The trouble is, a place like this is DNA encoded with its obsolescence. Like a deformed water headed baby kept on life support and doomed by its own genetics. And if this place is too survive then the option ain’t pretty
The next generation of rock music fans have split loyalties. And why shouldn’t they? if saturated by information and options its seems an act of a crazy person to belong to one group. A new study shows that current teens see know problem in belonging to more than one tribe; the signs were all there, raving ballerinas, straight edge punks, and vegan infantry in the army already exist.
The future is grim. when sub-cultures are worn and discarded like fancy dress, places like this will become a theme-park for scene tourists wearing pull on tattoo-sleeves, and foam studs glued to their immaculately made up faces. In a world of empty glamour and style-over-content authenticity is revered but never aspired to.
The true trappings of the ‘alternative’ lifestyle were always the things that permanently marked you as apart from the crowd, tattoos, piercings, and the Mohawk are stylistic signals of civil disobedience. But as the allegiance of any group is going to be split amongst many tribes and tried on for the weekend these symbols will eventually lose their potency. I cant think of one signifier that started in the subculture that hasn’t at some point been co-opted by the mainstream, faux-hawks, tattoos worn by any passing starlet, even Harrison fucking Ford got his ear pierced.
I see a future where, along side bars that offer ‘a taste of Latin’ and 80 theme bars, are built ‘rock dives TM’ where the waitresses wear leather jackets and serve amusingly named cocktails, spray on cobwebs adorn spotless clean wall that are interrupted only by an artful aged band posters, and the music is always well within government safety guidelines.
Or we could be lucky and wiped out by a giant fucking tidal wave.
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October 11, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Midge Diabolik
Nicely put, Nothing more to be said except Hear hear!.
October 16, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Ultra Toast
I got an email from my brother today. He told me about a metal head male with whom he works. He lusts after a metal head female. The metal head male has abandoned his plummage in favour of a jaunty hat and a pocket watch – which my brother believes is a tactic to increase his interest cache. My brother also believes that he has abandoned the plummage in an attempt to court the mainstream. But in courting the mainstream, my brother believes he has poisoned his courtship of the female, who no longer respects him.
How much of our true colour do we show in our plummage?
October 17, 2009 at 11:43 pm
Olulabelle
But what you are saying is not new…you’re saying the same thing as every generation before you. These are borrowed words. When people started to borrow from the Mods, from Punk, people rejected that, they railed against it: “the kooky, the freaky, it’s not cool anymore, it is mainstream!” Things that were once culturally significant and unusal became the norm and I think that’s how culture evolves in many ways.
It’s like when novels were first invented and everybody was terrified that the general public would become *imaginative* and might *daydream*. Like that was some big and terrible thing, the massive outpouring of public ‘imaginings’. Not that more novels would be written, that we would become more culturally diverse, richer. Just that somehow the strange few would taint the gentle many.
It’s unlike you to see things from such a narrow field though, so maybe it’s just that you and I are not cool anymore? Is it that that cool guy with the Mohawk you knew, he’s suddenly become so mainstream? That girl you always used to admire with the tats and the piercings and the way-too-tight red satin leggings – she’s just the same as anyone else now.
It used to be that we could particularly identify people, Goth was black eye make-up and piercings and listening to the Pixies, Metallica fans had long hair and wore leather jackets, some girls from random places like Basildon with nothing better to do wore Grolsch bottles on their shoes and liked a band called Bros. Us with our specificness, with our groups and our sections, our deliberate separateness. We had different clubs, different shops, different ways of speaking and we relished in that.
But don’t you think in a society where there is no longer any particular need for the library, for your Gran’s Encyclopedia Britannica, the only way forward is to make a great big pot, chuck it all in and see what combinations come out? Because what the hell else can you do with five thousand songs on your ipod and a podcast about acid, courtesy of your Dad?
You say you would prefer a tidal wave but I like this generation of young people, finding their feet in a sea of choice, picking from here, there, to create a whole new thing, their ‘own’ thing. You look at them with their random selection and their messy ball of multi-coloured playdoh choices and you can see how it reflects the planet that they live in. Every single teenager has already seen more advertisements than we have, us, twice as old as they are. When you were little could you have imagined ‘googling yourself?’
These kids with the florescent taffeta skirts and huge back tattoos, with blue har done up in a Minne Mouse bow, they represent the everything culture that they are immersed in. They are the next generation, they are our children and we are trying to influence them.
And by dint of that; of course entirely *because* of that, they have to be everything opposite to us.
October 18, 2009 at 10:23 am
Danny
hey belle – First of all I resent the implication that I may not be cool any more, I am, was, and always will be cooler than a fridge with an afro. But I do concede that part of this post may just be Grumpy Old Man Syndrome.
But let me unpack some of the things i was trying to say. This post and the two others in the series is less about my nihilistic views of the future and more a goodbye letter to a sub-culture I see, if not dissapearing, then mutating leaving me behind. Rock clubs and Pubs are dieing out and to me, a delicate weed that thrived in in these shady places, this is sad.
I have no doubt youth culture is moving on and its a lot of fun seeing how its changing and developing. A teeny bit sad that I’m not experiencing from the inside anymore but, like you, i doubt my brain is even wired in the same way as someone who was born in the last fifteen years. And this is a good thing.
although I do like your play-doh comment, because what happens when you mix different colours of play-doh together? it all becomes a brown indistinguishable, homogenized lump. Not a prediction, a warning maybe?
And if we do get rock ‘theme bars’ like we have 80 theme bars, then i personally will petrol bomb every single one. old punks never die, they just smell that way.