A society without a counterculture?
tedgioia.substack.com
tedgioia.substack.com
I lived in and near a city of a million people, but getting access to "alternative" music was difficult. My teenage daughter can find anything she wants on her phone.
Radical politics was fringe and out there. I scoured the local used bookstore for anything I could find that. Easy to find whatever you want now.
Publishing music or poetry or your opinions in general was a major endeavour. "Zine" culture was vibrant but marginal. Now you can easily publish whatever you want. (Doesn't mean you'll find an audience though.)
As for AMC or whatever. I'll repeat what others have said: why are you looking there? Why would you expect to find diversity there? Or in print journalism? Or in music charts? These are artifacts of the past. I can hear my 14 year old through the wall cleaning her bedroom while listening to Baby Metal. She didn't get that from a chart. Or from me. Stop looking for the "abnormal" in "normal" places.
That said, going to see Bob's Burgers in the movie theatre tonight with the family. It's not radical or subversive, to be sure, but something like that would never have made it to the screen in the 80s.
Now, if your definition of "counterculture" is a) being an anti-social jerk and b) getting attention and getting paid for it on someone else's platform. Yeah, you might have a hard time now.
Apart from the cultural rupture of the late 60s and early 70s, much of the entire second half of the 20th century was a wave of pretty aggressive mass media mass market conformity, so much so that our reaction as youths was similarily aggressive. Where do you think the anger in punk came from? Because everything kind of sucked.
If there's a problem with "counterculture" today it's that it'd be very hard to pick one single culture to counter.
IIRC, the guy now has a few hundred albums, and the range is genuinely crazy. There's obviously names like Bowie and Beyonce, but there's also random albums produced by artists in their rooms, or punk bands releasing cassettes that have found their way onto the internet, or fusions of wildly different cultures and styles, or snippets of YouTube videos set to music, or whatever else you can come up with. Themes range from Ghanaian independence or the failures of the EU, through to gender identity and parenthood.
If that's not counterculture, I don't know what is.
Is your problem that it's funded by US producers and the writers were American? Because almost everything else about it was pretty international.
I just think these distinctions are getting less and less meaningful.
Also an example that's a half decade out of date?
Frankly the French, German, etc. cultures and languages are under almost no threat. They have healthy domestic markets and great international influence. As a Canadian I find it almost laughable to hear Europeans complain about American cultural dominance; compare the situation in Quebec to that of France, Italy or Germany. Usually European complaints strike me as borne more out of elitism or essentialism than genuine grievance.
If anything the expansion of streaming services and the decentering away from cable services and Hollywood dominance has meant more exposure of North Americans to European productions.
Part of the issue is that you can't look for the counterculture in the places you expect to find it. If you do, you're probably just looking at a different corner of the same culture.
The other part of the issue is that even if you happen upon a counterculture, you may not like what you find.
For something to be truly countercultural, it couldn't just stand for the things we already agree with, it would have to genuinely shock or offend us. Because we are the culture, a counterculture would by definition be outside our context, and we would just dismiss it as ridiculous, rather than a movement.
We would probably not share it virally, or like it on Instagram. Thus, you won't find actual countercultures on popular forums. If you do, they've probably already been banned.
I think when we imagine a counterculture, we're actually imagining an edgier but still palatable version of the culture we're in. We think back to the countercultural movements of the 1960s-200s which have become simply the culture itself, and we think "Well, I agree with those movements, so I must be pretty countercultural". But no, that's just your culture. A counterculture is the thing that disagrees with you. An actual counterculture would read to us as ridiculous, dangerous, or even evil.
I hear a lot about comic book movies and those are getting extremely samey (or maybe they already were), but there are other things going on that I don't hear about.
Also, Shape of You is a super good song, so it's not SO awful that people love it year after year.
No counterculture item is going to be front page news like the whole new "Doctor Strange" movie.
Which, I get, knowing this makes me so not counterculture.
It's also at the point where even recreational substances, which were the idealogy of what countercultre was - is now legalized. We see this now with Marijuana and Mushrooms (Denver, at least.) - For medical reasons or not.
They weren't. Compare Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Batman Begins (2005). Compare X-Men (2000).
All of those had a story to tell. Recent superhero movies... not so much.
Like, goth (was) a counterculture, because it existed in opposition to mainstream aesthetics of beauty and fashion and gender performance. Punk rose in opposition to postwar British society. Counterculture is always transgressive, at least until it gets assimilated and commodified by capitalism, like goth and punk were.
