘shock humour’ communities where it took root. Alt-Right forum adherents would swarm onto social media pages of organizations or individuals and deliberately try to provoke outrage by collectively posting outrageous and offensive statements (Nagle, 2017). When users received sufficient pushback, they most frequently invoked irony in their defence. Nevertheless, this purported disinterestedness and a lack of seriousness about, or commitment to, a particular position was a form of strategic ambiguity. It left the uninitiated unclear as to the intentions and drew in free-speech absolutists to defend hate-speech masquerading as tasteless comedy.

Irony manifests itself in an eclectic use of musical iconography among the Alt-Right. Donald Trump, a hero of the Alt-Right, in the run up to the 2020 election utilized the eminently camp anthems YMCA and Macho Man, by the Village People, at his rallies. Despite well-documented Alt-Right opposition to gay rights, videos of Trump’s supporters enthusiastically singing and dancing to both Macho Man and YMCA followed him in the last year of his presidency and have reappeared in his current campaign. Trump’s use of Macho Man operated as both a knowing wink to his outraged critics, who branded him as a wannabe strongman, and his supporters who admired his more dictatorial side as among his better qualities. The invocation of the figurative strongman (‘macho man’) is rendered harmless or even absurd by the connotations and stylistic qualities of the excessively camp disco-tinged elements, despite the seriousness of what they imply. Out-gay popstar Ricky Rebel even recorded the song ‘MAGA’ ⁴ to the tune of YMCA, in which he sings ‘we’re all hu-man and we don’t segregate, just like wo-men helping make America great’ (original emphasis).

Popstar Taylor Swift was also appropriated by the more overtly white-nationalist elements of the Alt-Right as someone who, it was claimed, supported white nationalism. Andrew Anglin, founder of the largest neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, described Swift as ‘a pure Aryan goddess, like something out of classical Greek poetry. . . Athena reborn’, claiming ‘it is also an established fact that Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi and is simply waiting for the time when Donald Trump makes it safe for her to come out and announce her Aryan agenda to the world’. ⁵ This quote was accompanied by a series of subreddits and Facebook groups which sprouted up in 2015 around Taylor Swift. One, Praise the Empress, and another on Reddit, r/Aaryangodess, were simply a series of memes with her face accompanied by Nazi slogans, in the Fraktur font utilized extensively by the Nazi party during the 1930s and 40s. The slogans were often direct quotes from Mein Kampf or Hitler’s speeches focussing on the extermination of Jewish people. Her (2016) Look What you Made Me Do became a particular cause célèbre among the Alt-Right because it was interpreted as construing a revenge narrative in which Swift promised retribution against ethnic minorities who had ‘stolen’ the United States from white colonizers. ⁶ Swift’s own initial ambiguity around her political affiliation and her invocation of George Soros in a speech ⁷ compounded these rumours. ⁸ Similarly, Lana Del Rey was singled out for praise in threads on one of the largest Alt-Right subreddits r/trp (The Red Pill) in 2016 as being the most ‘redpilled female ever’. Two of her songs, You Can be the Boss and Fucked My Way to the Top, were both interpreted by members as really containing coded messages about women’s true position in society. These examples do not necessarily indicate a sincere commitment to these two artists. However, the ambiguity and confusion created by this ironic embrace is also a means by which to muddy the waters and to extend the reach of far-right messaging into other domains. Praise for two of the English-speaking world’s (currently) most well-known pop artists, Del Rey and Swift, though, represents an odd departure from the kind of stress on sincere authenticity of politics associated with the machismo of punk and metal.

