A photogenic subculture balances substance with documentation.
SAMUEL HYLAND
At one point in history, the grimiest, filthiest, and most sworn-by physical object in the punk canon was Tulsa, a 1971 photo-book by the filmmaker Larry Clark. Leaf through it now, and it might register as hollow shock-bait—limp penises, nude bodies fucking other nude bodies, young men shooting pistols, young women shooting heroin—but for an early-70s vanguard primed on pinning sex and drugs to inner-city slums, it was revelatory: not only did Hell exist in suburbia, but the ghouls guarding its gates were, like, 12. Two decades later, Clark would hammer the point home with Kids, the controversial 1995 film that followed a group of sex-obsessed junkies, median age 15, through Manhattan’s murderous back-alleys. Like Tulsa, or really any groundbreaking youth-culture opus, the afterlife of his directorial debut was more visual than visceral. Nancy Jo Sales wrote “Prep School Gangsters,” which spiked the concerns of desperate parents with jet-fuel; to this day, it’s fodder for Supreme ads and one-of-one T-shirts. Kids might still be recognizable to its titular age category, but if so, it’s more likely owed to the Mac Miller album than the major motion picture. None of which is to indict modern art, or young people, or the way things have gone: we’re image-readers now, androgynous minds with one foot in the world, and a second, larger foot in depictions of it. For all its techy complications, our era is pretty simple—we consult devices to reflect reality back at us, spend as much time with those truths as the tangible ones, then brave long, sleepless hours reckoning between the two. (Okay, maybe it isn’t that simple.) The information age has long given way to the image age; for better or worse, the image might just be more important than the information.
“The more time passes, the more costumes get added to the closet. You’d just hope that the costumes aren’t the only things doing the talking.”
This creates a murky middle-ground for punk subcultures—insular scenes that fortify themselves with coded information, then begin the dying process once said information is documented, dispersed, or diluted. What made Tulsa, or Kids, such jarring feats wasn’t only bleakness, but the fact that said bleakness was somehow distilled into a snapshot: if you’d grown up quickly and violently, too quickly and violently to remember anything, there was something disarming about seeing familiar-looking bodies retrace your footsteps on film, frame by frame. A half-century later, edgy imagery isn’t omniscient anymore; it’s omnipresent, which means it’s also pretty boring. A shame, that is, because surprise-surprise: in the image age, being a punk largely amounts to looking like one. Early on, punk subcultures were difficult to document, because they were fast, they were furious, and if you got too close, they were going to swallow you whole. But by 2024, enough punk documentation exists for image to supplant information—in this case, for the theatrics of fringe suffering to leap-frog any actual substance. Palatable punk, punk that tops charts and blares in department stores and gets glowing press, isn’t always punk; it might merely sound like it, maybe look like it, too. Which, again, isn’t necessarily terrible: music has only ever been cosplay, whether of reality or older music. The more time passes, the more costumes get added to the closet. You’d just hope that the costumes aren’t the only things doing the talking. They only work when the people wearing them have something to add.
Teezo Touchdown has a lot of costumes in his closet. He’s revered for them, and for what it’s worth, they work exactly how they’re supposed to: before you’ve heard his voice, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen his shoulder pads, or his streaky war paint, or his nail-laden locks, or his chain-link jerseys, or his silver-toothed sneer, or his oversized outerwear, or any of the other accessories I could add to this sentence for heightened dramatic effect. At a glance, he seems to personify Tulsa’s leather-clad language, its vocabulary of sharp objects, thousand-yard glares, harbingers of violence. And in our image-first era, this look—particularly the razor-edged matter it calls to memory—might just be more important than the music it serves to mask. It’s a marketable message, even if only for the high-schoolers juicing his streams, or the big-name brands juicing his inbox. You can be anything, little one, so long as you can dress like it.
“Sometimes I lay in my bed for eighteen hours straight watching the same movie on replay, because I need a mental vacation.”
