SUBCULTURE, DISASSEMBLED, REBRANDED, FORGOTTEN?

Subculture was never just about music or clothes for me. It was a survival mechanism through my teens that led the way into adulthood. It was a way to declare, in no uncertain terms, that you didn’t belong and you didn’t want to. I was never quite like my mates. While they were all swooning over the popular lads following trends, I couldn’t think of anything worse. I was into the bookish ones, the quiet guys with brains who stood for something, especially if they had a scooter or their brother happened to be a drummer. Watching his band rehearse during lunch? Total bonus.

Sociologically, subcultures are groups that form within a larger culture, bound by shared values, aesthetics, and rituals that deviate from the mainstream. They often emerge from youth movements, people from marginalised identities, or ideological resistance. But for some of us, they weren’t just a theory you could pick up, they were lifelines.

Subculture was tribal, sometimes inconvenient, and often ugly. It lived in garages, behind zines like this one, inside bootlegs and bruises. It wasn’t curated like most things these days, but that doesn’t mean today’s youth aren’t trying. Some are clawing at the edges of something real, even if it’s buried under hashtags. The problem isn’t that they don’t care. It’s that they’ve inherited a culture that punishes sincerity and rewards performance.

Subculture used to be a diagnosis. You didn’t dabble in it; you were consumed by it. It was the reason your mum cried when you shaved your head and started quoting Nietzsche at dinner. It was why you spent your weekends visiting Ian Curtis’s grave, drinking Stella, reciting ‘Dead Souls’ while contemplating the futility of love. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t marketable. It was a lifestyle choice with consequences.

Take the Mods, for example. A subculture I fell straight into. Born in late 1950s London, they were working-class youths who dressed like they were headed to a Milanese art gallery, not a council estate. They worshipped tailored suits, Italian scooters (got to be a Lambretta), and American soul records. They danced all night on amphetamines in basement clubs, rode their scooters like chariots, and clashed violently with Rockers in seaside towns. It wasn’t just fashion, it was pure defiance. A rejection of post-war drudgery. A refusal to be ordinary. “Clean living under difficult circumstances,” they called it. And they meant it.

Now? Some would argue that subculture is nothing more than a fleeting aesthetic. A mood that you can wear for 48 hours before pivoting to something more nonchalant. You don’t need convictions anymore, you need a Depop account and a vague sense of ennui (for those who don’t know, Ennui is a French word that I’ve picked up recently, it describes a deep, lingering sense of boredom and dissatisfaction, more than just having nothing to do. It’s that hollow, restless feeling when life feels dull, unfulfilling, and emotionally flat. Think of it as the emotional fog that rolls in when everything feels pointless, even if things look fine on the surface.)

So you’re not punk anymore, you’re “alt.” You’re not goth, you’re “dark-coded.” You’re not emotionally unstable, you’re “feral girl summer.” It’s all branding now. Even your breakdown has a colour palette. Even the punks have been domesticated. The emos have been absorbed into the Spotify algorithm and now exist solely as playlist titles like “songs that make me feel like a Victorian orphan with unresolved trauma.” Ravers are just people who wear mesh and talk about “liminal spaces” while queueing for overpriced horse tranquillisers.

It sometimes feels like subculture appears dead to the youth of today. It used to be a rite of passage, brutal, petty, and weirdly sacred to be part of something. You had to earn your place. You had to earn your place, not through suffering, but through showing up with sincerity, even when it was messy. Getting mocked for mispronouncing Siouxsie was cruel, and that cruelty shouldn’t be excused, but it did reflect a hunger for sincerity that’s hard to find now. It was like you couldn’t just be a punk, you had to live it. You had to suffer through the awkward phase where your wonky eyeliner looked like a cry for help and your Doc Martens boots gave you blisters. Gatekeeping was once seen as the bouncer at the door of authenticity, though that door often slammed shut on the wrong people. And too often, it slammed shut on the curious, the vulnerable, the ones who needed it most.

Education plays into this too, reinforcing class divides where the rich are taught to see themselves as inherently superior, while the poor are often romanticised for their grit. I’ve written before about how the poor get called cool because they live visibly, emotionally, without polish, while the rich hover above, mistaking access for authenticity. Subculture was forged in that gap. It wasn’t a hobby, it was a necessity. The poor didn’t adopt a subculture to be edgy; they built it to survive through things most will never experience. The rich wore subculture, but they never bled for it.

