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Boyz to Men: The Rumpus Interviews Alex Kazemi

by Miah Jeffra

Alex Kazemi’s novel New Millennium Boyz (Permuted Press, 2023) is a divisive book. It may piss you off, may offend you, may have you nodding your head to its reality-TV reality, a hazily self-reflexive gesture of the early millennium’s particular brand of pop culture consciousness. Heavily dialogical and uniquely sparse in reflective voice—despite being written from teen Brad Sela’s perspective—the novel reads more like a screenplay stitched together by saturated scenes of suburban banality and angst, largely concerning Brad’s troubling friendship with goth-kid Lusif and emo-stoner Shane. There is so much violent, racist and sexist overtone to the three teens’ interactions that it feels like we’re watching a mashup of The Doom Generation and Beavis and Butthead. Think Brett Easton Ellis. Think Larry Clark. Think deeply unsettling, especially as readers influenced and informed by the last two decades forced to look back. 

Born, raised and currently living in the Vancouver area, Kazemi began working in the fashion and music industry at 15, and emerged as a pop culture journalist, working for Dazed, King Kong and Prim, among others. His early experience inhabiting this—as Kazemi calls—“post-empire world” clearly influences the novel, flooded with sharp critiques and observations of Y2K music, from Blink 182 to Fiona Apple, backdropped by the popularization of the internet and reality-TV. 

New Millennium Boyz serves to indict our recent past as a caustic soup of creative expression, cynicism and techno-reality, a Baudrillard-ian horror film where the characters won’t stop watching themselves, and through gritted teeth simultaneously implore the reader, have we changed all that much? Using our current techno-reality, Kazemi and I chatted over Zoom to explore this question.

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The Rumpus: We obviously see your knowledge of music and culture and fashion all over this book. Why did you decide that you needed to write this story as a novel?

Alex Kazemi: When I was 18, I started writing notes. I uploaded the first 50 pages onto Tumblr and a lot of teenagers really resonated with it. I got a lot of messages and, as viral as things could go in 2013, it did. It wasn't initially concerning style or aesthetic or anything. I was only taking from what I knew back then. As I grew up, however, the meanings of those initial pages changed. I lost a certain innocence.

As the world became crazier, as my 20s became more turbulent, there were more intense emotions that I wanted to explore. I had to grow, practice, change, and evolve. This book is so different from the original Tumblr manuscript, but the reason it was a novel was because that's just what felt right.

Rumpus: In several moments in the novel, the dialogue runs together so much that you don't even know who's speaking. The characters blur. Why?

Kazemi: I remember working with my editor on the locker room scene where the boys are talking about girls and porn. I was like, “I have to include speaker indicators.” They're like, “No, because all the boys are just the same in the scene. They're all amorphous, facets of the extreme teen-boy experience.” I think that in that era—maybe every era—there were so many mixed messages of what it means to be a boy, what masculinity meant, the violence of it, that’s not explored much in art.

Rumpus: Why do you have it set right at the dawn of the millennium?

Kazemi: I was perplexed and fascinated by our culture becoming so obsessed with Y2K. I wanted to unmask the corporate, buzz-feed-type nostalgia for that era and create more of a gritty, voyeuristic version of teen-hood. What if we take the voice from American Pie and explore the darker aspects of that world? I wanted to show that these themes that we're dealing with currently in our culture, of hyper reality and the Internet age, emerged back then. 

Rumpus: You're very interested in the consumerism that is bound in this hypermediated society. Do you feel like we were worse off 20 years ago than we are now?

Kazemi: I often think about this. We look at Gen Z, who are so openly queer, openly celebrating their POC-ness, anything that makes them different. And then we rewind twenty years ago and it looks like we are now better off. How have we been able to make that progress if we didn't have social media, if technology didn't accelerate in the way it did? I don't know the answer to that. But it's often something I think about. I think maybe in certain ways we were more intelligent about our moderation around screen time. You open a magazine, and eventually it ends, right? An Instagram feed doesn't end. A TikTok feed doesn't end.

