Posts matching tags 'subculture'
2008/1/23
A bus company in Yorkshire is facing accusations of discrimination against alternative lifestyles after a Goth leading his girlfriend on a leash was stopped from boarding a bus:
"Our primary concern is passenger safety and while the couple are very welcome to travel on our buses, we are asking that Miss Maltby remove her dog lead before boarding the bus.
"It could be dangerous for the couple and other passengers if a driver had to brake sharply while Miss Maltby was wearing the lead."Which raises the issue of when does something becomes discrimination. Is there a difference between Goths (who, in this case, are presumably BDSM fetishists or Goreans or something as well; AFAIK, this sort of thing is not a fundamental part of the Goth subculture) leading each other on leashes and, say, some Muslim women covering their faces? Both behaviours are at odds with the accepted social norms. If there is a difference, is it because religious justficiations automatically bear more weight than non-religious ones?
While we're on the subject of multiculturalism in the UK: a childrens' educational CD-ROM based on the story of the Three Little Pigs has been rejected from a government agency's annual awards because it may offend Muslims.
2006/10/16
This month's Observer Music Monthly is a special issue guest-edited by Jarvis Cocker, and featuring a number of interesting things, among them, a round-table discussion of whether music still matters, including Nick Cave, Paul Morley and Cocker himself:
Nick Cave: People have been married to my music ... and I just don't think it would be very cool for them to switch on the TV and 'The Ship Song' comes on a Cornetto ad or something.
Paul Morley: It was as if all the boy bands and girl bands had wiped away the illusion of coolness created by the record industry, so they had to rehabilitate the illusion of cool. So a boy band, who would usually sit on stools like a bunch of Val Doonicans, held their guitars to kind of signify they were in rock. And after that came a flood of guitar bands - as if it was 1983 again, but without the politics. It was just that that kind of music by now felt comfortable enough for the mainstream. So that's why I blame Busted.
Antony Hegarty: My friends [the group] CocoRosie went to Brazil to play a concert, and their music isn't distributed in Brazil but there were 2,000 people there singing along; they knew all the words. But their record isn't even in the shops in Brazil!One could argue that CocoRacist's record company missed a trick in not having investigators at the show photographing/identifying those singing along so that they can be sued for piracy in the future. Perhaps their shareholders could sue them for failure to maximise profits?
Paul Morley: But going back to the beginning of the conversation, lots of people form bands now as if it's a career choice they're making. Because of certain TV audition shows, and the materialism of hip hop, you can actually envisage a career in pop music now, whereas back in our day, you would just make a song at a time, and go from week to week. The thrill of playing a gig and you never knew when or where it would end ...Elsewhere in the issue, there is a piece on what today's music-savvy teenagers are up to
The Underage Club could be the hippest show in town right now - it's just slightly hard to tell, because unless you're 18 or under, you won't be let in. The idea is that Sam puts on bands such as Pink Grease and the fantastically of-this-moment the Horrors - his particular favourites - to an audience of dressed-up kids who want to party hard but who normally aren't allowed into licensed music venues. 'Strictly No Arctic Monkeys,' it says in the online advertising, because they're too obvious and probably too old, and instead the club DJs spin a wide selection of tunes ranging from Sixties garage rock to early-Nineties riot grrrl and grunge. 'There'd be more Francoise Hardy if I had my way,' says Sam, smiling. 'But, y'know, I guess you've got to appeal to the masses.'It's reassuring to see that the abundance of access to diverse varieties of music is producing a generation of superhipsters with encyclopædic knowledge of esoteric genres and influences (some dating back to their grandparents' time), a DIY ethic the smarter post-punks would be proud of and acutely refined taste.
The article continues with a breakdown of today's freaky teen fashion:
An anthropologist might put them in the general class of indie kids, but they are loosely split into two different groups. There are the new ravers, who listen to bands such as Klaxons and the group second on the bill today, Trash Fashion. New ravers mix and match the skinny jeans and floppy hair of the classic indie look with the fluorescent fabrics of Nineties rave culture (Day-Glo face paint and tacky plastic accessories included). None of them is old enough to have danced with 20,000 people in a field back in the heyday of rave; rather, some might have been conceived back there and then.
Then there is the look made newly fashionable by today's headliners, the Horrors, which involves a dressier version of the classic goth look. It's achieved by painstakingly rummaging for the finest Victorian-looking garms and brought to life by some ghoulish make-up and lashings of hairspray. These kids don't have a name for themselves yet, but there are certainly shades of the Cramps and early Nick Cave.
One subculture not represented is emo - punk's pale-faced and more introspective offspring. 'It's not that I have a personal vendetta against them,' says Sam. 'It's just they have an embarrassing reputation. They do cringey things like cut themselves at parties, say stupid things, and just have terrible style. Not the kind of people I want at my night.'Though not everyone is optimistic about popular music culture in the age of the iPod, MySpace and last.fm; former KLFer turned grumpy old man Bill Drummond argues the case that all music is shite, and proposes a No Music Day:
Further on, Turner laureate Jeremy Deller looks at Depeche Mode fandom. Apparently the Mode are big in Russia, partly (as he argues) due to the cleanly futuristic yet melancholy sound of their music appealing to the Russian soul.
2005/9/26
Sociologists attempt to answer that most baffling of questions: why do we have Goths?
