punk is dead and so are we

footnotes

Over the last week and a half I’ve been working on fulfilling my dream of writing an unpublishable 1200-page novel that nobody will ever read. It proceeds apace, but I haven’t given much thought to updating this thing in the meantime. So let’s see what sort of quodlibetical gibberish I can throw together in a pinch.

Punks in 1983 (ganked from the Guardian)

After invoking the concept in our last episode, I figured it would be a good time to return to and leaf through the late Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? The book is well worth anyone’s time to read.

Fisher’s overall thesis could be (very sloppily) summed up as a kind of a refracted, through-the-rabbit-hole version of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” spiel, issued two decades later, examining “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” Western capitalism prevailed over Soviet communism, neoliberalism put its shoulder to the wheel, and now there’s no way off the ride and no exit ramps to anything else. The social environment set up by private firms and their enablers (as opposed to public institutions, religious organizations, or any other languishing political/cultural organs) determines our aspirations and our means, ingrains our values, delineates our conceptual horizons of possibility—and so on and so forth.

Capitalist Realism’s early chapters touch on what we we talking about last time: the “alternative” youth subcultures at the turn of the century who romantically imagined they were rejecting a bland and soulless Mainstream by eschewing Top 40 musicians in favor of buying and listening to records by NOFX, Korn, Nine Inch Nails, et al., and sartorially broadcast their self-imposed exile from preppiedom with fishnet sleeves, studded leather bracelets and chokers, plaid trousers with congeries of superfluous zippers, black band tees with cheeky imagery, purple and red hair dye, and other such fashion statements as were sold for a reasonable price at their local Hot Topic.

Fisher:

In the 1960s and 1970s, capitalism had to face the problem of how to contain and absorb energies from outside. It now, in fact, has the opposite problem; having all-too successfully incorporated externality, how can it function without an outside it can colonize and appropriate? For most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable¹…It would be dangerous and misleading to imagine that the near past was some prelapsarian state rife with political potentials, so it's as well to remember the role that commodification played in the production of culture throughout the twentieth century. Yet the old struggle between detournement and recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled “alternative” or “independent” cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. “Alternative” and “independent” don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.

Keep in mind that Capitalist Realism was published in 2009, when indie rock was still chugging along, Burning Man was becoming something everyone knew about, the exposed-pipes veneer of Brooklyn bohemianism was in vogue, and so on. The funny thing in retrospect is that all of this still might have appeared to be “alternative.”

By now we’re aware that the indie scenes of the aughts were simply the new veins into which the recording and fashion industries had tapped. Burning Man was the preeminent celebration of the same Californian Ideology which shaped the political and economic ethos of Silicon Valley. The stereotype of the Brooklyn transplant who moved into a low-rent neighborhood, shopped at thrift stores, experimented with promiscuity and drugs, went to shows and contributed to zines, and punched out Facebook posts about their impecunious circumstances was performing precisely the same number as the bohemians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; as per Peter Sloterdjik, they were “young bourgeois…[living] out their crises of adjustment in the transition from the world of school and home to the world of serious occupations.”²

Fisher’s observation that mass cultural “clubs” of recalcitrance and nonconformity are unwittingly scripted to repeat the arcs of their bygone predecessors reminds me of the climactic sequence in The Matrix: Reloaded where Neo speaks to the Architect and learns that he is not the first “One,” nor is the human insurgency unprecedented. The moment of crisis which the film depicts consummates a routine built into the machines’ system of control: as it operates, Matrix produces an effluence of liberated human subjects who predictably band together and attempt to resist their masters, and it always ends with the emergence of a One, the eradication of the human city, and its resettlement by the One’s handpicked group of survivors. The whole thing is accounted for, and the procedures for completing the old cycle and launching the next one have been refined to a science.

