Mark Twain: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, I wrote a long one instead”

Don't forget the footnotes.

Dear (redacted),

As you know, I’ve watched the controversy that has surrounded Sticky Fingers’ return to the limelight with excessive curiosity, and the internet’s many, varied responses to it have left me equal parts mesmerised and head-in-hands, what-the-fuck-have-we-done levels of frustrated with the state of the world.

But I suppose that isn’t unique to the Sticky Fingers’ drama. In the internet, we have created a monster that is uncontrollable; a Lernaean Hydra of turbo gronks that only multiply when challenged and who, like Schrodinger’s cat, seemingly only exist when observed. Thankfully, like Lupin’s Boggart, they can only affect you to the extent that you empower them, but, like George Costanza's double dips, the siren call of these morons manages to petrify you (in both senses of the word) before you even know what's happening.

Most importantly, however, like my self-indulgent and likely inaccurate references, they can all go and get fucked. Totally, wholly and properly fucked. Line them up and knock them down. Annihilate the fuckers and salt the earth. Destroy their false idols. Sanity über alles. Carthage must be destroyed.

I mean, have you ever seen /r/TheDonald?

It’s a nightmare of Black Mirror-ean proportions, but it is alarmingly real and horrifyingly so. It exists in the here and the now, but thankfully it is a here and a now within which I am able to dictate the terms of engagement. I simply can’t accidentally wander into /r/TheDonald. I administer the dosage.

However, the comments section on some music blog’s coverage of the latest flavour of outrage is a form of tribal warfare, us-against-them fuckery that I simply can’t avoid, or at least with any ease. It’s interwoven between Steve from highschool’s photos of Europe and Aunty Jenny’s thoughts on Brexit. These are things that I care about, and they are polluted with nameless, faceless tin-pot dictators preaching a Cognitively-n-Morally-White-Australia policy as they go toe-to-toe for internet points and an illusory sense of self-importance.

What’d Nietzsche say?

‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster’?

‘And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you’?

Perhaps he has a point. Time on Facebook certainly can't be considered time well spent, but Zuckerburg’s got my dopamine receptors all fucked and the lynch mob in my pocket has me transforming into Mr. Hyde before my very eyes. I don’t know if I love it or if I hate it. All I know is that it gives me energy. I feel alive.

I also feel, perhaps mistakenly, that I have a responsibility to respond to it, in some form.

(Fuck, a thought: am I part of the problem? The answer: likely.)

I don’t have to read the utter tripe that I find online. I don’t have to peruse message boards or forums or the convents, communities and cults that I follow with a perverted curiosity through cyberspace [1]. I don’t have to read their dogma, or compete with their holier-than-thou sensitivity Olympics (“It’s over Anakin – I have the high ground”), but I do feel that, where the doctrine approaches the ostentatiously obtuse and promotes mob rule, I should speak up. After all, somebody has to and if I don’t, who will?

(Martin Niemöllers carked it, we have a vacant position and I have a certain ambition. The time is right and the conditions are perfect. Put me in, coach.)

And so here I am - the dam wall of Sticky Finger’s controversy has broken once again. Dylan Frost has allegedly been escorted out of a Sydney pub, Kellys on King, after a verbal dispute with transgender model and writer Alexandra V Tanygina [2], thereby bolstering his ever-growing rap sheet of indiscretions and accelerating the deterioration of his public image.

For me, this was all-but-inevitable. After hearing of Paddy Cornwall (bass) being verbally abused in Newtown whilst eating a sandwich on a public bench in April, I remarked to (redacted) that it was a matter of time until some mouth-breathing, Team-Hysteria-World-Police dipshit grasped at some form of collective identity in a desperate attempt to belong to something, anything, by launching into a similar tirade at a short-fused Dylan Frost in defence of somebody that they don’t know, following an incident that they weren’t privy to.

Out-come the cameras, sharpen the guillotine, vultures circle the carrion, Music Feeds gets a boner (or half-boner, such is their impotence) as they bust out the sharpies to brainstorm a competitor for “2018s Most Misleading Headline” [3] before celebrating over a matured, 2017 vintage bottle of Passion Pop like the cheap cowards that they are.