As noted above, there have been women and girl-identified white-nationalist artists, such as Prussian Blue or Saga (see Dyck, 2017; Teitelbaum, 2017) particularly in the singer-songwriter tradition of ballads sung over acoustic instruments like guitar and fiddle. What marks Swift’s and Del Rey’s appropriation as relatively novel is, first, that these are two extremely popular artists whose lyrics are not explicitly political. Prussian Blue’s Wolves of Vinland, ⁹ for instance, contains explicitly supremacist lyrics but Swift’s affectless ‘Oh, look what you made me do’, despite being obviously not white nationalist, is vaguer, leaving its meaning more open to interpretation and debate. Second, others have shown the co-optation of folk music through nods to an ethnically pure ‘Volk’, with their emphasis on tradition and the authenticity of a stripped-back anti-modernist focus on acoustic instruments (Kaminsky, 2012; Shekhovtsov, 2012). Del Rey and Swift, by contrast, actively adopt the synthesizers and artifice of pop music in a way that embraces ‘poptimism’ over the discursive authenticity of rock and folk instrumentation (Kramer, 2012) as representing ‘the real people’. Third, unlike far-right appropriation of punk artists like Sham 69, Swift’s and Del Rey’s music is unashamedly non-subcultural, appealing to wide audiences in terms of both production and distribution. As noted, Prussian Blue attracted criticism even within white-nationalist circles for their low-fi production and amateur musicianship (Dyck, 2017: 120) but Del Rey and Swift are two of the world’s most accomplished, famous singers. Offering ambiguous interpretations of mainstream music, in this way, opens debate and allows discourses to spread as both proponents and detractors discuss the validity of such claims; ‘muddying the waters’ so to speak.

Ironic appreciation can also be seen in the rise of Moon Man, who became a kind of cult hip-hop phenomenon within the Alt-Right (Hawley, 2017: 84) and who, as Teitelbaum (2021) notes, has not hitherto received significant attention. Moon Man emerged as part of a trend known as ‘fashwave’ which plays on the aesthetics of nostalgia in the microgenre vaporwave (Larsen, 2022; McLeod, 2018). Vaporwave adopts heavily pixelated 90s video-game imagery and samples, often slowing them down or inserting deliberate ‘skips’ to replicate the effect of listening to scratched CDs as part of the overall aesthetic, appealing to retro-gamers particularly. Fashwave utilizes similar retro imagery but employs far-right iconography. Musically it is similar to darkwave, employing 80s analogue-sounding synthesizers reminiscent of retro-futurist films and nods to 16-bit video-game music. The Moon Man character, developed by McDonalds in the 1990s, was reappropriated in the early half of the 2000s, allegedly by a 4chan user named Farkle, and given new life as a racist automated vocal hip-hop phenomenon which spread like a meme. In this way it operated in effect as the aural equivalent of the Alt-Right’s mascot Pepe the Frog, ¹⁰ making use of musical and video samples drawn from 90s video games and hip-hop tracks while the vocals are automated text read out in a computer-generated voice most famously associated with Stephen Hawking and, later, the hacker collective Anonymous. YouTube initially removed the videos as part of its anti-radicalisation drive in 2019, and even BitChute, which is home to disproportionately more overtly extremist content, removed it in 2022, though it is still available on YouTube today.

In one video, from 2019, Moon Man is featured with a sawn-off shotgun in front of a Swastika under the title ‘Black Lives will Never Matter’. In another, his face has been superimposed on a scene from the film American History X, where Edward Norton’s character ‘curb-stomps’ a Black man to death, under the title ‘Kill a N**** Tonite’. One of the most widely shared videos, entitled ‘Right Wing Death Squads’, opens with the lyrics ‘All of you n*****s, cucks ¹¹ and liberals/ we’re sending death squads to your neighbourhoods after midnight . . . I’m Moon Man, representing white power, stacking bodies higher than Trump Tower’. The video for the track opens with the following disclaimer:

The following music video contains traces of mature language, racism and sick lunar beats. Please note that this is all satire and is not meant to offend any ethnic group in any way. It’s a joke. If you are easily offended please contact your nearest safe space.

The defence of irony here echoes Teitelbaum’s analysis of Swedish white-nationalist hip-hop artist Zyklon Boom whose name references the gas used on Holocaust victims (Teitelbaum, 2017: 65). Exactly what is satirical about either is difficult to fathom, but in using the disclaimer of ‘satire’, Moon Man’s track displaces the sense of moral offence at the clearly racist, white supremacist content to those who take offence at racism and white supremacy.

The idea of ‘ironically’ using symbols to cause offence can be traced back to a certain countercultural understanding, in that what goes against accepted social norms is subversive in-and-of itself. The use of Nazi imagery invoking the defence of ‘irony’ and ‘satire’ has historical precedent with punks (Hebdige, 1979: 106) who used the Swastika ‘ironically’ as a subversive strategy or the band Joy Division, whose name references the sexual abuse of women in concentration camps. Indeed, the principle of subversion was key to the art school aesthetics of 1960s counterculture, from which punk borrowed heavily in attempts to shock and outrage their parents’ generation. As noted above, the use of racist language and iconography in punk as a whole meant that it was ripe for both multifaceted interpretation and deliberate misinterpretation (see also Duncombe and Tremblay, 2011: 5). As such, the bricolage-based approach that the punks adopted in the ‘70s (Hebdige, 1979: 116–117) within the Alt-Right, might be read as an updated form of subcultural protest. The difference here is that it is the insertion of white-nationalist messaging into music forms which emphasize artifice, unseriousness and even frivolity which seeks their widespread dissemination. It represents a profound shift from the sonically subcultural towards a white nationalism which claims not to take itself seriously in terms of its audible iconography.

