Bring Back the Villains
Real athletes, real rock stars, and real vices are real necessary right now
Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: let’s introduce a bit of chaos.
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Ingredient List
🎵 : Every album in the Oasis catalog (so, no different than any other given week). I’m also really trying to will autumn into existence, so while I wrote this week, I’ve just been playing Spotify’s “Jazz for Autumn” playlist.
This is a single-serving course this week, no further introductions needed.
The Main Course
This week, Oasis announced their reunion after 15 years of separation on account of their brotherly hate. You know this, of course, because it may be the first time a real rock band has been talked about since Taylor Swift was in her country era, because that’s how we apparently measure time now.
The Oasis comeback is significant for two reasons. First, on a personal level, British culture had me in a headlock from the ages of 15-18, arguably the most important years of my life. Kate Moss, shaggy hair, techno music, Guy Ritchie films, pea coats, Burberry, Delirious (the peak of youth group Brit-Pop culture, if ever such a thing existed), and of course– Oasis. I recall whole study halls spent looking at Oasis liner notes, hand-drawing their logo, picking apart their album covers attempting to decipher any clues to their magical mystery tour. Just who is Sally and why can she wait? How could you not walk faster than a cannonball? Why does one band have so many Beatles references in one album?
In the summer while mowing my grandparents’ lawn, I’d balance my Sony Discman on my lap as “Definitely Maybe” spun in circles, trying its best not to skip. Feeding my ears with cigarettes and alcohol, even though my mouth had yet to touch either. Both things that my grandpa kept in his garage refrigerator, by the way. I broke up with my girlfriend in the summer before 12th grade; in history class that September she passed me a note that said: “How many special people change, how many lives are living strange?” That’s how deep that river Thames ran.
The second reason the Oasis comeback is significant is because we are in desperate need of villains.
To be a true rock star, you need to embrace villainy. Throwing couches out hotel room windows, diving Scrooge McDuck-style into piles of cocaine and hookers, playing with blood (animal or human are both fine), starting petty and/or serious arguments with other rock stars, crashing a car in downtown Los Angeles, turning your fans against you– these are all valid paths for a rock star to take. I’ve long argued that Liam Gallagher was the last true rock star, because he firmly possessed the three main qualities of one a) he was the frontman in a rock band that could draw massive crowds, b) he embraced vices and exhibited morally unacceptable behavior c) he didn’t care that he was an asshole.
There will be people who will say Dave Grohl is a rock star, but he is not (too nice). There are people who will say Chris Martin is a rock star, but he is not (too nice, and not rock). There will people who will say Axl Rose is a rock star (he was, but isn’t). If I’m being completely honest, I think Kanye West was the last true rock star as a full persona in the music space, but for the purposes of this piece, I’m defining rock star in the stereotypical sense of the word (i.e. lead singer of a a rock band).
While there were plenty of rock stars before him, who even still play live shows today, Liam Gallagher was the last of them to come along, because we will never see a rock band rise again to the same meteoric levels of fame. They came to fame at the hinge moment between analog and digital, print magazine and the internet. Today, there’s too many artists, they’re all too accessible thanks to social media and media in general, someone at some party is always recording them, and the internet and our phones dilute the experience of everything. There will just never be another rock star of that caliber. And if you think Imagine Dragons is rock, well, the exit is right here.
But we need more of them, and we need them to be here now.
Bring back the villains.
People love to loathe on Liam and Noel for all the reasons mentioned above, but also because their insistence on self-flagellation and fan loathing defies logic. Literally all these blokes have to do is stand on stage and play a guitar and we will pay hundreds of quid to come and worship them. That’s it! And yet they won’t do it, until now. The Gallagher brothers are– to borrow a term from Tim in the British version of “The Office,”– a “twat and a knob end.”
