I think in general since the early 2000's it's just really hard to find and connect with anyone who likes the same things. It's like everything has become really mainstream and really specific at the same time. I do miss hearing about cool vintage online shops directly from friends like back in high school, as opposed to hearing about it in videos, but we can still rely on the vibe when we're in person. Some ppl definitely have that alt vibe lol no matter how they dress.
Oh my god “mainstream but also really specific” is SUCH a good way to describe it. Like everyone has to have some sort of restrictive “aesthetic” and if you’re not like that 100% perfectly all of the time (and posting it online constantly), you’re not good enough. I think it’s partially because most people’s social lives are nearly entirely online now bc of the pandemic. It’s like highschool cliques (but with grownass adults too) but you feel pressured to fit in even in your own home.
It’s also important to educate oneself on the history of subcultures because we want to avoid replicating things that are offensive or appropriative of marginalised groups. Punks used to wear swastikas in order to shock people. Some punks wore swastikas because they were actual neo-Nazis.
There’s also problems with abuse and sexual assault in (apparently) every music scene; racism, homophobia, transphobia, and general bigotry and harm. I’m not trying to cancel anyone or even argue that you shouldn’t engage with a subculture because it has a dark side, but you need to know what people did wrong in the past so you can keep from repeating it in the future. No amount of rebellion or edge or style means anything if you aren’t listening to the voices of the people you’re supposedly on the side of.
I was 15 when the Sex pistols, The Damned and the Clash broke through in the UK. I then heard A Forest by The Cure in 1980 and Goth became my go to. 42 years later and I'm still into the Alternate L/s and at nearly 59 I really am a elder Goth who's never really grown up.
In my city there was a big alt community and I missed going to the shows, but when I saw alt aesthetics becoming a trend I was like “this is literally how people in my city look”
I wish I lived in a city like that. Some places it’s hard to find your local scene or whatever. You’re so lucky to have a community that’s large and open :)
Good video. I'd like to add that alternative culture has its roots long before the 1950's Mod era. The Romantics and Bohemians of the 1800s were seen as the counter-culture of the Victorian period, questioning social norms and influencing avant garde styles in later decades. The "trendification" of alt styles tends to come and go, but there always have been (and will always be) social outcasts, who seek refuge in a lifestyle that is separate from the mainstream.
Thank you so much for making this video! Now we need a series about subcultures, because now more and more people join the community, as you said, without any idea of what the community is about, we need more easily accessible information with the basic info about the subject of their interest You're amazing, Rayne🖤
just gonna type out some thoughts that popped up for me watching this 😱i'm 25 now and i related to going up to alternative people and hoping to have similar interests and make friends, but then having nothing in common. It's pretty isolating and harder to make alternative friends than before, especially since leaving school/uni circles. I get very nostalgic for school friends, going to concerts together, sharing music and just sitting around outside in a park or whatever hanging out and having fun, being in a little school band with my friends where we covered alternative rock songs!! Lotta nostalgia aha but I lost contact due to distance and people going off to uni. It seems like a lot of the culture is now online, on tik tok, twitter or discord groups with mostly younger people. But I just don't vibe with these online places D: I've found it really hard to find people for literal years with all these factors!
I just call myself alternative. 😅 I don’t listen to goth music as much as Emo music, Goth, gothic, and emo styles are my shit. With a little seam, egirl/eboy steampunk even. Mother mother, MCR, Green Day, evanescence, imagine dragons are my music. Edger Allen Poe, dystopian, non-fiction, modern psychological horror, classic gothic romance is my book tastes. 😂 You don’t gotta label it, we can be just us. It’s cool.
Congrats on getting medicated. I was terrified of getting medicated for my ADHD until like, a month ago, and honestly it’s like night and day. If it’s right for you, by all means take medication! All the shit about it making you into a zombie or whatever shouldn’t happen if you’re on the right meds, by the way. I was on an SSRI for ages and it made me feel like shit but I thought that was normal because of the narrative surrounding them. Turns out it wasn’t, and I ended up switching to a different SSRI and I feel way better. Don’t be afraid to look at your options.