The Matrix: Reloaded

From where I’m sitting—and I can no longer claim to have a finger anywhere near the pulse of the youth, and I urge you to correct me if I’m mistaken—the only visible instantiation of a subcultural franchise putting on against-the-grain airs similar to those of the punks and goths of the 1990s (who had all been thoroughly domesticated by that point) has lately been the “blue hair & pronouns” crowd—as I’ve occasionally seen them called by rightoid detractors. (I will continue to sandwich the term between quote marks because it’s definitely not what the aggregate to which we’re affixing the label would prefer to be called, but I’m at a loss for a better alternative.)

Where their presence in affluent suburbs or in gentrified or gentrifying urban neighborhoods is concerned, only the most myopic and self-satisfied of the “blue hair & pronouns” set can possibly believe that they’re swimming against the mainstream at this point.³ Regardless of what the social landscape looked like for same-sex attracted or and/or conscientiously gender-nonconforming people fifty, thirty, or even fifteen years ago, at this point “queer” culture is anything but counter. You can buy its swag at Hot Topic—and at Target, for that matter. It’s got its own shelf at the bookstore, a category on Hulu, playlists on Spotify, and representatives in newsrooms and film studios. Nothing intrinsic to it interferes with the general program. It has been neutralized. A space has been provided for it.

Today’s teenaged and twenty-something “blue hairs” will figure it out, in time—just as most of us learned that being punk or goth or metal or whatever else was essentially a paid subscription for a product line which we were sold on the pitch that we required it to give expression to the Authentic Selves that would otherwise be hidden under a bushel of blue jeans and polo shirts.

But for the most part, it rather seems to me that most modern subcultures aren’t interested in pretending to be anything other than hobbyists, fandoms, and followers of fashion and influencer content. At least they’re more self-aware than we were.

Fisher resumes:

No-one embodied (and struggled with) this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliche scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliche…Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed. But the high existential angst of Nirvana and Cobain belongs to an older moment; what succeeded them was a pastiche-rock which reproduced the forms of the past without anxiety. Cobain's death confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rock's Utopian and promethean ambitions. When he died, rock was already being eclipsed by hip hop, whose global success has presupposed just the kind of precorporation by capital which I alluded to above.

Remarks:

(1) Side note: Many years ago, I listened to old friend theorizing that the Powers That Be would never let Nirvana happen again. It wasn’t just that Cobain committed suicide, depriving the labels, retailers, promoters, publications, venues, etc. of future revenues (though in the short-term his death reaped a handsome dividend in terms of record, magazine, and merchandise sales), but that he did so out of disgust and despair over the role he’d too eagerly consented to taking on. He was a bad fit for the job, and in the parlance of Human Resources, the culture industry resolved to go in a different direction with regard to its future avatars. From then on, candidates like Cobain were screened right the hell out.

Beyoncé is a Good Fit. Taylor Swift is a Good Fit. Kanye West might behave erratically and embarrassingly—but he too is a Good Fit.

Cobain probably didn’t understand what he was signing up for.⁴ Beyoncé, Swift, and West almost certainly did—and even if they didn’t (how can anyone truly anticipate the unreality of superstardom?), their temperaments were perfectly suited for adjustment to the job.

(2) When you’re a teenager (or even an early twentysomething), it’s hard to countenance the idea that the vital and necessary energy of The Now with which you feel yourself crackling by means of induction is as temporary as anything your parents might have been caught up in during the rambunctious days of their own youth, and of which now only the relic radiation remains.

I hit my teenage years in the late 1990s and couldn’t imagine how the music dominating the “alternative” sphere could ever be anything except—well, forgive me the clichés, but the standard “edgy,” “gritty,” and “angsty” descriptors pretty much strike the bullseye. It was going to be AFI and Tool and Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down and Nine Inch Nails and Korn and whatever the hell else forever. Rap would always be gangster, the sounds of Prodigy and Chemical Brothers would indefinitely define electronica, and mainstream rock would coast along as grunge lite. I mean obviously, right? How else could it possibly go?

