Update – this article was amended on 17th July to remove an erroneous claim saying Fernow appeared at a benefit concert in 2016. It was actually a collaborator who attended, not Fernow himself. This was the result of a misreading of this article by me, and I apologise for the error.
I have said this before – there are numerous scandals in the dance music world which the press simply will not report on. Some have appeared on this blog, and this one’s been bubbling away for most of the last week too. Music journalists are often aware of them, but they end up getting spiked by cowardly editors.
Jean-Hugues Kabuiku is one of those journalists. He’s previously written for the likes of Resident Advisor and Mixmag, both of which aren’t covering his latest story. It’s about the links between the extremely prolific producer Dominick Fernow and the far right – and after grabbing a cup of coffee on this Sunday morning and reading this article, you’ll also conclude the links are pretty substantial.
They’ve been circulating for years. Yet Resident Advisor were selling tickets for his events for years, and even published this puff piece interview with the man himself in 2018. So it’ll be very interesting to see how they handle this. And I’m about to make it just that little bit more awkward.
You see, Whitney Wei was appointed editor in chief at Resident Advisor lately. Before that, her old stomping ground was Electronic Beats – and they’ve now made clear they want nothing more to do with him. Perhaps it was inadvertent, but this has the effect of well and truly dropping Wei in the soup.
Will she now do the same as her old employers? Or is she going to resort to Resident Advisor’s tried and tested tactic whenever they need to publish something that could be awkward for them – namely, get one of their writers to do a hatchet job piece and publish it anonymously? I won’t hold my breath…
The piece you link to is completely lacking in cultural context.
It was a point of pride back then to shock. Black metal is one of a few genres that featured lyrics akin to horror movies. An you took it about as seriously.
Neo-nazis were seen as pathetic, at worst, their ideology dead, crushed by the success of globalism.
Times are different.
This vatican shadow and his difficult music have not aged well.
I did not make his choices. There was a neo nazi in my extended friend group, he scared the shit out of me, others thought he was funny.
He could be linked to quite a few in the cultural scene over here.
People did not take any of this seriously.
The Nazis were a historical relic, their blood-driven past as distant from us then as communist dictatorship’s myriad crimes and tens of millions of murdered victims are now.
Flirting with nazi symbolism in irony then was about as serious as seing the hammer and sickle in a twitter name is now.
Something that I find disturbing too, mind you.
But I had the fashionable haircut of the time, it was either called the franz ferdinand or the hitler jugend haircut.
That was probably my worst discretion, a haircut.
I saw somebody call this guy out in a reply on twitter, for that haircut.
That was super umcomfortable.
Don’t y’all wonder what things that are morally acceptible now will come back to haunt you in 20 years time?
What I want here is not silence.
I want to call out the journalist for being a coward, in not confronting the subject, and in being lazy in not researching the cultural context.
Because this reckoning is due.
and this isn’t it.
This is food for backlash.
The guy did not get a chance to comment.
That is the bare minimum for fairness in journalism.
How does the writer not see that?
Its simple. You ask the guy to explain himself. You publish that. And then the rest can speak for itself. One email. Give it 48 hours. If there is no reply, you’re scott free. Not hard.
Because the connections between VS and nordic nazis are too numerous, he’d have a hard time weaseling out of this. But when he’s not allowed to comment, you get uncomfortable, knowing that you may not chose who appear alongside you on compilations, and such things. But when you have that long list, asking the accused is what gives the accusations power.
If people feel like this is a hatchet job, they become defensive. And I do not like feeling defendive for some shitbag that makes headache music and hangs out with nazis.
So please, someone, learn what journalism is before you try to school others.
I’d leave this comment on the original page, but honestly, I am not very enthusiastic to buy his journalism just to tell him that he shouldn’t call out other journalists for not asking questions and then not ask the same questions himself. That’s borderline sociopathy. Not paying for that.
I have no qualms with amateur’s house, or its author.
I look forward to reading more.
Respect for starting a new media project. We need this.