Septum piercings and fedoras rejoice across the nation, clicks are baited, careers are ruined and the wicked witch is burned. The people are free - finally free! Vive la resistance!

All in the name of something somebody read somewhere on Facebook, fired half-arsed into the dark by someone that they’ll never know. All without due process. All without regard for context. All without a kernel of nuance. All to please the compassionate masses.

Everybody takes one step down the conveyer belt at the sausage factory of identity politics, anxiously sharpening their knives for the next sacrificial lamb to display some sort of humanity and deviate from the moral hegemony of whatever standard they march under, hoping it won’t be them whose infallibility is caught on tape in an obscene display of being a fucking person. It’s far easier to avoid being caught when you’re the one pointing the finger. Welcome to Stasi-land. Please forfeit your rights and decency at the door.

So, what exactly is it that has gotten me so worked up? What has annoyed me to the point of entering the Twitter-sphere just to give some lazy lemming writing for The Brag a piece of my mind? [4]

Well it fucking happened, didn’t it? I couldn’t have been more correct. [5] Some prick tee’d off at a likely coarse individual who happens to have an elevated profile because he sings for living, and the poor guy, not immune to random sprays of abuse, gave a little back. A largely inconsequential argument ensued; two divergent accounts of the incident were provided to the media; and one of them (or both of them - it is unclear) ended up leaving the venue.

Stop the clocks, alert the press, sound the alarm, this is hot shit. The real deal. Bigger than the Beatles.

And, so here I am, yet again, donating far too much of my time to that which infuriates me in order to reprimand those that I hold in contempt.

I know that you’re interested, but busier than ever, and therefore probably haven’t had the time to follow the saga in entirety. More than that, though, I know that you’re interested in me and my interests, so I thought I’d provide you with a summary (albeit already quite a long one) to give shape to the thoughts that I’ve been ruminating on for a while.

Of course, as always, there is no end to the gratitude that I have for your support and readiness to constantly accommodate these indulgences. Perhaps one day you won’t be the only person interested in my opinion. Perhaps one day I’ll publish something proper on this and dedicate it to you. Perhaps I’ll just publish this. I’ve always found article writing hard. I come across such a wanker. You’d think that I’d be used to it by now.

If I do end up publishing this, a one and a half thousand-word introduction has got to be some sort of record, even for me.

Enough is enough - let’s get to it, shall we?

Order in the Court (of Public Opinion): A Note on Structure

For the following summary, I’m going to group certain occurrences according to the base event that they relate to, in an attempt to keep a very chronologically complex narrative coherent.

Given this, the main events we’re going to consider are:

Round 1: Dylan Frost vs. DISPOSSESSED

Dylan Frost vs. DISPOSSESSED Round 2: Dylan Frost vs. Thelma Plum

Dylan Frost vs. Thelma Plum Round 3: Dylan Frost vs. himself - a hiatus from public life to deal with private matters.

Dylan Frost vs. himself - a hiatus from public life to deal with private matters. Round 4: Dylan Frost vs. the People

Dylan Frost vs. the People Round 5: Dylan Frost vs. Alexandra V. Tanygina

Dylan Frost vs. Alexandra V. Tanygina Round 6: Kurt von Poppelov vs. the Australian Music Media

We might even break out into some sort of reflection at the end, but, then again, we might not. It all depends on how we’re going for time - I’m a busy man and I’d like to think I have more to do than attempt to turn the tide of the internet. It's the modern day equivalent of Caligula declaring war on Neptune, but that bloke was certifiably bonkers and I maintain that I am not. I don't know. You decide.

It’d be a lofty goal to say the least.

Decidedly defiant or deliberately dishonest?

DISPOSSESSED, deductive reasoning and alliterative subheadings

On the 28th of June 1914, Gavrilo Princip fired two shots from a previously concealed pocket-sized FN Model 1910 pistol on Franz Joseph Street, Bosnia, in a moment that would drastically alter the course of history forever.

In a rather regrettable series of affairs, one bullet pierced the stomach of Sophie, the Dutchess of Hohenberg, with the other striking her husband and heir presumptive to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in the neck.

