The Thrill Was Never There

I’m not a punk. I was never into punk. I could get behind things with a punk-ish spirit, like The Replacements or At the Drive-In, but it was never my scene.

I was too young and too not-in-the-know for ’80s hardcore, outside of that one Suicidal Tendencies video. Green Day never really sucked me in as much as Weezer or Oasis. My favorite Blink-182 song is probably “I Miss You,” because it didn’t sound like Blink-182. The old stuff never grabbed me as I got older. And I don’t do well in mosh pits. Sure, I’ve had periodic interests in bands that could be described as punk, like Fucked Up or Titus Andronicus, but I just never got into it.

Which is why, nine years and 50 weeks into this newsletter I call Tedium, I’ve written relatively little about punk. So, suffice it to say, I don’t understand the culture of a creator who calls himself The Punk Rock MBA.

But I will say this much: I don’t get how someone who calls themselves that could create a community around something like that for nearly a decade, as Finn McKenty did when he launched his YouTube channel in 2017, without any apparent passion for the work. After a few months of softly hinting that his meal ticket was kind of losing its luster, McKenty admitted recently that he had decided to quit being The Punk Rock MBA.

The reason was a bit of a surprise.

“It’s like, I made enough money from this,” McKenty said in an interview with podcaster Jesea Lee. “I don't have to keep making videos about System of a Down, so I’m going to stop.”

McKenty, it should be noted, had bonafides when he launched this channel: He didn’t just pretend to be a punk. In the 1990s, he was deep into the West Coast punk rock scene, and gained a reputation for developing DIY fanzines that helped spread the word about underground icons like the Dillinger Escape Plan. It gave him a lane to work with that made him a compelling watch for a certain kind of person.

This is the version of The Punk Rock MBA that Finn McKenty was initially trying to sell.

“There was nobody that was gonna cover, like, underground hardcore, so we had to do it ourselves,” McKenty recalled in a 2019 video on his secondary channel.

The point that he was trying to make in the video was this: This work taught him a lot about the way that marketing and business worked, and that allowed him to build a successful career for himself in the traditional marketing world, giving him access to Fortune 500 brands. The Punk Rock MBA, as it started, was an attempt to sell himself as a consultant who knew his shit.

If you watch his early content of this nature, it becomes clear that the “MBA” part of “Punk Rock MBA” was a significant part of the appeal of the work for him personally. His more recent videos are of the “the rise and fall of this famous band” variety, because that’s what performs for the algorithm. (In other words, he ended up being the Punk Rock MAH, i.e. Master of Arts in History, in practice.)

Problem is, when he started, he was actually trying to do something more interesting: Offer business advice from the perspective of someone who came to professional success via the hardcore punk scene. But the algorithm did not seem to want that from Finn McKenty, even if that was his general POV. Great idea for a newsletter—tough sell to the YouTube masses.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the concept of an “interest analogue,” a creator who was working in a specific lane because online algorithms had pushed them in a specific direction. The Punk Rock MBA made enough money from his gimmick that he was able to build a comfortable life for himself, but he rode that interest analogue for all it was worth, for reasons some might argue are crass (but not Crass).

I’m not in Finn McKenty’s head, but when I hear someone like this say, “I don’t care about System of a Down and don’t want to do videos about them anymore,” what I’m actually hearing him say is, “I actually grew up in the punk subculture, but the algorithm sucked me into constantly talking about bands I don’t actually care about.”

Which is a different thing than not being into punk music.

I heard about this whole controversy from Anthony Fantano, who was a guest on McKenty’s podcast a while ago, and Fantano was somewhat understanding of McKenty’s situation—he effectively was running a video Wikipedia about heavy music for people who don’t want to read a Wikipedia entry, which, based on his initial output, wasn’t the plan. But Fantano makes clear that, intentions or no, McKenty sort of created this trap for himself:

 At the end of the day, it was in fact a music channel, so in order to execute that marketing and execute it well you're going to have to engage at least a little bit on some level with the music world—music and drama in the music world, news stories in the music world, the history of the artists that you’re engaging with on a regular basis, and their fan bases … which, uh, Finn sort of displays open contempt for at multiple points in this conversation.

I see a lot of punk-focused creators not happy with McKenty for his comments, and I absolutely get it, but nonetheless: I think I sort of get where he’s coming from. Exactly a decade ago this week, I was putting the finishing touches on the concept for this newsletter, which I created after shutting down another project, ShortFormBlog. I have talked at various times about why I shut down that project, but one that really comes to mind is drift. I built it to be a specific thing, but at the end of the road, I didn’t recognize it from where I had started. I see that in McKenty’s content arc.

(Tedium, for what it’s worth, did evolve, but the 2015 pieces more or less look like the weekend pieces I do today, with slightly less research.)

McKenty didn’t get into this to be everyone’s favorite source on Sugar Ray or to weigh in on scene drama, but that’s where outward signals such as algorithms and audience interest pushed him. The money made it worthy of his time, but why do this when his heart was really somewhere else?

Put another way: If he sold out, it wasn’t because he chose to quit.