Gaming isn't a counterculture. What does it stand in opposition to? What is it rejecting from the mainstream, and what is it replacing that with? It's just a subculture. Like anime. Like D&D. Like being a fan of any commercial media. If you can buy it in a store, it isn't counterculture.
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. FFS, OP is looking for signs of counterculture in the Oscars and the New York Times Book Review. No surprise they don't find it, given how little relevance those old media gatekeepers have, and how they literally exist to define the mainstream and maintain the status quo.
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.
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".
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.
Tech also has a lot of counterculture still remaining - open source being a notable one
An example would be tabletop RPGs. D&D would be the mainstream within the and outside of the subculture. There's a counterculture that rejects that games should be a power fantasy (as in fantasize, not as in elves and dwarves) about killing people and taking their stuff.
People who play tabletop RPGs as a long-term hobby tend to focus more on the setting than on the ruleset. They choose a setting, which has implications on what kind of characters they will play, what kind of stories they will tell, and which ruleset is the most appropriate for that. Once a campaign is over, they often want to try another setting. Because there are only a few commercial D&D settings, the game after D&D is likely not D&D.
As an example, say your group decides they want to play a group of super-soldiers roaming around WW2 Europe killing ever bigger and badder Nazis while gaining more abilities and better equipment. You then pick up GURPS or D20 Modern or whatever. That's not counterculture, it's the same experience but reskinned and with different mechanics.
What I'd consider counterculture to be is something like Night Witches, which is still set in WW2 but is a very different play experience and tells a very different kind of story.
(It may be that I am missing your point and that we are actually somewhat in agreement.)
A kind of realism became popular in the 80s. Combat was supposed to be deadly, and even experienced characters could die due to bad luck in any routine fight. You were always expected to consider whether there were better approaches to the situation than fighting. Another variant of this trend was cosmic horror, where you might be able to fight the minions, but the actual villains were far beyond your characters. If you encountered them, your only choice was to flee, and the expected outcome of a campaign was a descent into madness.
In the 90s, (A)D&D started falling into obscurity due to poor business decisions. Many games of that time emphasized storytelling and role-playing over combat and other game mechanical considerations. Key D&D mechanics such as hit points, character levels, and extreme character progression were often considered obsolete. (But video games eventually brought them back to tabletop gaming.)
The 2000s saw the return of game mechanics, both in the form of D&D and the rise of experimental rule systems. Once common idea was that game mechanics should be used for resolving outcomes rather than actions. For example, you first discussed your plans for the battle, then resolved it with a few die rolls (or maybe with no dice at all), and then you narrated the events. Many designers explored games with an extremely narrow focus. For example, the rules would assume that you were playing minions of a villain who treated you badly. The situation got progressively worse, and you were eventually expected to try to overthrow the villain.
I'm less familiar with games from the 2010s, because life has taken me around the world and there have been fewer opportunities for gaming. But I'm still involved in organizing a largeish volunteer-run gaming convention. Based on what I see there, D&D-style games have not become that dominant.
Was that 'My Life with Master' you were referring to?
Green/Solar Punk/Drawdown: deeply against the status quo of endless growth
Socialism/anti-work: alive and well and unsettling corporatists everywhere.
Tiny House/Van life/Minimalist/Homesteading: all variants on rejecting traditional consumerism.
Wokeness/anti-racism/Me too: gets a lot of visability, sure but a huge change in which groups hold and share power.
Trumpism/anti-globalist/nationalism: a giant challenge to the established order of the 21st century.
The point is that by and large counter/sub-culture isn't readily accessible by the greater public (if it was it would simply be culture). It takes effort and activity. Kerouac literally had to be 'on the road' for On the Road to exist. The public doesn't have access to the back of the house, etc.
The author will never connect directly with counter culture if he doesn't find our present's roads and the kitchens. His connection to counter culture will always be mediated through second-hand accounts at best, or substantively diluted by mass media leaving the hollow husk of form at worst.
This is a tale about what happens if one doesn't stray off the beaten path to seek out niche communities and untold stories. It's a feeling of suburban sameness, that there should be more, and that we're capable of being more. It's out there, friend - waiting for you.
Every screen shows the same movie.
How was this different ten years ago? Twenty? Fifty?
The banal word ‘content’ is used to describe every type of creative work, implying that artistry is generic and interchangeable.
