Is there a temporal factor here the author's missing? The specific countercultural elements she's talking about are all the best-known artifacts from the countercultures of 30, 40 years ago. Listening to GG Allin in New York isn't subversive because in New York he's been old hat since around about the time that I suspect many of the people reading this article were still learning to read. Listening to GG Allin in the suburbs might be, though, because it would have taken years or decades for him to show up as a new thing in the suburbs of south Florida.
The Book of the SubGenius was also pretty darn subversive by the standards of the whitebread town I grew up in, but the cultural context in which I understood it sure changed a lot after I grew up, got a job, and found myself occasionally having drinks after work with a colleague who happened to help write it. She was nearly old enough to be my mom, and found my enthusiasm for what she considers to be a youthful lark to be rather adorable.
I bet my parents also thought it was adorable when I discovered the music they grew up on when I was a kid. Or rather, perhaps they were irritated because by then the psychedelic counterculture they belonged to had just become another puppet to use for selling processed cheese products.
I don't know that I can really judge the urban counterculture for the city I live in nowadays. I'm too busy being old and married and raising a kid and paying the bills to really notice it. And I'm in bed by the time the shows start, anyway.
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Is there a temporal factor here the author's missing? The specific countercultural elements she's talking about are all the best-known artifacts from the countercultures of 30, 40 years ago. Listening to GG Allin in New York isn't subversive because in New York he's been old hat since around about the time that I suspect many of the people reading this article were still learning to read. Listening to GG Allin in the suburbs might be, though, because it would have taken years or decades for him to show up as a new thing in the suburbs of south Florida.
The Book of the SubGenius was also pretty darn subversive by the standards of the whitebread town I grew up in, but the cultural context in which I understood it sure changed a lot after I grew up, got a job, and found myself occasionally having drinks after work with a colleague who happened to help write it. She was nearly old enough to be my mom, and found my enthusiasm for what she considers to be a youthful lark to be rather adorable.
I bet my parents also thought it was adorable when I discovered the music they grew up on when I was a kid. Or rather, perhaps they were irritated because by then the psychedelic counterculture they belonged to had just become another puppet to use for selling processed cheese products.
I don't know that I can really judge the urban counterculture for the city I live in nowadays. I'm too busy being old and married and raising a kid and paying the bills to really notice it. And I'm in bed by the time the shows start, anyway.