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This puts its finger on something I’ve had a vague feeling about for awhile now. Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was conside

This puts its finger on something I’ve had a vague feeling about for awhile now. Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval” I’d had my own notions of this being fueled by the suit-vs-rocker dichotomy turning into the self-promoting-artist lonesome internet point of light thing. But this article describes a bigger pattern, and I think it’s largely about commercial conquest and has little to do with the ideas inside. There’s also the theme of nostalgia and “good old” style marketing. How much junk food is marketed as “grandmas good olde traditional natural authentic junk food”? What is extremely frustrating is watching mediocre output be considered best in class merely due to the rubber stamp effect of popularity, popularity due to marketing power and branding. Clearly xyz charttopper is the best singer in the world if they are the most popular, right? The entertainment oligopoly falsifying the appearance of democracy and choice while limiting the range of presentable choices is actually symbolic of how many authoritarian systems fake democratic parliamentary procedures and such. Clearly the people have spoken, approving the pre approved choice. Lol. Everyone must obviously love autotune if 9/10 top ten songs use it.

matthewmacleod 4y ago
Honestly it just sounds like you’re no longer a youngster.
- coldtea 4y ago
  That's probably the most facile cliche answer, amounting to "it has always been this way". TFA, for one, shows tons of ways it isn't so...
  - teawrecks 4y ago
    > TFA, for one, shows tons of ways it isn't so... It doesn't though. What percentage of people do you think made up the viewership of the top 20 movies in 1977 vs today? People's attention is spread much thinner over vastly more "content" than ever before. You can be a fan of 20 different things that your neighbor has never heard of; this was much more difficult 50 years ago. I don't think the top 20 means much anymore.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    No, that's not exactly what it is. Culture hasn't always been this way, but people have. Culture, especially pop culture and various other side ones, have constantly been changing. The 50s were not like the 60s were not like the 70s etc. But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better." I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I wish I'd grown up today, I'd be far more likely to find friends with somewhat overlapping interests, and far less likely to get bullied for some of them.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      >But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better." I think the constant trap I see today is people perceiving different eras' output as "different but equal". A lot of this has to do with the populist notion that everything is about "taste" and nothing can be possibly better or worse. But there are absolutely periods of better and worse art output, decades or whole periods of cultural stagnation, sometimes in all arts or other times just in some, periods of burst developments, etc. When we see art and music history at large, we easily discern them and have names for them - and history scholars have. But when it comes to post '50s music, we can't fathom that some period is better than another, as if history is finished, and every decade is perpetually equally good. The funny part is that we think that in the period with perhaps the most decline compared to the past.
      - majormajor 4y ago
        Well, personally I definitely think, for music like you bring up, that post-90s is better than anything 1900-through-80s. The breadth of options of the present day is great, and the bulk of 20th century pop music that dominated the airwaves before that is just weak compared to the heights of classical music in centuries prior. I just don't think it's a moral failing if you disagree.
smokey_circles 4y ago
The word you are looking for is "contemporary" and nobody is spending money to make contemporary things appealing to you anymore. The collorary is your "counter culture" was bought and sold too. That one stung to find out, but alternative lifestyles have been manufactured for a long, long time
insickness 4y ago
The commodification of dissent. In the 50's, counter-culture was far more delineated from corporate squareness, which is why those old 50's ads are so funny to us now. Business evolved to where now it has the ability to coopt any emerging dissent and counter-culture almost immediately.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  It's still corporate but it's much less visible. Now many things look cool and transgressive - including elements of startup culture - but the goals are still corporate. In a real counter culture the goals are aggressively anti-corporate. The most impressive part is the way that individualism has become almost entirely a corporate creation. You "express yourself" by choosing and displaying products, all of which are either corporate or sold through a corporate monopoly (Amazon, Ebay, Etsy). The middle classes are allowed some artisanal choices, but only because they signal a more refined and informed kind of consumerism. There really isn't much evidence of individualism which isn't assembled from some combination of corporate-friendly competitive ambition, Veblen signalling, standardised rebellion/outsider tropes, and political and religious tribalism.