Hip-hop’s present is lined with purveyors of this philosophy—Carti, Thug, Yeat, Uzi—and among them, Teezo’s wardrobe probably weighs the most. But for all its weight in mass, it also packs a lot of poundage in gumption: galaxy-brained ambitions to replace the any in “anything” with every. The first time I heard his music, it was winter of 2021, and a friend was talking my ear off about this uplifting MC who made alternative rap and dressed in punk-ish attire and did runway shows and sang from his cold, lonely, metallic heart. The following few hours were spent with boppy music videos blaring from his Roku TV, extra loud in the awkward gaps where he paused, seemingly intentionally, to gauge my reactions to tracks he liked. Yes, I was bopping my head; Yes, my friend knew that I was bopping my head; Yes, it was very embarrassing. By our hangout, he’d only had a smattering of up-tempo singles to his name, each buoyed by arena-ready bass rumbles and sly nods to alt-rock. Every video was shot in front of the same spray-painted garage; in the one for “Social Cues,” my favorite of the day’s selections, he was languidly jutting between outfits, dance moves, and props—spike-studded full-leather catsuits, jeans and tank-tops, skin-tight trousers, bass guitars, bandanas. Lyrically, the music hilariously undercut whatever rough exterior he seemed to be going for. (“Sometimes I lay in my bed for eighteen hours straight watching the same movie on replay,” he warbled—oh so vulnerably!—over what could have been a late-career RHCP demo. “Because I need a mental vacation.”) But I liked that he was playing with pictures, and that even in darting between aesthetics, he wasn’t necessarily doing anything insufferable. Man wears various leather outfits, tells passersby to follow dreams. Corny? Maybe. Catchy? Yep! Breaking news? Definitely not.
Three years since then, Teezo has transcended fringe curiosity status, much to the chagrin of hip-hop purists. He isn’t just on your one friend’s Roku TV anymore: he’s on tour with Tyler, the Creator, on the cover of your favorite magazine, on the runway with your favorite brand, on the track with Drake, and in another friend’s text message on May 17—“do you like teezo touchdown? i bought a ticket to his show in nyc and wanted to see if you also wanted to go.” Come 7PM on June 6, the Subway Station at 14th Street/Union Square was rife with 20-somethings decked out in goth-wear, all brash, all beautiful. It’s one thing to follow discourse on Twitter—and by then, it was pretty bad—but a completely different thing to go to a sold-out show, surrounded by young people who don’t necessarily care that their hero is 31 years old, or that he’s on the Talking Heads tribute album, or that he’s getting flamed, or that the latest nickname to emerge from said flaming is “teezo touchboys.” He’s selling an image; the masses are buying it. In cases like tonight’s, they’re buying it for 50-something dollars a pop.
I commuted to the show straight from work, which meant that I was going to have to coat-check my drawstring bag. (My brand-new fleece jacket, too: despite forecasts prophesying a full day of downpours, it was actually very, very humid.) By the time my confirmation text arrived (Welcome to Irving Plaza! Paperless ticket: coat 19 green), the entire front of the ballroom brimmed to capacity with rowdy youths, and a security guard had begun ushering all newcomers toward the rear, where there awaited two options: go upstairs with the weary-legged elders, or hold your own on ground-level with the high-schoolers who got here late. Like good senior citizens—21 is the new 70—my friend and I labored up the steps, just in time to snag two of the last remaining open spaces. By showtime, it was hard not to feel like I was at summer camp. In lieu of an opening act, festivities began with “Touchdown Live,” a gimmicky trivia show hosted by Annabelle Kline and Jacob Ford. They’d read questions from a projector screen behind them—In the song 5 o’clock, after Teezo withdraws 30, what does he tell the teller?—then put their hands to their ears, prodding the audience to make noise for A, B, C, or D. After about fifteen minutes of this, they’d skulk backstage for a hard-earned water break, while a curated selection of music videos (wolfacejoeyy, Bickle) blared in their absence. Then they’d come back out and do it again—this time, maybe, with instructions to introduce ourselves to our neighbors and scream their names aloud, or prepare for the most vulnerable experience of our lives, or make the most noise possible. We’re your camp counselors, they seemed to be saying, and our only two rules are to (1) have fun, and (2) be awesome.