But identity, sadly, has become a product. Subculture isn’t a community anymore for many; it’s a shelf in Urban Outfitters. You don’t need to know the history, just the hashtags. You don’t need to feel it, just perform it. The algorithm doesn’t care if you’ve never heard of Jamie Reid; it just wants to know if your outfit matches the vibe. While some see it as bullying, others call it cultural preservation, but if it shames rather than teaches, it’s lost the plot. And maybe that’s fair, but then again, I can’t condone exclusion or bullying. Maybe the old gatekeepers were just bitter purists clinging to their vinyl collections like lifebuoys in this sea of digital chaos.

But something was lost, it’s undeniable. I’ve felt it for years. That sense of earned belonging. That weird, tribal intimacy. Now it’s all surface. All remix. All Pinterest moodboards. You don’t join a subculture, you borrow it, wear it for a week, and return it slightly wrinkled. People don’t live it, because the algorithm rewards surface-level engagement, not sincerity. Gatekeeping didn’t die because it was wrong. It died because it was inconvenient. And in a world where identity is curated for clicks, inconvenience is the first thing to go. When it stops being about preserving meaning and starts being about policing access, it can morph into exclusion. It becomes a tool for shaming newcomers, mocking mistakes, and enforcing arbitrary standards of “authenticity.” That’s where it crosses into bullying. Bullying in this context isn’t always overt; it’s often subtle, coded in sarcasm or elitism. It’s the things like laughing at someone for mispronouncing a band name. Dismissing someone’s passion because they discovered it through TikTok instead of vinyl. Creating hierarchies of “realness” that punish curiosity and vulnerability. The irony to all this is that subcultures were often born from marginalisation. They were safe havens for the misfits, the emotionally intense, the ones who didn’t fit the mainstream mold. When gatekeeping turns cruel, it replicates the very exclusion those subcultures were meant to resist.

So yes, gatekeeping can preserve depth, but if it becomes a weapon, it risks erasing the very spirit it claims to protect. Preserving depth shouldn’t mean policing identity. It should mean passing the torch, not guarding it with barbed wire. There’s a difference between cultural preservation and cruelty. The former educates; the latter humiliates.

Still, not everyone’s playing dress-up for the algorithm. There are kids out there who don’t care if their boots match the vibe, because they’re too busy building something that doesn’t need approval. You’ll find them in half-lit rehearsal rooms, soldering synths from scrap, or running DIY queer punk nights in venues that smell like damp and defiance. They’re not trying to be alt, they just are. Just noise, sweat, and a refusal to be fit in. It’s not nostalgia, it’s necessity. And while it’s not the dominant culture, it’s proof that sincerity didn’t die, it just went further underground.

In some circles, authenticity is cringe. Irony is currency. And if you dare to care too much, you’ll be labelled “emotionally intense” and quietly unfollowed.

To be cool was to feel, to show your anger at the establishment, to love fiercely, but now it’s only if you could make it look effortless, tidy. Give just enough emotion to suggest depth, but never enough to demand accountability. You can cry, but only in grainy selfies with perfect lighting. You can also rage, but only in captions that double as punchlines.

Now, if you love recklessly (do not recommend btw), grieve loudly (I’m great at this), or show up with your whole unfiltered self (always), you are a liability. “Emotionally intense.” A phrase that sounds clinical but means, hey, you are way inconvenient. You are now too alive for the feed. Too honest for the algorithm. So they quietly unfollow, not just digitally but spiritually. Because sincerity is confrontational. It asks others to feel, too. We now live in a culture that rewards detachment, so feeling everything is an act of defiance.

Even rebellion’s been repackaged. You don’t rage against the machine, you partner with it, drop a collab, and call it resistance. Your angst is now a marketing strategy. Your alienation is a niche. Your identity is a carousel of curated despair. You’re not lost, you’re lost “aesthetic.”

Like most things, Subculture isn’t dead; it’s just been gentrified and sanitised. There’s no sweat anymore. No risk. Just carefully curated safe ‘vibes.’ But somewhere, in the corners of the internet and the backs of pubs, some things don’t die. No curated playlists. No brand partnerships. Just raw emotion, bad lighting and the kind of honesty that makes people uncomfortable. My favourite. They reject performative sadness and embrace the real thing.

It’s not trending. It’s not digestible. And that’s exactly the fucking point.