The relative softness that defined the indie rock and emo pop explosions of the 2000s caught me totally unprepared, and I couldn’t quite figure out how it happened. I was slow to adjust—hang on, wait, this is what everyone thinks is cool now? Did I miss the vote?

In the world of durable goods, it’s called “planned obsolescence.”

Back to Fisher:

Gangster rap neither merely reflects pre-existing social conditions, as many of its advocates claim, nor does it simply cause those conditions, as its critics argue— rather the circuit whereby hip hop and the late capitalist social field feed into each other is one of the means by which capitalist realism transforms itself into a kind of anti-mythical myth. The affinity between hip hop and gangster movies such as Scarface, The Godfather films, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction arises from their common claim to have stripped the world of sentimental illusions and seen it for ‘what it really is’: a Hobbesian war of all against all, a system of perpetual exploitation and generalized criminality. In hip hop, Reynolds writes, ‘To “get real” is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you're either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers’.

Putting aside the fields of overlap between the respective ethea of gangster rap, mafia flicks, and Silicon Valley/Wall Street (and of hustle culture, for that matter)—notice that Fisher refers to gangster rap in the present tense. Evidently he hadn’t read the 2007 COMPLEX article “The Day Kanye West Killed Gangsta Rap.” At the time of Capitalist Realism’s publication, gangster rap’s useful life had already expired and the culture industry was rolling out its line of replacements.

There’s a bastard dialectic to it: the residual abrasiveness of grunge and punk, the overwrought aggression of nu-metal, and the muddy drawl of alt-rock characterized the atmosphere in which indie and emo could only be a breath of fresh air. With a systematicity that may be more art than science, the culture industry selects and stimulates a particular bundle of nerves to the point of numbness, and then seeks out a newly sensitized but neglected cluster to tickle instead.⁵ And so grunge replaces hair metal. And so the goth clubs move the post-punk and coldwave tunes into a side room while the DJs spin EBM and futurepop on the main floor. And so gangster rap cedes the field to progressive rap. And so all of a sudden the mallcore kids have swapped out their Slipknot swag for Fallout Boy gear. And the seventeen-year-olds who are just arriving on the scene at any point—whether they’re in the urban basements and loft apartments where a subculture germinates or the shopping malls and corporate-sponsored events where it senesces—all of them imagine they’ve really hit on something sui generis, something necessary and powerful.⁶

Scraped from a defunct blog called Punky Moms (“Parenting for Rebels: More Wine, Less Whine”).

What we haven’t touched on yet is the source of the idea that buying into some “alternative” cultural franchise is to push back against suburban conformity, bourgeois values, and/or the cultural mainstream. Because after all, that was the selling point: self-differentiation and tribal sorting along common lines of imagined noncompliance or resistance.

An article about hippies, authored by none other than Hunter Thompson and published in the 1968 edition of Collier's Encyclopedia Yearbook, gives some indication of how the culture industry learned to neutralize and exploit radical elements, and how it may have become acclimated to anticipating and guiding their cyclical emergence. (I’ve boldfaced a line that should always be recited before considering just about any phenomenon of the twenty-first century; Thompson was possessed of a marvelously acute mind before he went and destroyed it.)

The best year to be a hippie was 1965, but then there was not much to write about, because not much was happening in public and most of what was happening in private was illegal. The real year of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of publicity, which in 1967 gave way to a nationwide avalanche in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and even the Aspen Illustrated News, which did a special issue on hippies in August of 1967 and made a record sale of all but 6 copies of a 3,500-copy press run. But 1967 was not really a good year to be a hippie. It was a good year for salesmen and exhibitionists who called themselves hippies and gave colorful interviews for the benefit of the mass media, but serious hippies, with nothing to sell, found that they had little to gain and a lot to lose by becoming public figures. Many were harassed and arrested for no other reason than their sudden identification with a so-called cult of sex and drugs. The publicity rumble, which seemed like a joke at first, turned into a menacing landslide. So quite a few people who might have been called the original hippies in 1965 had dropped out of sight by the time hippies became a national fad in 1967.