"Sometimes you'll find that people who were low status in the school environment will suddenly find this new group in which the things that they do are considered much more high-status, credit-worthy things," he said.
And he added that particularly noticeable was the role of relatively feminine men in the goth scene.
"At school they were either bullied or just not really noticed too much," he said. "Suddenly they discover goth music, and they find themselves in an environment where actually, to be feminine as a man is rather valued, and suddenly girls are rather interested in you. "I think it's an alternative set of values which renders people - who previously didn't have status - desirable."That's not quote the explanation I heard (i.e., that wearing black PVC fetishwear, smoking extra-carcinogenic Indonesian cigarettes and cultivating an appreciation of laughable Teutonic fascist-themed dance pop is the best way for spotty, awkward geeks to get
2003/11/4
A piece about "furries", a growing subculture of people who identify themselves as anthropomorphic cartoon animals, and which may or may not be a sexual fetish, depending on whom you ask:
On condition of anonymity, the author of a G-rated a comic book featuring an animal character described his experience at a Furry convention he was invited to attend, and how revolted he was by the horny Furs he encountered. They have convinced themselves that all writers and artists who have ever placed a talking animal in a story must in fact be closet Furries at best, and that surely those creators would not be disturbed by the sexuality of Furry fandom, he says. This includes even the classics like Bugs Bunny, the Pink Panther, and Mickey Mouse.
"It's rough if youre a transsexual its even rougher if you try to explain that you're a cat in a human body," says another Furry fan, who bemoaned the fact that Furries cant opt to surgically change their species in the way transexuals can change their gender.
These conversations are typical of what one will find at Furry conventions, scheduled alongside social events like dances and talent shows. Scattered here and there in private hotel rooms, one might also find places like The Nursery where adult babies can get diapered and Fursuit dry-humping orgies, or Plushie parties, where people who disdain or cant find human sexual partners stick their organs into an SPH (strategically placed hole) torn into a carnival prize raccoon. But most of the Furries who get laid at the convention will probably hook up through mutual interests, physical attraction, flirtatious conversation, and a few drinks, just like everybody else does.
Apparently there are now "furry nights" at nightclubs in the US. Could Furry be the next Goth or something like that? (If so, I wonder how long until "furry" musical projects start appearing, and what they'll sound like. Or, indeed, until we see veteran Furries bemoaning the influx of trendy normals in tiger suits from Hot Topic or Dangerfield or someplace.)
2003/8/13
Warren Ellis (he who knows all too many scary goth camgirls) writes a commentary on the intersection of the geek/tech and goth subcultures:
Sometimes I think of LiveJournal as the world's biggest technogoth community. LJ has been both lauded and derided as a space for people with black clothes and strange hair to work out their alienation and disaffection in electronic public. That hasn't stopped it being successful, and it hasn't stopped it being a tool for national and international networking. As a piece of "social software," it's not flawless, but its influence and effect has been huge. If nothing else, several thousand alt.models, often very ambitious and creative, seem to have hooked up together with this thing. An army could be formed. That would be an army worth supporting with taxes. In fact, it could probably be paid for by Paypal donation links.
(Though I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the idea of goths forming an underground army. It's too easy to imagine paramilitary groups of real-life Blackshirts, motivated by the nihilistic tirades of Marilyn Manson and the cryptofascist bombast of VNV Nation, and filled with contempt for the inferiors who wear coloured clothing. First they came for the jocks, but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a jock, and so on. But I digress)
Though I was wondering whether LiveJournal was another one of those Gothic Internet Startups of the Not-So-Long Boom, like Dimension X (now part of Microsoft) and Netizen (no longer around). I once had the idea of a parallel history where the boom doesn't end, and the goth subculture evolves into a sort of tech-industry freemasonry, with membership and initiation essential for getting any sort of consulting gigs; and the usual goth-club "courtly intrigues" and catfights happening behind the scenes. It'd make a decent setting for a story or a novel.
2003/1/23
According to a recent A Word A Day a "goth" is "a rude or uncivilized person". So it's synonymous with "mook" then?
(Which other youth subcultures are named after words for disagreeable people? There's punk, for one.)
(Thanks to Cos)
2002/6/27
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Bootywhang: A piece on the rise of 'alternaporn' sites. These are independently-run online soft- to medium-core porn sites with subcultural themes (raver, goth, geek, punk, and others), 'real' models who often have online journals, and a distinct paucity of the ugly, degrading, exploitative material that your typical spamvertised commercial porn site pushes. And, perhaps surprisingly, many of their subscribers are heterosexual women.
"I want to take the sketchiness and smuttiness out of porn," said Chase Lisbon, 28, who launched Supercult in August 2001. "I don't use words like tits or ass or pussy anywhere on the site." Supercult is a mod-styled website featuring pictures of naked hipsters posing with Lambretta scooters and Star Wars action figures. Chase estimates that 30 percent of the site's paying users are female.
(Well, someone had to put Mod revivalism/retro hipsterism and porn together sometime...)
Anyway, as far as porn has been with us since the Etruscan era, if not cave paintings, and is likely to be with us as long as we have sex and symbols, it's a good thing to know that it's not all misanthropic, envelope-pushing brutality and ugliness ("Teenage sluts get banged hard by farm animals!"), and that perhaps porn can be humanistic and positive. Of course, the religious right don't agree. (via bOING bOING)