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Subcultures

The 20th century, particularly the latter half, was a time of increasing social diversity and individualism. The world wars that dominated the first half of the century put enormous psychological pressure upon vast numbers of people -- for instance, wartime conscription meant that not only were many involuntarily forced to directly confront the threat of death, but even those not directly serving in combat were put into uniform, thus denying them freedom in their choice of clothing and hairstyle. As a result, in the 20th century there was a rise of people frantic to both live life to the full and also express their individuality. When these people came together, they often established a subculture.

There seems to be a dynamic relationship between subcultures and warfare. A society sends its young, healthy and strong to kill the young, healthy and strong of another society and subcultures seem to be provoked through the social trauma which results. There also is a clear relationship between subculture and refugee or immigrant status. Since there is clearly a link between warfare and the creation of refugees and forced exiles, a sociological pattern is discernable.

Wealth and class can be considered a subculture although the term is more usually associated with fashion or with resistance against social repressions. Other subcultures are connected with sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. Travelling people such as the Roma tend to be universally a subculture.

The beginning of the century until World War I

For many years in the early part of the 20th century, subcultures were mostly informal groupings of like-minded individuals. For example, the Bloomsbury group in London provided a place where the talents of such diverse individuals as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E.M. Forster could interact.

Other pre-World War I subcultures were small things, social groupings of hobbyists or a matter of style and philosophy amongst artists and bohemian poets.

One early 20th century subculture that persisted to the modern day was Nudism. The first known organised club for nudists, Freilichtpark (Free-Light Park), was opened near Hamburg, Germany in 1903.

Also in Germany, from 1896 onward there developed a movement, mainly of young men (and later young women), which focused on freedom and natural environments. They were called Wandervogel which can be translated as "hikers", "ramblers" or, more exactly, "migratory birds". They wanted to throw off the strict rules of society and be more open and natural.

In Italy, a popular art movement and philosophy called Futurism championed change, speed, violence and machines.

World War I

Hairstyles at the beginning of the century were not strict unless you were in a religious order or other controlled circumstances (the military or prison etc.). Both men and women regarded long hair as normal. Men and women had, after all, always had long hair, since prehistory.

Because of the (1914-1918) world war, though, everything changed. The wartime trenches had infestations of lice and fleas. Soldiers had their heads shaved. Consequently, men with short hair appeared to have been at the front in the war, while men with long hair might be thought of as pacifists and cowards, suspected of desertion.

Some artists managed to avoid the war by sitting it out in neutral Switzerland. A group of artists in Zürich invented Dadaism as an anti-war, anti-art, art movement and a parody of the pro-violent attitudes of Futurism. They became politically active as an underground anarchical attempt to change society's trend toward self-destruction.

The 1920s and 30s

See: Roaring Twenties

In the 1920s, American Jazz music and motor cars were at the centre of a European subculture of freedom and wild living which began to break the rules of social etiquette and the class system. (See also Swing Kids.) Meanwhile, in America, the same flaming youth subculture was "running wild" but with the added complication of alcohol prohibition. Canada had prohibition in some local areas but where alcohol was permitted thirsty Americans coming over the border found an oasis. Some smuggling was done and this escalated as the crime gangs became organised. In the southern states of the USA Mexico or Cuba were other possible destinations for drinkers. Thus a drinking subculture grew in size and a crime subculture grew along with it. Other drugs existed which could be used as alternatives to alcohol. When prohibition ended the subculture of drink, drugs and jazz didn't go away. Neither did the gangsters.

The nudist movement gained prominence in Germany in the 1920s, but was suppressed during the Nazi Gleichschaltung after Adolf Hitler came to power. Social nudism in the form of private clubs and campgrounds first appeared in the United States in the 1930s. In Canada, it first appeared in British Columbia about 1939 and in Ontario nine years later.

In the art world, the spiritual home of most subcultures, the surrealist movement was attempting to shock the world with their games and bizarre behaviour. The surrealists were at one and the same time a serious art movement and a parody of other artforms and political movements. Surrealism had been developed by Andre Breton and others from the thinking in the Dada movement. Based in several European countries, surrealism was going to run into serious trouble when the Nazis began to take over. Subcultures and "degenerate art" were almost completely stamped out and replaced by the Hitler Youth.