Yea I took medication in high school. All SSRIs. They gave me that zombie feeling and it made me swear off meds. I’m happy I finally found the right thing for me
When I was a teenager, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the situation was quite problematic... I think the old punks and metalheads are no longer relevant today as they were then. The young alternative urban tribes such as the Emos, the Pop Punks or the Mall Goths were despised by the underground subcultures of the 20th century. Honestly, I started to be interested in dark underground subcultures when I was a teenager because... I was a bit weird... and I thought that edgy look was cool and I preferred rock misic to pop and EDM... and later I understood the rest of the philosophy I lived in a small place and didn't fully identify with punk, but the only alternative people in my town were a group of punks who became my friends. This situation influenced me because I couldn't choose friends with similar tendencies to mine and I had to get closer to punks so as not to be socially marginalized. Slowly and unconsciously I adapted my musical influences, my lifestyle, my clothes and my ideals to punk. Finally in 2010 I went to university and with the explosion of alternative internet cultures I was able to form my own identity. The problem with gatekeeping is that until the 2000s there were only 3 or 4 subcultures from which you could choose with a very specific aesthetic and way of living. Today there are infinite possibilities and the old punks and metalheads don't understand the young people who don't fit in their traditional patterns. There is a generational gap between boomers and genx that separates them from millennials and genz in the way they understand alternative subcultures. Great video, greetings from Spain
As far as I know, there were definitely alternative subcultures long before the mods, even in Britain! Teddy boys were already old guard by the time mods were around and even they were wearing a Victorian style of jacket throwing back to even older styles. And there were several reasons mods and rockers were at a divide not just rock vs jazz. Mods were modern by definition, and rockers mostly descended from teddy boys and had some very outdated and prejudice views. They listened to rockabilly and were not the “new” tradition, they were the retro 50s styled. Where mods embraced soul, rnb, rocksteady and ska music, all new and multicultural styles of music. Even mods eventually split into factions with soft mods leaning more towards middle class values and into the 60s hippiedom and hard mods being the framework to lead to the beginnings of skinhead, with working class styles and ska music. Eventually when punks came around all of these things were there own distinct tribes and all butted heads. Which goes to show how many different things inform alternative currents now a-days. Alt as we all see it now is very much a giant umbrella and generalizing term and in some ways even reducing many of these subcultures and counter cultures to being more or less just looks and styles instead of lifestyles and cultures Love these kinds of history and video essay vids 👍
I've always been drawn to alternative fashion, but I struggled (and still struggle) with differentiating and knowing about genres of music and subcultures, and it can get confusing knowing which subculture something fits into. This has kind of kept me from involving myself with anything, and only kind of dressing similarly. It's been unfortunate honestly, but I'd rather that than be rude or ignore history because I don't know of it. So this video has been pretty helpful. So thanks
I hate how i come up to people who look goth and whne we talk about bands it becomes immediately clear they only dress up and know nothing about goth yet say yes when i ask "are you goth?" Then i try to tlak about bands but it gets awkward and i just stop talking abouf bands and music all together. From almost all the people ive aksed only 2 were actually goth or knew anyhting about goth past the main 5: bauhaus, siouxsie and the Banshees, the cure and sister of mercy. This sounds good but these people never go past knowing one song from each band or just knowing the band name. You arent goth if over the past 2 years those are the only goth bands you know. Also im from California and yes, theres a shit ton of people who dress edgy or alternative and know nothing of alternative music except emo rap or mgk and stuff... apart from this, ive seen this topic brought up a lot but its always by people who arent alternarive but spealjng from a perspective as an outsider which is nice but never that indept like this. Thnaks for saying ur opinion as an alternative person!!