  - markvdb 4y ago
    There _is_ a lot of genuine expression. It's just not very visible and/or you might not recognise it as such. The sausage machine might be involved in some way , but that doesn't necessarily make it a product of the sausage machine!
    - Teever 4y ago
      Can you provide some examples of what you feel is genuine expression in this context?
      - kradeelav 4y ago
        Not the OP, but as an artist, art that tends to be banned or works that advertisers don't want to have ads placed next to is a good place to start. :) sexual/kink art is a big one especially as you get more esoteric.
silicon2401 4y ago
Watch "Century of the Self" (and "Hypernormalization") by Adam Curtis. Pop culture, marketing, and advertisement are in many ways the products of wartime propaganda techniques being applied to civilians by corporations during peacetime. Also watch Zizek for his thoughts on how corporations like Starbucks get people to try and practice their morals through consumerism. And since you mentioned falsified democracy, might as well look into Chomsky and his thoughts on Manufacturing Consent. These are legitimate, calculated phenomena that it's worth being aware of.
- oicU00 4y ago
  True that; there’s a government paper trail detailing the transfer of military propaganda research to university marketing and advertising programs. Check out Hyman Rickover, a proponent of a nuclear Navy that pushed members of Congress to vote mothball 10 years of thorium reactor research for uranium reactors so they had weapons material. I laugh at the notion we have a free market since the basis of our system is 50-70 year old back room deals that boosted families like Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Bezos. There’s zero science that explains how they’re ahead of anyone else in skill and intelligence. Plenty to suggest typical old fashion political propaganda and corruption.
  - phs318u 4y ago
    > I laugh at the notion we have a free market since the basis of our system is 50-70 year old back room deals that boosted families like Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Bezos. Can you please clarify what you mean? 50 years ago Gates was 16, Bezos was 8, Andreesen was 1 and Musk was newborn. 70 years ago none of them were even born. I highly doubt they were party to backroom deals!
    - tenebrisalietum 4y ago
      Their parents may have been.
      - oicU00 4y ago
tonguez 4y ago
most of it is the result of wealth inequality. no one can afford to be cancelled. if you want a vision of the future watch chinese youtube iq.com where everything is hollow and empty. every show just becomes a tool of the state, all entertainment is an arm of the MCI. we’re heading there slowly. every single creator today faces a black box known as “the algorithm”, on tiktok, instagram reels and youtube shorts. those are the only platforms you can get any views today. vertical videos. the things we all collectively said Rotate your phone and film in landscape mode, about. your videos didn’t get popular? they must’ve just been bad, now watch this 15 year old girl twerk in spandex. francis ford Coppola never had to compete with girls in spandex, but today’s entertainment does.
throwaway6734 4y ago
>Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval” I think it's because anti-institutional cynicism has become the new norm with the rise of gen-x and the "ironic" hipsterdom of the early 2000s. So much of modern culture is about operating in the negative space of the "normal" which takes significantly less effort than actively defining what you value and who you are.
cactus2093 4y ago
> Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval” It's all a matter of perspective, I don't see this trend as necessarily good or bad. There were some positives to the "underground" and "alternative" aesthetic, like being independent-minded and an emphasis on doing things that were new and original. There were some downsides too, like being jaded about everything, being too cool to show enthusiasm, and ultimately sometimes just blindly conforming to the "alternative" view for the sake of opposing the mainstream view. Similarly I think there are positives to how I see young people behaving today, the flip-side to the negatives you mentioned. Being genuine and showing emotion is cool again, and, perhaps ironically, since there is less cultural pressure to be "alternative" people are arguably being more honest with themselves by openly seeking approval. We're all humans after all and we all seek approval from others, maybe it's good that there is no longer any stigma around that in the influencer age.
gotaquestion 4y ago