In North America, the depression caused widespread unemployment and poverty, causing many young people to feel like dead end kids. The phenomenon of the dead end kid was taken into fiction and put on the stage and screen where it proved an enormously popular image with which people could identify. Films featuring The Dead End Kids, The Bowery Boys, Little Tough Guys etc were popular from the 1930s to the 1950s. See external link: The (Unofficial) Bowery Boys' Page.

The Dust bowl disaster forced large numbers of rural Americans from Oklahoma and elsewhere to move their entire families to look for some alternative way to continue living. This got them labelled as "Okies" and treated very poorly by the authorities in other states they moved to. The refugee situation was recorded in folk songs (many of them by Woody Guthrie) and in a novel, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and a subsequent movie of the book. The movie starred Henry Fonda.

The 1940s

Avant-garde artists like Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall had to flee Europe following the outbreak of World War II. They arrived in the United States and began to make contact with each other. Modern art's new home was in New York City. A subculture of American-based surrealism and avant-garde experimentation became the new centre of the art world.

In the 1940s, American fashion was still gangster orientated. Gangs gravitated largely around immigrant and racial cultures. In California, hispanic youth developed a fashion recognised by their distinctive zoot suits. The girls dressed all in black and were called Black widows. The zoot suiters use of language involved a lot of rhyming and trick words like so-called pig latin (also known as backslang). The whole thing, including Afro-American, Cuban, Mexican and South American elements and bits introduced by Slim Gaillard like McVouty oreeney was collectively known as Swing or Jive talk. See external link: Dictionary of Swing

The entry of America into World War II was heralded by a new legislation which made zoot suits illegal because of the extra cloth which they used up. This led to the Zoot Suit Riots.

In Europe, black-marketeers prospered under the rationing. Clothing styles depended on what could be begged or acquired by some means, not necessarily legal. There were restrictions everywhere. When the Americans arrived in Britain, black-marketeers did deals with GIs for stockings, chocolate, etc. Inevitably, subculture continued to have an image of criminality and the brave, the daring, the milieu, the resistance, etc. The black market in drugs thrived just about anywhere.

British black-marketeers were sometimes called Wide boys or Spivs.

After the second war, the zoot suit craze spread to France in the form of the Zazou youths. Meanwhile, the intellectuals in France were forming an existentialist subculture around Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in Paris cafe culture.

In post-war America, folk songs and cowboy songs (also known, in those days, as hillbilly music) were beginning to be more popular with a wider audience. A subculture of rural jazz and blues fans had blended elements of jazz and blues into traditional cowboy and folk song styles to produce a crossover called western swing. This type of music was able to spread across America in the 40s thanks to the prevalence of radio. Radio was the first almost instantaneous mass media and had the power to create large subcultures by spreading the ideas of a small subculture across a wider area.

A new jazz subculture formed from the rebellion of some musicians against the melodic stylings of swing. Their rebellion produced Bebop and the early players of it included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. The subculture which formed around this kind of jazz was the beginning of Hipsters and the Beat generation.

In 1947, the same year that Jack Kerouac made his epic journey across America which he would later describe in On the Road and the same year as the occurrence at Roswell, New Mexico which was claimed as a UFO crash, there was an incident involving a motorcycle gang at Hollister, California. A story about the incident was published that year in Harper's Magazine and would be developed (6 years later in 1953) as the Marlon Brando film The Wild One. A year after the incident the Hells Angels (without the apostrophe), formed in 1948 in Fontana, California. The name Hells Angels had been used as a movie title by Howard Hughes ten years before. The Hells Angels began as a motorcycle club looking for excitement in the dull times after the end of the war. They became far more notorious as time went on. Motorcycle gangs in general began to hit the headlines.

The 1950s

The Existentialists had a profound influence upon subcultural development. Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus transferred their French resistance underground campaign to the context of a cultural revolution and the American beat scene joined the movement. (See article: Underground culture) The emphasis on freedom of the individual influenced the beats in America and Britain and this version of existential bohemianism continued through the 1950s and into the 60s under the guise of the beat generation. Beards and longer hair returned in another attempt at returning to the image of peacetime man and the normality which had existed before the two wars. At the same time, as a result of American post-war prosperity, a new identity emerged for youth subculture: the teenager.