Their theatrics help as well. I’m sure there’s some real animosity between the two, but you’d be a fool on a hill to think that Liam and Noel don’t know it’s good business for show business to play up the bit. Public fights, diss tracks in real time from the other side of the stage, mid-set walk-offs. It’s WWF wrestling, just with a soundtrack. The British were never blessed with men in spandex underwear jumping off turnbuckles or clotheslining each other into the ground. So the Gallagher brothers will have to do.
As with wrestling, Oasis’ greatest success isn’t because of their raw talents on stage– guitar riffs thrown like haymakers out to the crowd, a champagne suplex-nova to bring the night to a close. It exists and thrives and works only because they’re absolute heels.
In case you didn’t grow up in the late nineties, when half the hallway in high school was giving Stone Cold Steve Austin suck-it signs while passing each other between classes, in both Mexican lucha libre and American wrestling, the heel is the antagonist of the play. His job is to create chaos, to subvert the hero, to elicit a loud chorus of boos from the crowd.
In his beautifully written piece on the art of the heel, Mike Edison points out that “the role of a heel is to get 'heat,' which means spurring the crowd to obstreperous hatred, and generally involves cheating and any other manner of socially unacceptable behavior.” Fans love it because it creates tension and drama and gives us something to unite against. Everything the heel does drives us to madness. The rule-bending, the violation of social norms, the pompousness and utter pretentiousness– It’s aggravating and nonsensical and irritating. He gets under our skin and zaps our bread baskets, Operation-style. But it’s all part of the show, and if the show must go on, so must the villain.
However, somewhere over the last couple decades, villains began to disappear. Maybe we peaked too hard in the eighties and nineties. The unbridled capitalism thing was cool until pyramid schemes became the hottest way to make money. Motley Crüe was great, but maybe not so much Vince Neil serving only 20 days in prison for drunk driving and crashing into another car, giving brain damage to its two occupants and killing his own friend in the passenger seat. With Captain Canseco at the helm, steroids brought baseball back from the dead, but sooner or later everybody had to jump on the roid express to keep up with the competition.
Sports in particular have become safer, and any fan knows that the raw quality of the product has been diluted. Hockey, with its players looking like jacked-up jack-o-lanterns and its icy courts stained with blood, has forever been known as one of the most visceral of all professional sports. Since its inception, an actual position in the game is that of the enforcer, a man put there for the sole purpose of protecting and avenging his own teammates. Fight card tallies and penalty minutes were sources of pride for the enforcer, not so much goals and assists.
In recent years, the NHL has sought to distance itself from the unbridled testosterone image, and the enforcer has taken on a more hybrid role, where brute strength and hand-to-hand combat has been replaced with puck finesse and stick handling. The position is hanging on by a death rattle, as just one player has cracked the 200-minute penalty mark over the past decade; in the nineties, penalty minute leaders routinely registered in the 350-minute range.
Most Americans will know that the NFL has undergone a similar dilution. Aside from the many penalties for rough play that have transpired over the past two decades, the most absurd and hotly debated penalty in the league is the taunting rule, which came into effect in 2021. According to the NFL rulebook, taunting is defined as “the use of baiting or taunting acts or words that engender ill will between teams.” If a player is flagged for taunting, their team will receive a 15-yard penalty, the most in the NFL, outside of an ejection. The player himself can be fined over $10,000 for his first offense and upwards of $15,000 for a second offense. The rule itself spawned a new nickname for the NFL: the “no fun league.” They had neutered the villain.
This was a huge mistake, as the average fan doesn’t remember what happened in the second half of any given Super Bowl, but even casual fans remember the character of Terrell Owens in the 2000s, whose villainy was so on point that he was able to spin it into a reality TV show. Early in his career playing for the San Francisco 49ers, T.O. cemented himself as the quintessential villain in the league– after scoring a touchdown in an away game versus Dallas, he promptly ran to midfield on the Cowboys own turf and spread his arms wide in the on top of the star, an act of desecration if there ever was one in Texas. Standing in the middle of Cowboys stadium, boos raining down, posturing and preening and soaking it all in– this was the professional sports version of wrestling’s Ric “The Nature Boy” Flair, a Rowdy Roddy Piper with pads.
