scenes and subcultures

You are always internalizing the culture around you. Even when you wish you didn’t. So you better surround yourself with something you want inside—curate a culture.

It makes sense that norms are shifting in this direction as Gen Z’s influence spreads. Raised on social media, with access to once illicit bad-taste touchstones like Rocky Horror just a click away, they’ve largely replaced IRL subcultures with a constellation of aesthetics—cottagecore, dark academia, Y2K—to be performed, then discarded or demoted... See more

One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.

So I will risk sounding like an old raver shaking her cane to note that subcultures, even the vapid ones, used to tie their participants to people and places. Getting into a scene could be work; it required figuring out whom to talk to, or where to go, and maybe hanging awkwardly around a record store or nightclub or street corner until you got... See more

Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?

Part of the inherent strangeness of belonging to any sub-culture is that you behave in ways that start to feel totally normal to you, but, understandably, seem utterly bizarre to anyone on the outside.The quirks of our obsessions aren't always glamorous. And yet these moments can still absolutely be worthy of celebration. After all, they're part of... See more