Jazz culture was transformed, by way of Rhythm and Blues into Rock and Roll culture. There are various suggested candidates for which record might've been the First rock and roll record. At the same time, jazz culture itself continued but changed into a more respected form, no longer necessarily associated with wild behaviour and criminality.

From the 1950s onward society noticed an increase in street gang culture, random vandalism and graffiti. Sociologists, psychologists, social workers and judges all had theories as to what was causing the increase to urban trouble but the consensus has generally tended to be that the modern urban environment offers all the bright lights and benefits of the modern world but often provides working class youths with little in reality. This theory and others were parodied in the musical West Side Story (based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet) in song lyrics such as Jet Song, America, and Gee, Officer Krupke.

As American rock and roll arrived in the United Kingdom, a subculture grew around it. Some of the British post-war street youths hanging around bombsites in urban areas and getting drawn into petty crime began to dress in a variation of the zoot suit style called a drape suit, with a country style bootlace tie, winklepicker shoes, drainpipe trousers, and Elvis Presley style slicked hair. These youths were called Teddy boys. For a night out dancing at the palais, their girlfriends would usually wear the same sort of poodle skirts and crinolines their counterparts in America would wear. For day-to-day wear there was a trend toward girls wearing slacks or jeans. At the time, the idea of girls wearing trousers and boys taking time over their hairstyle was socially shocking to many people.

British youth divided into factions. There were the modern jazz kids, the trad jazz kids, the rock and roll teenagers and the skiffle craze. Coffee bars were a meeting place for all the types of youth and the coolest ones were said to be in Soho, London.

In Britain, the political side of the Beat Generation was the anti-nuclear movement led by CND. Ban the Bomb marches became a very ruccessful British social phenomenon.

Teenage music and subculture was parodied in the 1957 play (and 1962 movie) The Music Man, particularly in the song "Ya Got Trouble".

In America and Australia, Hawaiian-influenced Surfing was the new youth sport. A whole subculture grew around the sport and the associated parties, clothes, speech patterns and music. During the same timeframe skateboard riding developed as a parallel lifestyle to wave riding. Both forms of board riding continued throughout the remainder of the century and into the next. From these two sports young people learned to provide their own social structure within which they could display skills and excellence.

In the Congo Free State (now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo), a youth subculture known as the Bills flourished, taking Western movies and cowboys as their main influence.

In the Netherlands we see two youth groups evolving in big cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam en Utrecht. One group who are called the Nozems similare to the British Teds, and another called the Artiestelingen, who can be compaired to the bohemian artist of pre-worldwar franch. The nozems spent there time listening to rock and roll music, driving there motorcycles through town and picking up ladies. and the artiestelingen would discuss philosophy, paint, draw and listen to jazz music.

The 1960s

In the 1960s, the "beats" or "beatniks" grew to be an even larger subculture, reaching such proportions that they spread around the world, and developed subcultures of their own. Subcultures within subcultures. That was the extent of cultural fractiousness in the 60s. The beat scene included Radicals, Peaceniks, Mods, Rockers, Bikers, hippies and, eventually, the self-parody thing: the freak scene. One of the main transitional features between the beat scene and the hippies was the journeying across America of the Merry Pranksters driven by Neal Cassady in a yellow school bus named "Furthur".

The term mod had different meanings depending which side of the Atlantic you were on and so did radical. Subcultures were still usually about living life to the full and wild behaviour, but in the 60s there was the Vietnam war to protest about, rebel against, and avoid getting drafted into. The hippies' big year was 1967, the so called summer of love.

There were subcultures which were also political movements, for instance the Black Panther Party and the Yippies.

University students around the world had always been a minor subculture but, by the mid-60s, had become a major one. In Paris, France in May 1968 a student uprising, supported by Jean Paul Sartre, and 121 other intellectuals who signed a statement asserting "the right to disobedience," brought the country to a standstill and caused the government to call a general election rather than run the risk of being toppled from power. Allen Ginsberg took part in a number of protest movements including those for gay rights and those against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons.

