the death of subcultures
the death of subcultures
or a rough draft about how Gen Z is lonely
gen x has its many many many faults (cough cough QANON, cough cough marjorie taylor greene, cough cough – I am hacking up a lung – ted cruz is not a boomer y’all!) but they were the last generation to have true and innovative subcultures.
punk1, grunge, emo, skater culture, goth, riot grrrl, all of these subcultures were either created by or continued by gen x. you may have noticed that many of these subcultures share names with genres of music, as subcultures and music genres are often born together. however, above everything else, subcultures are spacial in nature.
let’s talk about skater culture for example. in the 70s & 80s my dad had a quarter pipe in his parent’s backyard and seemingly every guy in the southwest with a skateboard was over at that house, because skaters, like everyone else, like to hang out and show off.
so if you like skating, you find others that skate and meet up at a place to skate, or alternatively, you find a place to skate and meet others there that skate. time goes by and you create specific words to describe what you are doing and now you have slang. your friends realize that a certain type of shoe works better, so you all go out an buy it, and soon you have a distinct style… yada yada, a subculture is born.
conversely, maybe you hang out at a clothing shop in london and you hear that a guy that worked there just joined a new band. so you decide to go to a show and you like the sound. but the radio isn’t playing music like that, so you keep going to venues that do and discover more bands and make friends. a girl who works at the shop is styling some of the musicians and you start dressing like her too. blah blah blah you’re now a part of the UK punk rock scene.
sure, there subcultures that have a large digital presence. take furries for example. they run the internet. literally. but furries aren’t spending shit-loads of money on fur suits just to hang them in their closets. they go out and wear them in public. while the furry subculture may have a strong digital community, it is blostered by in-person meet ups and conventions – that’s where the culture is formed and maintained.
to give some credit to millennials, many of them participated in these subcultures and they did create a few of their own. I mean they had scene and they had… scene.2
“but sarah,” you ask, “what about indie sleaze? what about hipsters? they created those!!”
one. indie sleaze is a term that was created by tiktok. it’s not real!! at most it’s an asethetic, but an asethetic that was created retroactively, through the digital equivalent of cutting images out of an old magazine and smashing them all together, removing the fashion from any context. it’s not a subculture.
two. arguably, hipsters are a gen X creation and i refuse to classify 21st century hipsters as a true subculture either. it’s a pejorative at best and an identity at worse. there is no ‘hipster community.’ hipsters are people who like to gentrify communities. there is no shared culture behind it and i think the mistake of treating hipsters as a subculture was the beginning of the end of subcultures as a whole.
Mark Greif (a member of gen x) published a piece in the new yorker called “What Was The Hipster?” way back in 2010. i find the past tense “was” in the title to be interesting, because it seemingly implies that the hipster was done. over. in the past. when it was just beginning to evolve into its final, most devasting form …which is kind of Greif’s whole argument.
Greif explains that hipsters were created when anti-consumerist “indie bohemians” artists and “flannel-clad proto-businessmen” collide in a space (aka brooklyn new york). he writes that a hipster is a person who “aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class,” which is impossible to maintain.
in his essay, Greif reconstructs the history of “the hipster” to get to the late-2000s/early-2010s hipster that we are familiar with today. the hipster has no set culture, no politics. in the absence of culture lies only consumption. they are the “rebel consumer” who, as Greif puts it, adopts the “rhetoric but not the politics of the counterculture” in order to convince themselves that “buying the right mass products individualizes [them] as transgressive.” i could write an essay about that sentence alone.
identity no longer comes from something you participate in, but it is instead something you curate. in the early 2010s, to become a hipster all you had to do is buy some flannel, skinny jeans, really ugly glasses, and even uglier hats and there you go. congrats!! you’re a hipster. you didn’t even have to leave the comfort of your own home!
while clothes has always been a signifier of a subculture, subculture fashion is paticipatory. the styles were created organically by engaging with other people. you end up wearing your community. think trading pins at a punk show. hell, think dapper dan repurposing Louis Vuitton and Gucci logos in his own designs. this isn’t something you can shop for on shein.
the hipster is inherently transitory, because it is not grounded in anything beyond consumption. the hipster is always searching for the next ‘cool’ product that they can purchase before it heads into the mainstream (sounds familiar, this foreshadowing). being ahead gives the hipster status, but the truth is they are already behind. they steal from the subcultures that are actually creating these styles and designs, and in the process, they strip them of the qualities that made them resistant to the mainstream in the first place. as if gentifying neighborhoods wasn’t enough.
