Hybridization, syncretisation, bastardization

Subcultures are interesting. Especially these days, from my perspective. I don't know if I'm leaving the whole thing or if I'm just leaving one to embrace severla others. Or if I'm leaving anything. I have kept it remarkably clean, I think. And there is not much I wear these days that I would not have worn 5 years ago.

I don't know... You used to go to a gig and try to wear the most 'true' shirt there was. The you started to wear shirts that where 'wrong' (i.e. punk shirts) to show some distance (and metal shirt at punk gigs). Now I don't know... I would like to wear like Genocide Organ-shirts or Grey Wolves-shirts or Con-Dom-shirts or TG-shirts or something like that, but I really think that would just go right over peoples heads. Totally pointless, because the point is not that people should think you are a nazi but that they should think.

So I am really really happy with the redbluewhite-stripesquarey Lee western shirt I just got because it looks awesome and it means I really don't have to deal with the issue mentioned above.

Me and Julius discussed things like this once. About not liking people who treats their subcultural life as some sort of hobby. You know what I mean? People restricting their life to only incorporate their subculture. People who choose clothes based on if it looks 'metal' enough instead of choosing them based on personal taste. People who maybe just should stay at home and collect stamps instead. It is your life. Live it, don't fake it.

Don't get me wrong. I have the greatest respect for people who really belong to a subculture (as for example the guys in Nifelheim), but in those cases it is just as much a case of fitting other interests in to the culture as it is of doing it right. The things they do more or less become automatically metal because they are the ones doing it. Like L. Just about everything about everything she does is 'goth' (actually, she makes it bigger than that and it is almost a case of Weberian ideal types) in one way or the other, because that is how she does it. It could be no other way. It is not a case of trying to be right and trying to follow the rules. It is a case of being right because it is you and being the rules, more or less.

I don't know how else to explain it. Some people try to be it and try to tell people what the rules are. They try to adapt themselves to their culture. Other people just can't do wrong because that's the way they are. They are just right. Or they make the deviances work for them. And others (and that's where I'm going, I think) just try to steal the parts we like and use them with or without (preferebly without, I think) the proper context. Hybridization, syncretisation, bastardization. I've always had more respect and love for mongrels and scavengers than I've had for pure breed prize winning champions.


Did I make up a new word there?