The article on Chuck Klosterman made me think of how grunge was a very socially conscious subculture that got badly mischaracterized by the media as nihilistic music for the irony-poisoned white dudes that eventually became Vice-reading hipsters. Come to think of it, wokesters like to mischaracterize 90s gangsta rap as a socially conscious movement despite its very overt moral nihilism.
I mean fewer people encountered it as the music of the \u2013 often queer \u2013 alienated youth of a depressed region than as the birth of “alternative”, the idiom by which rock participated in the shift of how instead of being an interracial populace together white people started going to college by default
[bit about how the shift from solo shredding to effects pedals to trackers and samplers models a shift from physical proletariat to technical administrators to petit bourgeois]
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