Also during the 60s, the beginnings of Hacker culture were forming from the increased usage of computers at colleges. Students who were fascinated by the possibilities of computers, the telephone and technology in general began figuring out ways to make the technology more freely available or accessible.

Another subculture of the 60s was the Rude boy culture in Jamaica and, latterly in the United Kingdom. The rude boy subculture influenced some elements of the British mods, which then developed into skinheads around 1969.

Disco first appeared in the 60s, which lead to the appearance of discotheques, such as the Whiskey A Go Go and Studio 54. In the 1980s, Disco turned into Techno.

The 1970s

See: The Seventies
In the 1970s, the hippie, mod and rocker cultures were in a process of transformation which temporarily took on the name of freaks (openly embracing the image of strangeness and otherlyness). A growing awareness of identity politics combined with the legalisation of homosexuality and a huge amount of interest in science fiction and fantasy forms of speculative writing produced the autre with an attitude freak scene. There was a lot of talk about "revolution", most of which was, undoubtedly, a lot of talk.

At some stage, though it's unclear when, some of the hacker/computer nerd subculture took on the derogatory word geek with pride, in the same way the freaks had done. Computer usage was still a very inaccessible secret world to most people in those days but lots of people were interested in computers because of their appearance in science fiction. The dream of one day owning a computer was a popular fantasy amongst science fiction fandom which had grown from a minor subculture in the first half of the 20th century to a quite large contingent by the 70s, along with horror fandom, comics fandom and fantasy freaks.

Since the freak scene was connected to the political ideas of the alternative society, the bands on the freak circuit didn't please the bank balances of the pop industry very much. A band like The Edgar Broughton Band or The Pink Fairies would play at a free festival, not on Top of the Pops. Legend has it that Hawkwind, a space rock band on the freak scene had refused to play on Top of The Pops when their first single Silver Machine "accidentally" went into the UK Singles Charts. The music/fashion/subculture which the pop industry created as a commercial alternative to the freaks was glam rock. Glam was a continuation of the trendies of the mod culture in the 60s, appealing to the androgynous trend of the seventies.

At the same time there emerged a new subculture called skinheads. The "skins" or skinheads were anti-aesthetic, pro-basic, fiercely working class tough youths. They sometimes had the image of homophobia and racism and this image was often true although, paradoxically, they loved black Jamaican reggae, ska, and bluebeat.

Skinheads mainly began from 1969, as a development from the hard, headcase type of mods but, by the mid-70s, some crossover was happening between skins and the freak scene. This developed into the punk subculture which became apparent from about 1975 onward. Punks managed to be both hardcases and tongue-in-cheek at the same time. The concept of Anarchism became fashionable.

Disco, which had begun in gay dance clubs, became a really significant centre of subculture from about 1975 onward. However, in some sectors, particularly in the NYC area, where disco had seemingly "taken over" all aspects of youth life from fashion, to behavior, to music, to dance, an aggressive "counter disco" movement was born. In fact, NYC area rock radio stations as WPLJ and WPIX encouraged their listeners to destroy their disco records and embrace rock and roll. The artistic response to this anti-disco sentiment, in conjunction with an anti-hippy dippy movement, was the Punk Rock movement.

Musically and lyrically, punk rock was the intentional antithesis of the repetitive electronic disco music and the dated flower child wails of 60's and 70's. NYC Punk rock, as characterized early on by the Ramones or by more obscure bands such as the Day Glo Abortions, rejected both the continuation of the hippy peace-n-free love subculture and the notion of disco's polyester generation. Instead, early punks played aggressive, quick paced three chord riff rock-n-roll songs, singing of happy insanity, nihilsm, and violence to small crowds. It should be stated that punk rock was not popular nor populist. Many of the early punks and early punk bands were considered actual lunatics, and incidents of extreme violence against band members and their following occurred, even in the clubs where they had created a community.

When punk was happening, some of the progressive rock elements took it as a challenge to live faster, harder and tougher than punk. They kept the long hair of the freak scene, adopted the black leather jacket as virtually a uniform and took on the name heavy metal (which is a phrase from the writings of William S. Burroughs).