I'm in my mid-50's. I missed the 1950's and 1960's in the US, but I recall the 70's and onward vividly. It is hard to impart to today's generations just how subversive MTV was in the 1980's. Being different in school in the 70's was a mortal sin, so people who did it were either truly weird or had immense self-confidence. "Alternative radio" didn't exist in most of the country, let alone cassettes and albums: department stores only sold what big labels offered. Punk and alternative had to be sought out by college students or people in cities. MTV changed all that radically. "Nonconformity" was a big word for teens in the 70's and 80's. It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in, not sticking out. Because there is no more "sticking out". Everything has been commodified and accepted. There is no longer a way to differentiate yourself from the pack, because the pack is so diverse. I think that has really shaken things up: there's nothing to rebel against, and Gen-X cynicism/nihilism has left an identity crises for Mil/GenZ. Although it appears these groups are going back to tradition and don't give a f*k about nonconformity. Steve Albini (legendary producer) wrote an essay in "Commodify Your Dissent" from the Baffler magazine around the time of the Dead Kennedys. He hits on the ability to buy anarchy patches in department stores as fashion items when in the past they were signs of a true counterculture. I highly recommend it, it captures what you are feeling up to a point, because it refers mostly to the 80's and 90's, and not the utter weirdness of today. https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler/dp/0393316734 https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...
- s1mon 4y ago
  I assume this is the Albini essay: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music
- sonofhans 4y ago
  I’m similar in age, and this rings true. Remember “conformist” being a derogatory term in the outgroups? > “Conformist,” he sneered, averting his eyes in disgust and flipping his dyed black hair over his eyes. :D
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  >It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in, Wait, doesn't that sound like the same thing? Presumably some kids are still non-conforming, and they are still the minority (because most kids of all generations have prioritized fitting in). Be very wary of survivor bias when looking back in time, especially when there is a risk of nostalgia. There was plenty of popular garbage in the 70s and 80s, there is plenty of good music being made now. The only real difference is that we have yet to apply the "is this good enough to keep around" filter to modern culture.
analog31 4y ago
Ah, the joy of being a snob. I mean this in a mildly self deprecating way. But to put it more mildly, it's the joy of being self confident in following one's own tastes.
teawrecks 4y ago
> it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval” I think you're just commenting from your bubble, and using the flawed argument from the article to rationalize it (not to mention the fact that the people you're most likely to see are the minority vying for your attention). In 1977 the top 20 grossing movies were probably watched by over 50% of movie watchers because there were just so few options. What do you think that proportion is now? I'm willing to bet that if you sampled random movie watchers, fewer than 10% of them will have watched any of the top 20 movies this year. There's just so much content out there, I don't think the top grossing movies mean as much anymore. People's attention is spread very thin across hundreds of thousands of small creators these days. And consider that if you're a small YouTuber with a few thousand core fans, you're roughly as successful as the most underground punk rock bands/indie film directors of the 70s. As I see it, the "alternative" culture is bigger than it's ever been. I could be a die-hard fan of a dozen different works that I consider very mainstream, and yet my next door neighbor will not be familiar with any of them.
majormajor 4y ago
> Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval” Not everybody considered those things cool - obviously they were specifically NOT the mainstream pop crowd, or else there was nothing to be "underground" or "alternative" against. There's certainly still underground/alternative pop culture. More than ever before! In some ways its harder to find (e.g. your search bubble isn't going to pop it up to you if it doesn't think you want it), ironically! But with that new bubble of being in your sub-community largely comes less need to "act out" against the rest of the crowd. This is largely good, except in cases of e.g. violent incel egging-on spiral-downward communities or your more "old fashioned" sorts of violent radicalism that continue to exist. (Here's a trivially simple example: the author claims that a smaller and smaller group is claiming a larger and larger share of the market in TV. But then look at something like this from wikipedia's I Love Lucy page: 'The episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital", which first aired on Monday, January 19, 1953, garnered a record 15.105 million homes reached, equivalent to 44 million viewers resulting from 71.7% share of all households with television sets at the time having been tuned in to view the program.[69] That record is surpassed only by Elvis Presley's first of three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on September 9, 1956 (82.6% share, 60.710 million viewers and a 57.1 rating ).[69] The overall rating of 67.3 for the entire 1952 season of I Love Lucy continues to be the highest average rating for any single season of a TV show.[70]' No show or musician commands anything close to that now. )
rospaya 4y ago
Punk got commodified pretty quickly, so did grunge, so much that the fashion part of grunge already got a second or maybe even third revival. Any subculture or trend that picks up steam gets commodified pretty much instantly, creating anything alternative or vaguely subversive into a cash cow for selling t-shirts pretty quickly.

