Experi(mental) music listening society.
For now in London and vicinity, but the cities I will add more as the wind blows and as I find them.
Especially around Halloween does it dawn on you just to what extent you are repelled by many things. None of it feels cool. It feels just like a gourd, a pumpkin, baked. Sure smells nice but the smell lingers in your flat and you feel just a little nauseous as it smoothly dissolves in your mouth. It's soft, it's hypoallergenic, it's good for you, your child, your toothless dog.
I love goth music. But seeing it popularised as a themed soundtrack to cutting pumpkins makes me bleh. Not because it's wrong, simply I find it irritating and a little awkward.
The great thing about halloween is the carnival culture. This is what this culture really severely lacks. HOWEVER I think halloween is just annoying. It is too fake. It is not total enough, it is too much of a convention. But this probably traces back to a general distaste for being told what to do and when to do it. The dictatorship of the calendar. Sure sounds ridiculous. There is no escaping the calendar, we are subject to it. The celebrations and holidays we have are tied to seasons. But I still don't like being told when I am supposed to celebrate or dress up. It is like some self imposed organisational order. Something about the date-fixation of things like halloween (among others) that doesn't sit right with me. I like halloween because there is more exciting strange things to look at on the streets, more weird niche music played places and chat about grind house, thriller, goth, freaky things that are usually relegated to a niche. In other words, Halloween is nearly a celebration of the subcultural in a way that subculture is made mass culture. It is just people dressing up whack . There is no actual substance to it.
About it and many other things. The semblance without substance. It's something that I have talked about in relation to punk. Somehow the 'punks' of today look more like models. I thought this at a photography show showing photos of the current underground. The people there were great, somehow you always feel 'not punk enough' at these places. The in-crowd dresses up as punks. And recognisable punks. Yes, it is a signal. But also yes, it is a lot of tartan. It is 'punk style'. It feels a little like 'punk music' and a 'punk music venue' with fresh stickers on the toilet walls. Don't get me wrong, I'll take 'punk style' over 'indie music' any day. But a lot of this punk feels like playing Lydia lunch with 5 technical guitar parts and a trained vocalist. It feels like overkill. I would liken it to taxidermy. It's cleaner, it's fuller, it's static and there to be admired... but there's one small distinct detail: it's dead.
SUBCULTURES
The problem with subcultures is that they require an inbuilt respect for authority... somehow it seems now more than ever. As banal as it sounds, even anti-authoritarian subcultures have a sense of authority. If they didn't there would not be a subculture.
Now... I may be wrong, since subcultures are not created and how far you extend what you call a subculture is not defined.
Maybe at the end of the day we all make a choice of what to associate ourselves with. I'd rather brand myself as something I do than as being accepted for a semblance. I would rather call myself a punk over any other term. But like philosopher it is a word devoid of meaning. It is something that sounds a bit scary and is a safe filter for about 60% of people you wouldn't want anything to do with. This is maybe what it is. Defining yourself is like a search filter. It's a keyword to find your places in the world. This is what these words have become to function as. However, as meanings get washed further out, they become less and less reliable.
FOR EXAMPLE Musically, when I see 'punk' there is a roughly 40% chance that I will like it. If it is 'jazz punk' it rises possibly to '60%'. Throwing in a description like 'sounds like the cramps playing John cage' will make that probability even higher. Some wanky description like that does more to inform me of their tastes rather than what they will sound like. They never sound like what it says on the tin and that is a good thing. This name dropping, in my experience, serves to capture the attention of people who are not impressed by the genre specifications. In a way, whacky band descriptions make me like a band more. But the right kind of whacky. And what the whacky is I cannot define.
To me, music is a multi-sensory experience. Sight and sound are both playing a big role. Especially nowadays when tracks devoid of pictures are a rare thing. When you see a band, the way they are dressed will influence what you think of the music... more than how good you think they are it will influence WHAT you think they are. A band playing rock in suits is jazzy, if they all wore hoodies they are the young new band. Crude example, yes. But all of these visuals signals are just a way that we make sense of the world.
The self-association with a term is one thing. Unifying a group of people is another. Better the latter. At least it';s not your own stupidity. Using an obvious description is one thing, a suggested united idea is another. I'd rather be grouped than by some music critic and differently by another than to have a blind belief in one thing. That will eventually only lead to a gnawing embarrassment. Polyamory of taste, if you will.
Horses for courses certainly. I do not give a fuck what I am historically categorised as, as long as it is not lumped together with ideas that I disagree with.
Now the self identification there is the curious part. There is a paradox. A degree of collectivism and agreement is needed to create a s'subculture', a 'scene', a ('friendship group' in other words).
My experience of this has been attempting to artificially begin a genre. It does not work. It is an illusion.
SHIT FLOATING DOWN A RIVER
Sometimes it feels like watching your own piece of shit float down a river. Not that I have had that experience, but that is what I imagine it would be like.
You're the one who made it but that makes you feel doubly repulsed. All that it is now had at one point in time looked good, tasted sweet, had an existence. This is how some ideas and projects go.
You shit them out and watch them float downstream until they disappear from view. You just have a brief, fleeting reminiscing thought every time it rains.