The continuance of hippie ideas of spirituality and mysticism was in the New Age movement, which increased in size and influence.

Mods made a comeback in the 1970s as a post-punk alternative mod phenomenon, inspired by rock band The Who and the British film Quadrophenia.

In 1976, a hit song "Convoy" by C.W. McCall arrived in the pop charts and romanticised the Trucker and CB radio subculture. In 1978, the song inspired a film "Convoy" directed by Sam Peckinpah, and starring Kris Kristofferson, Ali MacGraw, Ernest Borgnine, and Burt Young. The word "convoy" and quotes from the song lyrics became part of a popular cultural image of people standing up for their freedom.

Gradually, from the 60s, 70s and through into the 80s, the cultural influences of the Merry Pranksters, the Freak Scene, the New Age Movement and the Convoy idea seem to have coalesced into what became New age travellers.

In 1979, the Usenet was created as a medium of communication over the, still very primitive, internet of the time. The Usenet and the BBS subculture would become increasingly significant over the next few decades.

Also in 1979, Papa Wemba, a Rumba star in Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo, Africa began to be the leader of the Sapeur ('Société Ambianceurs et Persons Élégants' thus 'SAPE' for short), which he promoted as a youth cult. Papa Wemba's music has been influenced by previous stars of Rumba music in Zaire (such as Papa Wendo) and also by his visits to Europe and by the appearance, in 1974, of James Brown at the Rumble in the Jungle.

Wemba said: "The Sapeur cult promoted high standards of personal cleanliness, hygiene and smart dress, to a whole generation of youth across Zaire. When I say well groomed, well shaven, well perfumed, it's a propriety that I am insisting on among the young. I don't care about their education, since education always comes first of all from the family." The Sape was centred around Papa Wemba and Viva La Musica and continued to be a controversial movement in Congolese society for years to come, making a virtual religion of clothes.

The 1980s

At the beginning of the 1980s some of the followers of punk rock began to be bored with it and wanted to make it more stylish and introduce elements of glam. By 1981 this trend had become New Romantics and the music was synthesiser electro-pop.

New Romantics tended to be slightly camp and fay of behaviour regardless of whether they were gay or not. There was a bisexual vibe generally, regardless of the individual's actual sexual orientation. The clothes style was a return to the freak scene's roleplay of fashions from previous eras or imagined future ones. It was like using fashion to create a time warp. According to the Music magazines at the time, there were some alternative names New Romantics wanted to call themselves. One was Futurists and another was the cult with no name.

Other punk rock followers took the genre and culture further underground, where it evolved into a faster, harder genre coined as "Hardcore" or "Hardcore Punk". Some early hardcore bands are Black Flag, Minor Threat and The Bad Brains, Weirdoz, Sf's Flipper, and Youth Brigade.

Along with the Hardcore Movement came the "straight edge" Movement. Many associate "straight edge" with hardcore punk rock, perhaps because the founder of straight edge, Ian Mackaye of Minor Threat, owns Dischord Records, a label that supports the DC hardcore scene. However, this is a misconception: even McKaye states that he was not initially a punk. In contrast, Straight Edge is a progressive lifestyle in response to the "live fast, die young" associated with Punk Rock or Hardcore. Straight Edge is a lifestyle and (counter cultural) subculture, existing worldwide, but most notably in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. It advocates abstinence in relation to tobacco, alcohol and recreational drug use (especially psychoactive and stimulant drug use), and for some people in relation to promiscuous sexual behavior.

There was an unsuccessful attempt to manufacture an artificial subculture around the pop group Adam and the Ants. Supposed to be called Antpeople this remained merely a fictional subculture and didn't catch on in reality.

Other former punks searching for a new direction around 1979 evetually developed into the nucleus of what became the Goth subculture. Gothic culture developed naturally enough, without too much media forcing. The goths are a sub-culture of dark dress and gloomy romanticism. Unlike the New Romantics goth has become a permanent part of the sub cultural scene still going in the 21st century with some claiming their roots reach backwards to the gothic-romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the UK goth reached its popular peak in the late eighties with goth bands achieving chart success but went underground after that.

