A Visual Historical Library of Violence: Trawling the Internet with Alex Kazemi
Cory Bennet and Alex Kazemi dissect American masculinity, pop culture, and the Bret Easton Ellis-approved Y2K novel NEW MILLENNIUM BOYZ.
Cory Bennet: This book made me feel seen in a way no other piece of art has. Like “Oh, I grew up like this.” It showed the nastiness of growing up in the 90s as a boy. And it was nasty, if you had an internet connection and your parents didn’t care.
Alex Kazemi: I’m happy the novel made you feel seen because this is why I wrote it. There are so many bullshit representations of what the ‘teen male’ experience is, it’s always presented in such extremes like the ‘wallflower’ who is socially autistic or the closeted football player, and then we forget to explore the American ‘regular guy’ who is trying to manage what it means to be a young numb man amongst all the things you know in your gut are wrong but you still participate in them, to be cooler to older guys or your friends. We have all this media about the ‘secret lives of teenage girls,’ but people don’t want to look at the macabre realism experience of being a teenage boy.
I think a lot of people forget how for parents of millennials, technology and screen-hypnosis was a way for them to get a break from their kids, and this came with consequences. We were the first evolution of what would then become the iPad kids.
The internet in the late 90s/2000s was unregulated, and full of disturbing things and ‘stumble upon’ moments for a child. You could be on a peer-to-peer file service and accidentally download bestiality porn, when you thought it’d be a cool wallpaper of your favourite athlete or band member. It was a series of mind tricks, and games. That’s why the book is supposed to mirror the feeling of going down an online rabbit hole in Y2K, with this sheer adrenaline of ‘What’s going to happen next, if I turn the page?’ When you combine it with an MTV-driven monoculture that encourages boys to feed their worst impulses, you’re going to feel a bit gross.
CB: It’s no secret that there’s a connection between masculinity and violence, be that biologically inherent, culturally mandated, or whatever. But with the advent of the internet, all of a sudden it was right there, and it was extreme. The difference between our generation and my grandfather’s generation, for example, is that he could go down the street, fight the Italian kids, come home, eat dinner, and it was over the next day. But us, we could pull up murder, suicide, extreme porn 24/7. Our fathers were the ones who’d gone to war, but we could watch videos of Russian soldiers getting their throats cut by the Taliban and Bud Dwyer blowing his head off in Pennsylvania any time of day or night. If you wanted to exact revenge on the kid down the street, you could get the most fucked up ideas. As a male born in 1987, I remember Columbine very vividly.
We have all this media about the ‘secret lives of teenage girls,’ but people don’t want to look at the macabre realism experience of being a teenage boy. — AK
AK: We were given a visual historical library of violence for our subconscious mind. I mean, The Anarchist Cookbook could be pirated online. Kids were learning how to make pipe-bombs off of Usenet groups. The unfiltered version of the internet, along with the desensitization from spaces like Rotten.com or even some of the films released in one’s youth truly created this ‘video-game’ version of reality. Columbine haunted me throughout my childhood, and when I became a teenager, I always sort of associated an ‘evil’ with becoming a teenage boy, and my predictions were not far off. When I was a depressed teenager and I could explore the Columbine crime documents and try to understand the world Eric [Harris] and Dylan [Klebold] were living in, and why they felt so disenfranchised, I really tried to figure out the claustrophobic and false-importance effect the pop culture of the era had on that generation’s young boys.
I mean, Woodstock ’99 is a great example of this. You had these rage-filled 18-year-old Korn fans, who were genuinely getting angry and giving violent threats to the MTV News camera crew because they were playing Backstreet Boys or Hanson. Everything was all happening in one space, so you’d hear the music against your will, but the idea of that actually being something to get angry about really shows the level of Viacom brainwash going.