Ten years earlier the Beat Generation went the same confusing route. From 1955 to about 1959 there were thousands of young people involved in a thriving bohemian subculture that was only an echo by the time the mass media picked it up in 1960. Jack Kerouac was the novelist of the Beat Generation in the same way that Ernest Hemingway was the novelist of the Lost Generation, and Kerouac’s classic “beat” novel, On the Road, was published in 1957. Yet by the time Kerouac began appearing on television shows to explain the “thrust” of his book, the characters it was based on had already drifted off into limbo, to await their reincarnation as hippies some five years later. (The purest example of this was Neal Cassidy, who served as a model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road and also for McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) Publicity follows reality, but only up to the point where a new kind of reality, created by publicity, begins to emerge. So the hippie in 1967 was put in the strange position of being an anti-culture hero at the same time as he was also becoming a hot commercial property. His banner of alienation appeared to be planted in quicksand. The very society he was trying to drop out of began idealizing him. He was famous in a hazy kind of way that was not quite infamy but still colorfully ambivalent and vaguely disturbing.

Something a little similar happened with the urban punks of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but by then the Western social organism had experience in metabolizing them. Counterculture became subculture and subculture became mass culture.

The lesson learned from taking a purported public menace and processing him into a harmless clown in the form of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo was that any off-color or square-peg cultural element may be safely and lucratively popularized. After all, if it’s struck such a chord with a sizable cross-section of the youth, there clearly exists a market for it. Put its music on the radio; give recording contracts to musicians who can take the sound and sand off its roughest edges.⁷ Sell its clothes in department stores. Cast its stereotyped characters in movies. Dispatch the magazines to find ambitious and charismatic figures to become the scene’s public faces and clarify its definition as a brand. Subject the oldheads and their hangouts to a deluge of adventurous college students and then teeny-boppers.⁸ By that point, it won’t matter who the original or “real” beatniks or hippies or punks or queers are, what they believe, or what they’re about. The new reality created by publicity will have set in.

In all probability there are no sinister designs of social control; that’s where the metaphor of the Architect from The Matrix fails. Capital has demonstrated time and time again its inability to “think” in the long term, and the depth of its vision is in inverse proportion to the broadness of its outlook. The competing firms involved in the culture industry aren’t in the business of decontaminating countercultures or diluting subcultures; both are merely felicitous and predictable secondary effects of cultural-industrial profit-seeking.

Also important here is another byproduct of the capitalist system of organization: desacralization. If a normative practice left over from an earlier period of social development becomes an impediment against growth, it gets worn down and rolled over. Every culture evolves over time, sure, but a pre-capitalist society governed by traditions and strictures would have been exceedingly wary of relaxing or rethinking its rules, and slow to change under ordinary circumstances.

Hippies made 1960s social conservatives apoplectic because they flouted standing (but often implicit) customs that society expected them to observe—like, for instance, the one about men not growing out their hair. The aftermath of the 1960s are an object lesson in the astonishing durability and adaptability of capitalism: much of the perceived damage to the social fabric inflicted by the counterculture aligned with the general process of rescinding old values. Ultimately it was of no consequence to capitalist production and accumulation how [white] men wore their hair; the taboo was set aside because it had been tested and found to be trivial.⁹

Getting a nose ring circa 1980 was a great way of barring oneself from white-collar employment—but facial piercings ultimately hurt nobody and disrupted nothing, and so an old signifier of conscientious coarseness became a tame fashion statement no more out of place on an urban professional than a wristwatch. Tattoos, ditto—provided they’re not too extravagant. We might also say the same thing about being over thirty and playing video games, reading comic books, or having an avid interest in any other area of “geek” media; none are incongruous with the perception of one as a responsible and respectable adult anymore. What sense does it make to shame willing buyers out of buying?

