What is Counter Culture

Culture and Counter Culture

The story of civilization is a messy one. There has always been tension between the dominant class or culture who dictate cultural norms, and appropriate means of acting against a backdrop of control of kingdoms, markets, governments, and institutions. Alongside, there is always a sustained, systemic rebellion against these conformist norms by creative, often forward-thinking throngs of eccentrics, bohemians, and artists. The latter group harbors a hostility against this mainstream way of thinking, which they find limiting and repressive, and they have manifested their disdain in various artistic and intellectual movements that have evolved for centuries. The umbrella term for these movements is counter culture.

What is Counter Culture?

While there isn’t an easy or single picture of what counter culture is, it can be summed up by describing a few characteristics. Counter culture is a reaction to a perceived mainstream culture by those who are misfits or disenfranchised. Counter culture has been most prominent since the enlightenment, and as years pass and nations become wealthier, cultures have grown, and counter cultures have responded.

What is Counter Culture: The Roots

The roots of contemporary counter culture – at least in North America – are hard to pin down due to America’s young and comparatively messy history of racial and cultural tensions. Many historians agree that it began between the 20s and the 50s, when forms of African-American secular music like jazz and blues became gradually more consumed by the young Caucasian population, much to the anger of their parents. This angst fueled the allure of the “alternative” music that whites were drawn to, which had a raw and vital quality that the music of their forebears lacked. It was “edgy,” and more importantly, it was rebellious.

These developments started to become noticed and written about by many cultural figures of the era. The jazz phenomenon was documented by Norman Mailer in his seminal work The White Negro, and the term “counter culture” itself was popularized by Theodore Roszak in his 1969 book The Making of a Counter Culture, which introduced the theme of rebelling against a “machine” or a “technocracy” that became the basis for works like Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

This idea that people were being turned into conformist “cogs in the machine” became prime fodder for a counter culture explosion in the 1960s, resulting in not only hippies, but the L.A. freak scene, new age scene, underground comix scene, and funk and soul scenes. The participants were forces to be reckoned with, rising up against oppressive regimes in demonstrations like Kent State in 1968, and in historical outdoor festivals like Woodstock and Altamont in 1969. It was an era when freedom was being aggressively pursued on all fronts, from the sexual revolution to the experimentation with LSD, marijuana, and other psychoactives promoted by figures like Timothy Leary in a bid to “free the god in your mind.”

What is Counter Culture: The Transformation

A curious development in the progress of counter culture was documented in the 70s and 80s. The very hippies that had emancipated themselves from the cultural institutions of old with drugs and rock ‘n roll were now being seen by the youth of the era as the new establishment. For the aging hippies, they saw the rebellion of their youth as merely a trapping of their young age that time eventually ironed out, and they started settling into so-called “conformist” sedentary lives. But the youth of the era saw this generation as sellouts, vowing to never “soften up” and sell their own culture to commercials and burnout.

And so, the punk rock scene was born as a counter culture rebellion against the aging counter culture of hippies and progressive rock. Where layered, psychedelic epics would entrance your mind to another dimension, punk rock would make you snap out of your stupor with driving rhythms, distorted guitars, and ugly, unsavory derogations against the culture of the era, particularly governments.

What is Counter Culture: The Legacy

Much to the chagrin of these punks, however, patterns started to emerge with these rebellious movements. Rather than being wholesale revolutions designed to cause societal upheaval, cultural historians started to notice that movements were largely driven by youthful exuberance and ideation, which would generally yield as youth would age (although there would be some standout exceptions like Jello Biafra, Iggy Pop, and Henry Rollins). When this was noticed, counter culture rebels tried even harder and with more gusto on into the 90s.

Two major developments led the counter culture era of the nineties: rap and hip hop music, and grunge. Hip hop was, itself, a rebellion against the comparatively tame funk, soul, and R&B offerings of their forebears, and grunge was to be the end-all answer to punk rock, which was “sold out” by this time. This pushed counter culture into the extreme, with suicides being associated with grunge, and drive-bys and gang violence associated with hip hop, all in a desperate bid to remain “authentic,” or “keep it real.” But despite all of these movements, counter culture has to keep evolving since eventually, counter culture becomes accepted, and simply morphs into “culture.” That is not to say counter culture is not important. It is always a statement of the disenfranchisement of youth of the era, and as such, as long as there are youth to build and create their own legacies, counter culture will never die.