gen z – as all young people do – likes to characterize itself as different from the generations before them. we see ourselves as progressive, even radical, but i can’t help seeing patterns of the past being repeated at an even more acclerated rate. the rise of “asethetics” and “[blank]-core” often seen on tiktok (but many orginating on tumblr five years before…i see u cottagecore…) is the product of social media, but i argue it is just another permutation of hipster behavior.
indie sleaze, as i mentioned before, is one of such products. it’s nostalgic of something that didn’t actually exist, but that you can easily mimic and replicate, only to then replace when its now longer interesting. the name is perfect for SEO and all fast fashion sites (and the bloggers that link to them) have to do is paste “indie sleaze” onto the title and harvest some easy clicks.
when I started writing this post, I found a wikipedia page that listed various subcultures. among beatnik, gopnik, emo, and drag was… dark academia?? I saw “VSCO girl” repeated on list after list about 2010s subcultures too.3 my automatic thought was huh? why is this here??
for those not in the know, dark academic is an aesthetic that started to become popular on Tumblr in the late 2010s. think Oxford and private universities, tweed skirts, classic lit, libraries (at night, of course), dark furniture, the color green. It’s not a subculture. It’s a Pinterest board that only occasionally comes to life. there is a claim that dark academia is a lifestyle, but it’s unsatisfying to me. It seems to be more of a performance that people put on for social media than a way of life.
what values does dark academia hold? what’s its ideology? there are no dark academia meet ups or activities. like, where are the book clubs reading the Odyssey or Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray? (if you find any, can I join?) these questions can’t be answered because it’s a hashtag. a trend. an asethetic without community is not a subculture. posting photos of a type writer isn’t enough.
dark academia, cottage core, and the all the -cores that have followed are simply trends and aesthetics. they are maintained not by communities, but by algorithms. however, i think mistakingly labeling them as subcultures is revealing. it speaks to a greater malady that gen z is suffering from.
as social creatures, every person feels a need to belong. it’s why we have sport teams, religions, entire countries. we want to feel like we are apart of something. we want to be with people who like the same things as us, who understand our jokes. we want friends. that is what subcultures offer us. “here are my people” when we feel like we otherwise don’t belong.
the rise of “aesthetics” offers us the facade of community. we jump from aesthetic to aesthetic hoping to find people just like us! but they are empty. hollow. yes, there people are there. the hashtags are filled with accounts posting photos and tiktoks but where is the conversation? the engagement beyond a like or a quick comment? these aesthetics are fed to us by algorithms but they can never satiate the hunger we have for friendship and connection.
it’s not impossible for community to exist online. i think the disability community is a great example of how such one can work. however, they are far and few between. ultimately, our platforms don’t serve us to do so. we can’t expect posting to be enough.
i see gen z, which i am apart of, as a generation suffering from an intense loneliness. we have a longing for something, anything substantial but what we find is a bag of chips filled halfway with air. so we buy more bags of chips thinking the next one will be different. few of us even know how to cook (literally AND metaphorically). we don’t know how to form community that exists in space. so we all become hipsters, buying the next cool thing, hoping it will mean something to us, that it will act as a beacon to bring others to us. but it doesn’t. it won’t.
i wrote in my 2023 in and outs post the following: “the only way we will survive is by forming community will other people.” and i believe it. community is the only antidote to our loneliness that i can offer. but it can’t be found passively. joining one, creating one, involves work. effort. intention. genuine interest in other people. i wish i could provide a blueprint – a step by step guide – but honestly, i’m still trying to figure out how to do this myself.
but i think it will be worth it.
hi! this was supposed to be a MUCH shorter post. tbh i thought i could pump it out in an afternoon but i ended up traveling down a rabbit hole instead. i see this as more of a rough draft or sketch of my thoughts than an essay. so forgive how rough this is. there are some gaps. however, i’ve been interested in subcultures as a concept for YEARS!! so i have many many many thoughts on this topic, which i’m excited to write more on. that might happen on here. or it might happen on my other substack, thoughts spirals. idk, check out both!
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punk technically started in the 70s, so the boomers can claim that one, BUT I argue that punk really came into its own with hardcore punk…
i’m being intentionally reductive here. i haven’t touched on emo pop, for example, which is distinct from the emo subculture. this is also very US centric. there is actually pretty extensive lit on UK subcultures and japan has super niche subcultures such as lolita fashion (note: the term does not have the same connotation that it has in the US) that are very interesting.
someone tell me why ‘VSCO girl’ is deserving of its own wikipedia page. QUICKLY!