Is the dream of the underground dead?

[Harkat]

Inspired by a discussion in the 5 Panel techno thread

People have always wanted to look a bit cool and I doubt it was any different back in the detroit techno/berlin techno/chicago house/london jungle/garage/dubstep eras people idiolize (myself included).

I genuinely think people these days are a lot more shallow and so there are greater instances of people just being scenesters/bandwagoners. Back in the day it was a lot easier to be cool and edgy via pop music/culture and now the arse has dropped out of that there is a need to turn to the 'underground'. An 'underground' that has been increasingly commercialised since the early 90s, so much so that the underground is in fact just a re-branded facet of pop music/culture.

Is there really any kind of counter-culture any more? Will the youth stand up for anything coherently again or have they been beaten into conformity?

are most youngsters happy with the £20 + bf pre-packaged 'rave' experience?

So yeah, this along with factors like the internet possibly rubbing out the distinctiveness, community sense and collective ethos of subcultures.

Any thoughts?

[wub]

are most youngsters happy with the £20 + bf pre-packaged 'rave' experience?

Yes, because most of them don't know any better. The PrePackRave (henceforth known as PPR) is accessible, has music by artists they've heard of thanks to daytime radio exposure, and is well marketed via social media sites.

The PPR falls into the same bracket as Beats By Dre headphones and KRK Rokit monitors - if they are your first foray into the given field, they are marketed well, have visible branding, and catering for the common denominator...but if you start to take a more specialised interest in headphones/monitors/raving, you'll soon realise there are better alternatives on the market.

[Nihilism]

What's a PrePackRave? Never heard of that nonsens.

[Harkat]

But even really good DJs fit uner that bill these days. It's not like PPR only offers Nicky Romero and shit. Even the really "underground" DJs play like that. Maybe not *quite* as expensive as 20 P but does that make a difference?

[wub]

But even really good DJs fit uner that bill these days. It's not like PPR only offers Nicky Romero and shit. Even the really "underground" DJs play like that. Maybe not *quite* as expensive as 20 P but does that make a difference?

I wouldn't say so. Outside of the big name EDM lot, there isn't as much money in DJing as there was in the early 00s heyday...unless you're the man in the corner with the bag of pills.

[Harkat]

What's a PrePackRave? Never heard of that nonsens.

Going to Fabric or MoS instead of the old warehouse/field venue I suppose

[Muncey]

[Riddles]

What's a PrePackRave? Never heard of that nonsens.

quite common for students. get a ticket, tee shirt and sometimes even a bus to the venue. Get "big" DJ and a few radio 1 DJs and charge £30 each.

[magma]

The Internet didn't kill the underground, it liberated it.

The underground was only ever 'underground' because people found it difficult to find friends that were into the same niches as them - it wasn't so much a dream as a deeply unsatisfactory state of affairs that people tried their hardest to convince themselves was a good thing. The Internet means that even if you can only get excited by Organic Bulgarian Gnomestep you'll be able to find someone to talk to about it... and, of course, someone who thinks your taste is 'obvious' and that you should really be listening to Pre-2005 Organic Bulgarian Gnomestep because it's totally jumped the shark in recent years.

[Pedro Sánchez]

The Internet didn't kill the underground, it liberated it.

The underground was only ever 'underground' because people found it difficult to find friends that were into the same niches as them - it wasn't so much a dream as a deeply unsatisfactory state of affairs that people tried their hardest to convince themselves was a good thing. The Internet means that even if you can only get excited by Organic Bulgarian Gnomestep you'll be able to find someone to talk to about it... and, of course, someone who thinks your taste is 'obvious' and that you should really be listening to Pre-2005 Organic Bulgarian Gnomestep because it's totally jumped the shark in recent years.

Organic Bulgarian Gnomestep, does this have a forum yet?

[AxeD]

What's a PrePackRave? Never heard of that nonsens.

I guess they mean like I Love Techno, including travel etc..

I don't see any problem though. We get great events with either small or big names, setting can vary
from dark club, to industrial hall to forest etc.. Ticket prices between €5,- and €60,-.
There have always been a lot of people who don't look any further than the big events. They pack up their glowsticks and travel for hours to see the next hype. I don't mind.

Maybe there's 6 overhyped big events for every 2 good ones, but in a big city that amounts
to plenty of choice.

[hubb]

I already told you guys about Bleunk yesterday.

[sixs]

is dimensions underground PPR

[alphacat]

I'm old enough to actually have witnessed the transition mentioned in the OP, specifically when the mainstream started actively co-opting counterculture on a scale it had never tried before.