matthewmacleod 4y ago

Honestly it just sounds like you’re no longer a youngster.

coldtea 4y ago
That's probably the most facile cliche answer, amounting to "it has always been this way". TFA, for one, shows tons of ways it isn't so...
- teawrecks 4y ago
  > TFA, for one, shows tons of ways it isn't so... It doesn't though. What percentage of people do you think made up the viewership of the top 20 movies in 1977 vs today? People's attention is spread much thinner over vastly more "content" than ever before. You can be a fan of 20 different things that your neighbor has never heard of; this was much more difficult 50 years ago. I don't think the top 20 means much anymore.
- majormajor 4y ago
  No, that's not exactly what it is. Culture hasn't always been this way, but people have. Culture, especially pop culture and various other side ones, have constantly been changing. The 50s were not like the 60s were not like the 70s etc. But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better." I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I wish I'd grown up today, I'd be far more likely to find friends with somewhat overlapping interests, and far less likely to get bullied for some of them.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >But the constant trap that many posters here are falling into is nostalgia making you perceive the "different" that you grew up in specifically as "better." I think the constant trap I see today is people perceiving different eras' output as "different but equal". A lot of this has to do with the populist notion that everything is about "taste" and nothing can be possibly better or worse. But there are absolutely periods of better and worse art output, decades or whole periods of cultural stagnation, sometimes in all arts or other times just in some, periods of burst developments, etc. When we see art and music history at large, we easily discern them and have names for them - and history scholars have. But when it comes to post '50s music, we can't fathom that some period is better than another, as if history is finished, and every decade is perpetually equally good. The funny part is that we think that in the period with perhaps the most decline compared to the past.
    - majormajor 4y ago
      Well, personally I definitely think, for music like you bring up, that post-90s is better than anything 1900-through-80s. The breadth of options of the present day is great, and the bulk of 20th century pop music that dominated the airwaves before that is just weak compared to the heights of classical music in centuries prior. I just don't think it's a moral failing if you disagree.

smokey_circles 4y ago

The word you are looking for is "contemporary" and nobody is spending money to make contemporary things appealing to you anymore. The collorary is your "counter culture" was bought and sold too. That one stung to find out, but alternative lifestyles have been manufactured for a long, long time

insickness 4y ago

The commodification of dissent. In the 50's, counter-culture was far more delineated from corporate squareness, which is why those old 50's ads are so funny to us now. Business evolved to where now it has the ability to coopt any emerging dissent and counter-culture almost immediately.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
It's still corporate but it's much less visible. Now many things look cool and transgressive - including elements of startup culture - but the goals are still corporate. In a real counter culture the goals are aggressively anti-corporate. The most impressive part is the way that individualism has become almost entirely a corporate creation. You "express yourself" by choosing and displaying products, all of which are either corporate or sold through a corporate monopoly (Amazon, Ebay, Etsy). The middle classes are allowed some artisanal choices, but only because they signal a more refined and informed kind of consumerism. There really isn't much evidence of individualism which isn't assembled from some combination of corporate-friendly competitive ambition, Veblen signalling, standardised rebellion/outsider tropes, and political and religious tribalism.
- markvdb 4y ago
  There _is_ a lot of genuine expression. It's just not very visible and/or you might not recognise it as such. The sausage machine might be involved in some way , but that doesn't necessarily make it a product of the sausage machine!
  - Teever 4y ago
    Can you provide some examples of what you feel is genuine expression in this context?
    - kradeelav 4y ago
      Not the OP, but as an artist, art that tends to be banned or works that advertisers don't want to have ads placed next to is a good place to start. :) sexual/kink art is a big one especially as you get more esoteric.

