Post-Class, 10/23

In class we discussed Hebdige's Ideas on the taming of subcultures. I would like to expand upon that conversation and examine a few distinct examples herein.

Punk - a word deriving from the act of sexual penetration referring to a prostitute or the submissive male in a homosexual relationship. This word was somehow co-opted by a musical movement determined to seem dangerous and outsider; to be the antithisis of everything they didn't like about the 'mainstream' popular music of the time.
With the passage of time punk grew more and more popular and found it's way to the radio in diluted form. Stores like Hot Topic decided that there was a lot of money to be made in the hawking of an outsider look to dissaffected teenagers unable to grasp the inherent irony of wearing a mass-produced shirt with the words 'you laugh at me because I"m different, I laugh at you because you're all the same' on it. Punk subgenres like Hardcore and Emo have been mainstreamed into barely connected shiny shit biscut radio fare. Bands like Panic! at the disco have very little to do bands like Rites of Spring, just as bands like Atreyu have very little to do with Black Flag.

Furries - Furries are people who, excuse my bluntness, enjoy wildly fornicating with each other while dressed in animal suits or find the sight of artificial animal features on a person sexually arousing. Before the advent of the internet age, Furries may not have even existed. Now, however, they are starting to come out of the proverbial woodwork. There has been a CSI episode dedicated to the subculture. Some sportscasters ran into them at a hotel and were so disturbed they discussed them during the game they were narrating that day. The true horror of the web age is that it has given the depraved a place to congregate, mutate, and multiply. This horror has acheived physical manifestation in the form of the internet program SecondLife; where one may proudly walk around with a gorgan-esque mane of phalluses, be an anthropromorphic sheep (with a huge pulsating phallus, of course), or a terror so unspeakible it would drive you to madness.