With the passing of Dave Brockie—better known as Oderus Ungerus, his stage name as lead singer for the metal band GWAR—it’s time to consider one of the truly horrible practices in our modern time: the appropriation of minority unfrozen alien culture by the human majority.
For those of you fortunate enough to be ignorant of the band, GWAR would take the cultural dress of aliens, described by the band as "Scumdogs of the Universe," and put on performances based on the traditions of these oppressed peoples. The defining aspect of a GWAR show was their use of "Alienface" to approximate the appearance of these otherworldly beings: Using a grotesquely exaggerated rubber foam costume and horrid face paint playing up the stereotypical features of the alien race, the band would perform for the amusement of the human masses.
They never once acknowledged, let alone worried about, the impact their performances were having on native alien peoples. And the horrible recreation of the stereotypical alien behavior led countless humans to consider the alien peoples a violent and savage race, one that shouldn’t be trusted and must be feared.
Now, before you start humansplaining—I’ve heard it all before, believe me—just understand that the majority culture has no right to pick and choose which aspects of a minority culture to emulate. It’s doubly bad that GWAR highlighted only the negative aspects of Scumdog culture. We didn’t see the tender moments with families, the traditional low-eco-impact farming of their space cubes, the customary tribal dances. Lord knows we wouldn’t want something like "context" to get in the way of the commodification of a native people.
The worst aspect of GWAR, of course, was the band’s use of Scumdog culture to perform unspeakably barbaric acts on human authority figures, just one more tool in the fearmongering shed. One of my writers, Adam Kredo, attended one of the band's latest alienface shows. As the set unfolded, a person dressed up as Barack Obama was paraded on stage:
Did these aliens exchange knowledge with the leader of the free world? Did they break bread with him and share their technology? Did they connect on the level of equals?
Of course not:
The juxtaposition is clear: These savages are not to be trusted, their culture not to be respected.
The commodification of the Scumdog culture by the human majority is something to be jeered. At a time when so many authentic Scumdogs have difficulty finding work in the entertainment industry, shouldn't we be disgusted by the fact that these alienface impostors make a living by stealing an oppressed group's identity?