By: Me
On punk, goth, pop, whatever you call yourself.
everybody feels like they need to belong to something. the fact that it so often is separated by genres of music is coincidence, or just convenient for the musicians, granting them much recognition in their genre by their dedicated fans clad in their spikes and mohawks, low cut jeans and spaghetti strap shirts, or black makeup and tall buckled boots. the rivalry between sects is to be expected. hostility can’t be avoided between peoples who choose to be different from eachother.
What bothers me, though, is the idea of “posers”. a girl who wears a lot of sparkly, studded belts and listens to blink 182 and new found glory calls herself punk, and is berrated for it by a girl who makes her own clothes out of old socks and shoelaces, and listens to rancid and operation ivy, because she "doesn’t get what punk is realy about. the truth is, that they are both punk because they both want to be. but there are more then one kind, i suppose. the point is, that you are whatever you want to be, because that’s who you identify with. there are a whole lot of “posers” of any given style, hence creating their own style. much like any of the other’s came about.
By others i mean goth, punk, grunge, thug, metalhead, etc. in general, these kinds of schisms are generated by a small group of people who don't agree with, or don't work well in the mainstream culture of their surroundings. thus creating the necessary friction for them to break off from the mainstream and create their own little puddle. from this primordial soup of culture comes music, art, poetry, and other products that trickle into the main stream to draw more entities into the subculture they came from, thus causing it to grow into the phenomenon known often as rebellious youth, because most partakers of the subculture are younger and were less set in the ways of the mainstream culture they started out in. ..where was i going with this?...oh yeah. the subculture that first started out with just a few people who wanted to be different from everybody else grows so large that it even rivals that from which it branched away from. people associated with any given subculture have it's signatures all over it. for the sake of example i'll use punk: sometimes wear spikes, but mostly just miscelaneous armbands. some paid for, but in most cases makeshift. often wear clothes they make themselves, or buy from specialty stores at outrageous prices.
Crazy spiked hair is popular, often with color that was never meant to grace the hair of any human being in nature. they have slogans like “@$#% society”, on their backpacks, and wear monochromatic tee-shirts of varying quality shouting the names of their favorite punk bands. the mindset of a punk tends to go something along the lines of “i could care less what people think i look like, i’m not buying baggy pants”. from this radical subculture, which to my knowledge started in the early 80’s, though i could easily be wrong, myself not being steeped in the histories of punk, branched other subcultures. preppy punks, for example, are those who didn’t quite let go of the pop they came from. slogans like “you laugh at me because i’m different, i laugh at you because you’re all the same” grace cars and backpacks alike, shouting to the reader that this person is diffent from everybody else. unfortunately, the plain fact of the matter is that this person who is laughing at the majority for being the same just has to look over his/her shoulder at who is behind them to see that everybody on their side looks the same as well. thus, i come to the conclusion that every attempt to be different ultimately resorts to the same product.
Nothing more then a second mainstream, sitting high on their pedestal of originality. most punks look like most preps with studs, and a large group goths look like a large group of grungies with black clothes and upside-down crosses on their shirts. the ultimate product is equal to it’s origin with different clothes and a different beat to it’s music. the same goes for any culture or subculture, thus making slogans like “you laugh at me because i’m different, i laugh at you because you’re all the same” completely ludicrous when one steps back and gets a sideways look at the situation.
Ditto, Vorpy! I ain’t even going to try reading that until someone makes it more readable.
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