This unseriousness and distancing should also be understood within a broader shift towards the resurgence of widespread use of irony in contemporary culture during the early 2000s which saw a resurgence and transformation of hipster culture and aesthetics among the mainstream. In much the same way as its 50s predecessors: ‘the twenty-first-century hipster borrows from the blank irony described by Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson and instead turns it into an affective, nostalgic and connective force’ (Hill, 2017: 79). The symbolic linking with early-2000s hipster culture, in fact, was designed to give the Alt-Right a slightly more ‘alternative’ vibe so as to provide an ‘edgy’, countercultural gloss to Nazism with the aim of enticing younger audiences in a way the Ku Klux Klan could not; this was Spencer’s expressly stated aim in adopting the ‘Alt’ label. A lack of sincerity means that one does not need to commit to a coherent political ideology and, by extension, to music as representing one’s political views as authentic in the same way. This lack of sincerity, as such, continues to lend itself to fascist ideology in that it disseminates iconographies and messaging widely, while providing plausible deniability for the more sincere elements.

Aesthetic pluralism: expanding audiences

Alt-Right ideologues such as Spencer framed their particular brand of white nationalism as pluralist; one which paints ‘whiteness’ as a singular, marginalized cultural identity among many and espoused an outwardly (disingenuous) respect for cultural diversity (see Mondon and Winter, 2020). This is indebted to the New-Right’s broader strategy of framing white supremacy in terms of ‘ethnopluralism’ (Mudde, 2019: 30; Spektorowski, 2000). As also noted above, the Alt-Right morphed from an explicitly fringe white-nationalist movement which emphasized the formation of an ethnostate based on racial identity, to a more amorphous entity containing, within it, competing ideas around aims and strategy (Hawley, 2017: 148–149). Yet, despite rhetorical differences between the factions, one commonality is that all preached racial separatism rather than supremacy even if, at its core, the majority of members were ideologically predisposed towards the latter.

There is some historical precedent for this framing in relation to how the far-right have historically used music. For instance, Rock Against Communism, ¹² organized in 1979 by the British National Front (Copsey and Worley, 2016: 27), was a specifically separatist response to Rock Against Racism. The labelling of the event as ‘against communism’ rather than ‘for white nationalism’ indicates a similarly pluralist rhetoric in that it constructs communism as a threat to (white) British identity. What is different, however, is that the way music has intertwined with the Alt-Right is decidedly pluralistic in the way it appeals through online means to non-subcultural and specifically mainstream musics (as noted above) and explicitly those which have their specific origins in African diasporas. This stands in contrast with punk, metal and even country-derived sub-genres which, because they were ‘stripped overt markers of African-derived musical traditions’ (Dyck, 2017: 125), were more easily adapted and transformed ‘into a vehicle for violently pro-white political ideologies’ (p. 125).

Aesthetic pluralism has lent itself to genre-eclecticism among the contemporary far-right more broadly. There is now far-right folk and neo-folk (Kaminsky, 2012; Shekhovtsov, 2012) as well as ‘fashwave’ (Larsen, 2022; McLeod, 2018). Stranger, however, has been the embrace of styles which have historically directly been associated with Black communities, specifically hip-hop, among the far-right (see, for instance, Teitelbaum, 2017: 80–81). Nevertheless, while the emergence of niche white-nationalist rappers have attracted few views or plays, Alt-Right rappers have had much more widespread success and appeal. Bryson Gray, a Black rapper, for example, released his full-length album ‘MAGA Ain’t Got No Colour’ ¹³ in 2020 to acclaim among the far-right. Clearly, the title of the album was designed to reflect a more inclusive approach to the far-right MAGA movement where he tries to dispel the (well-founded) assertion that the movement is heavily linked to white nationalism. As such Gray, because he is Black, also lent a greater sense of authenticity to the music as well as support to the claims that the movement was not racist. Loza Alexander, a Hispanic, Proud-Boys associated rapper even produced a promotional video advertising the January 6th attempted insurrection in his F.A.F.O ¹⁴ where he explicitly stated (in advance) that ‘things were going to happen on January 6th’. ¹⁵ More recently, Tom MacDonald’s FACTS has recently racked up 18 million plays on YouTube while established hip-hop artists such as Kanye West have been positively reviewed on prominent Alt-Right site Counter Currents (see below). Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, even wrote his own hip-hop musical.

