Counterculture Commodification

masscult and midcult

someone should do a case study on vice magazine

Isn't complaining about this stuff just the activists version of
>REEEEE NORMIES GET OUT

how retarded are you

Not sure. Explain how I'm wrong.

It seems very dubious to me that certain activities are 'authentic' and stop being so once they become popular. It seems to be assuming bad faith.
To paraphrase Russell, it's posers all the way down

you cant distinguish from early ramones/richard hell and green day?

Punk is a case in point.
Punk in 1976 was just as much a lifestyle choice for bored teens. Still a bunch of affluent teens having fun by dressing up.
There was never a point where the real authentic punk went away. It was the same from the start.

hipster isn't counter culture anymore. alt-right is now counter culture. it's funny because the main stream likes to say
>WE'RE ALL REBELS
now when the actual rebels are the opposite. it's a giant meme

It's more about how almost everything can be commodified.

He probably should've used Hip-Hop or more recently, grime, as an example.

you dont get it

>He probably should've used Hip-Hop or more recently, grime

The same rules apply my friend.

A generation before punk it would have been blues, with very earnest young men poring over old acoustic recordings from the delta, telling themselves this was ~real~ blues, not B.B. King or Clapton

>Hip-Hop
>Same rules apply
>Still a bunch of affluent teens having fun by dressing up.

Pardon me, I didn't realize that Public Enemy were the result of bored affluent teens.

Oh come on! Public Enemy? Not dressing up?
They were university graduates wearing Black Panther costumes. And giant clocks.
If you want to believe they were totes 4real then go ahead. Do you think Bowie was actually from Mars?

Doesn't mean they weren't awesome, as were the Ramones, but it's pop music man. It's all a show and hype. There's nothing wrong with that btw

Counter culture is really ironically conforming to mainstream culture. There's no real, true counter culture.

Maybe there's a different name for what I'm referring to.

>Isn't complaining about this stuff just the activists version of
>>REEEEE NORMIES GET OUT

No, it's about how rich kids and corporations having the unique ability to grab anything that is even remotely authentic (or counter to the system), stick it on a t-shirt and sell it to you and simultaneously robbing it of any power.

We have Che Guevara's face stuck on everything, we have hobo-chic, we had the awareness bands fad etc.

And yes, I would like normies to get out of my videogames, retro-game collecting has been so fucking hard the past 7 or so years.

Shops now have the nerve to sell a Mega Drive TWO, UNBOXED for nearly £40.

There certainly has been. It's easy to forget how transgressive counter cultures of the 1960s and 70s were, because we live in an age were those counter cultures have simply become aesthetics to be reproduced. In the late 50s, simply wearing your hair long as a man was extremely provocative and went against the whole ethos of gender and industry.

>A generation before punk it would have been blues, with very earnest young men poring over old acoustic recordings from the delta, telling themselves this was ~real~ blues, not B.B. King or Clapton

It's not the same. The original punk bands didn't have an aesthetic or particular sound. There were no formal conventions. There was no fashion style. That all came later with commodification and the Ramones etc. For a very brief moment, punk was an anti-music, and antagonistic movement. The difference between them and what came to be known as punk is quite stark. It isn't the difference between insiders and outsiders, it is the differences between a completely different ethos.

Paul Piccone
Christopher Lasch

>how transgressive counter cultures of the 1960s and 70s were
This is a myth perpetrated by TV, go read up about how heavily businesses cultivated and profited from the 60's counter culture, nearly the entire scene artificial with very few people actually believing any of the hippie ethos.

So what IS there then?

just because something is quickly profited on doesnt mean it wasnt authentic. the pace with which everything is crushed has just sped up

I wasn't talking about the "hippie" ethos. The whole hippie thing was a fashion.

Embarrassment, most people involved in the fake counter culture of those time periods are embarrassed they got hoodwinked and regret most of the social change they caused.

What are you saying?

They put something in the weed that turned all the flower children conservative.

You are looking at punk with rose tinted lenses user. If you get in your time machine and go to the 100 club to watch the sex ppistols in 1976 you would find the same sort of posers you seem to think you better than. Watch the filth and the fury, Steve Jones admits he just wanted blowjobs

Is there any generation that has done more damage to Western civilization than baby boomers?

I love the Warhol reveal similar documentaries have, what a guy, spent his entire fortune on classical art and didn't own a single pop art piece.