And of course, pertinent to the “blue hair & pronouns” set addressed above, there was the hard-won fight for gay and transgender acceptance. As it turned out, keeping LGBT people marginalized served no practical purpose, and in fact erected a dam across certain channels of market flow. Discrimination is costly in terms of unearned revenues, excluded talent, and in its sustenance of pocket economies. Expressions of gender identity and of sexual orientations outside the hetero and the monogamous are in this regard no different from long hair on men, facial piercings, or tattoos: while they might be anathema to squeamish traditionalists, they exert no stress upon capital, whose watchword is mutatis mutandis.

Provided the engine performs as it should, the upholstery material, the tinting of the windows, the license plate frame, the hubcaps, the color and shape of the body, and the music on the stereo are all negotiable.

Ngrams search for “subculture”

Moreover, the very concept of “subculture” has been naturalized. While the aesthetics, habits of media use, leisure activities, and folkways observed in some large and publicized slice of the adolescent population might be inexplicable to anyone over the age of thirty at any given time, that slice’s existence is no longer puzzling at all. We expect a decade’s youth-trends to shock older and more conservative cohorts, and to bring at least a little unease to parents who’d up until then liked to think of themselves as reasonably liberal and au courant.

Perhaps somebody would like to bring up Plato’s complaint about the youth and their awful new music back in the fourth century BCE and tell me that none of this is endemic to the modern condition, let alone capitalism. But remember that Plato lived in Interesting Times—his world was not a stable one. Under the permanent revolution of capitalism, all times are Interesting, and the social and technological environment in which a child is raised ten years from now will always be markedly different from today’s.

It is also in line with Fisher’s capitalist realist thesis that each successive wave of generation-defining subculture was noticeably less renegade than the last. The original hippies voluntarily moved into or beyond the fringes of productive society.¹⁰ The punks gave society the middle finger, but didn’t actually want or intend to leave it. The ravers just wanted to get fucked up and dance. The archetypical hipster of the aughts wanted Apple products, a neighborhood coffee shop (preferably not Starbucks) with wi-fi, and for the Democrats to take back Congress and the Presidency. (He’d have also been gratified if his ex would return his Death Cab for Cutie records and the NES he’d hooked up at her apartment.)

Whereas the hippies were tuning in, turning on, and dropping out, the young malcontents and revolutionary hearts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century go by a truncated dictum. They tune in and turn on—period. Dropping out is too much, and there doesn’t seem to be much of anything else to drop into.

This brings us to the acme of the capitalist realist attitude, as per Fisher:

Capitalist ideology in general, Žižek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief—in the sense of inner subjective attitude—at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Žižek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal—we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads…

“Ironic” isn’t the word I’d have used; the hip, above-it-all detachment of the aughts is passé. “Resigned” or “dissociative” might be more up-to-date. One repeats the dictum “no ethical consumption under capitalism” not as an admonition, but as permission to spend one’s money how one pleases because the damage has already been done, and is inexorably being done, regardless of whether one chooses to summon a DoorDash driver to bring them their tendies, order a mountain of marked-down domestic items on Amazon, or accept a position at some pernicious firm that makes the world measurably worse on the basis it pays better than walking dogs.

…I suddenly had a vivid memory of my father gently scoffing at me when I tried to explain to him the message and the appeal of Rage Against the Machine. (How silly I must have sounded; I was fourteen years old!) He understood that my copy of Evil Empire was as unlikely as any of his old John Prine records to turn his son into a fledgling black-bloc anarchist; he knew that the revolution, if it ever came, would neither be televised nor sold at the mall.

Through trial and error, the Millennials were subsequently to discover that the revolution wouldn’t be wordpressed, facebooked, tweeted, tumbled, instagrammed, or youtubed, either. It is a moment too soon to decisively add “tiktokked” to the list, but its inclusion is not in doubt. We learned way too late the lesson of the 1960s: vibes, messaging, and art product is not enough. Energy does not simply prevail.