The greater the number of people interacting the more interchangeable any human output becomes. More people equals less granular. Five natural scientists five hundred years ago in a nation of 500,000 people have a much wider variety of capability and output than ten thousand engineers in a nation of fifty million today.
The dominant company in the creative culture views everything as a brand extension.
There's no explanation as to why this is bad. I think it's pretty cool Disney is building Star Wars themed hotels when the alternative is hotel-themed hotels.
Indie music and alt music are marginalized.
Again no citation. Show me that people today listen to less indie music than they did in 2000.
Telling jokes becomes a dangerous profession.
There's not even a comment or a claim on this one, just a video of one rich guy slapping another rich guy. Are more comedians facing career-ending audience reactions than they used to?
Overall this is an incredibly low-effort article and I'm disappointed it hit the HN front page.
Wishful. Today's counterculture sometimes appears on HN. Its 'values and norms of behavior differ substantially from the' HN mainstream ... the sassiest is quickly and, without reply, anonymously 0-bulleted to the bottom of the threads.
Problem is, good entertainment is still happening locally, but (hey author,) you need to get off your ass to find it. Bands, comedians, actors, etc. who you haven't heard of unless you're actively attending -- with tens to hundreds of audience members. Statistically, it isn't even a blip. But it's the "culture" the author finds missing. The revolution will not be televised.
While it's great to go out and see interesting local stuff - we also need mainstream entertainment for when we are not at those spaces during the other 99 percent of our time.
This is the author's point: the revolution was previously televised. Original films, 'alternative' music, street press, small publishers, etc have all but vanished from the cultural landscape.
This has lead to a kind of stagflation of shite. A cultural blight where the sameness of cultural product grows and becomes harder to break out of.
This was not the case in the 90s: your local music store was promoting new music up and down the charts, even in the middle of the country. This economy has completely disappeared in recent years as a result of streaming economics.
(Everything people blame on this is actually caused by having primary elections, but California uses jungle primaries, which have different incentives.)
In the US struggles between either party might seem fantastic to members of both parties, but anyone outside that Overton window, often people with widely diverse views, dread nothing more.
Another way of putting it is that sophisticated systems of control always incorporate their own opposition, which actually provides stability. Lone empires tend to topple over. Taking California as an example, not despite but because of its dominant culture it is more dynamic. Even its real opposition, which is forced to act outside of the system is more interesting, subversive, radical than what you'd find in a 'balanced' state.
I'm not referring to mistakes of kitschiness, or excess, or technical incorrectness. If you're in any place where folks are exploring expression (or even technicality), then they will inevitably do something that may seem weird.
In those places where culture and expression have peaked and got nowhere to go, where the gestalt has distinctly chosen predictability over possibility, things may feel out of place simply because they're e.g. displays of skill for the sake of displays of skill. Or even more tritely, production for production's sake.
This may sound alternately cliché or obvious-after-the-fact, but when there is no counterculture, nothing will be weird, at all. And that is because nothing is being dared or played with.
These concepts are not zero sum. The world is not the same as 60 years ago but rearranged, it's an entirely new world full of different people and possibilities. But that fact doesn't make for a good viral blog post.
Everyone after them thinks it’s weird that they’ve confused listening to a single kind of music with an entire lifestyle.
(Boomers, who had a single counterculture instead of subcultures, similarly thought that doing drugs at music festivals was somehow actively saving the world.)
Now society has so, so much more choice, it becomes boring to see the same old hundreds of choices, we’d rather have one mainstream and one underground.
Source: lived through the bad old days.
Rather than one monolithic counterculture, there are lots of small signs of divergent movements I would call true counterculture. LGBT, veganism, youth culture like tiktok. There's also harmful ones like the alt-right, antivax, and conspiracy theory movements.
These two lines here:
"Creative work is increasingly embedded in genres that feel rigid, not flexible"
"Even avant-garde work often feels like a rehash of 50-60 years ago"
Convinced me the author is having a depressive episode after rewatching Friends on Netflix for the 4th time this year.
You consider "true counterculture" things like LGBT and veganism, that are openly supported by every western government and corporation? Really?
When you call other forms of counterculture "harmful" what you're really saying is "things that my culture has told me are harmful", or in other words "things that are counter to my culture".
I don't even know if we have a mainstream culture anymore. Going from 3 tv channels to millions on YouTube means most people aren't watching the same thing. Despite the population exploding, ratings are a fraction of what they were.
