Did Technology Kill Underground Culture?
Unlike their predecessors, recent subcultures like grunge and emo lived and died in record time
When Kurt Cobain died, I took it pretty hard. Everyone who knew me at that time went out of their way to see if I was okay. A few of those people surprised me, because they were the same ones who had once made fun of me for liking Nirvana, grunge, and alternative music in general.
But a funny thing happened in the early 90s — all the music I listened to, and all the bands I loved that no one had ever heard of, suddenly became popular. Instead of being an outsider, I was suddenly an insider. People who wouldn’t even give me the time of day were suddenly asking me to borrow CDs, tag along to concerts, and receive free bass and guitar lessons.
In short, it was a nightmare. I remember thinking to myself: How did this happen?
Not only that, how did it happen so fast? How did grunge emerge from the backwaters of the Pacific Northwest onto MTV and fashion runways, all within the span of a few years?
After all, punk never went mainstream, and only became popular when the watered-down version — pop-punk — emerged several years later. Hippie culture peaked by the late 60s/early 70s, but had been around at least a decade before…