The difference between our generation and my grandfather’s generation, for example, is that he could go down the street, fight the Italian kids, come home, eat dinner, and it was over the next day. But us, we could pull up murder and suicide 24/7. Our fathers were the ones who’d gone to war, but we could watch videos of Russian soldiers getting their throats cut by the Taliban and Bud Dwyer blowing his head off any time of day or night. — CB
CB: What impact do you think this easy access to violence had on a new generation of American men? I’m interested in the intersection of violence and masculinity, particularly the sort of televised/internet violence we experienced and the impact it had on us as young boys growing up. Like you and me—we’re men right now, and we grew up with this. What kind of men are we?
AK: I think a lot of our sexual tastes and arousal templates were shaped by pornography, early fetishes shown in videos we watched as preteens/teenagers. Some would say that we were following baseline instincts, but also the hyperreality of it and the expectation it created in real life gave us a feeling of dissatisfaction with partners who didn’t adhere to these scripts. I think this is a form of violence, and it applies to the way we process murder and death too. Does it surprise you that a millennial can see a beheading or mutilated baby on their Twitter feed at 8AM with their morning coffee, feel nothing and scroll up, and then see an Olivia Rodrigo meme?
That initial shock from seeing something disgusting and readily available on the internet like 2Girls1Cup or whatever, when you grow up with that, you expect for this dark content to find you everywhere—in your online life and in your everyday life. Shannen Doherty can die from breast cancer, and you can read that as text on a screen, feel nothing, and then head to Pornhub all in the time span of 2 minutes. And then we get all shocked that people ghost each other, and are unable to have mature conversations? The practice of escapism has been happening since going on Disney.com as a child. Everything is happening in the same space, all the time, and this constant stimulus-reaction mechanism creates a numbness, a nullified void-state, and this is why we have all these millennial men who are trying to ‘feel again’. Brad in NMB is looking for emotion, looking to chase the dragon of dopamine, to the point where he will compromise his reputation, hurt others, if it means the reward in the end is the ability to feel. To me, this is directly correlated to the Y2K media ecosystem he is growing up in.
CB: The pop culture references are insane—reading them felt like opening a time capsule. Can you tell me a little about how you researched for that?
Doing the research truly drove me insane. There really isn’t one thing in the book that wasn’t fact checked. The fashion, slang, everything. I went to university libraries, I bought home videos off eBay, I would buy obscure films. Videos. Message boards, forums, archived websites. Crime documents. Magazines. Nonfiction crime books. Brooks Brown, who was friends with Eric [Harris] and Dylan [Klebold] in real life, helped me a lot with just trying to understand the feelings and emotions behind being a young boy in that time. — AK
AK: Fuck, man. Doing the research truly drove me insane. There really isn’t one thing in the book that wasn’t fact checked. The fashion, slang, everything. I went to university libraries, I bought home videos off eBay, I would buy obscure films. Videos. Message boards, forums, archived websites. Crime documents. Magazines. Nonfiction crime books. Brooks Brown, who was friends with Eric [Harris] and Dylan [Klebold] in real life, helped me a lot with just trying to understand the feelings and emotions behind being a young boy in that time. I interviewed a lot of people, hundreds of people, with very specific detailed questions. It’s so funny to me because like, everyone gets so pissed about the pop culture references, but I spammed the book with them to try to create a repulsion around how inundated everyone was with the capitalist intrusion on their minds. It’s supposed to be like: ‘Holy fuck. I can’t believe I saw that one Nestle commercial 30 times a day. What is something that could’ve replaced that commercial in my mind? What could have I done with that space? Or was I happier, when it was that simple?’
CB: What has happened to pop culture? I remember being completely obsessed with it growing up. MTV, TRL; that’s how you knew what was cool. Now, youth pop culture seems fractured. There aren’t any more monolithic corporations pumping out what the kids should be into. And because of that, there are no more identifiable subcultures with an ethos. No one’s telling us what to love so we don’t know what to hate. Well, I guess we have a deluge of TikTok influencers telling us what to love. What impact do you think this is having on youth culture? What do you think the kids growing up now have left to push against?