Post punk and post hippie elements continued and a particular type of anarchist-pacifist subculture centred around the records being put out on the independent Crass label by Crass themselves and other bands including The Poison Girls. Crass records was a very independent operation enabling bands with an extremely raw sound to put out records when the major labels might not have bothered with them. Crass also organised gigs around the country for themselves and other bands and campaigned politically for the anti-nuclear movement and lots of other causes they believed in.

In American urban environments, a form of street culture using freeform and semi-staccato poetry, combined with athletic break dancing, was developing as the Hip hop and Rap subculture. In jazz jargon, the word rap had always meant speech and conversation. The new meaning signified a change in the status of poetry from an elitist artform to a community sport. Rappers could attempt to outdo each other with their skillful rhymes. Rapping is also known as MCing, which is one of the four main elements of Hip hop: MCing, DJing, graffiti art, and breakdancing. From the early to mid 1980s, poetry culture in a broader sense caught the same kind of energy as rap and so began the first of the Poetry slams. Poetry slamming became an irregular focus for the latest wave of poetry aficionados.

After the New Romantic fashion broke and had been around for a lot less than the five years they talked about, the trend moved on. There was a brief abortive fashion which was called Urban vagrants but which failed to become a true subculture. Urban vagrants was too artificially manufactured by the media.

A subculture relishing free enterprise capitalism sprang up in the mid 80s and were branded by the tabloid press with the name of Yuppies (the first two or three letters intended to mean either Young Urban Professional or Young and Upwardly mobile and the remainder to sound like hippies). In the USA the yuppie style was contemporaneous with the Valley girl stereotype which was all about outer flash and cash at the apparent expense of any inner spirituality or gravitas.

Wine bars gained popularity over the traditional pub as a meeting place in Britain of the 80s. Wine bars in fact gained such popularity that many pubs converted part of their premises to a wine bar style. Along with this trend was a resurgence of jazz, especially in the forms of Jazz funk and Smooth jazz. In the late 80s and 90s this would lead to a subdued back-lash, seeing many independent establishments and chain pubs re-assume a more traditional decor, in the spirit of the end of Thatcherism.

The free festival movement was still going in the 80s and, in fact, expanded to create different types of events.

In 1985 Stonehenge Free Festival was disrupted by a massive police presence attempting to prevent the festival and break up the Peace Convoy. The resulting Battle of the Beanfield was the largest mass civil arrest in English history.

Free parties and raves began from the mid-80s and became a flourishing subculture. The music was electronic dance music which developed from Techno, pioneered in Detroit and Chicago by people like Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, as well as electronic music, pioneered by Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and others, taken by way of progressive rock bands like Hawkwind, filtered through the sounds of dub-reggae and the electro-pop bands like Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode and given a different twist via The Art of Noise and early hip hop and recycled psychedelia. Towards the end of the 80s rave culture had diversified into different forms connected to music such as Acid House and Acid Jazz and would continue to diversify into the 90s. Rave culture thrived from the mid-80s to the end of the century and beyond.

The Usenet and BBS subculture had developed an element called Slashdot subculture which involved its own forms of ettiquette and behaviour patterns both social and anti-social and the phenomena of trolling, spamming, flaming etc. The computer subculture was also influenced by Fictional subcultures of the future to be read about in cyberpunk literature.

The 1990s

The 1990s saw most of the subcultures of the eighties continuing in some form or another. The music and clothes changed more than the sense of identity associated with the cultures. Dance music continued. Raves continued. Pop continued. Hip hop continued. Rock continued. Goth continued. Punks and Hippies were back. 80s Valley Girl looks were recycled in Japan as Kogal. Sixties styles like Mod bands and psychedelia were revived and recycled. There were, within rock and dance music, some variations like grunge within rock or drum and bass within dance styles but these and others were just musical styles, not radically different mindsets representing actual subcultures. Even the term Generation X or Gen X refers to a condition experienced equally by previous generations and presented in a published form by journalists and novelists as if it were a new phenomenon. Alternative society elements continued as DIY Culture. Important musical-cum-social movements included house, rave, techno, trance, hardcore, handbag, garage, electronica, Crusty, pagan techno.

