4 ms·

Sounds like it was a lot more about where you lived and a lot less "whether you had a personality". I was never a skater kid and never pretended to be one, but

Sounds like it was a lot more about where you lived and a lot less "whether you had a personality". I was never a skater kid and never pretended to be one, but I knew plenty and they wore shirts from Kmart because in rural PA kids aren't going to have access to the whole "authentic punk social infrastructure" or whatever it is that supposedly grants kids access to "personality".

finnthehuman 2y ago
>supposedly grants kids access to "personality". You have it backwards. The shirt is neither necessary nor sufficient. sporkydistance was dogging on poseurs. deadfread was explaining why a t-shirt was ever an indicator (and even when there's someone handmaking shirts for your thing they're taking as many sales as possible). The shirt validating the identity is a wrong interpretation of what was written. But it's also a normal perspective these days, one core to social criticism this conversation is getting at.
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
Bennie sells discs at the disc golf course. Bennie is the guy who arranges timed skiing races up on the mountain. Bennie is just the placeholder of 'if you do this a lot locally, you know XYZ who is always around' and hence you are 'part of the scene' IE you have actually engaged with it on some level. Nowadays that might be substituted with 'do you watch XYZ streamer'. The t-shirt didn't represent having a personality. It represented than 'I am around this community enough I have at least interacted with Bennie'. Someone wearing a Kmart t-shirt saying 'ah did you get that from Bennie' would be the exact cred/personality as having a Bennie shirt.