A generation of kids wanders into a DIY venue and gets their fill of drugs relevant to their generation and locale. Blues, speed, blow in Denver it’s cheap grass. And the ever-present booze. Piles and piles of discarded PBR, Miller High Life, and Rolling Rock cans with a few of the well-off kids' craft beers thrown in for good measure. An aluminum salvager's wet dream. Most of them grow out of it, go to school, get a respectable career, adopt neoliberalism and vote blue religiously, and that's at best. A good portion die from dope or suicide or preventable disease or violence. A few cling on like refugees from any good diaspora, exchanging their dungarees or store smocks from an auto shop or liquor store for attire that's just as much a uniform as any other aspect of the greater culture. Working class adults in their mid-thirties "Charging up" to go stomp the shit out of some teenagers in a mosh pit and opine about how the scene was better in their day, "You shoulda seen them live." The lens of nostalgia warped kaleidoscopically, distorting the grim and frequently doldrum reality of misspent youth into some kind of glory days, "Death or glory becomes just another story."

The culture is (and has to some extent, always been) an elitist cult of sound. "Posers," or "Sellouts" tossed around at any band that ever got airtime on a college radio station and any kid dumb enough to buy their T-shirt. Every flavor of personal taste becomes an object of contention and somewhere the point (or lack thereof) becomes muddled or even strangled completely. Obscurity is king and, like all good countercultures tend to do, the hipster element comes into play. The raw ethos has been killed, castrated, watered down, resurrected, killed again, lowballed, and blue balled over and over again. Yet another youth culture that devolves from firebrand and taboo to cheap and comical. Hell, malls in backwoods Arkansas have Hot Topics.

Maybe that's the real nature of revolt? It happened to the hippies. It happened to the beatniks. It happened to hopheads and their jazz. It's happened to hip-hop in the last two decades. "PLUR" has become bad joke in the EDM scene. Was there ever anything more to any of it than being young, angry, horny, and loaded? Some vague idea that by being together with similarly affected young adults that we could consciously project some Brave New World that we could never reconcile the finer points of? We thought we'd change the world with booze and blood, dope and smut, screams and spittle. “That's all you get to taste, poverty and spit.” Everything becomes accepted, normalized, stereotyped, and, by next year, delivered to your front door with free shipping on Prime Day.

That's not to say there isn't beauty in this futility; life-affirming art, fraternity, purpose, and even incremental shifts come with it. By and large though, the nature of any American subculture with any sort of radical element, especially one draped in its bloody robes of subjective morality, is to collapse. In its wake, the smart, rich, and lucky ones walk away unscathed with a good story or two to tell their very bored children over and over again, "My daddy was a hippy, now he's a head of state." The other survivors amble on like orphaned children or dope sick junkies, looking for something they once found great comfort in that's now dead or itself a cage. Crass dismally proclaimed "Punk is dead" in 1978, but the reality is that it was stillborn. It, and every other congregation of young people hell-bent on revolution with no genuine notion of how to enact it.

Maybe that's the nature of growing up. I lived fast but failed to die young. I'm sitting at the threshold of my thirties. I pre-game with Tylenol extra strength rather than 40-ounce bottles of Mickie's. The flames that were stoked by power chords, vitriol, and malt liquor remain but in a much more controlled burn. I'll always be mad at the world. It's systems of power, corruption, slavery, oppression, and, more so than anything, its staunch commitment to division and hate. But god, how I loved the sound of rain I heard on my junk car's roof tonight or the sweaty embrace of a grateful stranger. Aldous Huxley said, "I wanted to change the world, but I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself." I walk a little slower. I breathe a little deeper. Go to bed a little earlier. Maybe I've sold out. Maybe I never bought in in the first place.

So I'll pull a grey hair from my ever-thinning hairline. Pour $15 a bottle chardonnay into a coffee mug. Put my indeterminately loaned, noise-canceling headphones on. And listen to the Dead Kennedys on full volume to overcome my ever-loudening tinnitus. In the words of the great, nasally voiced sage himself, "Make the same old mistakes, again and again. Chickenshit conformist like your parents."