Aggressive Tone as Identification
During the mid 1980 s, Seething Wells– also referred to as Steven Wells– seemed to regulate a specific admiration from men. He was viewed as brave, confrontational, clever. But more than that, he exhibited the type of disorderly dominance that, because period, reviewed as alpha male energy. It was a cultural moment when maleness was determined in noise and derision. His aggression was mostly incorrect for credibility; his volatility was taken as radiance.
But to me, also then, it looked like another thing. Something strangely uncommon: a male in deep psychological distress, secured a public performance of control he really did not actually have– since psychological policy, for him, seemed entirely out of reach.
He appeared of punk– a scene that positioned itself as anti-establishment, yet in truth, frequently duplicated the very same rigid sex standards it noisally disavowed. The trouble was, in those days, all you had to do was very own the room. Screaming and ranting were viewed as signs of authenticity. The funny scene favoured mouthy male performers that might bulldoze an audience. Psychological subtlety was often rejected as weakness.
Wells was understood for his hatred of the Tetley Bitter Males– a collection of British TV adverts including flat-capped, working-class Northern males, depicted as psychologically stunted yet special. The project was unapologetically chauvinistic, objectifying females while representing men as obliging simpletons.
The campaign was nostalgic and safe, but Wells’s reaction to it was extreme and disproportionate. He saw in those adverts a vision of England he could not endure. However in regularly railing versus them, he executed a disturbing brand of manliness that was rigid bitter, sneering and compulsively opposite. He could not allow any gentleness to stand. And that, paradoxically, was what made him so admired by various other guys shaped by the mentally constricted norms of 1980 s male society. Men admired Wells’s stance, feeling that by aligning themselves with his loathing of the Tetley Bitter Men, they were doing their little bit to show they weren’t the type to demean ladies. His charm lay, in part, in supplying a kind of ethical cover for troubled males.
From an emotional perspective, his behaviour was disclosing. The compulsive demand to provoke, the lack of ability to tolerate any emotional motifs, the rage bubbling simply under the surface area– these are not the indicators of a person mentally safe and secure. They’re usually indications of unrefined trauma. Potentially childhood forget or humiliation. What may have started as innovative energy altered into a survival approach: dominate or be dominated. And it was strengthened– exacerbated– by the praise he obtained from other men.
Evidently, a boy when provided him a handwritten duplicate of the lyrics to “English Rose”. Wells eyed it, made a reducing comment, and instantaneously discarded it. The story stuck with me. Wells couldn’t accept susceptability. He had to flatten it, mock it, treat it as a threat. It tested his worldview– or most likely, the fragile scaffolding that maintained his very own pain unreachable. He seemed incapable of deep feeling unless it was refracted through rage, irony, or ridicule.
This was the broader environment of the moment. The 1980 s media and funny scenes, specifically in Britain, were crowded with males like him– fantastic in flashes, yet fundamentally formed by misogyny and a deep anxiety of psychological intimacy. The “brand-new man”– an expression that began flowing in the late 1980 s, describing a much more mentally literate, reflective maleness– had yet to authentically hold. Females were seldom the focus of direct contempt, yet they were typically lacking altogether– eclipsed by the manly ranting, the friendship of dispute.
After his fatality, Wells was commemorated as a firebrand, a needed irritant, a supposed speaking-truth-to-power number. Yet it’s worth asking: what kind of culture transforms unsettled male injury right into efficiency, and after that canonizes it? Who benefits from the myth of the angry man wizard? And who is silenced by it?
I saw him once at the North East London Polytechnic Freshers Ball. His act consisted of an excessive, hostile tirade against the art students– he mocked them as pompous, arrogant, and ridiculous. He suggested that compared to him, they were the ones devising. However I keep in mind reasoning: possibly it was envy. Probably he saw in them a type of flexibility he really did not have– the capability to procedure feeling with thoughtfulness instead of releasing it like a shaken can of soda, splashing temper almost everywhere. The capability to develop without rage, to shape emotion rather than simply appear from it.
There was an unfortunate fad in the 80 s– the social change (message- 1960 s) toward using art purely for self-expression and psychological catharsis– which was primarily ego-driven noise, what the thinker Joseph Campbell termed “expression without craft.” True creative expression often begins with an anxious energy the artist doesn’t yet understand. They attempt to give it form. In doing so, they clarify it and release several of the tension. Yet Wells never seemed to reach that second phase. He remained inside the disruption. What he projected was raw, unfiltered, and usually wounding. At times, it veered towards antisocial qualities– high disagreeableness, chronic enmity, reduced empathy. Not because he lacked sensation, but due to the fact that he had no safe access to it.
Having actually attained some sort of cult standing, individuals became conditioned to see anything he claimed as a subversive offering, even when it was peculiar, disturbingly off-key or unhinged. The ones that absolutely appreciated it were mostly males.
