It’s difficult to decide exactly where to start this piece so I think I’ll cleave to tradition and lead with a specific time and place. In April of 2012 I was on the Trapped in Reality tour with Generation and Sisterfucker. I had been in contact with Jonathan Coward, best known for his R&B project Shams, about setting up our NYC show. There had been talk about a bar but it apparently fell through and we went with a last minute show at Jonathan’s Brooklyn apartment.
I can’t recall the exact chain of events that led to me adding a rapper called Drrty Pharms to the bill. We had met in Los Angeles and stayed connected over social media so most likely I either saw he was in NYC and offered or he saw I had a show that night and asked. I was a fan of his music from the very small amount of exposure I‘d had to it. I had been booking shows at a warehouse in the West Adams district of Los Angeles called McWorld and at the end of one night the proprietor of the space had a friend of his jump on the mic.
It’s important to remember that in 2012 the trend of SoundCloud Rap was just emerging and the ‘90s revival that would soon sweep over mainstream fashion was still relatively underground. My first impression of Drrty Pharms was a small statured blonde kid in wide leg JNCOs and an oversized Marilyn Manson T-shirt wearing a necklace of a Barbie Doll head with short cropped hair and drawn on makeup.
He instantly reminded me of the way my Junior High School friends in the early ‘90s had dressed and acted. After cueing up his beat from a miniature mp3 player he awkwardly stared at his feet and began rapping with perfect cadence in a voice barely above a mumble. I had to strain my ears to make out a snatch of lyrics:
“Motherfuckin’ dirty whores, what you fuck with Drrty for? I ain’t givin’ you the dick so what the fuck you flirting for?”
I took the whole thing as a self conscious parody of both the exaggerated sexual bravado found in mainstream rap music and masculine fragility wrapped in the aesthetics of Woodstock ‘99. It seemed as tongue in cheek to me as Kimya Dawson from The Moldy Peaches singing:
“Who’m I gonna stick my dick in?”
Besides that his skills in beat production, lyricism and delivery were undeniable and despite the lowered voice and downcast eyes he exuded palpable charisma.
At the NYC show he brought along a girlfriend with long blonde hair who stood directly in front of him for his entire set doing a dance move I refer to as the “groupie hip sway”. I began to notice that misogyny, including violent misogyny, seemed to play a larger role in his lyrics than I realized and distanced myself from that point on.
Here is a short video of his set that night. The recorded song riffs on a Fugee’s hit and is not especially violent. His devoted fan, presumed partner, is not visible in this shot. His mumble had marginally grown in confidence but the high point of the video is a shout of “HE SUCKS!” from the otherwise small and unresponsive crowd.
I have a copy I can embed for anybody interested:
I would say this is the moment I realized Wolfe’s music/persona was not what I’d been reading it as. On the same tour I was singing and playing drums in a project called Dealbreaker that I’d best describe as an exploration of “dark masculinity”. I think I projected my own creative energies on what I’d seen of his work and made an error in doing so.
Things like the inherent threat of violence in sexual dimorphism, the predatory nature that can accompany mate pursuit and the fetishization of young male artists as “sexual outlaws” all interested me in abstract, artistic ways. In my own life I was trying my best to be open, vulnerable and above all else consensual in this arena. I think I mistook Wolfe for a kindred spirit when we were closer to opposites.
He’d passed me a SoundCloud link and trends in his album titles were eye opening. I think the big one was Beating Women to Make Beats to Beat Women to. Sure the Spacemen 3 reference was transparent but when somebody always makes the same joke is it even a joke? It seemed clear that hurting women both physically and sexually was important to him so I turned my attention away and moved on.
It wasn’t my scene and I doubted I could do much as an elder or positive influence – from what I’d read he thrived on opposition and negative attention.
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A few years later I started to notice that his social media profiles, if not his music, were building a following around New York City. This happened mostly through my now-wife LaPorsha who had several mutuals close to him or in his circle. His music productivity had stepped up with the Beta Boys collective but the bigger bump was undoubtedly his shocking and offensive posts.
He regularly tested the boundaries of what 2013-2014ish Facebook would allow with posts about grooming and abusing women, references to consumption of Child Sexual Abuse Material, guileless racial caricatures and questionable confessionals about living as a sexual submissive to men of these races. The first recorded use of edgelord is recorded by Merriam-Webster-Webster in 2015 and Wolfe no doubt employed this archetype to drive engagement, including hate engagement, and expand his reach.
It doesn’t mean the things he was saying about himself were either untrue or inaccurate.
By 2019 his SXSW set was featured in Vice, large outlets like GQ and Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgard (known for mining the culture of transgression in Norwegian Black Metal) used him as a model and No-Wave legend Lydia Lunch released a split record with him. It’s worth noting that other young artists, Tyler the Creator and his collective Odd Future for example, were mining similar territory as a quick path to notoriety and have since moved away from abrasive, homophobic and misogynist lyrics.