This has gone on for too long and I’ve opened many more jars than I intended at the onset. I will end with Thompson’s concluding remarks about the hippies, which contains a grim genealogical implication for every strain of “outsider” subculture that followed after them:

Most hippies are too drug oriented to feel any sense of urgency beyond the moment. Their slogan is “Now,” and that means instantly. Unlike political activists of any stripe, hippies have no coherent vision of the future which might or might not exist. The hippies are afflicted by an enervating sort of fatalism that is, in fact, deplorable. And the New Left critics are heroic, in their fashion, for railing at it. But the awful possibility exists that the hippies may be right, that the future itself is deplorable and so why not live for Now? Why not reject the whole fabric of American society, with all its obligations, and make a separate peace? The hippies believe they are asking this question for a whole generation and echoing the doubts of an older generation.

1. There are some distinct “capitalism shapes our ideas and dreams” passages in a recent American Affairs piece titled: “Omelets with Eggshells: The Failure of the Millennial Left.” It is worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll just leave some excerpts here, and boldface a few lines if you’re only interested in skimming.

In the final analysis, the Left became the last defender of neoliberalism, not its undertaker. For all its denunciations, was it incapable of imagining anything else? …[W]hen amid signs of mass revolt for the first time in decades, the ostensible forces of utopianism sought to change the content of politics without challenging the neoliberal shell that contained it—to make an omelet without breaking any eggs.

The revolution would not be televised, but it would be Facebooked. For all their “resistance,” the young protesters bore striking similarities to the disposition of contemporary capitalism. “Smash things up, something better will emerge from the wreckage” sounds awfully like Silicon Valley–style “disruption.” Or, in a nice touch that Bevins reserves for a footnote, it sounds like Obama, who claimed his biggest mistake was failing to plan for “the day after” in Libya. Twenty-first-century capitalism continues to be anti-institution­al, non-normative, anti-planning, short-termist, and rests on controlling flows more than building. What, then, is the point of a Left that only reflects these dominant characteristics of contemporary society back at it?

The absence of clear political and class identi­ties and meanings meant that symbols were sought elsewhere. One leading participant in Brazil’s June Days tells Bevins that the activist group’s main influence was Mexico’s Zapatistas, whose struggle had been introduced to them via the ’90s band Rage Against the Machine. In Hong Kong, a three-finger salute, taken from The Hunger Games films, became a common marker. “I think it is also a little sad, and definitely very unfortunate, that we got so many of our ideas from pop culture,” one Hong Konger concluded.

2. Sloterdjik continues:

Research has established that there were only a few long-term Bohemians; for the great majority of Bohemians, the milieu remained a transit station, a space for testing out life and departing from the norms. There they used their freedom to work out their rejection of bourgeois society until a (perhaps) more grown-up “yes, but” took its place.

Earlier in Critique of Cynical Reason, he refers to the social function of bohemianism as “a regulator for bourgeois careers.”

3. (1) Individual cases may vary, of course, but these days it’s usually safe to assume that someone at the train station with a pink undercut and a xie/xir pin on xir laptop bag isn’t following a lifestyle which prompts an allergic reaction from the system. If xie is living a zero-waste freegan existence, is on xir way to monkey-wrench a pipeline project, or up to anything else that’s truly radical, then I respectfully stand corrected.

(2) The urban/rural divide is important here. There are small towns in rural and exurban America where dying one’s hair blue or pink and asking to be referred to with “they/them” pronouns would not go over well. Historically, these would have also been unwise places for a young man to grow out his hair and wear a peace-sign pin on his shirt in the 1960s, or to go around with facial piercings and Bad Religion “crossbuster” swag in the 1980s.