In terms of recorded music sales and downloads, rap and hip-hop are – or at least were until recently – the world’s most commercially lucrative genre, so it is, quite simply, the music to which a quantitatively larger majority of people have been exposed in English-speaking countries. More than this, however, the music’s appeal stems from its signification, among white audiences, of masculinist dominance which lends itself neatly to symbolic of the physical assertion of power endemic to radical right movements as a whole. Musically, the emphasis on the backbeat, spitting, staccato vocal delivery in a lower register which emulates guttural threats or animated speech patterns, associated with anger and irritation, contribute to this image. A lyrical focus on self-sufficiency, braggadocio and physical domination also mean that hip-hop as a genre is perfectly suited to white audiences, particularly those who fantasize about retribution and resistance while simultaneously positioning themselves as ‘underdogs’. Added to this appeal are the racist cultural connotations of hip-hop with ‘hypermasculinity’, both through its roots in African diasporas, in which predominantly Black men in the United States have been discursively constructed as dangerous or threatening, and through the music’s illicit links to ‘gangsta’ (i.e. illegal) culture.

Alt-Right ideologues’ insistence on metapolitical strategy may also go some way to explaining this insertion and re-interpretation of white nationalist talking points in relation to established mainstream rappers such as Eminem and Kanye West, among other artists (de Boise, 2022) using techniques borrowed from left-leaning cultural theory. The influential Alt-Right website Counter Currents, which in itself attempts to advance white nationalism in a more ‘respectable’ fashion (see Hawley, 2017: 19) included a music criticism section which reviewed almost exclusively bands and artists, across a range of genres, with no connection at all to white nationalism. Lead music critic Scott Weisswald ¹⁶ reviewed well-established indie rock bands like Neutral Milk Hotel (whose 1999 In the Airplane Over the Sea lamented the atrocities of the Second World War), Modest Mouse, Morrissey as well as – again – releases by Taylor Swift (specifically Folklore). Weisswald even reviewed Kanye West’s Jesus is King, writing longer polemics about the genius of the ‘old Kanye’. ¹⁷ Given that Morrissey and West have both flirted with white nationalism and conspiracy theories, this makes them potentially more palatable vehicles for positive interpretations, even if these reviews were written years before their most recent controversies. This alone does not, though, explain the appearance of Neutral Milk Hotel or Swift.

Instead of focusing on white-nationalist artists, Weisswald, again, uses the frame of white nationalism to read and interpret quantitatively popular established artists with little to no connection to white nationalism. Importantly however, in reviewing mainstream releases this lends a veneer of respectability to the white-nationalist leanings of the site, increasing interaction with the site from those who may be interested more in the reviews of the bands rather than Counter Currents’ politics. As such, as per metapolitical strategy, it inserts far-right political meaning more subtly into existing cultural texts rather than creating new ones. The reasons for these respectability politics are partly strategic in that aesthetic pluralism appeals to a quantitatively wider audience; more people may like Kanye West than are interested in overt white-nationalist politics. By reviewing the music, this becomes a way of locking people into particular world views through a focus on music rather than politics, as well as offering a degree of plausible deniability as to the core message. As such, focusing on a wider range of aesthetics and music styles also reduces the associations with far-right politics which are connected to far-right politics, in popular opinion, by both the way that hate-rock sounds and the lyrical explication of its message.

