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.
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.
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.