Thinking about the death of subcultures. Like I haven’t seen any goth kids or punks or any obvious subcultural movements in years. And obviously part of that is just cultural change, but when I think of modern subcultures the only thing I can think of are those tiktok alternative people, like egirls, but there isn’t that sense of a real “scene” going on with their own lifestyles and music and events, like lived experience that’s shared. I feel like what we might call modern subcultures are all reduced to mere aesthetics and they’re all mostly online, and they all look way too pretty – their make up is always perfect and their clothes are perfectly aesthetic and there’s none of that deliberate freakishness going on; literally grunginess itself has been commodified. There’s none of the real expression of confusion and anger that came with growing up in a world that you felt on some level was fucked up but you couldn’t express why, so you expressed it by dressing like a freak, by looking kinda deliberately out of place. I want that spirit back because this is what subcultures were about. Let’s bring back real subculture, not the alienated commodified version that’s based on aesthetics and has been reduced to social media, but the kind where you actually go out looking completely unhinged on purpose to disrupt. The kind where you meet other people and feel a sense of empowerment in your willing difference from the mainstream, and by that I mean the kind that is explicitly anticapitalist.