silicon2401 4y ago

Watch "Century of the Self" (and "Hypernormalization") by Adam Curtis. Pop culture, marketing, and advertisement are in many ways the products of wartime propaganda techniques being applied to civilians by corporations during peacetime. Also watch Zizek for his thoughts on how corporations like Starbucks get people to try and practice their morals through consumerism. And since you mentioned falsified democracy, might as well look into Chomsky and his thoughts on Manufacturing Consent. These are legitimate, calculated phenomena that it's worth being aware of.

oicU00 4y ago
True that; there’s a government paper trail detailing the transfer of military propaganda research to university marketing and advertising programs. Check out Hyman Rickover, a proponent of a nuclear Navy that pushed members of Congress to vote mothball 10 years of thorium reactor research for uranium reactors so they had weapons material. I laugh at the notion we have a free market since the basis of our system is 50-70 year old back room deals that boosted families like Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Bezos. There’s zero science that explains how they’re ahead of anyone else in skill and intelligence. Plenty to suggest typical old fashion political propaganda and corruption.
- phs318u 4y ago
  > I laugh at the notion we have a free market since the basis of our system is 50-70 year old back room deals that boosted families like Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Bezos. Can you please clarify what you mean? 50 years ago Gates was 16, Bezos was 8, Andreesen was 1 and Musk was newborn. 70 years ago none of them were even born. I highly doubt they were party to backroom deals!
  - tenebrisalietum 4y ago
    Their parents may have been.
    - oicU00 4y ago

tonguez 4y ago

most of it is the result of wealth inequality. no one can afford to be cancelled. if you want a vision of the future watch chinese youtube iq.com where everything is hollow and empty. every show just becomes a tool of the state, all entertainment is an arm of the MCI. we’re heading there slowly. every single creator today faces a black box known as “the algorithm”, on tiktok, instagram reels and youtube shorts. those are the only platforms you can get any views today. vertical videos. the things we all collectively said Rotate your phone and film in landscape mode, about. your videos didn’t get popular? they must’ve just been bad, now watch this 15 year old girl twerk in spandex. francis ford Coppola never had to compete with girls in spandex, but today’s entertainment does.

throwaway6734 4y ago

cactus2093 4y ago

> Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval” It's all a matter of perspective, I don't see this trend as necessarily good or bad. There were some positives to the "underground" and "alternative" aesthetic, like being independent-minded and an emphasis on doing things that were new and original. There were some downsides too, like being jaded about everything, being too cool to show enthusiasm, and ultimately sometimes just blindly conforming to the "alternative" view for the sake of opposing the mainstream view. Similarly I think there are positives to how I see young people behaving today, the flip-side to the negatives you mentioned. Being genuine and showing emotion is cool again, and, perhaps ironically, since there is less cultural pressure to be "alternative" people are arguably being more honest with themselves by openly seeking approval. We're all humans after all and we all seek approval from others, maybe it's good that there is no longer any stigma around that in the influencer age.

gotaquestion 4y ago

I'm in my mid-50's. I missed the 1950's and 1960's in the US, but I recall the 70's and onward vividly. It is hard to impart to today's generations just how subversive MTV was in the 1980's. Being different in school in the 70's was a mortal sin, so people who did it were either truly weird or had immense self-confidence. "Alternative radio" didn't exist in most of the country, let alone cassettes and albums: department stores only sold what big labels offered. Punk and alternative had to be sought out by college students or people in cities. MTV changed all that radically. "Nonconformity" was a big word for teens in the 70's and 80's. It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in, not sticking out. Because there is no more "sticking out". Everything has been commodified and accepted. There is no longer a way to differentiate yourself from the pack, because the pack is so diverse. I think that has really shaken things up: there's nothing to rebel against, and Gen-X cynicism/nihilism has left an identity crises for Mil/GenZ. Although it appears these groups are going back to tradition and don't give a f*k about nonconformity. Steve Albini (legendary producer) wrote an essay in "Commodify Your Dissent" from the Baffler magazine around the time of the Dead Kennedys. He hits on the ability to buy anarchy patches in department stores as fashion items when in the past they were signs of a true counterculture. I highly recommend it, it captures what you are feeling up to a point, because it refers mostly to the 80's and 90's, and not the utter weirdness of today. https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler/dp/0393316734 https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler...

