scenes and subcultures
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.
meaningness.com • Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution
Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?
meaningness.com • Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution
Before, you’d be a goth and watch goth movies and listen to goth music and dress in all black. Now you just dress like that and it doesn’t matter who you are. The fashion isn’t the byproduct of the subculture: the fashion is the subculture.
Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick • Lol Fashion's Giving Me an Existential Crisis 😅
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.
Henrik Karlsson • First We Shape Our Social Graph; Then It Shapes Us
What is a scene? It is a group of people who are producing work in public but aimed at each other. The metal bands in Karlshamn, where Schuster grew up, were a scene. They performed on stage — but the audience was mainly their friends who played in other bands. If they were anything like the other local scenes I’ve seen, they cha
... See moreHenrik Karlsson • Scene creation engines and apprenticeships
It's not only UK dance music of the Nineties that is associated with cities; the whole history of popular music is about urban scenes. It's no accident that Motown started in Detroit, house in Chicago, hip-hop in New York… Cities are pressure cookers which can synthesise influences
quickly and in a way that is both collective and idiosyncratic. Scen
... See moreþÿMark Fisher,Darren Ambrose • þÿK-punk
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 t... See more
time • Welcome to the Era of Unapologetic Bad Taste
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 sco... See more