It’s worth remembering that these zones have become economically and culturally marginalized and are out of sync with the Mainstream—though that can’t be much comfort to a closeted gay kid growing up surrounded by homophobic Evangelicals and MAGA types.

At the same time, it must be said: regardless of its origins in a political struggle for civil rights and protections, and in a history of real marginalization on the basis of immutable personal characteristics, by now I don’t think it should be controversial to point out that “queer” became trendy much in the same way Beat culture, goth, and Theosophy became trendy. Nor should it be impermissible to observe that being heterosexual for all intents and purposes, going by [s]he/they or they/them pronouns, and following “queer” fashions in terms of personal presentation and media consumption is something very different from being really and truly same-sex attracted (as in not just being fascinated with the idea of same-sex attraction) or suffering from debilitating gender dysphoria.

(Footnote: There are many reasons for the incoherence and exasperation surrounding the LGBT conversation, one of which is the conflation of a characteristic aesthetic and brand of hyperliberal politics (often vulgarized) with a set of unambiguously defined demographic groups considered in its totality—exemplified by a queer-identified friend of mine who viewed Pete Buttigieg’s performance during one of the 2020 primary debates and asked “is he even gay?” It reminded me of a moment during the 2008 Democratic primaries when various media outlets were asking the same question about Obama’s race: “okay, but is he really, like, black-black?”)

4. Hate to admit it, but this still holds up—even though he doth protest far too much here. Mr. Warner was a Good Fit.

5. Does anyone still remember the so-called swing revival of the mid-to-late 1990s? It was interesting to watch because there was nothing organic about it; you could see the record companies, radio stations, and MTV trying to make it a A Thing. As soon as they stopped, it evaporated.

6. I suppose today it might be more appropriate to replace the part about basements and lofts with “obscure online community” and the bit about malls and events with “verified users’ feeds”—or something else along those lines. The hologram no longer merely reflects subculture, but determines and houses it.

7. (1) More likely than not, a main cause of subcultural franchises crystallizing around music (at least until recently) was the relative ease with which that aspect of a novel urban scene could be captured and popularized. Once you got the musicians on television and in the magazines, everything else could follow—fashions, movies, lifestyle paraphernalia, etc.

(2) The Beats’ defining statements were disseminated and popularized by the printing press, not by television or radio. Kerouac and Ginsberg slipped in just before the door closed.

8. As I understand it, this is precisely what happened with gay bars. Video games too—after a fashion.

9. An earlier post quotes Joshua Meyrowitz at length on the merging of the Movement’s and the Establishment’s values during the 1970s and 1980s.

10. Thompson again:

The concept of mass sharing goes along with the American Indian tribal motif that is basic to the whole hippie movement. The cult of tribalism is regarded by many as the key to survival. Poet Gary Snyder, one of the hippie gurus, or spiritual guides, sees a “back to the land” movement as the answer to the food and lodging problem. He urges hippies to move out of the cities, form tribes, purchase land, and live communally in remote areas. By early 1967 there were already a half dozen functioning hippie settlements in California, Nevada, Colorado, and upstate New York. They were primitive shack-towns, with communal kitchens, half-alive fruit and vegetable gardens, and spectacularly uncertain futures. Back in the cities the vast majority of hippies were still living from day to day. On Haight Street those without gainful employment could easily pick up a few dollars a day by panhandling. The influx of nervous voyeurs and curiosity seekers was a handy money-tree for the legion of psychedelic beggars. Regular visitors to the Hashbury found it convenient to keep a supply of quarters in their pockets so that they wouldn’t have to haggle about change. The panhandlers were usually barefoot, always young, and never apologetic. They would share what they collected anyway, so it seemed entirely reasonable that strangers should share with them. Unlike the beatniks, few hippies are given to strong drink. Booze is superfluous in the drug culture, and food is regarded as a necessity to be acquired at the least possible expense. A “family” of hippies will work for hours over an exotic stew or curry, but the idea of paying three dollars for a meal in a restaurant is out of the question.