Then, in a manner typical of those shot at close range, they proceeded to make a hell of scene and promptly both bled far too much to be consistent with sustained life. Side by side they kicked it, went head over biscuit and assumed room temperature into perpetuity.

From there, you know the story. Austria-Hungary, slightly unimpressed with the whole thing, declared war on Serbia a month later, and Serbia, likewise unimpressed, buzzed their mates, Russia and France, for back-up. Humanity had a big barny and far too many people died in an awesome display of our collective daftness. Yadda yadda yadda. World War One. What a war [6].

In a way, the incident involving Dylan Frost and DISPOSSESSED at Marrickville's Red Rattler Theatre in 2016 was a lot like the two shots fired by Gavrilo Princip on that fateful day. Then again, in a infinitely greater number of other ways, it most certainly was not, but, in a letter of this length, I feel a certain mandate to keep it light and to restrict my indulgences is to doom us both to a fate worse than death [7]. No, no - if nothing else, Birrugan's Facebook status provided the spark that lit the power keg of drama that would follow and, as the first skirmish in a war of attrition that rages on to this day, it provided fans and opponents alike with ideological figureheads behind which they could rally. Whether this was either groups intention or want was irrelevant. Two distinctly different camps had emerged from the dust, and with their fortifications assembled, neither was leaving without the fight that they had been promised.

Similarly to how underlying currents of nationalism and imperialism actually put Europe on a collision course for war in 1914, a backlash against Sticky Fingers was seemingly inevitable. At the time, the band was barely scraping through tours, outwardly doing all that it could to self-destruct, with their notoriously hedonistic and unsustainable lifestyles clearly taking a heavy toll. A product of rapid stardom, unchecked ego, undiagnosed mental illness and a largely enabling fanbase: they were flying far too close to the sun for the ride to continue much longer. The outcome, it seemed, was written in the stars that they were so foolishly chasing.

As such, whilst one could argue that the delightfully defiant DISPOSSESSED provided a platform, a precedent, to embolden others to speak out against the band, the cynic in me can’t resist the notion that, without such an incident, the other dominoes within this narrative wouldn’t have fallen at all. It is possible, even likely, that others would have taken their place but, what I am trying to suggest is: would we still have seen Frost vs. Plum without DISPOSSESSED? Would we still have seen Tanygina vs. Frost without Plum? I'm not so sure, just as I am not convinced that the supposed motivations for these incidents (racism, misogyny and transphobia) manifested themselves as clearly as the internet may find cognitively convenient.

Now, that’s not to say that Thelma Plum, Alexandra V. Tanygina or any other individuals in the saga are bad people, that they have lied or purposefully mislead others. Not at all. The truth is always far more complex than that.

All that I am proposing is that, as per the old adage, there are seemingly three sides to every story, with the ever-evasive truth lying somewhere in the No Man's Land between the hard-line Sticky Finger's loyalists, a rag-tag swarm of misogynists and bigots whose attitudes have been wrongfully projected onto the band themselves, and the High Sparrow's Holy Crusade, an army of pious bullies who, in their battles against the great 'Other', proudly terrorise anyone who won't bend to their own arbitrary labels of right-and-wrong. It appears that the latter will stop at nothing to destroy the band’s image in Australia and, unfortunately, Sticky Finger’s zealots are giving them both the mandate and means to do so.

So, what actually happened?

On the 29th of July 2016, DISPOSSESSED’s then-vocalist, Birrugan Dunn-Velasco, took to his personal Facebook account to detail his version of an incident that occurred at the group’s concert the night prior. [8]

Unfortunately, for reasons to be outlined below, the original post has since been removed, but I, ever resourceful, managed to get my hands on a transcript. It can be found here.

Amongst other things, Birrugan accused the crowd of ‘hyper defensive white supremacy and self-entitled colonial white privilege’, and stated that the band ‘walked off stage when the lead singer of Sticky Fingers among many others began grossly shirt fronting us’.

Jesus. Sounds unpleasant, doesn’t it? Why attend a show just to argue with the performing band? Fans were outraged. Rightly and righteously so. What a fuckin’ prick.

