8. The worst thing on the internet

Did it fill your head, did it entertain?

Sleater-Kinney promo from 2000

There was one thought I couldn’t quite catch as I was writing last week’s newsletter, sitting on the last train home from London, refining my opinions on Kathy Acker and so on as I slid west through Reading around midnight. The mention of the Sleater-Kinney lyric I used as the strap (“Don’t tell me your name if you don't want it sung”) reminded me that, a few years later — on their 2000 album All Hands on the Bad One — S-K had written a song with a very different take on the public-private line.¹

I’d always vaguely, lazily assumed across the however-many-thousands of times I’ve sung along to it that “Was It a Lie?” is about the death of Princess Diana. “When the collision came/ She died right away.” “Was she your TV show/ Was she your video/ A woman’s pain never private, always seen.” And perhaps it is, indirectly, but that’s not exactly what the lyrics pointed to when I looked them up on the train.

The scene described involves tracks, a train, a woman who errs into its path and whose death is filmed, then watched over and over again — broadcast on TV, endlessly available on the internet. “Did it fill your head, did it entertain?” demands singer Corin Tucker. “Did you feel alive at the end of it?” Over the middle eight, the song moves from the perspective of someone watching to the perspective of the woman as the band’s other vocalist, Carries Brownstein, sings: “When you play it back to me/ It’s more like a parody/ And that’s all I’ll ever be.”

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What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen on the internet? In the early days of home internet connections, me and a friend dared each other to google terrible things, thrilled and appalled at the depravity each string of words could unearth. Quite soon, I had seen things I didn’t want to have seen. Quite soon, we stopped playing the game. It had seemed fun to stare into the abyss, to prove that even if there was plenty human that was alien to me there was nothing I was unequal to eyeballing. But the abyss went on and on. Anything bad I could imagine, it could exceed.

I never saw snuff, at least. But plenty of people did. In 2009, Caitlin Moran wrote a column called “It took 1 min 47 seconds for my memory to become host to a horror that will never go”:

Four weeks ago I saw a murder on the internet. There isn't a punchline to this; it is not an intriguing play on words. Four weeks ago someone on a chatboard posted a link, with the exhortation: “See if you can keep your breakfast down after watching this! I couldn't!”

Since “See if you can keep your breakfast down after watching this!” is, as one poster pointed out later, the kind of comment that, in the 21st century, precedes a link to a very fat woman trying to get out of a very small car or - if the chatboard is really bitchy - that shot where Mischa Barton is mixing Lacroix and Chanel very badly, quite a few of us clicked on the link.

Instead, it took us to some footage shot on a mobile phone, in some bland, murky woodland. It appears to be early summer. Fifteen feet away there's a man on the ground. It's immediately clear that a great many terrible things have happened to him quite recently, and that he will die very, very soon.

Till the S-K song reminded me, I’d somehow forgotten that this was a part of the noughties internet — sites like Rotten.com (founded 1999) and LiveLeak (2006) which existed solely to host death, torture, gore. It was also part of the noughties internet to make a game of it — to trick people into clicking unsuspectingly on something that would, if they had any humanity in them, leave them haunted and scarred.

I understand the impulse to look nightmares in the eye. The same friend I played the googling game with studied forensic pathology at university, and I used to flick through his textbook, awed and appalled by the delicacy of the saponified baby and the tender rawness of a motorcyclist’s flaying injury. But I knew I was a tourist, a graverobber, trespassing on what ought to be treated solemnly when I shrieked at a page-turn.

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I think “Was It a Lie?” is the second S-K song to be “about the internet”. Their album before All Hands on the Bad One, The Hot Rock, has “God Is a Number”, which is a fairly pat bitch about how technology is severing humans from the real (oh no, not numbers). “Was It a Lie?” is much more hard-edged, much less of a period piece. It takes the image of this video — a woman’s death turned into entertainment — and turns it into an analogue for the consumption of women generally.

