Hey

[jadis]

Nice to be here.

Something I only noticed during the pandemic is that I missed this format, even though I had used it only very occasionally even before the big and annoying social platforms took over every corner of the internet.

Which is to say, I'm hoping to find a little island of (some aspects of) 2005, where "being alternative" still has meaning, people are curious about culture and everyone you know is downloading arcane stuff from emule and soulseek...

[Marie Monday]

hi there new person
I've seen your posts here and there, I like your music taste. Welcome to musicbanter, the forum that is stuck in time because we're in a perpetual circular loop like a snake biting its own tail

what is the meaning of being alternative tho

[Marie Monday]

Oh I know what you mean by being alternative, I just want to make sure they don't mean the same

[jadis]

Thanks!

what is the meaning of being alternative tho

I think what I'm trying to say is that in the early 2000s there was a stronger link between one's cultural, esp musical, tastes and one's identity, esp if you were an outsider of some description. You would hang out at one of the pubs in your town where they played weird music and meet like-minded people based on your shared taste for underground cinema or hardcore punk, whether you were a crust punk or a goth or whoever.

The impression I get from being around very bright and highly critical people who are in their early 20s today is that they 1) listen to whatever came out last week 2) would deem it weird and high-key problematic if someone told them that there is more to music than the global superstar they're obsessed with.

I know there are multiple biases informing this impression and yet I can't help feeling that on some level it has some broader truth to it.

[Marie Monday]

The impression I have from my experience is not as bad as that, but I'm also unsatisfied by the music/culture most people around me like. I think things have always been that way for the most part, but it seems that there used to be much more subcultures, I think you're onto something there. Maybe the internet destroyed that. In a way that's sad, but then again I suspect that those subcultures were almost as shallow and conformist as more mainstream popular culture. Most people are mediocre, and so are most people in alternative subcultures. Communities full of interesting people are very rare, and I think they're only possible if there's something interesting about what binds the community. And even then it often doesn't apply: art communities are full of posers, science is full of bland people who happen to have a specific kind of intelligence, etc. I guess I'm trying to say that linking culture to identity isn't much help when good culture doesn't ensure a nice or interesting identity. On the upside, that means that interesting people can be found everywhere

[The Batlord]

Originally Posted by jadis

Which is to say, I'm hoping to find a little island of (some aspects of) 2005

[jadis]

Originally Posted by The Batlord

Yeah I guess I should've stressed my 2005 had nothing to do with that of most people... but darn it, it was real!

[The Batlord]

[jadis]

Originally Posted by Marie Monday

The impression I have from my experience is not as bad as that, but I'm also unsatisfied by the music/culture most people around me like. I think things have always been that way for the most part, but it seems that there used to be much more subcultures, I think you're onto something there. Maybe the internet destroyed that. In a way that's sad, but then again I suspect that those subcultures were almost as shallow and conformist as more mainstream popular culture. Most people are mediocre, and so are most people in alternative subcultures. Communities full of interesting people are very rare, and I think they're only possible if there's something interesting about what binds the community. And even then it often doesn't apply: art communities are full of posers, science is full of bland people who happen to have a specific kind of intelligence, etc. I guess I'm trying to say that linking culture to identity isn't much help when good culture doesn't ensure a nice or interesting identity. On the upside, that means that interesting people can be found everywhere

For the sake of the argument: in a certain sense we're all posers. Social behavior involves externalizing and codifying certain things into signs others can read. And as long as we *have* to do all that, doesn't it make sense to construct our social selves around the things we actually care about, like a shared taste for Siouxsie and the Banshees?

I guess what happens then is certain people who only have a superficial appreciation of Siouxsie and the Banshees (the look) glomming onto the community and ruining everything? The actual posers as opposed to posers in the wide and abstract sense I proposed above? People who favorite SATB song is Face to Face?

[Marie Monday]

Originally Posted by jadis

For the sake of the argument: in a certain sense we're all posers. Social behavior involves externalizing and codifying certain things into signs others can read. And as long as we *have* to do all that, doesn't it make sense to construct our social selves around the things we actually care about, like a shared taste for Siouxsie and the Banshees?

I guess what happens then is certain people who only have a superficial appreciation of Siouxsie and the Banshees (the look) glomming onto the community and ruining everything? The actual posers as opposed to posers in the wide and abstract sense I proposed above? People who favorite SATB song is Face to Face?

I agree that we're all posers in the strict sense you describe. Which people I consider 'actual' posers isn't necessarily about depth of appreciation, I think. What makes someone a poser is more artificial than superficial; I mean building an external identity in a calculating way, in order to be perceived a certain way (beyond just trying to find people with similar interests), to an extent that it's annoying to other people. In that way, if someone really likes one single greatest hit of a band but really loves them for that and genuinely wants to wear their shirt out of enthusiasm, then I'm cool with that. And conversely, I think that if someone knows their stuff about something and really likes it, but their main motive for identifying with it is to seem interesting or smart, then they're a poser. But of course it's a floating scale and almost everyone is guilty of that to at least a small degree