I think mod was definitely not the first alternative style, even in the 1950s (although it sounds like such a unrealistic stereotype) greasers were definitely a subculture compared to the norm and even back in the 19th century there were controversial alternative fashion fads such as tight lacing corsets and I’m sure it has happened somewhere even before then
Regarding goth, not all goth music came out of post-punk! Slightly before the British post-punk goth era started, Californians invented deathrock. Deathrock is a goth subgenre that came directly out of punk, instead of post-punk. :) (there’s actually some debate about if deathrock should be considered goth or its own thing, but that’s a lot to get into)
Can I ask you where you get all od these informations? I'm so impresed by this video. I want to know all this stuff about alt history too. More videos like this please. I love this.
I recommend reading books!! My recommendation would be Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. It’s my fav book. Just go to any local music biography section at a book store and pick something that looks interesting.
I like A lot of music including goth, punk and emo. I think I should identify as alternative because even with fashion I'm eclectic. Coz I see it as an umbrella term, one that could be used to describe someone like me who doesn't really fit into one subculture.
Oh it’ll def get out of mainstream trends eventually. Idk at this point I’m convinced everything will be both in and out of trend at the same time alll the time based on our current attention spans lol
Gatekeeping isn't a binary black/white thing, newbies have to meet the existing culture halfway. It's not unreasonable for people who are actually living the lifestyle to be hostile to stereotypical "instagram tourists", but at the same time everyone was new once and there's no future in a scene that totally excludes new blood.
To paraphrase Mark Fischer in Capitalist Realism, Alternative and Independent are not outside the mainstream but are the mainstream. and they have been for decades. Tell me if youve met a person that doesnt want to be independent or different, especially in the era of capitalist realism. I dont take issue with this video outside of that. . I can't abide anyone saying it isnt mainstream because the cultural cycle has Hauntology to rehash all cultural trends because new culture is not progressing fast enough for trends to do anything but repeat the past, "haunt" it. That was the effort of the Post-modernists. to Critique culture and I think it was Derrida who popularised the idea of Hauntology until Fischer expanded on it in "Ghosts of my Life" My only problem is that saying modern cultural trends arent mainstream is just a lack of education on their part. from not paying attention. All cultural products fall into a mainstream category because nothing new is being created fast enough for new culture to cement itself.
There's not really an 'alt culture'. There are many different subcultures that are within the alt umbrella. Like punk or goth. You'll have a much easier time narrowing it down. Subcultures have their own culture so it's hard to say what 'alt ideology' would be without picking a specific type of alt.
I think in general since the early 2000's it's just really hard to find and connect with anyone who likes the same things. It's like everything has become really mainstream and really specific at the same time. I do miss hearing about cool vintage online shops directly from friends like back in high school, as opposed to hearing about it in videos, but we can still rely on the vibe when we're in person. Some ppl definitely have that alt vibe lol no matter how they dress.
Oh my god “mainstream but also really specific” is SUCH a good way to describe it. Like everyone has to have some sort of restrictive “aesthetic” and if you’re not like that 100% perfectly all of the time (and posting it online constantly), you’re not good enough. I think it’s partially because most people’s social lives are nearly entirely online now bc of the pandemic. It’s like highschool cliques (but with grownass adults too) but you feel pressured to fit in even in your own home.
It’s also important to educate oneself on the history of subcultures because we want to avoid replicating things that are offensive or appropriative of marginalised groups. Punks used to wear swastikas in order to shock people. Some punks wore swastikas because they were actual neo-Nazis.
There’s also problems with abuse and sexual assault in (apparently) every music scene; racism, homophobia, transphobia, and general bigotry and harm.
I’m not trying to cancel anyone or even argue that you shouldn’t engage with a subculture because it has a dark side, but you need to know what people did wrong in the past so you can keep from repeating it in the future. No amount of rebellion or edge or style means anything if you aren’t listening to the voices of the people you’re supposedly on the side of.