Rumpus: Do you feel like that is one of the functions of all the sexism, the racism, the homophobia of the characters in your novel, for us to look back twenty years ago and see how far we've come?

Kazemi: I particularly made the characters like that to show what the culture amongst white men was encouraging at the time. It’s definitely not a celebration of it, but more so holding up a mirror to how those issues were presented in that time period. Twenty years later we're supposed to look at it and be like, “Holy fuck, this is how people talked. This was normal. Why was it like that? And why did we allow it to be like that? And why did we associate it with creative freedom?” 

Rumpus: So, you’re suggesting media of the time was packaged in this effort to celebrate creative freedom, when in fact, it seemed to indulge in aspects of our own culture’s hatred?

Kazemi: If kids are listening to Adam Carolla on Love Line and he says something objectionable, they don’t have the clear ability to critique it like we do now. They were inside of it. They were participating in the culture. For us to say that our media doesn't encourage certain impulses in us is just absurd. Of course, we can't control who is consuming the media. I'm not saying violent movies creates school shooters, but I'm saying there are unwell people who are not equipped to handle this content, and it can unfold into madness.

Rumpus: One of those examples would be the protagonist, Brad? 

Kazemi: Brad is in this masochistic male friendship [with Lusif], yet he also fears losing him. A level of trauma bonding.

Rumpus: Do you think that is born of some desperate need for young males to share intimacy, that they would let someone like Lusif abuse them, because at least they were experiencing an intimacy with another male, without reproach, that isn't fostered in our culture?

Kazemi: Absolutely. I think that these young men who, for instance, pledge a frat are really looking for a shared intimacy amongst other men. They're desperate for communication and physical intimacy that feels safe for them and their sexuality. Brad was so intimacy-starved that he would let someone bad like Lusif into his life. I think boys in our culture are in that state of starvation a lot, and that's pretty scary to think of what they're capable of doing in that malnourished state. I was trying to display the way teenage boys have to manage being a good boy to their family while behind the scenes they have all these unresolved feelings around sex and violence and drugs. They're this weird, netherworld creature that's not a boy, not a man, managing this middle-space. They are processing a lot of unresolved sexual energy. It's something that is provoking a very extreme reaction in readers, which is so weird to me because I never predicted that. I definitely have a better understanding of the prose that most people like, and I don't think I went the traditional route.

Rumpus: You averted the traditional route by being so heavily dialogical without much access to Brad’s interiority?

Kazemi: That's interesting because a lot of people say that's a lot of telling. But it's fucked up because in my head, I was like, “Oh, I'm showing their reality. I'm almost creating reality TV, setting it up with minimum imagery, and then getting to watch the conversation.”

Rumpus: Maybe these critics are summoning classic tropes of storytelling when reviewing this book. I think what you said resonates with me. The book mirrors the reality television narrative. Minimal situation and lots of dialogue and reaction.

Kazemi: There are these moments of suburban romanticism in our culture, of hanging out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, smoking—American rites of passages that would resonate with the typical Total Request Live watcher. I definitely did try to create those tiny moments of suburban claustrophobia. The book resembles a three- to four-hour nineties teen movie. It's like an extended cut. I'm shocked that I did it and also that I was so insistent with my publisher to stay true to my vision. Obviously, it's not something I want to do again, this type of style, but it is a bit jarring.

Rumpus: You say you're probably not going to write a novel like this again. Do you have another project on the horizon?

Kazemi: I definitely have ideas, but much like the Madonna school, I'm all about reinvention, thinking of different ways to tell stories. I want to stay in the novel medium and I want to write more books, but I have to figure out what comfort zone I’m going to push against next. ________________________________________ Miah Jeffra is author of four books, most recently The Violence Almanac and the novel American Gospel. Miah is co-founder of Whiting Award-winning queer and trans literary collaborative, Foglifter Press, and teaches creative writing and decolonial studies at Sonoma State University.