Yeah, there was a "punk" documentary at some point that had all these modern artists going on about how influential the movement was to their music and how much they admired those artists, etc.
The punch line at the end of the movie was interviewing the original punk folks and seeing how angry they were that everybody missed the damn point. The point wasn't to imitate the "punks" well--the point was to stand against the mainstream any way you could.
> Anyone who looks at society and just sees the same dreary, banal wasteland of consumer garbage year after year is, themselves, far too mainstream to even be aware of counterculture.
I disagree. The counterculture very much ripped through to the normies in the 1960s and 1970s. So, much so that it terrified the mainstream.
Since then, the mainstream has made damn good and sure that won't happen again.
> The punch line at the end of the movie was interviewing the original punk folks and seeing how angry they were that everybody missed the damn point. The point wasn't to imitate the "punks" well--the point was to stand against the mainstream any way you could.
I’ve been listening to a lot of 80s/90s post hardcore recently and Spotifies highly advance recommendation system has been stuffing my recs with modern post-hardcore.
so I decided to peak one of the more recent albums and remembered why I don’t listen to much punk genres past the early 00s.
The stuff from the 80s and 90s was new, different, and completely raw. Even if you don’t care for the music itself, it’s obvious that the artists were pouring themselves into the music and you could feel that.
Conversely, the modern stuff sounds “cleaner” and occasionally more technical but at the same time feels sterile and devoid of the emotional weight carried by the predecessors.
I’ve been wondering lately, there was a brief period in the 2010s when some punk derived genres (notably metalcore, deathcore and post-hardcore) were hitting mainstream charts and I kinda have to wonder if that helped kills those genres because modern charting music often is very boring.
> Since then, the mainstream has made damn good and sure that won't happen again.
Sounds conspiratorial. The best you can say is psychedelics were banned, which is half of what made the hippies lose interest in their parents’ generation.
But the other half was improved communications technology, and it improved again after that so there’s no longer a way to have a single counterculture. Just because you’re into one thing about hippiedom doesn’t mean you need to sign up for all of it.
Since then there have been countercultures, but they were right-wing ones like the Moral Majority. You wouldn’t recognize those if you just think they’re being extra-normie.
Not really. More like direct action by selfish actors.
The existence of Fox News is a direct reaction to the media being non-compliant about Vietnam. The union busting propaganda was a direct reaction to the strikes of the 70s and early 80s. And the police forces have always been the fascist tools of the moneyed class (see: Pinkertons).
No conspiracy is necessary. Elephants will sometimes trample things simply because they are in the way.
> The best you can say is psychedelics were banned, which is half of what made the hippies lose interest in their parents’ generation.
I would, in fact, reverse that statement. I posit the fact that drug usage (especially marijuana) going mainstream sapped a lot of energy from what people regarded as "counterculture".
The punch line at the end of the movie was interviewing the original punk folks and seeing how angry they were that everybody missed the damn point. The point wasn't to imitate the "punks" well--the point was to stand against the mainstream any way you could.
> Anyone who looks at society and just sees the same dreary, banal wasteland of consumer garbage year after year is, themselves, far too mainstream to even be aware of counterculture.
I disagree. The counterculture very much ripped through to the normies in the 1960s and 1970s. So, much so that it terrified the mainstream.
Since then, the mainstream has made damn good and sure that won't happen again.