The idea that "labeling people as fascists will make them hang out with fascists" isn't true in politics, but I think it's uncomfortably a little bit true in music due to a complex economic dynamic. (Thread)

Very few musicians actually admit to being fash. "Controversial" bands range from "uses Nazi iconography, doesn't do anything to subvert it or dissuade the Nazi fanbase" (DiJ, pretty clearcut) to "wears weird makeup & got caught up in satanic panic by concerned high school moms".

But a club promoter/booking agency or record label doesn't always have a lot to go on. A lot of fascist aesthetics are chosen for plausible deniability. Aside from open ideological statements - which not everyone feels safe making - you're basically stuck doing background checks.

So it's easy to arrive at false positives in music scenes with dark aesthetics (Laibach is pretty clearly anti-authoritarian but communicates that through context and nuance!) - & it's harder to clear a false positive than to arrive at one, bc Nazis also say they aren't Nazis.

So promoters who don't want to book fashy bands wind up having to figure out what their level of risk tolerance is. They can book entirely uncontroversial music, or try to do due diligence, but like, they don't have access to 24/7 surveillance of musicians, nor should they.

It thus becomes statistically more probable that any artist with goth/industrial aesthetics, horror/gore themes, taboo outsider art stuff, will have played a set at some point with a fashy or borderline fashy band - and this has an interesting implication for the entire scene:

Labels/promoters with some risk tolerance are more likely to book Nazis but also more likely to book innocent weirdos who ran afoul of the PTA.

Nazi labels/promoters *have incentive* to book innocent weirdos as cover.

As a result, telling them apart grows harder over time.

What to *actually do* about this is a difficult question.

Be critical of assertions that an artist is fascist, and check sources?

Sure! That helps, ultimately, on some levels, but at the same time a lot of fashy musicians are hiding in plausible deniability.

Plausible deniability does have two sides to it. The harm done by a Nazi artist who can't spread comprehensible ideology through music is somewhat limited.

Ofc, with online communication and side channels, that's only so good a strategy - new coded speech arises constantly.

I'd like to see more comprehensive resources putting together public knowledge about artists in these scenes in context of the content of their actual work. Like, sometimes the interview is ambiguous and the lyrics/imagery are ambiguous but both together tell the full story.

I'd also like to see activists like @UR_Ninja who infiltrate fash spaces talk more about what Nazis say about music; which obscure artists really, truly speak to them.

Because that can be indicative in its own way, Republican Springsteen fans notwithstanding.

(end for now)