Chronically Online Americans, “Aesthetics,” Romantic Ireland, and Hozier.
What’s up with all that bog man stuff? Well, I observe as many spaces as I can to see how Irish American identity is weaponized and baby, it’s all connected. Let me explain…
Many of the tropes we see in American led rom coms about the Irish or Ireland approach Ireland as more a creative sandbox than a real place. To have the place be ultimately malleable to our romance, the people must too be less real, more feral, from another time. And I think a lot of the Cringe™ behavior from Americans re: Hozier, has the same roots.
Firstly, I have to introduce you to some of the more popular aesthetic movements of the internet age because as Hozier gets more and more wrapped up in these in the minds of young Americans, the more Cringe™- and perhaps dangerous- our language around him gets.
And of course this is not implying that these trends are solely for Americans or that the only content creators are Americans and that all those content creators are inherently flawed. I’m simply going to be staying in my lane as a Cringe American.
Dark academia is a subculture romanticizing academia. Some of it seems to come from a general love of learning and a sort of wandering loneliness, a great wish to find fellowship through academia
Ancient Rome & Greece as an artistic mine are heavily featured but it’s vaguely European and often specifically highlights English academia. Americans romanticize a different kind of colonialism however. It’s not decolonization but a movement towards quiet colonialism you can still read a book around. Fascism you can hide in a library from. Romanticizes addictions, sleeplessness, mental health downward spirals. Inherently classist.
Further reading:
Cottagecore was almost a movement, now a romantic aesthetic that centers an imagined rural/agricultural lifestyle that is somehow slow living and eternally a mild summer where your workload never requires you wear coveralls, boots, or galoshes
It’s less importing some decidedly English echoes of colonialism. It’s more echoing the Homestead Act and particularly the Southern Homestead Act, which of course greatly favored white people. Manifest Destiny rehashed.
Nature as soft and gentle, the city as inherently “unnatural,” often serves to dehumanize the people in it, no mindful engagement with climate change or how families doing the dirty stuff in agriculture are being screwed over by everything from hyper focused and no nuance convos around climate change (farmers and cows aren’t the enemy you think you are- climate experts have biases too and are not agriculturalists) to Bill Gates.
Further reading:
Both of these aesthetics offer a laissez-faire spot in white supremacy for LGBTQ white folks with the money to run away and live somewhere else if their two chickens die or they don’t cross plant right.
Hozier is good. Real good. Like, upsettingly good. I saw him live because I couldn’t stop listening to his second album and I thought it would get it out of me, but no, it just made me listen to his entire discography with more appreciation. And your boy is out here talking about some dirt, some earth. Tearing it up. It is not entirely wild that some of his music would make it into these heavily romanticized spaces.
With fans dedicated to him to the extent of constant vision boards and even a host of fan fiction portraying him as something more than human or some kind of demi-god, it’s more about what parts of his varied musical palette they highlight, which parts they might ignore, and how they project into those lyrics and to the sound. It is an age of parasocial relationship after a hundred years of “celebrity” that has helped us see those in creative industries as both more than human and not human when it suits us.
You’d nearly believe these fans are showing great reverence for what Hozier can do with lyrics. Their dedication is something not only felt but performed in the various languages across different social media platforms. But Hozier being part of their escapist fantasy is more important to them than true reverence, creating a kind of conceptual evangelical for what Hozier makes them feel. By virtue of a perceived wildness & more innocent whiteness- both functions of white supremacy in Irish American identity being projected onto him- Hozier could be Cottagecore Christ for white LGBTQ folks with little else to oppress them.
For example, there are a lot (A LOT!)of instances of the song Cherry Wine being used for weddings or for cottagecore videos. That alone reveals an unwillingness to actually process Hozier as a creative, to actually hear what he’s saying or doing with whatever medium he’s choosing, no matter how clear he is. While the guitar is sweet enough there’s little room for romantic interpretation of the abusive relationship that is central to the song. Even less if you watch the music video.
But for people who seem to cling to his every word in an effort to refrigerator poetry him into being a sentient tree or fae king boyfriend, just add water!- there is a deliberate ignorance that Hozier’s music is deeply inspired by Black musicians and their socially conscious work in the U.S. The Nina in “Nina Cried Power” is of course Nina Simone and from both the overall sound of his music when you don’t curate based on your dissociative fantasy AND Hozier speaking of his musical influences and goals as an artist you have to work to overlook his art as something inherently political and anti-racist.
For me, this reaffirms that Dark Academia and Cottagecore have become primarily a very relaxing way for mostly queer white Americans under 40 to lean into the comforts of white supremacy without admitting that’s what they’re doing. And it’s dangerous because some of them don’t realize that’s what’s happening.
It lets otherwise “woke” leftist Americans lean into white supremacy without admitting that’s what they’re doing, like they’re just taking a nap in the romantic literature woods. Oopsy daisy. And it’s dangerous because some of them don’t realize that’s what’s happening.
It is not the white supremacy of actively spreading the Irish slave myth or even the latent cringe of insisting that you know an exact percentage of Irishness in your ancestry. Millennials and Gen Z are clued in to how embarrassing that is even if it is an appropriate time. It is white supremacy not of racism and appropriation but the white supremacy of not engaging in anti-racism. You don’t have to be racist, you just have to be comfy enough to not fight racists and your space will belong to them.
This has of course come to a head recently because Hozier is on an EDM track and on Twitter, TikTok, and Tumblr, Americans are doing the most. The curated ignorance of his heavier blues inspired work, the collective cognitive dissonance, it’s threatened by the entrance of new music that can’t be put into their pre-existing categories. This song doesn’t invite you to the past in any way and so it places you in the present.
And they can’t take it.
Because romanticizing academia, colonization, & displacement don’t work in 2021 unless you’re willing to admit you don’t care about the collective. You just want your own out, your own comfort.
More and more, Irish fans or maybe not even fans honestly, are telling us to HUSH and GOOD
So why can’t Gen Z and Millennial Americans imagine a gentle life of learning or farming or husbandry- OR an Ireland- that is modern, progressive, full of people who are human beings just like us, influenced by many things.
It’s because assimilation is still happening in the United States and not just to immigrants.
New assimilation in America is less about immigration, as we have so far othered immigrants of color that the right wing can’t consider they’ll ever be “real Mericans”. New assimilation is corporate culture. Go to college. You’ll make money. Here are all the rules for getting there.
As early as kindergarten we’re told to lose regional accents. Our jargon & vocabulary is flattened. Jobs send even middle management or leadership to weeks long training off site to learn the jargon of work and to dehumanize their peers.
It’s the same reason American nerd culture gets so heated when the MCU is criticized. We have no gods. We have no folklore. Only tokens. Pay for your Pop Vinyl. Show your culture token…
We can’t imagine that Ireland has developed as an actual real place because we can’t imagine a population that isn’t being constantly streamlined to sound like NPR & work for Tesla.
We don’t need signs saying who we won’t hire. We don’t need government action to ban languages outside English. By virtue of a lack of infrastructure & deep nuanced education in most places in America we don’t have a history or culture to begin with. We’re assimilating ourselves.
I genuinely believe that outside of the difficult battle ahead in making “Celtic” spaces in the U.S. unfriendly to white supremacy Americans have to find some way to reclaim cultural tradition. It’s traumatic to be presented with, “belong to nothing or belong to whiteness.”
You DO have your own culture somewhere. It got buried somewhere. You don’t need a romanticized Ireland or a bog king or cottagecore. You need to reclaim it. Where were you born? Somewhere a library has first person accounts and records of crafts, crops, & community.
