Culture as a whole may not be your friend, but the edge of culture is an area that you should be very friendly with. For every marketing driven fad and gimmicky flash in the pan, there are also beginnings of movements that could shake the established ways of society to the core. New styles of writing, music, dance, art, as well as world views and social theories all present the world to us in a different way that we haven’t seen before. To bring it back to a theme that I talk about a bit on this site, what they do is create noise  that disrupts the signal that mainstream culture and established forms pump out to the population, and make people re-evaluate what they like, and how they see the world.

These new form then become part of the overall evolving cultural framework, merging with other forms, morphing, changing and spawning new forms and movements

Emerging cultural trends are the only place that there is any chance for something vital to occur. They either become new movements, or merge into existing forms and change them, resetting their direction. All of this happens in very strange ways, with movements becoming vectors for ideas, inserting viral memes into subcultures and the over culture as a whole. Look at what late 60’s rock music did for the hippy lifestyle. Because people dug the tunes, a whole lot of other ideas piggybacked into their lives as well like peace, love, environmentalism, drug use, eastern philosophy, new age ideas, fashion trends and lifestyle choices.

Of course, eventually every cultural trend will eventually be co-opted by the marketing driven corporate machine and ground down through a predictable, vampiristic cycle of abuse and over exposure. The key is to go back and look at the original spirit of the movement, and look at what made the originators come up with the style.

Also, I don’t want to contradict myself, but I do see a lot of sense in people using traditional forms to express themselves and their ideas. Traditional views of things like magick, shamanism, meditation have worked well and served people for thousands of years. If you really look at these things that appear on the surface as timelines, what you see is the  most staid and steady cultures are still not too stagnated and full of dogmatism (at least in some areas and by some practitioners). They still allow themselves to be vital, for the nuances of the form to flourish, for fresh insights to allow the practice to evolve and mature. As soon as everyone knows all the tricks, the fun soon goes out of the game.

Tags: dance art, lifestyle choices, mainstream culture, memes, original spirit, social theories, subcultures, vectors, writing music