You make such great points. This is definitely another reason to keep yourself informed :)
I was 15 when the Sex pistols, The Damned and the Clash broke through in the UK. I then heard A Forest by The Cure in 1980 and Goth became my go to. 42 years later and I'm still into the Alternate L/s and at nearly 59 I really am a elder Goth who's never really grown up.
hi ! do you have any bands you’d recommend to someone younger trying to get into it ? thanks !
@@hubbabubba5393 Him, Bauhaus, Theatre des Vampires, Blutengel are very good easier to listen to types but still with a Goth Aesthetic.
In my city there was a big alt community and I missed going to the shows, but when I saw alt aesthetics becoming a trend I was like “this is literally how people in my city look”
I wish I lived in a city like that. Some places it’s hard to find your local scene or whatever. You’re so lucky to have a community that’s large and open :)
Which city? I wanna know now so I can visit lol
@@caitlingill santa ana CA
Good video. I'd like to add that alternative culture has its roots long before the 1950's Mod era. The Romantics and Bohemians of the 1800s were seen as the counter-culture of the Victorian period, questioning social norms and influencing avant garde styles in later decades.
The "trendification" of alt styles tends to come and go, but there always have been (and will always be) social outcasts, who seek refuge in a lifestyle that is separate from the mainstream.
Thank you so much for making this video! Now we need a series about subcultures, because now more and more people join the community, as you said, without any idea of what the community is about, we need more easily accessible information with the basic info about the subject of their interest
You're amazing, Rayne🖤
Series is definitely coming! I’ll be talking about punk first which will prob take multiple videos
I’m an amalgamation of metalhead, rivethead, goth, steampunk and grunge. I have many interests
If you want to be a goth, listen to goth music. That's it.
What about other subcultures?
What if someone just likes the style itself but doesn’t wanna be a part of the sub culture
@@noneof_urbiz then they just shouldn’t call themselfs goth and just dress like it
@@Charliezz_ And then people get mad when you’re dressing a certain type of way but your not a part of the culture…
@@noneof_urbiz as long as you don’t say that you are dressing goth then it’s fine
just gonna type out some thoughts that popped up for me watching this 😱i'm 25 now and i related to going up to alternative people and hoping to have similar interests and make friends, but then having nothing in common. It's pretty isolating and harder to make alternative friends than before, especially since leaving school/uni circles. I get very nostalgic for school friends, going to concerts together, sharing music and just sitting around outside in a park or whatever hanging out and having fun, being in a little school band with my friends where we covered alternative rock songs!! Lotta nostalgia aha but I lost contact due to distance and people going off to uni. It seems like a lot of the culture is now online, on tik tok, twitter or discord groups with mostly younger people. But I just don't vibe with these online places D: I've found it really hard to find people for literal years with all these factors!
I just call myself alternative. 😅
I don’t listen to goth music as much as Emo music,
Goth, gothic, and emo styles are my shit. With a little seam, egirl/eboy steampunk even.
Mother mother, MCR, Green Day, evanescence, imagine dragons are my music.
Edger Allen Poe, dystopian, non-fiction, modern psychological horror, classic gothic romance is my book tastes. 😂
You don’t gotta label it, we can be just us. It’s cool.
Goth is also just as complex as punk, and is about the music!
Congrats on getting medicated. I was terrified of getting medicated for my ADHD until like, a month ago, and honestly it’s like night and day.
If it’s right for you, by all means take medication! All the shit about it making you into a zombie or whatever shouldn’t happen if you’re on the right meds, by the way. I was on an SSRI for ages and it made me feel like shit but I thought that was normal because of the narrative surrounding them. Turns out it wasn’t, and I ended up switching to a different SSRI and I feel way better. Don’t be afraid to look at your options.
Yea I took medication in high school. All SSRIs. They gave me that zombie feeling and it made me swear off meds. I’m happy I finally found the right thing for me
When I was a teenager, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the situation was quite problematic... I think the old punks and metalheads are no longer relevant today as they were then.