s1mon 4y ago
I assume this is the Albini essay: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music
sonofhans 4y ago
I’m similar in age, and this rings true. Remember “conformist” being a derogatory term in the outgroups? > “Conformist,” he sneered, averting his eyes in disgust and flipping his dyed black hair over his eyes. :D
InitialLastName 4y ago
>It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in, Wait, doesn't that sound like the same thing? Presumably some kids are still non-conforming, and they are still the minority (because most kids of all generations have prioritized fitting in). Be very wary of survivor bias when looking back in time, especially when there is a risk of nostalgia. There was plenty of popular garbage in the 70s and 80s, there is plenty of good music being made now. The only real difference is that we have yet to apply the "is this good enough to keep around" filter to modern culture.

analog31 4y ago

Ah, the joy of being a snob. I mean this in a mildly self deprecating way. But to put it more mildly, it's the joy of being self confident in following one's own tastes.

teawrecks 4y ago

> it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval” I think you're just commenting from your bubble, and using the flawed argument from the article to rationalize it (not to mention the fact that the people you're most likely to see are the minority vying for your attention). In 1977 the top 20 grossing movies were probably watched by over 50% of movie watchers because there were just so few options. What do you think that proportion is now? I'm willing to bet that if you sampled random movie watchers, fewer than 10% of them will have watched any of the top 20 movies this year. There's just so much content out there, I don't think the top grossing movies mean as much anymore. People's attention is spread very thin across hundreds of thousands of small creators these days. And consider that if you're a small YouTuber with a few thousand core fans, you're roughly as successful as the most underground punk rock bands/indie film directors of the 70s. As I see it, the "alternative" culture is bigger than it's ever been. I could be a die-hard fan of a dozen different works that I consider very mainstream, and yet my next door neighbor will not be familiar with any of them.

majormajor 4y ago

> Something I noticed was that being “underground” and “alternative” was considered “cool” when I was a youngster. Now, it seems all transgressive elements have been stripped from the mix and it’s all about “please like me, like my product, I’m desperate for your approval” Not everybody considered those things cool - obviously they were specifically NOT the mainstream pop crowd, or else there was nothing to be "underground" or "alternative" against. There's certainly still underground/alternative pop culture. More than ever before! In some ways its harder to find (e.g. your search bubble isn't going to pop it up to you if it doesn't think you want it), ironically! But with that new bubble of being in your sub-community largely comes less need to "act out" against the rest of the crowd. This is largely good, except in cases of e.g. violent incel egging-on spiral-downward communities or your more "old fashioned" sorts of violent radicalism that continue to exist. (Here's a trivially simple example: the author claims that a smaller and smaller group is claiming a larger and larger share of the market in TV. But then look at something like this from wikipedia's I Love Lucy page: 'The episode "Lucy Goes to the Hospital", which first aired on Monday, January 19, 1953, garnered a record 15.105 million homes reached, equivalent to 44 million viewers resulting from 71.7% share of all households with television sets at the time having been tuned in to view the program.[69] That record is surpassed only by Elvis Presley's first of three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on September 9, 1956 (82.6% share, 60.710 million viewers and a 57.1 rating ).[69] The overall rating of 67.3 for the entire 1952 season of I Love Lucy continues to be the highest average rating for any single season of a TV show.[70]' No show or musician commands anything close to that now. )

rospaya 4y ago

Punk got commodified pretty quickly, so did grunge, so much that the fashion part of grunge already got a second or maybe even third revival. Any subculture or trend that picks up steam gets commodified pretty much instantly, creating anything alternative or vaguely subversive into a cash cow for selling t-shirts pretty quickly.