The timeline as I understand it goes like this:

the sixties happened (I was not alive, did not see this part) and the culture industry (records, movies, tv, advertising) got caught with its pants down in a big way. People went from buying Frankie Avalon records to Jefferson Airplane records overnight and nobody in a position to profit had a clue what was going on. By the time the mainstream got a little bit hip, the high water mark had already broken.

The seventies brought punk & new wave (some would argue the latter was a watered down version of the former created for marketing purposes) and again, the culture industry didn't see it coming. While everybody on TV in the late seventies had massive sideburns and beards and giant permed hairdos and wide collars and polyester leisure suits, they would - again - fumble to catch the zeitgeist and by the time skinny ties and short bleached hairdos had hit the mainstream less than 5 years later, the '77 wave of punk had also peaked as a dynamo of new culture.

The eighties brought hip hop, and the culture industry begrudgingly acknowledged it a little earlier than the last two times. By the end of the eighties and well into the nineties the "urban music" market had been successfully co-opted into the mainstream (leaving behind pesky artifacts of consciousness & dissent like Public Enemy) - and when the rumblings of the underground began to be heard in the Pacific Northwest, they were ready for it. Grunge was nothing more than a marketing term slapped onto an existing aesthetically loosely-shared post-punk/metal scene. Rave too didn't take long to get re-branded and sold to kids in Iowa as well (I remember walking into a Macy's store in 1993 or so and they had both grunge and rave fashion lines for teens... shirts with holes in them already... overalls with whistles attached...)

---

What the culture vultures had figured out by this point was that they didn't have to bet the farm on just one "mainstream" - that all of these subcultures we used to call the underground were just new marketing demographics that were growing at the same rate as the population. So many untapped markets!

Which is why you see ridiculous shit these days fasttracked to total cultural ubiquity; they don't even care if the stuff bubbles up organically from the ghettoes and suburbs like it used to - they're quite happy to synthesize a 'perfect' movement to fit their mathematically modeled zeitgeist, and the commercial EDM circuit is a prime example of this.

---

All this being said, there is still an underground, but it has an identity problem to a certain degree because in the old days it knew where it stood: firmly in opposition to the dreck found aboveground. But since that they know that even they can be bought and sold (I still remember the first time i heard DnB in a Taco Bell; it was 1998) ... now there's both a fear of succeeding and a fear of not succeeding/getting bought out.

[Laszlo]

are most youngsters happy with the £20 + bf pre-packaged 'rave' experience?

...but if you start to take a more specialised interest in headphones/monitors/raving, you'll soon realise there are better alternatives on the market.

That Ram where I saw you last is a perfect example of what I mean by a PPR. Is there anything on the market better than that?

The Internet didn't kill the underground, it liberated it.

The underground was only ever 'underground' because people found it difficult to find friends that were into the same niches as them - it wasn't so much a dream as a deeply unsatisfactory state of affairs that people tried their hardest to convince themselves was a good thing.

This is only true if you grew up in the sticks.

[kay]

There's always going to be an "underground" that sets itself up as being different from the mainstream.

The only difference now is that the mainstream is much quicker at co-opting the current crop of underground streams, so much so that oldskool hardcore mole men aren't able to jump off to the next underground stream because they haven't realised what's happening.

But fear not, there's always going to be someone in some tiny room somewhere making random sounds that sound like a new type of music.

[nowaysj]

I think the only underground that can exist now, is outside of the reach of google, ie not on the internet. Music and people that don't exist on the internet.

[Be-1ne]

something new will come around. or go back underground....

best example is D&B the biggest underground genre that never sold out and never went away and now looks like its about to come back with an almighty vengeance.

Nothing will ever match it, but smaller scenes will co exist. And I think Dubstep is the most likely to survive due in part tot he fact it has a physical presence in the records labels have released. all these other pony sub-genres that exist only online will die out as the creators grow up and realise they will not be super starts from puting shit tunes on youtube.

[ezza]

i find it funny when people think they're going some bare underground ting that no one knows about and 2000 ppl turn up

thats more than what u get at your average sleezy top 10 club

id say between the age group of 18-30 'undergound' is more commercial than 'commercial' is lol

[nousd]

nothing is underground until it's over & people realize how good it was
so dreaming of the underground is either an exercise in nostalgia
or a premonition of a night flowering, yet to be undervalued.

furthermore, dreams of the underground are primarily in smellavision,
the dampness of echoing catacombs mixing with the scent of elation
while eidetic pinpricks of jangling synesthesia escape capture

Nothing is underground until it's over and has escaped capture.