Keith Reed
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Leading an individual life is extremely hard when you have sleepy chain restaurants and tired trends as cultural influences. Individuality does not come easy to most, but singularity is difficult to achieve. I find myself in a weird intersection of originality and following the currents. Today, the counterculture is simply about giving the usually voiceless a platform.
As a whole, the media are holistically planning our lives, from the next super food to new ways to fight dark spots. Tastemakers control what it is we see and do, with widespread recognition and the “en vogue” nature of the general public’s attitude, that leaves those who swim up the streams and bark up all the wrong trees in a peculiar position.
Considering the collectivist ideals that America has conjured in us, those that rebel become social pariahs. I would not call myself a pariah per se, but black sheep seems to fit. I have consistently wrestled with the restless tendency to be like my peers. The gremlin was conformity and individuality a cure for it.
Counterculture has always existed, but the definition tends to shift across generations. The varying and transitory nature of it causes this confusion; the people who do not find themselves a part of the zeitgeist then make their own. Hence, counterculture is born through the sediment. The only way to definitively figure out what counterculture is to look at it retroactively. This is a foray into what counterculture looks like to me today.
It can take the form of many styles of art from writing or photography to fashion and music; the opportunities are veritably endless. I spoke with a few people on the topic, and their ideas vary. The Internet has bestowed upon those outcasts of the world the power to be daring and inventive. In this particular fashion, one example is the Art Hoe Collective spearheaded by the young Mars and Sage Adams. The collective is a curatorial safe space for people of color to display their artwork, primarily on Instagram and Tumblr, but the community keeps growing.
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Gender and sexuality have become topics that younger generations are dealing with. YouGov UK did a study on British adults and asked them to self-identify their sexuality. Many plotted themselves on the Kinsey Scale, which places them in a range of sexual dispositions from exclusively heterosexual (0) to exclusively homosexual (6). The results were that 23 percent of adults were not 100 percent exclusively heterosexual, compared with 49 percent of young people (ages 18-24). Nowadays, gender and sexuality are to be seen as fluid and on a continuum.
Many of these young voices are not even in high school, yet they are challenging tough issues, such actress Amandla Stenberg fighting cultural appropriation and Grace Wales Bonner working for the degradation of Eurocentric aesthetic standards. Or Hari Nef, Jazz Jennings, and Grace Dunham becoming the public face of transgender rights activism and fighting against their marginalization in contemporary society.
To name the many people involved in this movement would not do them justice. Counterculture is a transient creature that takes on many shapes. There will always be a counterculture, and finding it is never that easy because of the retroactive nature of the description, but even though they might not be as visible, we can rest assured they are working behind the scenes for change.