Pop culture does not exist in the 2020s. There is no ‘fixed’ arena for a popular culture to exist. Everything is fractured, everything is algorithmic and there is no unification around music, movies, films, fashion. You pretty much are just looped into what the social media corporations think is suggestible to you, so you live inside a feedback loop of yourself, and you can’t get outside it. It’s suffocating and scary. — AK
AK: Pop culture does not exist in the 2020s. There is no ‘fixed’ arena for a popular culture to exist. Everything is fractured, everything is algorithmic and there is no unification around music, movies, films, fashion. You pretty much just are looped into what the social media corporations think is suggestible to you, so you live inside a feedback loop of yourself, and you can’t get outside it. It’s suffocating and scary.
There are definitely no identifiable subcultures. If you go online in certain corners, you may think ‘brat summer’ and Chappell Roan are the biggest things in the world, but go up to a 15-year-old on the street and ask “Do you know what these things are?” and he will say “Nope,” because his reality consists of some Twitch streamer from Germany with 150 million followers and random songs he heard scrolling on Instagram reels. There is nothing to push against, because there is no identifiable mainstream culture. Even Billy Corgan used to say, “I never would have started a band if I didn’t want to compete with the music that I thought was shit on MTV.” That kind of sentiment seems impossible for a youth today to understand, or even be interested in. Gen Z has no concept of ‘selling out’, they are used to buying 10 different vinyl variants of their favorite artist so they can post about it on Instagram and ‘fit a vibe’.
If you go online in certain corners, you may think ‘brat summer’ and Chappell Roan are the biggest things in the world, but go up to a 15-year-old on the street and ask “Do you know what these things are?” and he will say “Nope,” because his reality consists of some Twitch streamer from Germany with 150 million followers. — AK
CB: Do you view NMB as an argument against the current trend of fetishizing the 90s?
AK: Hell yeah! I’m trying to stop the entire nostalgia party, or at least challenge people and say, “Oh okay, so you love Gregg Araki movies and you wish it was 1999 and you want to dress gender-bendy, but also you are queer? Then let’s look behind the curtain—you’d probably get beaten up, spat on or called a slur, and there would be no Instagram or TikTok or vlog you could post, to tell the world about ‘your experience’. The cops might not care about what happened to you. Do you still want to go back?” I mean, that’s why NMB has this like, funny Showtime/The L Word/Queer As Folk/Entourage ‘realism’ vibe, because art used to be a way to display these social issues, even on 90210 and Dawson’s Creek. That’s why there are all these interludes with Brad and Lu attacking people of color. Because this shit really happened, and we can’t pretend it didn’t. I’m holding up a mirror to human issues in ways typing a virtuous tweet can’t.
Don’t you remember when Trump won in 2016, how there were all these videos of people posting ‘racist attacks’? Why is something offensive when presented in the form of literature/art, but when you see it on your Twitter feed, it’s a call for change? “The cameras are new, the content isn’t,” or whatever.
Why is something offensive when presented in the form of literature/art, but when you see it on your Twitter feed, it’s a call for change? — AK
CB: That’s true. This book was hard to read at times, and I can imagine a lot of people being offended. What do you think about content warnings, trigger warnings, things like that? Our new cultural emphasis on sensitivity?
AK: I’ll tell you what I know. The trigger warning in NMB is ultimately annoying because I was under the impression that literary forefathers like Dennis Cooper, Bret Easton Ellis, and even much more brutal Gen X writers paved the way and paid their dues, and created a cultural landscape that gave me the permission to honestly really do whatever the hell I wanted. I think you can’t put a ‘content warning’ on real life, and in the violent disruptions. I get how it must be hard for a victim of childhood sexual abuse to read NMB and feel a trauma response, but that’s not everyone. People who have experienced the ‘offensive’ things in the book might feel validated or liberated, and be like: “Wow, I feel seen. I feel heard. I know what it’s like to see these things. How is this the planet I’m on?”
