Hey
 

Nice to be here.

Something I only noticed during the pandemic is that I missed this format, even though I had used it only very occasionally even before the big and annoying social platforms took over every corner of the internet.

Which is to say, I'm hoping to find a little island of (some aspects of) 2005, where "being alternative" still has meaning, people are curious about culture and everyone you know is downloading arcane stuff from emule and soulseek...

hi there new person
I've seen your posts here and there, I like your music taste. Welcome to musicbanter, the forum that is stuck in time because we're in a perpetual circular loop like a snake biting its own tail

what is the meaning of being alternative tho

Oh I know what you mean by being alternative, I just want to make sure they don't mean the same

Thanks!


I think what I'm trying to say is that in the early 2000s there was a stronger link between one's cultural, esp musical, tastes and one's identity, esp if you were an outsider of some description. You would hang out at one of the pubs in your town where they played weird music and meet like-minded people based on your shared taste for underground cinema or hardcore punk, whether you were a crust punk or a goth or whoever.

The impression I get from being around very bright and highly critical people who are in their early 20s today is that they 1) listen to whatever came out last week 2) would deem it weird and high-key problematic if someone told them that there is more to music than the global superstar they're obsessed with.

I know there are multiple biases informing this impression and yet I can't help feeling that on some level it has some broader truth to it.

The impression I have from my experience is not as bad as that, but I'm also unsatisfied by the music/culture most people around me like. I think things have always been that way for the most part, but it seems that there used to be much more subcultures, I think you're onto something there. Maybe the internet destroyed that. In a way that's sad, but then again I suspect that those subcultures were almost as shallow and conformist as more mainstream popular culture. Most people are mediocre, and so are most people in alternative subcultures. Communities full of interesting people are very rare, and I think they're only possible if there's something interesting about what binds the community. And even then it often doesn't apply: art communities are full of posers, science is full of bland people who happen to have a specific kind of intelligence, etc. I guess I'm trying to say that linking culture to identity isn't much help when good culture doesn't ensure a nice or interesting identity. On the upside, that means that interesting people can be found everywhere

Yeah I guess I should've stressed my 2005 had nothing to do with that of most people... but darn it, it was real!

For the sake of the argument: in a certain sense we're all posers. Social behavior involves externalizing and codifying certain things into signs others can read. And as long as we *have* to do all that, doesn't it make sense to construct our social selves around the things we actually care about, like a shared taste for Siouxsie and the Banshees?

I guess what happens then is certain people who only have a superficial appreciation of Siouxsie and the Banshees (the look) glomming onto the community and ruining everything? The actual posers as opposed to posers in the wide and abstract sense I proposed above? People who favorite SATB song is Face to Face?

I agree that we're all posers in the strict sense you describe. Which people I consider 'actual' posers isn't necessarily about depth of appreciation, I think. What makes someone a poser is more artificial than superficial; I mean building an external identity in a calculating way, in order to be perceived a certain way (beyond just trying to find people with similar interests), to an extent that it's annoying to other people. In that way, if someone really likes one single greatest hit of a band but really loves them for that and genuinely wants to wear their shirt out of enthusiasm, then I'm cool with that. And conversely, I think that if someone knows their stuff about something and really likes it, but their main motive for identifying with it is to seem interesting or smart, then they're a poser. But of course it's a floating scale and almost everyone is guilty of that to at least a small degree

that won't solve poserism

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality

but nobody is contradicting that

Fair enough. Fashion can mean a lot, if I would have known about Lizzie Mecier Descloux and her sense of fashion in my teens, my life would have been very different
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fa/8a...1488e79181.jpghttps://www.lesonparisien.com/images...343086ea54.jpg

God damn it where's that avatar of you I told WWWP to use? I want it right now.

you were behind that? you sneaky little **** you

Oh yeah... as attested by, among others, the 1982 video for Strange Little Girl, which I can't embed here cause I'm still short of 15 posts, I'm told watch?v=4-YqO1AMrms

My own fashion icon was the Stranglers singer: lots of leather jackets; black suit jackets with black jeans and sneakers; rain coats with sneakers... pretty basic stuff (though in hindsight I wonder if some people thought the inspiration was Dylan Klebold rather than some British postpunk guy).

Plus I loved Blue Sunshine-era Smith and Severin, they looked really cool in the photoshoots for that album.

you can embed youtube videos, one of the introduction threads tells you how

Lol she PMed me asking for a new avatar so I made that avatar and told her not to tell anyone why she put it up or where she got it from.

I had some punk compilation with a live version of this song that blew the studio version out of the water.

Haven't been able to identify which one it was out of all the live versions that are on YT, maybe what you hear on a CD is one thing and on YT another, plus it was 15 years ago... But it was perfect.

Indeed, bullseye!

Thanks very much!

Yeah I see what you mean. I'm probably better placed to appreciate this now that I found that one recording of them I used to love (thanks to rostasi), and have more mental bandwidth to just sit down and listen to their other stuff.

Welcome!!!!!

Thanks!




I think this song was ruined for me by that Youtube video...