The young alternative urban tribes such as the Emos, the Pop Punks or the Mall Goths were despised by the underground subcultures of the 20th century.
Honestly, I started to be interested in dark underground subcultures when I was a teenager because... I was a bit weird... and I thought that edgy look was cool and I preferred rock misic to pop and EDM... and later I understood the rest of the philosophy
I lived in a small place and didn't fully identify with punk, but the only alternative people in my town were a group of punks who became my friends.
This situation influenced me because I couldn't choose friends with similar tendencies to mine and I had to get closer to punks so as not to be socially marginalized.
Slowly and unconsciously I adapted my musical influences, my lifestyle, my clothes and my ideals to punk.
Finally in 2010 I went to university and with the explosion of alternative internet cultures I was able to form my own identity.
The problem with gatekeeping is that until the 2000s there were only 3 or 4 subcultures from which you could choose with a very specific aesthetic and way of living.
Today there are infinite possibilities and the old punks and metalheads don't understand the young people who don't fit in their traditional patterns.
There is a generational gap between boomers and genx that separates them from millennials and genz in the way they understand alternative subcultures.
Great video, greetings from Spain
As far as I know, there were definitely alternative subcultures long before the mods, even in Britain! Teddy boys were already old guard by the time mods were around and even they were wearing a Victorian style of jacket throwing back to even older styles. And there were several reasons mods and rockers were at a divide not just rock vs jazz. Mods were modern by definition, and rockers mostly descended from teddy boys and had some very outdated and prejudice views. They listened to rockabilly and were not the “new” tradition, they were the retro 50s styled. Where mods embraced soul, rnb, rocksteady and ska music, all new and multicultural styles of music. Even mods eventually split into factions with soft mods leaning more towards middle class values and into the 60s hippiedom and hard mods being the framework to lead to the beginnings of skinhead, with working class styles and ska music. Eventually when punks came around all of these things were there own distinct tribes and all butted heads. Which goes to show how many different things inform alternative currents now a-days.
Alt as we all see it now is very much a giant umbrella and generalizing term and in some ways even reducing many of these subcultures and counter cultures to being more or less just looks and styles instead of lifestyles and cultures
Love these kinds of history and video essay vids 👍
I call myself alternative, I listen to goth, punk and metal and have been doing so for many a year.
I've always been drawn to alternative fashion, but I struggled (and still struggle) with differentiating and knowing about genres of music and subcultures, and it can get confusing knowing which subculture something fits into. This has kind of kept me from involving myself with anything, and only kind of dressing similarly. It's been unfortunate honestly, but I'd rather that than be rude or ignore history because I don't know of it.
So this video has been pretty helpful. So thanks
I hate how i come up to people who look goth and whne we talk about bands it becomes immediately clear they only dress up and know nothing about goth yet say yes when i ask "are you goth?" Then i try to tlak about bands but it gets awkward and i just stop talking abouf bands and music all together. From almost all the people ive aksed only 2 were actually goth or knew anyhting about goth past the main 5: bauhaus, siouxsie and the Banshees, the cure and sister of mercy. This sounds good but these people never go past knowing one song from each band or just knowing the band name. You arent goth if over the past 2 years those are the only goth bands you know. Also im from California and yes, theres a shit ton of people who dress edgy or alternative and know nothing of alternative music except emo rap or mgk and stuff... apart from this, ive seen this topic brought up a lot but its always by people who arent alternarive but spealjng from a perspective as an outsider which is nice but never that indept like this. Thnaks for saying ur opinion as an alternative person!!
