Sad Girls and the Death of Subculture

I'm soooo commercial-substitute-for-an-identity-core

This week I input my personal information into a shady website so that it would give me a pie chart of my music tastes, for neither the first nor I suspect the last time. I felt myself waiting with bated breath, hoping it would give me a result worthy of my Instagram story, before waking up to the reality it was not actually interesting enough to draw people into the infinite mystery of my being. Every year I diligently wait for my Spotify Wrapped, hoping and praying that my top 5 songs won’t be infiltrated by something that undermines the persona I imagine for myself and therefore be rendered unpostable. I’ve managed to dodge that bullet for the most part, although I had a very close call one year when I listened to the iCarly song multiple times a day for several weeks, which luckily seem to have fallen during the lawless period in December where Spotify doesn’t track your data. After another year with Taylor Swift at number one 1 (and One Direction at number 3, confusingly) I spent January listening to every album by The Cure with the express purpose of dethroning her with something more impressive. Sure, I like The Cure. In fact I probably like them more than Taylor Swift. But I wasn’t listening to them because I liked them more than Taylor—I was listening to them because I wanted people to think that I am the kind of person who likes The Cure more than Taylor Swift.I live in the Panopticon of Spotify Wrapped, my every listening habit watched by an algorithm prepared to humiliate me every December should I give in to my base desires to listen to Disney Channel theme music or the odd vaguely Christian country song. Recently I even find myself wondering what my response would be if one of those tiktokers who ask people on the street what they’re listening to approached me— if a microphone was put in my face this instant, would they catch me listening to a compelling indie artist like June Henry? Would it be a day when I’d have an eye-rollingly predictable answer that doesn’t actually represent me, like boygenius? Would everyone in the comments be saying “lol me” as I tell them I’m listening to Clean by Hilary Duff? Or would they catch me on a truly dark day, when I’m listening to a pre-Blurred Lines Robin Thicke song? I’ve never had anyone interview me on the street, I’ve never even seen one of those videos shot in my city, but the slim possibility has made me hypervigilant. I agonize over the Spotify links I post to my story for 20 people to see and 0 to listen to because it is crucial to how I am perceived. I’ve never been asked to name a song by a band on my t-shirt, never been called a poser, and yet I am always posing. People often talk about social media this way, as surveillance, and I believe this comes at the cost of subculture. An audience is not a community.

Part of the death of subculture (or at least it’s current flop era) is simply the constant exposure. How can anything really be underground when any random tiktok can get millions of views? How niche can a style be when people can just buy it in bulk from Shein? With streaming services replacing traditional avenues like radio and album sales, there is now an incentive to blur genres, not further establish them. The more Apple Music playlists you can fit on the better. Whereas before having an established genre label meant a built in demographic, now anything that can’t be given a million nonsensical titles (what is Goblincore really?) seems to be a risk. Things are being handed to us on an increasingly overstimulating platter. 

Discovering music pre-streaming was a much more painstaking endeavour. I read music reviews to find out which bands would be essential to forming my music taste, then took CDs out from my local library to burn onto my iPod for the walk to school. I listened to indie and alternative stations, sitting through cringey radio banter and countless ads for local businesses. And even that was in the digital age, free of much of the stress of the past. My favourite artists are, for the most part, not people I found at local shows or through diligent study—they were on my Discover Weekly (and Songza, gone but not forgotten). Combing through record stores, saving paychecks to buy an album and pray that you liked the whole thing and not just the singles, these were high stakes. Discovery was a process, a skill. Now you can find a curated playlist called “Combing Through a Record Store” and have all that done for you. And while in almost every way making it easier to explore a wider variety of music is a blessing, it does remove one element that is critical for a subculture to form—effortfulness. Subculture fashion should be a labour of love, a painstaking process of finding and modifying whatever you can get your hands on into something you can cherish. Safety pins and feathers and home sewn ballroom gowns show a level of care and commitment that you just won’t get from a ready made E-Girl uniform off of Shein. It’s so easy to flit from trend to trend without enough time to lay roots in any one corner of the world. How do you form a community when no one can decide where they belong?

Underground England wrote on the subject of the infamous British goth scene: “Many subcultures are borne from a feeling of ‘otherness’; a means of outsiders banding together with a shared impetus and uniform. None more so than the Goths, a subculture forged from themes of clandestine mystery and melancholic romance.” The ethos was clear, the music and fashion were established. The clothing was more than an aesthetic choice, it was a uniform, an unapologetically brazen beacon signaling other outsiders. They had their own clubs, their own concerts, their own hangouts. Sure, they were often a punchline or the subject of a moral panic, but it was a shared struggle. If anything, that was part of the appeal.

