Youth subcultures: what are they now? | Culture | The Guardian
►http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/mar/20/youth-subcultures-where-have-they-gone
But the most straightforward, prosaic theory is that, as with virtually every area of popular culture, it’s been radically altered by the advent of the internet: that we now live in a world where teenagers are more interested in constructing an identity online than they are in making an outward show of their allegiances and interests.
And then there’s seapunk, a movement that started out as a joke on Twitter, turned into a Facebook page, then gained traction to the point where it became a real-life scene, with a seapunk “look” that involved dyeing your hair turquoise, seapunk club nights and seapunk music. “Seapunk is the name of a mid-western club movement created by a group of turquoise-haired twentysomethings who like to drown warehouse breakbeats in a flood of sub-bass and watery Wu-Tang samples,” ran one piece in style magazine Dazed And Confused. “The term was originally envisioned in a psychedelic GIF dream by Lil’ Internet, but producer Fire For Effect has been responsible for turning it into a fully fledged lifestyle.” Before you dismiss that as sounding like something made up by Charlie Brooker for a forthcoming series of Nathan Barley, it’s perhaps worth noting that seapunk genuinely appeared to make an impact on mainstream pop: the seapunk look was variously appropriated by rapper Azealia Banks, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Taylor Swift. In any case, I’m too late. One of seapunk’s supposed core members, Zombelle, apparently declared the movement dead when pop stars started cottoning on to it, which perhaps tells you something about subcultures in 2014. They catch people’s imagination, get appropriated by mainstream culture then die away: it was ever thus, but now it happens at warp-speed. Punk’s journey from the first sightings of the Ramones and Richard Hell in New York to the front pages of the British tabloids took a couple of years, over which time it changed and developed and mutated. Seapunk’s journey from internet gag to Rihanna using its imagery on Saturday Night Live took a matter of months.