In the second half, T.O. scored another touchdown and doubled down on his first celebration, running back out to the midfield star and planting the ball firmly in the middle of the star. He was immediately plastered by Cowboys safety George Teague, which would become the most memorable moment in Teague’s own career. Terrell Owens’ villainy elevated both players to iconic status and offered an elevated entertainment product in the process. He was the quintessential heel and he was the best.
Call it safetyism or call it cancel culture, but things have changed since then. I’m not here to say whether it’s net good or bad. But the product has become dull, and not just in sports. Life has become dull. Yes, it’s probably good that we aren’t shaking up skulls like snow globes anymore for our Sunday afternoon entertainment. Or that shortstops aren’t facing career-ending injuries thanks to Chase Utley spiking them ten feet off the base. It’s nice to know that rock stars will face career consequences if they’re sending nudes to minors in their DMs.
But there’s a reason why the UFC is experiencing record growth, especially with Gen Z. The UFC has gone against the grain of everything in society, embracing both the violence and the villainy. Instead of tamping down the temper of Conor McGregor– the brash walking and trash talking Irishman who single handedly elevated the sport over the past decade– they gave him all the spotlight he wanted. He was easy to hate, but also easy to root for, and he ran with it. Fans loved it, because right there in the octagon was the endangered species of villainy.
It should be no surprise then, that a frequent attendee and oft-guest of Dana White (founder of UFC) at championship matches is none other than former president Donald J. Trump.
When Trump became president in 2016, I was surprised that everyone was surprised at this sudden turn of events. Really? He is the perfect heel. We’ve built the heel to icon status, we’ve idolized villainy, and then we took it all away in every other aspect of culture. And then you’re surprised when the quintessential heel wins the election for president of the United States? Come on, this is the script we’ve all been waiting for. The hard truth that nobody wants to hear is that Donald Trump is good for villainy. This is never more evident than ratings for cable news networks, which saw record viewership during his presidency and have since cratered. In the months following Biden’s inauguration, CNN lost 36% of its primetime viewership. More than anyone else, they need the villain.
But it’s not good for us. If you try to put out a fire that’s always been burning, it’ll pop up somewhere else. Or you’ll get a Billy Joel song out of it. Either way, in the absence of villains, we turn on ourselves, and the epitome of that betrayal is siding with politicians. This is the cohort of humans that lie out of every side of their mouth, shake hands with fingers crossed, and kiss babies after kissing their interns. They’re the absolute worst version of ourselves, but since we’ve removed the villain from all other areas of life, we’ve come to find them where we can, and apparently the arena of politics is an acceptable place to do so.
That turn to politics, of course, has been fueled by online discourse and social media, a place where– in the absence of villains– people have turned to both sow and reap evil. We extinguished the real-life version and have replaced it with toxic rhetoric and the seeds of mind viruses, the worst trade-off you could ask for. The norms have changed, and not for the better.
We can’t go on like this. We need a return to real-life villainy.
One of my favorite pieces of advertising is a print spread from Nike circa 2003. It featured Steve Prefontaine (aka “Pre”), the kid from Coos Bay, Oregon, the iconic running star who took the world by storm in the late 1960s and early 70s, before his untimely death in a car crash on a curvy road in Eugene. He was brash and he was bold, he took the lead from the front and went for it. No guts, no glory. In the thirty years between his death and the Nike ad in question, nobody had come close to touching his style and swag. The ad asks the question: “Where are all the rock star runners?” The truth is, running– middle and long-distance running, in particular– had become boring, each year a turnover of a new vanilla flavor. Everyone was a hero, just trying to do their best out there, focusing on getting better.