“I skated with them for three or four years, broke my shoulders, and bombed hills that they wouldn’t even bomb (…). And finally after about three years they treated me like one of the skaters, one of the kids. They trusted me.”
Below the banister where we stood, there was a separate, stanchioned section furnished with tables for suited industry types, which seemed fitting: Teezo Touchdown is a put-together punk, a prototype engineered by the Powers That Be to embody, then exploit, an era that puts photo above fact. But his music takes no risks, has no gumption, lacks the complexity and nuance his image so loudly suggests. And now that the stakes are so much higher—as are his ticket prices, his streaming numbers, and his cultural vantage point—this could be infuriating. Except it isn’t, because before something can be infuriating, it has to be interesting. In keeping with his optics-oriented practice, tonight’s set was split into segments that seemed more like acts in a play, complete with intermissions, drastic costume changes, microphones embedded in floral bouquets, and scripted-seeming monologues. Most songs were about dreaming big, or not being scared, or doing your best. He’d burst out from stage left in an all-new getup—maybe a catsuit, maybe a tank-top with denim shorts, maybe a hoodie with those metallic locks peeking out—and jolt into a bassy stomper like “Mid,” thrusting hordes of teenagers into their very-first mosh pits. And just below my friend and I, between sips of frothy margaritas, the suited businessmen would whip out their phones, zoom in on the audience, pan back to Teezo, review the footage, upload Instagram stories of said footage, scroll through the people who viewed the last one, swipe down a list of replied to your story notifications, and text back whoever was hot. “Everything is about pictures, now” is an old, futile complaint: images are only a barrier to knowledge if you lack the creativity, or imagination, to use them as a catalyst, or see how someone else could. But in Teezo’s case, everything truly does seem to be about pictures—take away the things that make him photogenic, and you’re left with good-sounding music about good-natured sentiments. Which is good. But nothing more.
To his credit, Teezo Touchdown is a masterful performer, to the point where he’s never not putting on a show. In retrospect, what irked me the most was that this entire concert—maybe this entire tour, too—was built around a thesis that denied this, rather than lean into it. Before Teezo came on, Kline hinted towards “some real exclusive shit” we’d be treated to as a thank you for being his first sold-out New York audience. The “exclusive shit” in question was a pre-recorded sit-down interview, played segment-by-segment in the intervals where he went backstage to change. The caveat, in Kline’s words, was that he was being “vulnerable,” but the supposed truth fell flat: it’s hard to gauge reality from a pre-packaged clip, let alone when said clip is a loading screen for costume-switches that’ll only mask reality further. I’d been hoping to see beyond what his online denigrators were saying—that he was old, corny, washed-up, an industry plant, a psy-op, a flop—but by L-Train time, I was left with nothing: no concrete confirmations, and no good reasons not to believe the allegations, either. For someone so infatuated with punk aesthetics, it’s surprising that no one’s told him about the Ramones, or that you’re allowed to just play your music and leave. An old-timey proverb asserts that it’s better to close your mouth and be thought a fool than open it and be proven one. Teezo may personify Tulsa, but he personifies this even more.
💐💐💐
“People pay money to see others believe in themselves.”
By the time he made Kids, Larry Clark’s career was pretty much over. Two decades had passed since his breakthrough book, and the shockwaves it sent into the vanguard were already churning into a larger, younger, counterculture—still beholden to its blueprint, but primed, like any teenager, to whisk it further away from the grips of its parents. If a 31-year-old Teezo Touchdown is fighting old-head allegations, Clark had quite the hill to climb at 50. Or, more accurately, quite the hill to bomb. In doing fieldwork for the movie, he orbited and studied New York’s teenage skaters: first as a voyeur, then, eventually, as a fumbling participant. “I wanted to explore something I never knew anything about: contemporary teenagers,” he told Interview, in 2016. “Visually, I thought the most exciting teenagers were the skateboarders. I started hanging out with the skateboarders for about four years, and if you’re going to photograph skateboarders you can’t run after them, you’ve got to learn how to skate. So at about 50 years old I learned how to skate, and skate fast enough to keep up with them and hold my camera. I skated with them for three or four years, broke my shoulders, and bombed hills that they wouldn’t even bomb (…). And finally after about three years they treated me like one of the skaters, one of the kids. They trusted me.”