Racist overtones: ‘Western’ cultural superiority

A more outwardly ‘pluralist’ approach does, however, entail a trade-off, and even a contradiction, in terms of messaging (see also Teitelbaum, 2017: 43) which poses a dilemma for contemporary far-right movements. The shift in the tone of the politics brings more people in but also changes the movement’s character and risks what some see as ‘diluting’ the core. Indeed, as noted above, within the Alt-Right there were conflicts over the aims, definition and methods. This inevitably meant that there were internal debates around the value of certain musics over others. There is a danger, however, in conflating tone with the core message as a proxy for extremism. To this end, it is important to note that, while jazz and soul were occasionally praised, despite the embrace of rap and hip-hop among sections of the Alt-Right, there was still an uneasy ambivalence around its value. Accusations of ‘degeneracy’ were frequently levelled at Black hip-hop artists recalling explicit Nazi tropes around jazz and modernism as a global (‘internationalist’) Jewish conspiracy (Levi, 1994: 122), through labelling of Black music as ‘degenerate’ or promoting a ‘culture of degeneracy’. ¹⁸

In addition to its album reviews of non-white-nationalist artists, Counter Currents published several essays on the cultural supremacy of Western classical music as well as more implicitly racist tracts on Black music. In the essay ‘Imagine Music Without Black People’, ¹⁹ Weisswald, in a deceptively multiculturalist twist, argued that:

The idea that certain modern musical developments, genres, or leitmotifs belong to one ethnic group in a country that is inescapably multicultural is somewhat disingenuous. Music is a broadly cosmopolitan field, with many different people and groups collaborating on the global stage and across time.

Appearing to refute Herder’s nationalist argument for music’s moral worth based on place, which became a central philosophical to Nazi blood and soil nationalism (Viereck, 2003), Weisswald invokes the term leitmotif in a quasi-academic nod to Wagner, suggesting that musical innovation is not defined by ethnicity. This argument sounds reasonable, perhaps even liberal. Weisswald slowly builds up his rhetorical polemic, stating that, in a society without Black people, the majority of the population would not have known that music from African diasporas existed, therefore music would not be better or worse. Again, this is a standard relativist stance. However, what starts out as mere patronizing condescension quickly pivots to the infinitely more sinister assertion that:

The suggestion that we would be losing out on black music if they were no longer in the country is really suggesting that overwhelmingly Jewish media companies would be losing out on the ability to commodify their suffering and anger – anger that is presently threatening to destroy us. In essence, some hip-hop-loving Leftist insistent on keeping his token blacks in the country really wants to keep them here to suffer for his entertainment [emphasis added].

Here is the crux of the ‘ethnopluralist’ framing, which nods towards Nazi conspiracies in suggesting that jazz’s burgeoning success in Germany, during the earlier half of the 1930s, was as a specific result of global Jewish conspiracy.

In another more explicit defence of ‘Western culture’, Weisswald applies the term Gesamtkunstwerk (again referencing Wagner) in order to analyse what he argues to be the ‘completeness’ of concept albums produced by Western indie musicians with no links to the far-right (Modest Mouse, Neutral Milk Hotel). Simultaneously, reintroducing well-established distinctions between serious and friviolous popular musics, he rails against the evils of contemporary pop music, titling the article in a characteristically tongue-in-cheek fashion Pop Music is a Satanic Mind Virus (employing its own knowing wink to the more occultist elements of the far-right). ²⁰ In an uncharacteristic moment of candour, he notes:

The New Right’s goal of injecting our ideas into the mainstream can very easily be mistaken for a desire to become mainstream ourselves. That is not necessary at this stage in the culture war . . . Pop music is but one facet of the whole thing. Don’t let this discourage you from enjoying what little of it is pleasant to our ears, but by all means, consider the significance of such an act. ²¹

Echoing an argument visible in even less explicitly white-nationalist Alt-Right forums (see de Boise, 2022), Weisswald argues that certain popular musics are emblematic of the superiority of Western culture (specifically pop music produced in Sweden which is of a ‘scientific’ character ²² – implicitly invoking scientific racism through an appeal to Sweden’s majority white population) while others are detrimental to it. Despite embracing pop, he makes clear distinctions between superior and inferior artists which are indebted to their national roots.