Later that year everything for Wolfe came crashing down.
The above link will give better details and clearer sources but a sting had been underway involving Wolfe sourcing heroin to fellow Columbia students – one of whom died of an overdose and opened the case through her phone records. My own feelings on the ethics of punishing drug dealers are complex but more damning was a wealth of CSAM (formerly called Child Pornography) found on his phone during an airport seizure.
More interesting is that while at least four female victims of rape and grooming by Wolfe contacted the New York DA – often with references to specific rap lyrics in his songs bragging about verifiable features of these crimes no charges of this type were pursued. One of his accusers contacted the police department after seeing that the trial was moving forward but nobody had followed up with her – she was told there were no records of her being interviewed.
The sad reality is that defense lawyers tend to bully sexual assault victims and attempt to tear them, and their lifestyles, apart. Traumatic events are asked about in detail multiple times – looking for the slightest inconsistency or hesitation in order to throw the entire testimony into question. The DA likely viewed allowing such witnesses to testify as too much of a risk if their reports crossed their desk at all.
Ultimately locking up a rapper for the classic crime of drug conspiracy and trafficking was a slam dunk, the contraband sex material on his devices guaranteed extra charges but his female victims were evidently deemed unreliable and unworthy of taking the stand. For anyone who doesn’t know that every police precinct in America is overflowing with completed rape kits that decay on shelves untested this might sound surprising. Without extreme extenuating circumstances female victims of sexual violence fall perhaps lowest in the hierarchy of who our peace keepers believe in pursuing justice for.
Nonetheless I can’t help but feel that locking up a suburban, wealthy white kid who attended early college on drug charges feels a little too much like leaning into cliches and prejudices around his chosen music genre as opposed to seeking retribution for his victims in the truest sense.
After all, play ground myths aside, most drug buyers are eager shoppers and active participants. I would not say that about rape victims.
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With Wolfe behind bars and mentions of his name falling sharply since 2019 it would be valid to ask why am I dredging up his name and crimes at all – possibly throwing more attention his way. My reasons are twofold: first the Facebook reminder of our 2012 show sparked memories but more importantly reviewing his life and circumstances reminded me of an obscure decadent/weird fiction German novel from 1911 called Alraune.
For those readers who delight in moments where my fancies and tenuous connections twist into improbable filigrees we have arrived at the candy. From here on out shit’s getting weird. A brief synopsis and profile on author Hanns Heinz Ewers are in order before any jab at proceeding.
I knew the word Alraune from references in a Thrones album title and Castlevania games long before I read the original myself in the 1929 US translation. Ewers is a diminished, misunderstood figure in weird and decadent literature for one obvious reason – a brief formal alliance with the Nazi Party. As best as I can tell he was more Prussian nationalist than White Supremacist and many of his works show reverence for so-called “primitive cultures” of his era.
From 1901 he travelled Europe as the writer for a vaudeville troupe but hung this up due to prohibitive expenses and the heavy hands of Censors. He continued to write in many genres including his best known works: the Frank Braun trilogy of horror novels. Alraune is the centerpiece of these. The Nietzchean anti-hero Braun is generally regarded as the author’s self insert.
He traveled extensively and found himself on US soil during the First World War. This led to his arrest for fomenting support for the Kaiser. Eventually he was sent back to Germany and won favor with the Nazi party for his film work and biography of theatrical propagandist Wessels. His homosexual tendencies and the proud retention by his literary stand-in of a Jewish mistress led to a quick falling out with the party and a brief ban of all his works in his homeland.
He secured a reversal and died of tuberculosis soon after. Call me a Nazi sympathizer if you must but the paucity of his works in reprint seems rather unfair in contrast to his admirer, H.P. Lovecraft, who proudly supported the Nazis in their racial extermination goals yet today sees his own works reprinted in at least 100 different complete editions and countless works set in his mythos by other writers. I also admire Lovecraft’s writing despite his deplorable politics. I thought I’d throw in for added historical and literary context that Ewers wrote on Poe and corresponded for many years with Aleister Crowley.
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That’s more than enough of Alraune’s author so let’s talk about the book and why I think it pertains to Wolfe specifically.
At its core it is a gender-bent retelling of the Frankenstein myth where genetics, Eugenics and the questions around nature vs nurture replace the original work’s reanimation of corpses. The catalyst for the story is an Alraune, or mandrake root, in the form of a gnarled human figure that falls from a wall and into the punch bowl at a bourgeois gathering.