I think mod was definitely not the first alternative style, even in the 1950s (although it sounds like such a unrealistic stereotype) greasers were definitely a subculture compared to the norm and even back in the 19th century there were controversial alternative fashion fads such as tight lacing corsets and I’m sure it has happened somewhere even before then
More subculture examples from the 50s are the teddy boys / girls and the beatniks
Regarding goth, not all goth music came out of post-punk! Slightly before the British post-punk goth era started, Californians invented deathrock. Deathrock is a goth subgenre that came directly out of punk, instead of post-punk. :)
(there’s actually some debate about if deathrock should be considered goth or its own thing, but that’s a lot to get into)
Thx to explain about alt. its real appreciate🖤💀 and about gatekeeper. 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🖤
Somehow this video popped up into my feed and i love it. I always appreciate and respect alternative music and communities 😮😊
Can I ask you where you get all od these informations? I'm so impresed by this video. I want to know all this stuff about alt history too. More videos like this please. I love this.
I recommend reading books!! My recommendation would be Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. It’s my fav book. Just go to any local music biography section at a book store and pick something that looks interesting.
@@raynexcross thank you very much. 😊
I loved this! Def would love to see your punk video
I like A lot of music including goth, punk and emo. I think I should identify as alternative because even with fashion I'm eclectic. Coz I see it as an umbrella term, one that could be used to describe someone like me who doesn't really fit into one subculture.
Mods were not from the 50's. It's a 1960's subculture. Their suits were Italian, they rode scooters and listened to the Kinks amongst other
Great video! I couldn't tell you were reading a script. ;)
The gate keep is crazy but I feel yiu
I think alts have never been so unclassified
1:00 same 💀
Except I’m not moving anytime soon 😢
What keeps my hopes up is that the mainstream is always changing and some years from now they'll change anyway and get onto something else
Oh it’ll def get out of mainstream trends eventually. Idk at this point I’m convinced everything will be both in and out of trend at the same time alll the time based on our current attention spans lol
@@raynexcrossit did lol everyone is wearing hollister and putting bows in shirts 😭
This is really useful, thanks
Gatekeeping isn't a binary black/white thing, newbies have to meet the existing culture halfway. It's not unreasonable for people who are actually living the lifestyle to be hostile to stereotypical "instagram tourists", but at the same time everyone was new once and there's no future in a scene that totally excludes new blood.
To paraphrase Mark Fischer in Capitalist Realism, Alternative and Independent are not outside the mainstream but are the mainstream. and they have been for decades. Tell me if youve met a person that doesnt want to be independent or different, especially in the era of capitalist realism. I dont take issue with this video outside of that. . I can't abide anyone saying it isnt mainstream because the cultural cycle has Hauntology to rehash all cultural trends because new culture is not progressing fast enough for trends to do anything but repeat the past, "haunt" it. That was the effort of the Post-modernists. to Critique culture and I think it was Derrida who popularised the idea of Hauntology until Fischer expanded on it in "Ghosts of my Life" My only problem is that saying modern cultural trends arent mainstream is just a lack of education on their part. from not paying attention. All cultural products fall into a mainstream category because nothing new is being created fast enough for new culture to cement itself.
Very off topic but i love your brows
Awesome video!
" I'm a fifty six year old virgin "
Alternative because I don't belong anywhere else.
Great video!! I love your channel
Can you do a podcast on alt?
Idk about a whole podcast but I’ll certainly be making more videos
Could someone please tell me what alt ideology is? Or send links bc I can't find any info and I want to really get into alt culture
There's not really an 'alt culture'. There are many different subcultures that are within the alt umbrella. Like punk or goth. You'll have a much easier time narrowing it down. Subcultures have their own culture so it's hard to say what 'alt ideology' would be without picking a specific type of alt.
"Alt was never mainstream" *takes pills for mental issues*
Me
wrong. 90s alt was mainstream.
Woww wwoww wooww don't E word me
What about Avril lavigne is she punk?
All of this is rather immature.
It’s a silly little video no need to take it seriously lol
most of you are fakers from tiktok and thats what killed it
𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘮
Emo is not goth. Just to let everyone know. From music to the look. Be proud of your Emo, Emos.
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Interesting , like listening to you talk🥰