It’s also, wrote Brownstein in her memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, about the band’s experience of fame, which — even at the middling level of Most Successful Riot Grrrl Band — felt intrusive. Tucker and Brownstein had been a couple for a while: the press had outed them before they’d told their families. In true lesbian style, they stayed together as a band after they broke up and recorded a break-up album (The Hot Rock) together.²

Snuff gave them a metaphor for fame. Snuff also, I think, influenced the nature of fame. As Moran wrote, people who saw this stuff were changed forever, and not everyone was changed in the direction of more mercy. TMZ published footage of a murder in 2013. Amy Winehouse’s decline was anatomised point by point: when she died, the paps showed up to catch her corpse being removed from her home, the same as they had for all the times she had stumbled drunk out her own doorway. The coroner’s report into Whitney Houston’s death was tastefully broken down into listicles: “9 Surprising Details”! When you can see anything on the internet, the question of “too far” becomes wispily academic.

Sarah x

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Please, please don’t tell me about the worst thing you’ve seen on the internet. I’ve seen enough, tyvm. But I would love to hear your other thoughts on this — via email or as a comment.

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Gimme, gimme more

• Carrie Brownstein interviewed teenage girlpunks the Linda Lindas! It’s pretty cute

• This was a weird article. It’s bizarre to not mention the alarmingly low bodyfat required for the Sarah Jessica Parker look. Or the rise in “liposculpting”, which goes hand-in-hand with the Brazilian butt lift in the modern-day contruction of the skinny-thic body. Or… you get the idea. But anyway, abs are back, in one more line of attack from the noughties fashion insurgency.

• Speaking of SJP: “The TV show and the message were not very feminist at the end. But that’s TV. That’s entertainment. That’s why people should not base their lives on a TV show.” SATC creator Candace Bushnell has said the very obvious about the show.

1. I suppose I don’t really have to account for my musical taste now — as mentioned in the Freddie de Boer piece I linked to last week, the “poptimists” have inherited the earth, with their relentless refusal to draw any generic lines in music — but in the nineties/noughties, I definitely felt like a weirdo, given my equal love for lo-fi rock ’n’ roll (“music that sounds like it was made in a bin,” my boyfriend said, as I futilely tried to convince him that Sonic Youth were good) and high-gloss pop from Max Martin and the Neptunes. Was I being a bit affected? Absolutely, and I enjoyed it as an eff-you to muso boys who thought their conspicuous consumption of the Flaming Lips was a personality. And I certainly didn’t invent having omnivorous taste in music: partly I got the idea from Sonic Youth, with their Karen Carpenter obsession, but it was mostly an acquisition from my Dad, who had brought me up on a jumble of garage psych, Motown, power pop, punk, C&W, R&B, folk blues and girlbands. My childhood was spent surrounded by such a volume and variety of vinyl, pretty much anything I was curious about was always available to me, meaning I probably had the closest thing to an analogue version of the total asynchronous immersion in music that’s became possible once torrenting came in. (It was a long time before I realised “being really into Steely Dan” was an unusual quality for a child born in 1981.) The idea that “credible” and “bubblegum” lived in different universes was pretty new anyway: the rock purists and indie scenesters who decided what mattered in the nineties music press couldn’t really account for a history where the Beatles had been influenced by the Ronettes. But even knowing the past was on my side, I got a particular kick when bands I loved gave my approach sanction — the Afghan Whigs’ cover of “Creep” being the TLC song not the Radiohead one felt like a great vindication (even if it is, objectively, a much less interesting song when delivered from a male perspective rather than a female one). So yes, I’m writing a book about Britney, and you’re getting a newsletter about Sleater-Kinney.

2. Tucker and Brownstein are both bisexual and Tucker is now married to a man, but the lesbians stay loyal. When I went to S-K’s 2015 reunion gig at the Roundhouse in London, I saw a lesbian friend there who said: “You are now standing in the highest concentration of dental dams in Europe.”