>rich kids and corporations
what level of ideology are you on? every "movement" is ruined within by it's originators. check on your local ACC's and how they are funded.

>ACC

I am unfamiliar with this abbreviation.

What you're basically saying is that all music and it's subsequent subculture was birthed by affluent teenagers having fun?

Nearly every local movement or organization in my country is funded my Soros, they went from being respectable to booting out their originator and becoming completely ineffectual laughing stocks.

As far as pop music goes? Yep, absolutely. Nothing wrong with that of course. Nothing worse than rockists who think if teenage girls like Iit it must be bad.
But all pop music sub cultures are about selling jeans and bubblegum

Nice dodge.

Tbqh, I'm of the opinion that counterculture these days isn't physical at all anymore, and instead finds its home on the internet. I hate to hołd romantic notions about this shithole, but honestly, Veeky Forums is probably the closest thing to counterculture out there, if you think about it. I kind of think of us akin to the merry pranksters, in a weird way

Bronies are counterculture.

Again. The Sex Pistols were basically a pop group, they're exactly the type of thing I was talking about. They were punk when punk had already become an identifiable current of aesthetic and genre.

Punk was initially an incredibly short lived description that the people who were later identified as punk didn't identify with at all.

The only thing that connected the bands was complete formal experimentation. Not even resembling what we think of as punk now. In that sense it never really died, because formally unrestrained bands are still a thing, and always have been, but the bands that were initially called punk stopped being called punk and punk came to mean something else. The word, the ethos was solidified in concrete almost immediately, and it became a genre and "subculture."

It doesn't change the fact that the origins of punk were in originally artistically and socially subversive ideas. I didn't mention poseurs. I don't think I'm better than the Sex Pistols or any other band.

>This is a myth perpetrated by TV, go read up about how heavily businesses cultivated and profited from the 60's counter culture, nearly the entire scene artificial with very few people actually believing any of the hippie ethos.

This is called co-optation. Do you really think corporations really purposefully crafted the massive social upheavals that happened in the 60s?

They just took advantage of it and com modified sentiments that were earnest to begin with.

The same thing will happen to Veeky Forums. It's just strange that it hasn't quite happened already. I've been here since 06, and Ive only just started to notice the commodification and co-optation of the Veeky Forums dream.

>Do you really think corporations really purposefully crafted the massive social upheavals that happened in the 60s?

This isn't really up for debate, It's a widely recognized fact that 60s was manufactured by a alliance of big business and the CIA; they distributed a massive amount of LSD for free and told people it was a miracle cure and then bombarded them with advertisements creating a consumerist generation that made various sportswear owners billionaires overnight.

Source please

So who are these people more punk than the Sex Pistols? Have you informed John Lydon yet?

>Asking for a source about MKUltra
You serious m8? just google Ken Kesey, the originator of the Hippie movement worked directly with the CIA to dose as many people as humanly possible with LSD and manipulate their environments to see how it affected their trip.

Television etc etc.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. 1979. London: Routledge 1987. Print.

Ken Kesey isn't a reliable source. And handing out acid to a few hippies in America doesn't equate to world wide shakeup of moral standards. Not to mention that these processes were already underway before acid and the hippie generation were even a thing, and people had already started growing out their hair in britain by the late 1950s, and there was a burgeoning movement for changes in gender relations in regards to work etc etc

The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed

You're welcome, ya scum.

youtube.com/watch?v=kVkOzFU11iE

punk was real

>tfw goths became commodified scene and emo posers
>tfw vaperwave became exactly what it was critiquing
>tfw the lgabc+ community was lumped together and commodified to make them visible to and easily regulated by administrative regimes

Lots of people are more punk than The Sex Pistols. They couldn't have become as famous as they did if they'd been as hardcore as most actual punk bands because some of the stuff that went on at shows was too degenerate for the general public.
youtube.com/watch?v=9m7tPikH0UA

you just have to put a band pre 1976 more punk than Sex Pistols. it´s easy man.

I'm not into punk so I don't know enough about it to name specific ones, I just know that much.

All the responses to this poster prove exactly what it says
Literally
> muh sekret club! We are leegon!

autonomous culture clubs

>The same thing will happen to Veeky Forums.
> will happen

; )

I haven't read it but it might be relevant.

Commodify Your Dissent.

This thread is hitting levels of rockism that shouldn't even be possible