Other subcultures revolved primarily around live shows, groupies being the prototypical example. Deadheads followed the Grateful Dead from coast to coast to see as many show as possible. People slept in vans, in tents, with strangers. For full timers like many Deadheads it was a lifestyle and, of course, a community. Although Deadhead culture is still alive and thriving, like most die hard fans today they now exist primarily online. The Deadheads have had to go virtual for obvious reasons, but it raises the question: is groupiedom as dead as Jerry Garcia? Who can afford to be groupies now that the average concert ticket in the US costs almost $100? Kurt Cobain once scoffed at the idea of Madonna tickets costing $40, and today the average ticket price for some stops on Taylor Swift’s eras tour was more than ten times that. What about the devoted young stans who would’ve been the primary demographic for this time of fervent fandom who spent 2 of their formative years unable to go to concerts at all?

cringe

The band TV Girl made a statement last year telling “entitled and hopelessly ignorant” teens and tweens that when the website says show at 7 the band comes on after an hour of entry and an hour of openers after some young fans complained that the band was two hours late. But the tweens and teens they were speaking to were probably far too young to go to concerts and learn those rules before Covid shut everything down. And this is a tremendous loss for subculture. Historically, most music scenes have been lived and died around live performances. Rock n’ roll, jazz, punk, disco, grunge, all of these movements before they became mainstream were defined by their physical culture, by the people who made and loved them. What good is a uniform with nowhere to wear it? What good is a signifier that doesn’t signify anything?

as someone who doesn’t remember anything I am here to controversially say you can still have fun at something even if you forget most of it

I will say, the culture of live performance has radically shifted with social media. Almost every concert I’ve been to of an artist with a young fanbase has featured a heartfelt plea for people to put their phones away, at least for a few songs, a request that is overwhelmingly ignored. Mitski was accused of all manner of crimes when she asked people to stop recording her shows—many of which, in the end, seem to come down to: how else will people know I was here?

In Standing on the Shoulders of Complex Female Characters Rayne Fisher-Quann writes: “ it’s become very common for women online to express their identities through an artfully curated list of the things they consume, or aspire to consume [...] the aesthetics of consumption have, in turn, become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable: your existence as a Type of Girl has almost nothing to do with whether you actually read joan didion or wear miu miu, and everything to do with whether you want to be seen as the type of person who would.” Music has always been used as self-expression, of identification and identity. The only difference now is the traits people try to convey, and the avenues they use to do it. Your taste must be both unique enough to set you apart while being recognizable enough that people know what type of person it makes you. What good is telling someone your favourite band is one they haven’theard of, one they can’t categorize? If you say you like Phoebe Bridgers, people will assume you have daddy issues. Mitski? Mommy issues. Thanks to Morrissey and 500 Days of Summer liking The Smiths is now basic and embarrassing, a surefire sign of a misogynist or a pick me. In contrast, liking The Cure is a sign of taste and discernment (even though The Cure were arguably more popular) and is only ever really brought up in comparison to liking The Smiths as a sign of implicit superiority. There’s a plethora of Sad Girl music to choose from, and despite most of these so called Sad Girls denouncing the label it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere because, as Quann says: “young women are conditioned to believe that their identities are defined almost entirely by their neuroses, these roundups of cultural trends and authors du jour often implicitly serve to chicly signal one’s mental illnesses to the public”.

In the bathroom at Mitski’s London show a girl in another stall asked everyone for our favourite Mitski song. One said Last Words of a Shooting Star and without thinking I said “are you okay?” to which she, of course, replied, “we’re Mitski fans, none of us are okay”. Sure, there may be some truth to that, and every great subculture was founded on shared pain. Lonely outsiders became goths, disenfranchised youth became punks, queer people thrust to the ugly fringes of society created their own technicolour ballroom scene. But all of these subcultures, while founded on rage and sadness, offered a reprieve from those feelings. A way to, even momentarily, feel less alone, less angry, less sad. And dancing! Everyone has stopped dancing. The “Wednesday Dance” that took the internet by storm was based entirely on goth dance clubs—what’s the equivalent for alternative fans of today? The isolation and individualization of the social media era has touched every facet of our increasingly insular society, and subculture has been a victim. Shared loneliness is a tool of identification, never connection. We comment “me af” on poetry compilations set to Scott Street but it ends there. Nothing is done to combat this loneliness, only to wallow in it.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but there must be ways of looking at the art we consume as more than a personality trait or an easy category. Listen to the radio. Listen to albums neither you nor anyone you know has heard of. Go to the library or the record store and pick something at random. Learn how to sew, figure out what you actually like enough to make. Start dancing again—it’s what Mitski would want (probably, although she’s never gonna tweet at us again to ask)