CB: I’m really interested in the genesis of this book. I know everyone hates this question, but I’m genuinely curious—what pushed you to write a book like this? It feels like it’s more than art, like a thesis. And it’s so different than anything you’ve published before. How did it all begin?
In my 20s, I was just constantly rewriting, taking notes. It was such a compulsive process, I found it genuinely upsetting and I was resenting the whole path of being a novelist. — AK
AK: The idea for the book started when I was a teenager, and I was angry about the rise of YA fiction like John Green. I found it repulsive, mixed in with the editorialized version of being a teenager that was being presented on Tumblr and Instagram. I felt completely angry and alienated by it, and I felt like it was all artificial lies. I then contrasted this with how most of my life was me and my male friends, driving around, talking about girls, getting Slurpees and hating on movies and pop culture. The most electrifying moments of my adolescence involved bonding with people over shared interests when it came to movies, art, celebrities. So, when I started to write the book at 17, I kind of wanted it to be a diary of my angry depressed/disenfranchised thoughts. I then knew I had to shock people to be seen, so I put a ‘fighter fish’ on my tongue and took a pic and posted the first 50 pages of the book to this website called Scribd. The Tumblr kids kept reblogging, reposting it and then eventually the book went as viral as an online PDF could in 2013. I then reached out to literary agents and publishers and got the MTV Books deal. So over the next 10 years, in my 20s, I was just constantly rewriting, taking notes. It was such a compulsive process, I found it genuinely upsetting and I was resenting the whole path of being a novelist.
When the pandemic hit, I was really forced to go through all the content I’d amassed, all the fragments, and I had to put together the world, and live in it and create in a disciplined way. The book meant something different to me by my late 20s than it did when I was a teenager. I was finally able to see the absurdity and beauty of being a teenage boy and I could engage with the content more objectively, create the world more deliberately. I knew exactly what I wanted, and my publisher was sort of horrified at first. They couldn’t understand why anyone would want to put out a book with the reality-TV surrealism prose I was trying to create. It’s really a screenplay disguised as literary fiction in a lot of ways, but also I think anyone would look at you like you’re insane if you’re like, “I want to put out a book that has the hypnotic boringness of Laguna Beach but with rich white boys in the 90s, and also with the intense feel of a Larry Clark/Gregg Araki movie but also I’m mocking the entire Y2K teen movie/TV genre. And also I want it to be heart-wrenching.”
The book meant something different to me by my late 20s than it did when I was a teenager. I was finally able to see the absurdity and beauty of being a teenage boy. — AK
CB: On a related note: I’m wondering what you think of alt-lit, as a genre, as a moment. Do you think there are still writers who embody that style, without the label?
AK: I’ve always hated alt-lit. Since discovering it as a teenager, I found it repulsive, the kind of ‘gotcha’ hipsterdom pretentiousness about it and then how the style just got so xeroxed over and over. I found it really annoying that I was associated with any of those people, or my book was. I mean, my book is more for moms who are worried about their teenagers, or fans of cult teen movies. One thing I will say is ‘alt-lit’ definitely predicted Gen Z’s navel-gazing obsession with writing about their online lives and online memories and experiences, but of course, that is just not revolutionary in 2024 at all, to me.
CB: Is there anything you can share about what you’re working on now? Reading about, writing about?
AK: I would never tell you the truth about that in an interview. What I can tell you is I’m very much in the ‘in-between album’ phase, where I’m exploring and trying to have more fun and be intuitive about it. Now that I just turned 30, I feel less anxiety or pressure to produce or to outrun my mortality. Nothing feels as serious, and nothing will be as painful as the looming fear of having an unfinished project in my drawer that I never share with the world, and that constantly tortured me throughout my 20s. It was a real, constant, moment-by-moment stab from the gods. I’m just happy NMB is out in the world, and cool dudes like you have read it. That’s the dream right there!
This book sounds iconic! Re: influencers telling the new generation what to love: "What impact do you think this is having on youth culture? What do you think the kids growing up now have left to push against?" Such a great question here that I'll be thinking about for my writing students. <3