In 2006, the DJ named Girl Talk released his mixtape Night Ripper and ripped open the seams of American youth culture. It was an exciting and unexpected form of music that, rather than being a self-generated creation, combined elements of existing hits to create a new semi-genre: the mashup.
He mashed up the Waitresses’ “I Know What Boys Like” with Juelz Santana’s hook “I Know What Girls Want” from “Run It!” by Chris Brown. This hook was an homage to Jay-Z’s “I Know What Girls Like,” which was itself an homage to the Waitresses’ hit.
It was a layered and Escher-esque amalgamation. The mashups came a mile a minute, relentless and pounding, building and building. This wasn’t mixing two songs together, this was grinding them into a paste, reconstituting them and creating what sounded like a soundtrack of the future, which was odd, since the entire mixtape reached back and regurgitated the past.
In her book Collage Culture, the poet Mandy Kahn argued that this mix was a pivot point in American culture. It represented a new era, the end of the self-generated creation of culture, the beginning of the smushing of everything that had come before into one big, exciting lump. It wasn’t just music that was being mashed up.
It was everything.
In the eighties and nineties, subculture was king. Your destiny was shaped by the people you fell in with. If your dad bought you a skateboard and you took to it, odds were you’d be smoking blunts under an overpass and writing graffiti someday relatively soon. If you liked Tolkien and Beetlejuice a lot, odds were you’d be wearing thick rubber platform boots and doing bloodletting ceremonies to Skinny Puppy in a few years.
Subcultures, at the time, represented hidden paths, obscured from view but promised to unfurl for you; all you had to do was look hard enough. Every book I ever loved when I was young was about a weak kid who one day discovered they actually had great power that had been concealed from them. Their hero’s journey was to discover that, while they’d felt they were boring and alone, in fact, they were mighty and had a great community waiting for the moment they seized their destiny.
This journey, the same one Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker and the Narnia kids and countless other white fantasy children went through was the same journey teens in the nineties went through. Only for me, the tools were drugs and dancing, not magic and swords. The things I found on my journey felt like superpowers. If only for a while.
Subculture was a discovery of your people. It was everything.
I have always been attracted to people who stood out, the agitators against the dominant culture, those who didn’t accept the rules society set out for them. The weirdos. I have chased those kinds of people and those kinds of experiences my whole life.
Maybe my destiny was always set in this direction, as the groups I wrote about that don’t exactly fit the classic mold of true subcultures—specifically the Jewish and deaf communities—were a part of my life long before I got high with my friends, before I went to rehab, before I went to my first meeting, my first rave, my first burn, did my first stand-up set. These were foundational elements in my identity from my earliest memories and set in motion my affinity for the people outside the margins of society.
I was troubled as a kid. As I mentioned before, I really felt my difference and my imagined ugliness acutely. There was something thirsty about my identity, and the groups I found when I was young quenched that thirst. It was less that I felt comfortable once I found them but more that they allowed me to feel like comfort in my own skin could be redefined within the new framework I’d discovered.
Subculture, finding your people, was the whole journey of youth for me. It created my life. And as rough as parts of my life were back then, at least I grew up in a big city, and for me, finding my people was an easy process. They were everywhere; they were all around me.
But if you were the lone goth in your small agricultural community, pulling on black fishnets as the rooster crowed, climbing on the tractor to thresh corn into pentagram shapes, it could be a lonely existence.
Then came the internet.
The early internet was like a portal for isolated freaks, out there floating in middle America, looking for their people. YouTube and message boards allowed you to be exposed to a subculture, connect with people from it, order the garb, and become an affiliate member of the hippie, punk, rave, goth, or underground hip hop scene without leaving your house. For many this was a huge expansion of their lives. For some, queer kids especially, it was a potential saving of their lives.
But then the internet changed. It grew, it metastasized. I’m not an anti-tech guy by any means; the personal advantages my deaf mom received from the internet are too consequential to ever condemn it altogether. I am aware that a forty-three-year-old writing about how things have changed has a kind of “old man shakes fist at clouds” feel to it. But this is what I think happened to American subculture: As the internet grew and pop culture simultaneously collapsed on itself, what took the place of those twisting paths of destiny became a mega mall of monoculture.
The internet is culture. The internet is music, fashion, politics, people. It’s everything.
Culture itself has reflected the mashing. Music now can feel genreless. Hip hop can be driven by a techno beat or have a guitar riff by Ed Sheeran. Hip hop fashion looks like rock fashion looks like goth. Kanye looks like he’s going skiing. Art is made for Instagram. The revolution is contained in a hashtag.
The internet consumed desire, aesthetics, music, art, identity, everything. Everything is one now. Teens don’t look for their people anymore; their people are TikTok. Everything is a meme. All dance is a #challenge. The hero’s path is now a thoroughfare, it’s a highway.
Maybe I’m overstating it. I know young people still have distinct interests. I know outliers still find one another online. But I feel sad that what was a chance adventure is slowly becoming more of a set path.
When I look at my daughter, who is now five, I can’t even imagine how homogenized and prepackaged culture will be by the time she is old enough to go looking for her own identity. So in some ways I wrote this book for her. So that she could see what I loved about the various spaces in which I spent my life. Each of them so distinct from one another. Each of them their own ecosystem, each set in motion by disparate elements, each scene an entire world.
From AA, I hope she knows that no matter how badly things go, redemption is always possible and that from pain often comes growth. And that no matter how badly things go, you are not alone.
From Judaism and the Hasidim, I hope she remembers who she is, that history is important, that fighting for survival and identity is the antidote to hatred.
From the rave scene, I hope she remembers to dance. It’s way more important than it seems.
From Burning Man, I hope she finds the moments in life that are worth living simply for their own enjoyment, that immediacy and experience isn’t incidental; it’s medicinal. You need presence in spontaneity.
From the deaf community, I hope she learns that communication is the basis of all knowledge and that you can never allow another to define what makes you you. Self-determination is not a goal; it’s an imperative.
From comedy I hope she remembers to laugh, to think, to push the envelope, and to never take herself too seriously.
And when, in 2080, she is strapping on her cybernetic eyeball and plugging the external hard drive into her brain stem, stepping out into the 180-degree summer heat of the plantless wasteland that is Earth, I hope more than anything that she’s found the way to a world of her own. I hope she’s leading the life she discovered, the one that’s uniquely hers. I hope she’s found her path. I hope she’s found her secret superpowers.
I hope she’s found her people.