That’s part of what I was thinking here.
I guess it depends on how isolated one was. If one had some sort of connection to a city, it’s still possible to make those connections, and certainly people did (though not always).
It seems to me that lots of indie artists are valorized to some degree, to one degree or another, by the mainstream culture, but in a way that seeks to show that their only “real” value is how they shape the larger culture. How many bands that came out of punk/postpunk culture are now being inducted into the R-n-R HOF? And how many films are made now about how great it is to be a punk rocker?
Me too, which is part of why I posted it.
But was it countercultural or was there a counterculture attached to it? I do wonder how we classify an artist getting top 40 play, but appealing to an underground culture?
That is questionable. There is so much content out there, that it’s impossible for everyone to watch the same thing…
I noticed that too. I want to follow up on some of his other articles, and see where he lands politically.
Lenny Bruce has entered the chat!
I think maybe part of my problem with this is language, as in what do we mean by counterculture? Is it just any moderately subversive youth culture that isn’t entirely a creation of a corporation? I would argue that it’s something more, such as really seeking to counter the mainstream norms of a particular society. So, in modern society, that would mean (in part) a culture that isn’t highly commercialized and bound by the norms of the market, maybe a culture that opposes the “american dream” ideology? Communalism over individualism? Embracing leisure over the protestant work ethic? Sexual and gender fluidity over the binary? Etc.
But as others have noted (especially @the_borderer) that corporations are great at co-opting outsider culture and selling it back to us (big business is very wise).
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Well, the alt-right (or however they call themselves now) certainly believe they’re a counterculture, and most of them even behave as such. Case in point:
(Not sure how serious he was, but many people apparently did and still do take this BS seriously.)
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If you’re whole entire goal is to ensure white male supremacy over the planet, then you’re not part of a counterculture, you’re shilling for capitalism.
We do ourselves a disservice when we don’t take these fuckers seriously. They are literally working to “bring back” white male supremacy, which was a guiding principle of empire in the 19th and 20th century. As someone who actually studies counterculture in my work, I categorically reject their claims, serious or not.
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“Too-many-to-count-erculture.”
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Yep, still a bunch of BS.
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In the same sense that sticking to vaudeville-era Blackface routines became a “dangerous profession” at some point in the 20th Century.
If you can’t get people to laugh at your material anymore it’s time to come up with new material.
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Agreed. That’s literally the job description anyway. Come up with new things to make people laugh is kind of what comedians do.
On the note of counterculture, of course there’s still counterculture. There’s even Zines and trading stories and fic and music and all that stuff, and it’s happening on the internet now, today. All these niche/fringe things STILL exist and still proliferate by word of mouth, but they definitely exist and are definitely NOT commercialized by modern culture. You DO have to look for them though (both online and in the world around you), so if your time is spent mostly on amalgamation, conglomeration, or aggregation mass media sites like boing boing, reddit, etc, you probably won’t find these niches. It thrives in DIY places, not in commercialized places. Ao3 has a ton of it.
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It seems that this right wing rebranding is starting to wane…
Opinion polling institute Datafolha says that 49% of the Brazilian population identifies with the left. The right call has the sympathy of 34% of the people.
This research took into account some points such as behavior and economy.
https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2022/07/brazilians-are-less-conservative-than-the-noise-of-social-networks-suggests-when-what-is-at-stake-is-the-school-education.shtml
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He’s a little late to that party. 1992:
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Good, cause it was always bullshit. We live in such a cruel social system in captialism, I feel that anything that leaned into cruelty was just more of the mainstream culture. The real counterculture is kindness, generosity, and love… few people are as counterculture as Mr. Rogers, I say!
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I couldn’t agree more.
I like this comic strip by a brazilian cartoonist called Laerte. The cat is one of her most famous characters. This time He states that this is a wild world full of horrors and injustice. Then He asks what a simple cat could do in face of this nightmare. I think as an individual, that’s what we can do most immediately.
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Nothing is more punk rock than mutual support!!!
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i don’t want to spend a load of time picking apart mr. gioia’s list but i would point out that 50 years ago during what might be thought of as a recent high point for the counterculture, dark side of the moon spent 193 wees on the hot 100 list and 724 weeks on the top 200 list so the tendency of extremely popular music to stick around for a while is not new to our debased times.
i get his point but the more things change . . .
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There is a famous mathematical theorem in, like, graph theory maybe, where if there are enough connections it all congeals into one big lump
Just because of the neighborhood I live in, I know people in the Native American and maybe biker-adjacent communities—I’d say there is a counterculture, and it is large and energetic
The bad news is that it’s the antivax woo people
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I just read the article and I can’t help but sigh at how old and out of touch this 64 year old man yelling about these days sounds. I refuse to believe a world where one of the most popular forms of entertainment is watching a disabled Puerto Rican woman performing live on camera as a half-demon anime avatar roasting a white guy making Cubano sandwiches wrong on a popular YouTube channel, and who can find enough success from it to afford her medicine and upgrading her housing arrangements
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It started off as a counterculture, admittedly with a few names attached who were definitely not counterculture. Pete Waterman was using the money he was getting from Rick Astley’s and Kylie Minogue’s chart success to buy the UK rights to acid house and techno records. He even tried to change Boney M from disco to house (which might have worked if it wasn’t for a legal battle over their name). I doubt the producers were thinking of chart success when they made the original pressings. On the other hand, I don’t think this is a classic case of recuperation. Pete did seem to care about the music, even if other people disagreed with him. It was the pop music side that was a means to an end.
I’d also class the KLFs chart success as détournement, it was always considered to be a prank by them and they didn’t cope well when people took them seriously and expected them to come up with their next top 10 hit. After that, I guess their performance with Extreme Noise Terror at the Brit Awards was inevitable.
I’d say the visible EDM counterculture had ended by the late 90s, most of the EDM that was getting into the top 40 by then was commercial house and trance. It still continued underground though.
Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood spent nearly a year in the UK top 40 and got to #1, despite being mostly banned from radio and television (or more accurately, because of it). At one point it was at #2, behind Two Tribes, also by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. The ban was eventually lifted, once the powers that be realised it was a PR disaster and the song was almost certainly going to win awards.
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Mark Thomas failed to get himself arrested about 10 years ago.
Admittedly, most of the Met Police were aware enough to recognise that arresting him for standing outside Buckingham Palace imagining Britain without a monarchy, and encouraging other people to imagine it, would be a disaster for them even if it is technically treason under English law.
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