I wouldn't say that. YouTube is happy to pick semi-random popular videos from 14 years ago and generic crap and [re]viralize them by shoving them into everyone's recommended feeds, so much so that comments like "the algorithm has brought us together again, see you in 10 years" have become a meme.
Right now so much digital existence/content/interaction/place is subsidized/exists on a small handful of massive planetary scale quasi-mainframes, big portals/silos. We use a small handful of mostly identical operating systems with little general customization/tailoring.
It's not monoculture but technical duo-culture or whatever leaves so much of existence in the hands of so few, is so undiverse, is a place where there's so little chance for new & original & different to get a start.
I think the sense in which we live in a society lacking counter-culture is that counter-culture now is most of our culture.
Brooks is now "just another uncool Boomer" but he made this same observation over 20 years ago.
Mainstream culture was always bland, safe, and predictible. We remember auteur cinema from the 1970s for example, because they stood the test of time - the great works of Coppola and Scorsese, but the top grossing films of the era were no better than the MCU of today. The same about TV. And music. Look at old Billboard charts, at old Grammy winners - none of them represent the "best" of any decade that we look back at with fondness.
Are Alternative weekly newspapers disappearing. Of course. But that's not because there is no outlet for those alternative voices anymore - they are just not being expressed in a dead tree-based medium anymore. They're on YouTube, on blogs, and yes, on Twitter. Do they have the same amount of reach as late night show clips? Of course not, but that was always the case with alternative culture - it was never as big as the mainstream.
The controversial (for this site) reality is that Alt-right and ALt-left are the counter cultures. Mainstream American media is extremely centrist and safe, and always has been. The US political system and judicial system are extremely conservative and take very little action except to repress civil rights. The "cancel culture" the right freaks out about IS a counterculture. A perhaps overly left-leaning, but a counterculture to the mainstream nonetheless.
These are the top films, and second place, for 1970-74
70 Love Story, Airport
71 Fiddler on the Roof, Billy Jack
72 The Godfather, The Poseidon Adventure
73 The Exorcist, The Sting
74 The Towering Inferno, Blazing Saddles
I only stopped because I got bored copying and pasting. I'm not convinced the MCU stuff really compares. And I love all that Marvel stuff! Maybe if they could do a decent soundtrack. .
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026560159/
By comparison, entries for the 2010s include MCU franchise films, Star Wars Sequels, Jurassic World (a sequel), The Lion King (Remake), etc:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026040906/
Going year-by-year doesn't really change things very much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films...
Hes got a ton of views, seems to be doing fine. A couple of video game scores too (River City Girls).
I dunno if he does any traditional records, but he is certainly not mainstream.
There are a ton of other YouTubers that come to mind (Wellerman / sea shanty memes for example) which became outrageously popular on YouTube, Tik Tok. How do we count these performances?
-------
Video wise, more and more kids are watching YouTube channels completely alien to me. I really can't keep up with them, but apparently they have millions of views.
Dude Perfect, SloMoGuys, some various science channels come up for me a lot. Are these counterculture?
I've also participated in some simpler foam-based HEMA combat. As others would call it: LARPing. Is this counterculture?
Cause if its considered counterculture and considered dead... I dunno, I see it all over the place.
The Age of Empires community rented out a castle and streamed their championship from it. https://youtu.be/2u3HupyXyKQ
That's not mainstream at all. I guess Red Bull sponsored it but otherwise it felt quite natural: the long running members of the community all meeting up and honestly interacting with each other.
The theater screening comparison is apples-to-oranges, as the second (older) image is of an arthouse theater, and many of the films were made in different decades.
I don’t doubt that there is less variety in theatrical releases nowadays, but that’s in part because niche content has moved to other media. It’s the same thing with the printed weeklies.
“Content” is a superset of “cinema”, not its reduction. It’s been called “programming” on television for decades.
Is this the first time a song topped the charts three years in a row?
Netflix’s library is shrinking due to the rise of other streaming services, not due to “homogenization”.
And the less said about the “slap” tweet linking to a New York Post article, the better.
The culture that is marginalized is the counterculture.
the smaller this set becomes the harder it is to "counter" it. And the stronger the culture has a grip on power the more counter-culture must fight.
the US led counter culture in 1960s took on enormous entrenched power in Western world - and mostly it "won".