But was everything as it seemed?

On the 11th of August 2016, Sticky Fingers' Paddy Cornwall (bass) and Seamus Coyle (lead guitar) provided an exclusive interview to themusic.com.au (found here) in which they labelled the incident as a ‘massive misunderstanding’. Instead, the band asserted that, as a ‘few words [were] being thrown around the room’, Dylan yelled ‘Fuck Pauline Hanson’, before later admitting that ‘it was not really his place to … yell out something’.

The band further claimed that both Dylan Frost and Paddy Cornwall attempted to parley with DISPOSSESSED in the aftermath of the event, with the former penning an apology letter to Serwah Attafuah (guitar) and the latter reaching out to Birrugan Dunn-Velasco in a manner not described. Carrier pigeon? Yodelling? Morse code? Hard to say. The article indicates no response was received. Perhaps Hedwig was intercepted by Death Eaters, or maybe the situation wasn’t as clear cut as the elementary black-and-white binaries found in the good-guy-bad-guy dynamics of Harry Potter.

This revelation would be the biggest shame of them all. Nuance is awfully hard to translate into caps lock in the comments section of Junkee’s latest opinion piece, and even then, it’s terribly cold outside the tent of groupthink. One moment in No Man’s Land can turn into an eternity trapped inside the Purgatory of Individualism all too easily. No thanks, not today, not for me, safety in numbers.

In absence of any further evidence, fans and opponents of the band were trapped within in a he-said-she-said standoff [9], with sufficient testimony to plausibly defend their own viewpoint, but not enough to comprehensively refute that of those who disagreed.

At least, that was until the 12th of December 2016, when the deadlock was arguably broken in favour of Sticky Fingers by footage of the event uploaded to YouTube by, somewhat ironically, DISPOSSESSED themselves.

Referencing ‘Australia’s Shame’ [10], a DISPOSSESSED affiliated speaker is depicted challenging the crowd, lamenting (his belief) that it took the release of the June 2016 documentary for onlookers to be sympathetic with DISPOSSESSED’s cause, citing that ‘we’ve been saying it forever … [it’s] shit that we live every day of our fucking lives’.

With the monologue unfolding, it’s a mere matter of minutes before some bottom-feeding member of the front row mistakes the performance for a conversation and, upon hearing a phrase that she recognised (an apparently stimulating rarity in her life), she jumped at her cue to get involved.

‘I didn’t even see Four Corners’, she interrupts, before topping off the catastrophically entitled social misread with the angelic, ‘Go fuck yourself’, instantly resolving any uncertainties about the quality of her character. Good on ya, champ. It wasn’t a question.

From here, the portrayed scene wastes no time in descending into anarchy. Piggybacking the courage of the first responder, every other dullard in the audience wanted a turn, repeatedly calling for music to be played in the place of the still-unfinished socio-politically charged speech. Eventually losing patience with the crowd, both the band and the speaker leave the stage, accusing the audience of ‘not listening’ to the show’s key message. ‘You should know better’, they argue and, to be fair, it'd be hard to disagree with them.

Self-acclaimed ‘vessels [of their] ancestor’s wrath’, DISPOSSESSED are an inherently political band who exude enormous passion in absolutely everything that they do. If you attend a DISPOSSESSED gig and are offended by the tone of the discourse, you are either lost or an animated fart, a bumbling vortex of stupidity and delusion, devoid of sense or sentience, the exceptional type of naive that surely requires some sort of agency to exist.

Doubly so if you are Caucasian and alarmed at their lack of sympathy for you and your inability to comprehend the cause. Somebody obviously didn’t do their research. The contents are literally what is written on the tin. Don’t like it? Don’t go. Vote with your feet and your wallet. Whatever you paid at the door is now a sunk cost, so go spend the remainder of your pokies winnings on house white elsewhere and make a mental note to avoid the band’s concerts in the future. You have no right to attempt to dictate the message presented at an activist performance and, if you ever forget the hierarchy of importance at a gig, ask yourself the following questions: who is being paid to be here? Who is here by choice, and who is here by obligation?

