An obituary for Tyler West
a historian as at home in a mosh pit as he was in the archives
I first met Tyler West when he interviewed me for this masters thesis on the extra-parliamentary left during the fifth labour government, a thesis that in his own words “critically evaluates the extra-parliamentary left; identifying the strengths, weaknesses, achievements, and failures of the most important groups, campaigns and movements.”
Tyler and I shared an understanding that documenting our social movements was an important thing to do. It was the same motivator I had for recording an oral history of the Occupy movement in Christchurch a few years before. When doing this kind of history, one finds people reluctant to be interviewed, seeing themselves as perhaps part of an important movement, but unimportant as individuals. A mix of New Zealand’s famous tall poppy syndrome and the tendency on the left to deemphasise our individual contributions in favour of the collective struggle. For that reason I wasn’t going to say no to an interview for this research.
We continued to have shared research interests. We both spoke on a panel on the far-right in Aotearoa New Zealand at the New Historians conference hosted by Victoria University in 2023. My book Fear had come out recently and Tyler had co-authored with Sebastian Potgieter a chapter on the topic ‘Southern Africa in the political imagination of New Zealand’s radical right’ published in Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand that same year. We were joined on that panel by Mark Dunick, who also contributed a chapter. Tyler’s two part article ‘Outpost of Empire: The Origins of New Zealand’s Far Right’ (part 2) is another valuable contribution to this history.
Beyond academic interests, Tyler and I shared a love of heavy metal and horror movies. One of the several times he stayed at my house when passing through Christchurch, I gave him a flash drive full of MP3’s I’d ripped from the various demo disks and albums I’d picked up during the city’s thriving metal scene in the 2000s, I think a few tracks got some airplay on Haunting the Studio, the show he co-hosted on Dunedin’s Radio One.
Tyler was someone who could spend the afternoon reading Marx and Engels on The first Indian war of independence and then spend the evening listening to some Iron Maiden or watching an entry in the Friday the 13th series.
These interests were interlinked though. The Otago Socialist Society’s halloween week event this year, which in the circumstances had to be cancelled, was to feature Tyler in conversation with the media scholar Rosemary Overell on the topic ‘Anthems to the Estranged’ with the two of them “Discussing a wide range of topics orbiting around the core theme of social and political issues raised by/present in the heavy metal subculture”. It was advertised with a poster featuring Karl Marx wearing a Jason Voorhees style hockey mask, a fitting image to capture Tyler’s aesthetic.
The below, from his blog and reproduced in his funeral program, shows his attitude toward the music scene that gave respite from the day to day realities of capitalism.
“It is in moments of rapture, being tossed about by a roiling crowd, that I have a reaffirmation of my politics unlike that which anything else could induce. This is why I must do this. This moment of fulfilling connection which refuses the alienation of person to person. In the mass, I de-individualise for a moment, and in the aftermath of that moment I am refreshed with the feeling of being fully human. For a second, I would die without question for each and every person in the crowd. Of course, I return to straightforward thought by the time the song is over and the crowd calms down, but the impact lingers. It is for a chance to experience on a routine basis a life for which the impersonal alienation of market logic is abolished, and in which the reproduction of life is organised such that focus might be placed on the development of beautiful and worthwhile things, to which I make what contributions that I can.”
I last saw Tyler in person when he came to Christchurch to see the UK band Orange Goblin, in what turned out to be their last international tour. He and I wore the same t-shirt size, and I remember returning from the merch table noting there was no shortage of 2XL- “this is a band who knows the Doom Metal audience”. Band t-shirts were the semi-official dress code for his funeral, I wore a Pull Down the Sun shirt. I’d wanted to wear the Orange Goblin shirt, but somehow I lost it at some point in the past year. A real shame as typically I’d wear a t-shirt purchased during a tour until the printed graphic was full of cracks and the front was dotted with holes (Tyler, I understand, would wear them a little longer still). As disappointing as it may be to lose a gig t-shirt though, it’s a lot harder to lose a friend.