A nearby lawyer lays out the relevant mythology: a mandrake is said to form when a murderer is hanged at a crossroads and his final seed, released from the act of breaking his neck, soaks into the fertile earth. When the leaves grow to sufficient size a witch or wizard pulls up this root. This must be done at midnight on a full moon with either cotton stuffed ears or a hapless animal set to the task. The screams of the tiny creature as it is ripped from the earth are said to bring instant death to any listener.
Once acquired the mandrake manikin is brought home, regularly bathed in wine and said to bring money into the household while rendering the masters irresistible – all at the price of unfortunate early death and eternal damnation for their immortal souls. Irregardless the talisman of the Alraune was heavily sought after and commanded high prices. The magical root is featured in several Biblical stories and especially anthropomorphic specimens are in the collections of several museums.
With the legend out of the way the novel shifts its focus to the science. The aforementioned Frank von Braun is in attendance as is an uncle of his named Doctor Jacob ten Brinken. The Doctor keeps a private laboratory for experiments including artificial insemination. Ewers no doubt believed the procedure to be unprecedented in humans but his research failed him. A Scottish surgeon completed the first documented conception by this route in 1790 while crafty midwives and other women have no doubt understood the potential for the majority of human history.
The Alraune inspires Braun to advise his uncle to attempt to recreate the magic creature in human form. Rather than a hanging the semen is collected from a convicted murderer and rapist the evening before his execution by guillotine. With his nephews’s help, and an elaborate cover story about a disinherited prince, Ten Brincken convinces a young red haired prostitute to bear the child. Her name is Alma Raune but she shortens it to Al.Raune when signing the contract.
The child, a daughter, is named Alraune ten Brincken and made the sole inheritor of the doctor’s estate at the exclusion of his nephew. Her birth is appropriately portentous – throughout a lengthy delivery she screams like an otherworldly creature and is born with the skin of her legs fused together to the knees. The mother dies from blood loss and the operating surgeon, the older doctor’s assistant, succumbs to blood poisoning after performing corrective surgery for the skin condition.
The source of the infection is inferred to be a microscopic scratch inflicted upon his forearm by the infant.
The young Alraune needs a bit of time to appear sinister. An older wealthy doctor like Ten Brincken, now His Excellency through some honorary title or another, simply does not involve themselves with the care and emotional upkeep of children. Around the estate the majority of the serving staff detect some offensive pheromone or mannerism in the young girl and do only the bare minimum to keep her alive.
In the house of the Gontrams, the scene of the happy party where our anthropomorphic root creature had a sip of wine, the personification of death has been making sport and with the assistance of consumption the bony fingers have whisked away the mother and most of her sons. An older daughter lives but spends her days with a wealthy Duchess and her daughter Olga. That leaves, besides the father who would be unsportsmanlike for death, the youngest son called Wölf or Wölfchen.
I was not expecting the name when I picked up this book to see how well my theories fit the text. The coincidence is not as canny as it could be – for in my allegorical reading Wolfe Margolies (Drrty Pharms) is not Wölfchen Gontram but rather Alraune ten Brincken herself. The gender-flip has flipped a second time and seems to create a more congruous twist on Frankenstein than the recent Poor Things outing – which promised a feminist reading but instead chose to trade in puerile fantasy and the male gaze…
With Wolfe as our Alraune poor Wölfchen from the original story needs an avatar in our reality. Wölfchen was Alraune’s childhood playmate and plaything. Like many male characters in the narrative she is to him like a flame to a moth and will burn his wings and cause his destruction.
I nominate for this office the girl who was doing the “groupie hip sway” at our 2012 concert on Troutman. She is never visible in the embedded video segment and I have no idea how to find her name or how things with Wolfe turned out for her. According to certain patterns, in Wolfe’s behavior and choice of victims, the smart money seems to be on “not well” but for now let’s leave her image on the “wildcard” space.
Just for this one moment, as we do in every work of horror; be it novel or cinema, let us pretend that nothing is predetermined, anything is possible and in the end we could hope for safety and happiness – instead of merely the cold comforts of revenge…
[End of Part 1 of 2 *************************]
Next time: More on Wolfe, his crimes, his life and the novel Alraune. A discussion of the themes through a social lens. The alt-right/incel pipeline and angry young men. Feminism. Accountability and who gets it, does everybody?
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 
re: the Nazi stuff, Celine was definitely a bigger piece of shit than Ewers or Lovecraft (who reportedly was becoming less racist and leaning towards socialist in his latter days before dying in 1937) and it seems like he’s still acknowledged as being a great writer in most mainstream circles. Some writers just fall through the cracks!
Also I’d recommend the book Poor Things even if you didn’t like the movie. The fact parts seemclike a “male fantasy” is not unintentional and is directly addressed in what I found to be a very funny way.
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