Very interesting discussion.
I think toughness for the pure sake of it has its place in Noise. Why, to the contrary, wouldn't it have a place?
Noise by its nature is a genre not at all synonymous with things of comfort.
I think the reason people would disavow the tough guy characteristic, because it makes them uncomfortable and is their nature response / defense to such behavior. Other men especially.
Assholes are not generally liked. I also think that the more hardcore genres of music distend the norms of human behavior more, because many are initially attracted to them to let loose and vent frustration.
The problem is when the "tough guy" is very clearly a persona and not at all genuine. Someone mentioned the "street cred" tough guy, and I despise such a thing. Those types have no sense of identity or purpose, they are only masculine because of certain living conditions, but they don't understand certain virtues of being a man / person, that they balance their tough guy demeanor with a fashionable personality sold to them by the same people shoving a hip-hop down their throats.
It's a shame, really, because most masculine men are of this lost and hopeless variety. It is such a rarity when you actually meet a masculine man with a refined and sophisticated taste in things obscure and of high-quality.
The average punk and metalhead are better than the average hip-hop listener, but they're still mostly lost. The more mainstream fans of Industrial are often better, but they often become one with their scene friends and all adopt a uniform sense of politics and ethics, that they lose their slight individuality with a different herd mentality.
This largely makes up the bulk of hipster politics coming into a scene that is based on transgression and extremeness, and then trying to fool their vain ego that they are iconoclasts, they cannot see their slavish nature which impels them to want to tame down extreme subcultures, and they justify it through their sense of politics and use that as an excuse and a deflection when they attempt to do this.
As a rule, the more obscure a fan base, the more sophisticated and individualistic the enthusiasts.
I can only speak of myself and to my nature. Any music I make that would be classified as "tough guy" is either based on direct experiences of my life or my twisted sense of black humor. Or both.
My cheerful and joyous nature is not usually seen in such underground circles, where the predominant attitude is apathy or misery, in the face of transgressive and taboo subjects.
I feel happiness, and dark aspects of life do not deter this at all for me.
The more obscure the genre, the more senseless it would be to use a "tough persona" because their would be less people to impres with it.
My motivation for making music is one-hundred percent a quest to bring to life certain inexplicable and often fleeting feelings and sensations of the dark aspect of the divine.
Only really recently did I start making my music available online to others, so nothing I do is ever to impress others. I cannot say much promotion has even gone into my music as distribution. I am not buying ads or anything, probably because I am rather off-put by it because the types who usually do are the rap artists who, with no sense of value or virtue, are enslaved to the wheels of the system itself, with its insistence on everybody wanting to be a fucking celebrity, or all the hood kids who insist on being flashy with their money or car, because they saw someone do it on the internet, and these people are dirt fucking poor. Always.
It would be cool to see more people who would be considered tough guys, and are also truly individuals at their core.
Most people window-show for personal identities tailored to them from internet ads, and this is clearly obvious by all the little pigeonholed categories of postmodern society, and these people are followers, they have no fucking clue who they are, yet they infiltrate iconoclastic scenes and infest it with their hipster politics.
This does make some part of the Noise scene, but even those people in it who insist upon identifying with one of the categories of modern society, they are usually more individualistic than more mainstream versions of people identifying with the same thing.
Worship of fame made it this way. Fame in and of itself is largely innocuous and what you make of it, but the NEED for it is certainly pathological, and it's characterised by people who need attention and the approval of mass amounts of strangers. The irony is that people in the underground are viewed as seeking attention, but they largely do not give a fuck how they are viewed.
I have not heard of any "hip-hop" influenced Noise, but I would not be surprised given the fact that the internet made it far easier for different genres to come into contact with each other.
A lot of phrases that pretty much everybody use, like "MOTHERFUCKER" are hip-hop inspired, but I see this more as intentionally stealing from and simultaneously mocking the lingo, at least if for if I were to say it, which is completely different from somebody who is completely serious about their urban lingo, without any irony.
So yeah, testosterone for the sake of testosterone certainly has its place in the Noise scene. But only if it's genuine, and not with the intent to impress people. And it's easy to tell the difference.