Alignment with the contested notion of ‘Western culture’, is, however, often more implicitly asserted in cultural and ethnic rather than racial terms. Here, in an act of what has been called ‘racism without racists’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2017), culture is instead invoked as a substitute for race. To this end, while Western popular musics are argued to be emblematic of the superiority of Western culture, it is in discussions of ‘classical music’ (and specifically Euroclassical music) where this argument really comes to the fore. Counter Currents even had a special issue to mark the 250 years since Beethoven’s christening in which the author explicitly ties Beethoven’s ‘genius’ to the legacy of ‘white European civilization’ going so far as to speculate that:

I imagine he [Beethoven] would have shared the views of Johann Gottfried Herder, who advocated a form of nationalism that upheld cultural pluralism. ²³

As noted above, this nod to ‘upholding cultural pluralism’ is a metapolitical strategy while the antisemitic dog-whistle of ‘the globalist agenda’, can be read in a variety of ways depending on one’s view of Herder. While Herder did not specifically racialize the concept of the physical soil in a way that the Völkisch movement did, his comments on the ‘maddening’ dilution of folk music by foreign influences (Herder and Bohlman, 2017: 32) and specifically his assertions that Jewish people were a nomadic people ‘[lacking] any true sentiment or honour’ (Apsler, 1943: 11) tied in with a moralist national sentiment defined by physical geography. Weisswald’s appeal to cultural pluralism, therefore, has to be understood in a long tradition whereby ‘white’ is a racial category which both excludes Jewish people and a more recent endeavour to advocate for ethnonationalist exclusion as a specific ethnic identity by appropriating the language of liberal multiculturalism.

The re-interpretation of white, Western male composers in the Euroclassical tradition to fit far-right narratives are also observable, too, in ‘Alt-Lite’ or ‘IDW’ authors’ works today (see, for instance, Peterson, 2018: 27–28). As noted above, this is not a completely new phenomenon (Lööw, 1998: 180). However, current attempts to claim affinity with Beethoven and Mozart carry racialized overtones regarding the racial superiority of white Western composers without mentioning their race specifically. These discourses resonate with wider audiences precisely because they operate within a discursive locus concerning the West which exalts its cultural products as evidence of its moral superiority. Much as Nazi musicologists largely supported notions of racial superiority as essential to the music’s worth, as well as a global conspiracy perpetrated through culture (see Levi, 1994: 98–102), with globalism currently used as a synonym for internationalism, the contrast between the claimed superiority of (white) Western music and the supposed ‘degeneracy’ of music with roots in African disaporas are discussed in terms of cultural superiority or inferiority, even in the less explicitly white-nationalist Alt-Right forums today. Musical nativism, which became fused with ‘blood and soil’ explanations of music’s sonic character during the 1800s, is still invoked in the far-right’s aesthetic judgement, despite the shift in tone.

Conclusion

This article has argued, following others (see Teitelbaum, 2017, 2021), that there have been fundamental shifts in how music is utilized by the contemporary far-right. Where it differs from more recent work is that it shows how the Alt-Right, as a specifically Anglophone white-nationalist phenomenon, which has had enormous cultural and political impact across the world, used music as part of its metapolitical strategy in mainstreaming its message. In some ways its tactics have been indebted to broader attempts to ‘professionalise’ extremist right-wing parties, coupled with the opportunities afforded by digitalisation, and which has seen a greater eclecticism among far-right groups at large. The strategic emphasis on altering the tone rather than the core of the message among ideologues can be seen in its appeals to music and various aspects of its musical culture.

However, the widening of the musical styles associated with the far-right also represents a broader consequence of the increasing appeal of its ideas among different sections of populations in Western countries. The fact that the Alt-Right developed into a large conglomeration of different threads, held together by a sense of the ethnic and cultural superiority of something called ‘Western culture’, has meant that its musical symbols have become increasingly diverse and varied, engaging more widely with mainstream culture and music than previous far-right incarnations. Nevertheless, despite this professed ironic unseriousness and move towards a greater aesthetic pluralism, there is still a profound emphasis on musical value as defined by ethnic superiority, even where the word culture is employed as a synonym.

Metapolitics, since the term’s formulation, has always emphasized the role of music in building support for nationalist causes (Viereck, 2003). What made the Alt-Right’s approach particularly concerning, however, is that in pursuing a maximalist strategy with regards to exposure, the clear demarcation between white-nationalist and conservative became increasingly blurred; a trend among the contemporary far-right more broadly (Mudde, 2019). Indeed, this strategic ambiguity has been part of Alt-Right strategy since the beginning, manifesting itself in not only an obfuscation of an obviously white-nationalist music, as radical right artists embrace a wider array of genres, but also a widening audience through the interpretation of established artists. While this potentially risks alienating core supporters, in both cases, this strategic ambiguity has potentially reached further than ‘hate-rock’ music scenes were previously able to do and, as such, marks a potentially more insidious threat through its particular brand of musical metapolitics.