Today, the sport is exciting because of one man– Jakob Ingebrigtsen, the young Norwegian phenom who is on a trajectory to become one of the greatest runners of all time. He is hated by many thanks to his unbridled confidence bordering on narcissism, his pre-race smack talk, and his rivalry with other runners, namely his arch-nemesis Josh Kerr. Their ongoing feud hung them both out to dry in the 1500-meter race at Paris, as Cole Hocker slipped by them both to grab the gold in the final stretch.
Ingebrigtsen is easy to root against and even easier to hate and he is exactly what the world needs right now. Sometimes he goes out hard and loses badly, sometimes he breaks a world record by three seconds. This is what rock stars do. Nike finally found its rock star runner.
As much as I love running, I also realize that’s just one slice in a very small microcosm of sport. Which is why I think that the rise of the cigarette is the most promising sign that villainy is back.
The cigarette itself has always been a marker of villainy– from rock stars to movie stars, from Cruella DeVille to Jeffrey Dahmer to Hunter S. Thompson. You may not be James Dean, but you are a rebel. I wrote about my love and nostalgia for smoking a few months ago, and in 2024, that sentiment is shared by the general public. Anyone who’s alive knows that smoking is having an in moment. Not vaping, but real, analog, nicotine and tobacco cigarettes.
The number of tobacco depictions in binge-watched shows in the last couple years has nearly quadrupled, according to Truth Initiative, America's largest anti-tobacco public health organization. Earlier this year, The Independent showed that “a new study from University College London (UCL) revealed that there was a major surge in 18- to 24-year-olds in England taking up smoking during the pandemic. Before Covid, the number of people smoking overall was falling 5.2 per cent per year, but since 2020, the rate of decrease has slowed to just 0.3 per cent.”
This is what happens when you remove the villains. We will find them where we can, even returning to old ones, the worst ones.
A common enemy, a dose of danger, a risk versus reward– these are the things that unite us. As noble as it is to stamp out the baddies, the truth is, we need villains the way the light needs the darkness, the sun needs the rain, the candle needs the flame.
In Sebastian Junger’s book “Tribe,” he devotes a chapter to World War II and wartime in Europe. London was in a blackout lockdown as the Germans bombarded the city for nearly two months straight. Despite the mass death and chaos and turmoil during the war, “psychiatric hospitals around the country saw admissions go down.” Across the board, suicide rates drop during war time while overall morale goes up. Junger concludes that “when people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose...with a resulting improvement in mental health.” It seems contradictory, but good thrives in an inverse proportion to evil.
The villain is a grand uniter.
Of course, I’d rather not see villainy rise to the level of führerdom and a redux of Axis versus Allies, but a little bit of evil could do us a lot of good. Don’t let it flourish, but allow it to spread its wings, so the good guys have something to do.
Cigarettes and bare-knuckle fighting and trash-talking and showboating are a good start. And that’s just at the first Oasis reunion show.
Hopefully the rest of the world follows suit.
Course 2
Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week
This past week was pretty laid back, finally. The kids are back in school which means we’re finally back to a semi-normal schedule, which I like. I feel like I’ve finally unpacked and organized everything from this summer, so that’s a bit of a relief. I did get in a great workout on Wednesday night at the Faster Bastards weekly run in Druid Hill Park. Despite a 95-degree temperature at the start, I felt fantastic, one of those once-a-year runs where everything clicks. The course is no joke, but I felt stronger and stronger as the run went on, clicking off some of my fastest miles of this training block on the biggest hills so far, and it somehow felt fairly effortless. Now if only I could find that magic on race day.
I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round-up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.
I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to this week’s episode here, where I recount the legend of the lost license, a wild story from last weekend where I found a North Carolina drivers’ license on my run and was somehow able to track the woman down and get it back to her even though she had no online presence. Fun times.
END OF MENU
Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.
Maybe an argument to make that Jack White was the last rock star, he'd at least get in a fight. But it's an argument I'm not sure I'd believe.
Imagine Dragons is this generation's Nickel Back