Everything You Should Want To Know About Counter Culture :)

Counter Culture is poorly defined on the internet as it stands today in fact if you were to ask Chat GPT to spit out a thought piece on Counter Culture throughout the ages in North America it would start in the 1960s and end in the 1970's. Essentially encompassing the anti-Vietnam War movement.

But the reality is that Counter Culture can be defined as any major movement that rejects cultural norms and practices. Anti-Segregation and the speeches of Martin Luther King were for the time considered to be counter to the prevailing culture of the time otherwise there would have been no desire to assassinate the public figure if what he was preaching was generally accepted.

Occupy Wall Street in the 21st century was counterculture to the generally accepted norms of post-capitalist society, where a person's value could be measured by their net worth. Canada for its part put a man at the front of a venture capitalist-styled gong show despite the fact he's widely known for having run over an entire family with a luxury boat in Muskoka.

The #METOO movement ran counterculture to the patriarchal trends of sex, gender, and power dynamics in the workplace among other things. The reality is that counterculture did not end with the Vietnam War, and its essential value in society did not wax or wane in the slightest with the passage of time.

But perhaps my favorite mainstream counterculture movement began in the 1990s and continued through to the early 21st century. Alternative Music essentially an entirely new genre of Rock N Roll, itself a response to a rigid right-wing society led by the circular hip motions of Elvis Aaron Presley was nothing like we had heard before.

It doesn't take you more than 5 seconds of scanning the airwaves to hear an unchanged rendition of Kurt Cobain singing The Man Who Sold The World, Smells Like Teen Spirit, or Something In The Way. It isn't that these songs are inherently superior to Pop or Hip Hop music in any way, it's what the musical movement stood for and has yet to be replicated.

Essentially Kurt's music is the triumph of individuality over conformity, which came at a very topical period in the 90s when most middle-class families grew up in identical-looking Suburbs, identical-looking High Schools, and smoked identical joints of mildly illegal weed. These musical sensibilities made their way to Hollywood also in the form of new post-modernism scripts.

Donny Darko, American Beauty, American Psycho, Office Space, essentially a deluge of films about how sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something. Anti Corporate Culture, Anti Suburban Culture, Anti Hustle Culture, are all sprinkled with a fine mist of Anti Capitalist Culture. But the livelihood of such sentiments of individuality and rejecting normality don't have much of a home in a world where a person's value can also be measured by their social vanity metrics.

I never knew Kurt personally or Elvis or Martin Luther King for that matter, but I'm fairly certain they would not have celebrated the fact that middle-class suburban house wife's/husbands can command the thoughts and minds of over a million individuals just by the strength of their tightened buttocks exposed on camera (god I'm old.)

They also wouldn't have anticipated the ramifications of having a million people exposed to pure frivolity and then have them attempt to replicate said behavior like their very livelihoods depended on it. There is no room for individuality when all of us aspire to look the same way, act the same way, think the same way, and be incentivized to do so harder than any of our peers.

I don't want to call this the Orwellian future that we chose...but social media is literally the Orwellian future we chose. That's why you should care about the continued longevity of the counterculture movement, because without it these articles wouldn't exist because I'd be too busy chasing likes with pictures of my shirt off to express a single independent thought.