With the advent of social media the idea of a common cultural set is broken - we don't all watch the same TV the same songs, but we have the same government
So our common culture battlefield is less over art and more over courts and legislation.
Of course if you have a superficial interest you'll only get fed the mainstream bullshit. But is it seriously that difficult to peruse the cinema's pamphlet and choose some quirky movie near the bottom? Is it that difficult to peruse your radio spectrum and find a station that features more indie musicians? And how about doing some actual research on the internet once you find that quirky movie or that indie song? Maybe you search for the director or the singer, you discover a new genre, you find a forum somewhere and deep down the rabbit hole of incredible new stuff you go.
This post screams Gell-Man amnesia to me, I'm sure that this guy is passionate about a topic and would cringe if I said that everything about his favorite passion is mainstream and indie content is disappearing.
I mean, Ted Gioia is probably the foremost jazz critic and historian in the country, so I’d warrant that his listening is fairly broad, and he’s definitely knowledgeable. But it’s likely broadest only within that particular sphere. I’d absolutely trust his opinions about jazz. I’d moderately trust his opinions about music more generally (except, probably, for pop). And I’d only marginally trust his opinions on culture as a whole. I’m sure he’s generally “cultured,” but that doesn’t make one an astute critic, as this piece rather illustrates.
The problem with the list of theses he’s produced is that he’s trying to parlay his expertise in a fairly sheltered part of culture into an expertise on culture generally. Some of his pronouncements aren’t entirely off-base; they’re just issued with a confidence that is probably unfounded. What’s weird is that, as a jazz critic, you’d think he’d be more in-tune with forms of culture outside the mainstream, since he spends most of his time thinking about one of them…
What is a counterculture? Isn't alt/indie music marginalized by definition? Why would the (dubious) assertion that joke telling has become dangerous be indicative of no counterculture? What's an example of a period/place with a vibrant counterculture? Can any of these "warning signs" be present in such a period/place?
What the author seems to be arguing is that pop culture has become boring and repetitive. For a more interesting take on why this might be the case, see Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Past--he argues that a set of structural conditions (such as no cheap rent) has led to media industries recycling safe, nostalgic content.
Also, the Dune movie is not a reboot.
> — TV commercial for Vanderbilt perfume, 1994
From a book someone recommended recently:
Commodify your dissent - https://openlibrary.org/books/OL687158M/Commodify_your_disse...
If what the author claims is true then congratulations, independent OSS devs! You don't exist, therefore there is zero risk of burnout.
1 warning sign the author may be trapped in a Twitter bubble of his own making.
One of my favourite musicals (Falsettoland, set in the 80s) has the following lyric, which I think on a lot:
> In the 60s, we had a new world to start!
> Could this be (oh God, don't say it)
> Could this be the new world we started?
> Here I sit, broken-hearted...
He's right, but a bit late to the party
(Of the brothers Gioia, I’ve always preferred Dana, anyway.)
Our culture is nothing but counterculture. The entire thing is copies of copies of copies of the author thinking that they and their friends are the first and only people to take a bold stance against power, or corruption, or whatever.
Communism also killed creativity by educating people to think the same, but at least the jobs were secure and the rent was very cheap.
Example: video games.
Of course there were a lot of failures in the beginning, but at least there was loads of creativity.
Then the "EA" system kicked in and killed creativity... because they did not want to take any risks with creative game design but rather "make a new" what sold in the past (NFL games, FIFA games...) but with shinier grafix, as if grafix was all of the fun (think about minecraft).
So sooner or later money kills creativity PLUS human development.
It really is that bad.
Buying a game for my Atari ST in the 80s was a) expensive b) hard <usually a trip to the mall>. The variety wasn't nearly what it is now.
You have to differentiate between diversity and success. The market is much bigger now, and the selection broader. Within that large market there's only a few products that come to dominate. If you choose to just look at what's dominant, well, yeah, you'll get a negative opinion. But that's the thing. That stuff is popular because it appeals to the widest audience. By definition.
But it doesn't do that by squeezing other things "off the shelf."
They buy the same food from the same 5 megacorps, they watch movies and tv produced by another 5 megacorps…
Americans can’t ever be arsed to put together a general strike.
(Conservatives have more children earlier in life, and despite talking about anti-sex more, aren’t as successful at it as liberals.)
Also, big companies are good and are more productive at agriculture. Though, the reason we have them is that family farmers intentionally sold their farms to corporations because their wives were in danger of making their own money from parts of them.