“He’s not sure who he is when he’s there, or if, in fact, he wants to be there at all.”
Subcultures are in-groups to varying extents, but when you link those in-or-out dynamics to performance—music, visual art, film, et cetera—the threshold becomes the stage. By being challenging, a project becomes something of a balancing act, artist and audience taking turns being in limbo. And in some sense, it’s only when these lines get blurred—punisher and victim, performer and witness, insider and outsider—that something unnatural happens: far beyond answers, but far beyond the need for them, too. One version of Larry Clark is a punk godfather who lives in museums; another is a novice skateboarder who cuts his teeth (and breaks his bones) with his cultural progeny. One informs the other, and only because one informs the other, both inform the audience.
A week after I saw Teezo at Irving Plaza, I went to Rumsey Playfield, where Central Park Summerstage seemed to be hosting avant-garde day: Slauson Malone 1, Sun Ra Arkestra, Kim Gordon. Between all three acts, somewhere around thirty words in total were addressed to the crowd. Which isn’t really my argument here. I’m not against stage banter, or artists’ rights to explain themselves, or things that aren’t mysterious. I’m just against being bored. There’s nothing specific I can point to, technique-wise, to explain why these sets were entertaining—the G-major chord plucked by Sun Ra’s rhythm guitarist at 7:43 PM incidentally coincided with the interpretive dance of their keyboardist, who squinted toward the setting Sun at a 45 degree angle!—but 24 hours after the show, I’m still scrounging for answers. And the more elusive they’re proving, the more I wish I could go back. Midway through Slauson Malone 1’s set, singer-guitarist Jasper Marsalis simply walked off stage, and the duo’s cellist, Nicholas Wetherell, aggro-bowed until his glasses fell off his face and broken strings dangled over his lap. When the Arkestra walked on, they seemed to be at the command of extraplanetary forces: beating organs with hammers, blowing breathy prayers into horns, frenziedly signaling at one another, wide-eyed, as if speaking a secret language. There was a moment in Kim Gordon’s set where she sang in autotune, and I laughed: here was this aging alt-rock heroine, known as the straight-faced bassist of a legendary band, breaking out into the spiritual language of Duwap Kaine. But then she kept singing. And there was no option but to shut up and listen. “People pay money to see others believe in themselves,” she wrote in Girl in a Band, her 2015 memoir. Interestingly enough, between this free concert and the previous week’s expensive one, the former was far more believable than the latter.
“He says one’s identity is easily changed when what’s in front of you is reserved and transparent, directed and produced.”
On my way home from the Summerstage event, my phone ran out of battery, and I started reading a collection of writings by Richard Prince, Clark’s mischievous artistic contemporary. The stories relied on an off-kilter sense of humor, idiosyncratic and occasionally discomfiting. In one of them, a nameless man skipped his 12-hour shift to duck in and out of porn theaters. “He’s not sure who he is when he’s there, or if, in fact, he wants to be there at all,” Prince’s diagnosis read. “He says one’s identity is easily changed when what’s in front of you is reserved and transparent, directed and produced.” Concerts aren’t X-rated film screenings, but by some metric, they’re pretty close. There’s voyeurism, intense bodily exertion, sweat, secrecy, stimulation, touch—each of which can change a person, render them anonymous for a few hours, bring about connection while also feeling libidinal. To be an artist is to be looked at; to be a fan is to look. It isn’t on either party to make the other’s job easier, but for all a spectacle demands, it helps for its players to at least be earnest. The inherent question at any show, no matter which one you go to, is why: why this artist; why this music; why this effort; why even be here. If the answer stopped with the act, then there would be no concerts, and we’d just have live-action museums—$50 to stand within 3 feet of Kim Gordon!, an ad might say. Looking at an artist, especially in the picture era, is a balancing act between myth and truth, no less than the one we brave every time we look up from our phones and back. If you don’t find yourself struggling across this tightrope, it’s likely that the artist you’re looking at isn’t an artist, after all: they’re just a picture.