Just as you don’t have to bend to the will of the world, it does not have to bend to yours. Find a space with a more personally palatable message and get your rocks off there. You’ll enjoy it more. I promise. Entry level stuff.

But, the question remains - where was Frost in all of this? What was his role in the unfolding contagion of chaos? Judging from the raw footage, the sole piece of non-partisan evidence that we have: not a lot. Certainly not what you’d believe from the comments on Tone Deaf articles anyway. The Sticky Finger’s front man is depicted attempting to calm both the audience and his now-involved girlfriend (“What you’re fucking doing is you’re having a fucking go”), who, in responding to the increasingly combative tone of the speaker, is showcasing the sort of banshee-like pipes you’d expect to hear from a war-wearied mother at your local Woolworths, donning a Monster Energy t-shirt as she chases the fruit of her loins, some sugar-raddled rodent named Jayden, down the cereal aisle [11]. The disparity in the couple’s vocal capabilities is mesmerising. Opposites truly do attract.

Otherwise, Dylan is seen to mediate between the crowd and the band, hands clasped in a pleading manner, vocalising only the diplomatic phrase: “I have the utmost respect”.

There is no doubting that the footage is incomplete, but it’s all we have, and it paints a fairly compelling picture. It is difficult to imagine that:

The person behind the camera would have stopped filming an tense scenario without some form of detente, the confrontations conclusion or the urgency of violence - the last of which was not reported - or that;

The band would have returned to the stage to prolong the dispute after their depicted departure. [12]

Therefore, not only is there no indication of wrongdoing on Frost’s part, but, applying Occam’s Razor, there is nothing to suggest that we should believe that he acted in a manner, off camera, that is inconsistent with what is depicted. And so, regardless of the burden of proof utilised, it is impossible to rationally conclude that Frost’s behaviour was compatible with the allegations of extreme racism that he has faced post-fact. Even the most partisan of all lynch-mobs would struggle to convince themselves of his guilt beyond reasonable doubt and, more appropriately given the scenario, the balance of probabilities rests firmly within his favour.

But, of course, where emotion is involved, nothing is ever that simple. An individual’s dislike of the band may cause them allow emotion to override the available evidence, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it is logical or equitable to do so. What worries me the greatest is that some people have seemingly allowed these charges to justify their hatred of Sticky Fingers, only to then allow their hatred of Sticky Fingers to justify the charges. This is unashamedly circular thinking at its finest, but, then again, in today's digital democracy you are not required to show your working. I’d like to think that we should hold ourselves to higher standards, but, as this saga has indicated, I may alone in that regard. Time will tell.

And so, what about DISPOSSESSED? They must be the bad guys, right?

Well, no, not necessarily. I certainly wouldn't argue so. After all, Frost's positioning within the ordeal is broadly consistent with Birrugan’s initial account as DISPOSSESSED were ‘grossly shirt fronted’ in an oppressive manner by a crowd that included ‘the lead singer of Sticky Fingers, among many others’.

Instead, what was misleading within his testimony was the extent of the role played by the Sticky Finger’s front man in instigating, or perpetuating, the crowd-on-band aggression. Considering Frost’s proximity to key members of the disagreement (such as his girlfriend) and his status as the only member of the crowd (that I am aware of) with a public profile, he would've been incredibly salient from the vantage point of the stage. Perhaps Birrugan, in the heat of the moment, mistakenly attributed some of the crowd's misbehaviour to Frost and, outraged by the situation, wrongfully, but not necessarily dishonestly, lambasted the singer in his public summary of the event. Given the delightfully imperfect nature of us all, alongside research regarding the accuracy (or complete lack thereof) of eye witness accounts, I can't hold this against him, and it pains me to see others doing so.

Sure, it's regrettable that DISPOSSESSED didn't handle Sticky Finger's apology with more aplomb, but was that really to be expected? DISPOSSESSED is synonymous with anger. They are angry by consequence, angry by necessity, angry by function, angry by design. It's their brand, their trademark, their blueprint, their shtick.

They were hardly going to extend an olive branch in return, and I'm hardly going to ask that they change. To do so would compromise the very thing that makes them unique, important and, if nothing else, intriguing.

Play on.