The main new technological development of the 90s was the internet. As the 1980s ended and the 90s began Tim Berners-Lee created HTML which made possible the World Wide Web. Importantly, the web allowed internet subcultures to grow from tiny numbers of geeks, to big global online communities. These communities are as diverse in their preoccupations as any other subcultures. Despite its geek-leaning origins, the internet soon became the focus for subcultures of all kinds and towards the end of the decade, the internet became "cool" rather than geekish. Online gaming communities, online forums, online projects of all kinds, serious or frivlous sprang up against this backdrop.

As always, coffeehouses are a gathering place for subcultures. In the 90s some new ones sprang up offering internet access with the coffee: Internet cafes.

In the 90s, there was an increase in anti-globalisation protests. These had been taking place since the 1970s, but the World Wide Web made it possible for isolated groups of the anti-global movement to get into close and regular contact with each other. They became more of a single community of protest and developed an international alternative media. And yet at the same time globalisation and global capitalism reached a cogency and stride that had never been accomplished before; Capitalism won final victory over Communism and the free market won out against Socialism; whereas before capitalism had been the preserve of the conservative estblishment, subcultures realised that free markets and capitalism gave them more power than before and the power to pick away at the establishment's strangle-hold on wealthy, property and business ownership, for example with the Fair Trade movement. The Genie was out of the bottle and this was compounded by the people-power of the internet.

Also of note in the 90s was the first successful deliberate, commercial creations of subcultures around various groups or ideas. Based rooted in the music of the nu metal and mallcore scenes in America, these included Juggalos, based around fans of the band Insane Clown Posse, Maggots, based around the band Slipknot and Ghoulscouts, based around the band The Murderdolls. It should be noted that these subcultures are not particularly large or strong compared to many of the naturally evolved subcultures, and in many cases form only a secondary subcultural identity: the possible exception being Juggalos, who have their own slang terms, jewellery, modes of address, styles of dress and makeup and music scene, centered around bands with a musical similarity to the Insane Clown Posse, mainly on Psychopathic Records. These artificially created youth movements are reminiscent of the fictional street gangs in William Ford Gibson's 1980s cyberpunk trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. The similarity seems to be the result of increasing influence back and forth between fact and fiction in the way contemporary culture is generated.

The fancy dress of the 1970s freakscene and 1980s new romantics found its most enthusiastic devotees amongst the youth of Japan. In the 90s a great many varieties of fancy dress fashions became common in Japan. Examples: Visual kei, Gothic Lolita.

The 2000's

So far the 2000's seem to have produced little in the way of their own unique subcultures. The internet seems to have replaced people's need to form large, distinct social tribes in and with which they socialise with the ability to seek out even tiny groups of people with whom one shares beliefs or passions, courtesy of the internet. Subcultures from all decades since WWII persist and few have died out. Popular culture is dominated by rehashes of old ideas but very little genuinely new experimentation. If any thing, the people are the entertainment with the advent of reality television shows.

Noise and Experimental music have begun to receive a large underground following. Recent attention has come to this subsculture with some cross-over success with the Indie Rock scene through bands such as Wolf Eyes and Smegma. The noise subculture now supports several large annual festivals such as New York City's No Fun Fest and Seattle's Wooden Octopus Skull Festival. The noise and experimental subscultures have formed from the cultural input of goth, industrial, punk, diyindie, and rave subcultures, as well as from 20th century avant-garde composers. Recent influence has been seeping in from Hip Hop culture. These subcultures assert the individuality and anti-mainstream attitudes, by consuming other subcultures, and distilling their essence into a new form of "music" that will never see radio airplay. The noise and experimental subcultures are so out-there and contradictory to mainstream sensibilities that you're left with a subsculture equally made up of people so unhip as to be hip and so hip as to be unhip. However this is an exact analogy to the original Punk and Goth movements, which continues the 2000s' pattern of rehashing old ideas. Culture, to that extent, is now largely remixable.

See also

Books (both fiction and non-fiction) on related matters:

Cultural history | Subcultures | 20th century

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "History of subcultures in the 20th century".

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