>>17802471Late 20th century youth culture was not actually a credible social movement but socially corrosive LARPing and it’s quite embarrassing that elder generations identify with it so much and see them as such groundbreaking things.. In reality they were:
A) Consumerist, as their entire structure, identity and purpose lived and died with buying shit. Buying clothes, buying music, buying drugs, buying anything. From the beginning to the end consumerism was the absolute lifeblood of late 20th century youth culture
B) Degenerate, in that basically all of them served in part as blanket license to promiscuous sex, substance abuse, and corrosive political movements - particularly the counter culture of the 1960s, the absolute mother of all modern narcissism and filth.
C) Performative. Related to the above all of these movements were entirely about the simulacra. Politics, lifestyles, music, art, it was all purely a matter of fashion and outside of a few true movers and shakers entirely about being seen as being part of a thing rather than the authentic expression of something.
In this way late 20th century youth culture in the USA was not actually counter cultural at all, it was the completely natural youth manifestation of hegemonic contemporary American culture. Consumerist, degenerate, and performative.
The one that actually significantly subverted all of these was certain strains of the hardcore punk scene from the 80s into the 90s. It actively resisted commodification on a fundamental level that went even beyond merely avoiding large corporate entanglements, it morally resisted drug use, casual sex, the meat industry and eventually even abortion and homosexuality, and it was totally iconoclast. You can’t say it was entirely un-performative, performativeness is simply too integral to the concept itself of a youth culture movement. But this was definitely the only time one came close to defying mainstream cultural hegemony in a meaningful way.