#please please interact

to give a bit of context, i was a pre teen to young adult from the mid 2000's to mid 2010, which i call the middle to end of that time's "alt scene boom". recently alternative culture experienced a rise in popularity again - funnily enough around the time a staple of that era's music scene, my chemical romance, announced their return (which i will come back to at a later point as they are, in fact, important to note, whether you personally like them or not) - and with that rise in popularity there weren't just new and younger people joining but some even found their love for the alternative subculture again. i use alternative as an umbrella term here as it should be. there are of course multiple different 'camps' hidden underneath that.

very recently i watched a documentary about the "death of the classic goth scene" which was very interesting in so far as it gave me an insight as to why i saw so many alternatively dressed people walking around in my teen years to a shocking dwindling of that number. the documentary explained that the goth subculture in itself got divided into more and more 'camps' (such as steampunk, cybergoth, victorian goth, etc) until there was no real "grapevine" between them anymore. to explain what i mean by that: when people start to gatekeep between those camps, communications stop. and as a consequence the bigger scene gets dissolved:

the alternative scene lives from new input and new ideas. if that is not given because you do not step outside your specific 'camp', don't let anyone in who's for example only interested in a specific aspect of that 'camp' and are also not allowed to take from another, or even just new people trying out something new entirely, then there also cannot be any growth because after a while there are no new ideas, no fresh input that would keep it alive.

that same thing already happened under the bigger umbrella of "alternative", people were forcefully dividing themselves or being divided into different camps like punk, goth, emo and others. while looking for a specific term and therefore identity under which to group to find others that might be interested in the same aspects of alternative culture that specific subculture stands for, it also led to people from those subcultures turning their back on the other subcultures they were technically siblings to. for that we can just use one of our generations favorite terms: gatekeeping.

the different subcultures gatekeeping their culture, fashion, history, music and so on led to an ending to the different 'camps' influencing each other. this proved fatal: the alt scene Needed each others influences to grow and change, and simply stay alive.

that is why bands like my chemical romance worked - because they took input from different subcultures across the board. basically, when people stopped holding hands, so to say, alt more or less "vanished" from the public eye.

if not the most popular, there is no denying that my chemical romance is the most influential alternative band of that specific time period. it even went outside the line of “alternative” as for example wearing military style jackets experienced a sudden boom in popular fashion after 2006 - the year my chemical romance published their most famous album the black parade and wore military jackets to each of their concerts. singer gerard way’s classic shaggy longish hair with bangs became known as the classic ‘emo’ haircut which then slowly made its way into mainstream fashion for boys everywhere. ‘guyliner’ was a broadly used term in teen magazines and even if men wearing eyeliner was done before, it was suddenly not just a thing for a specific subculture anymore. of course that all wasn’t received positively by everyone but nevertheless: alternative culture was seen and seen everywhere and you were able to find gerard way’s skeleton painted face on the same magazine page as hannah montana’s miley cyrus.

but why were they so influential? why did they rise to the top that fast and were known by most subcultures under the “alternative” umbrella?

simply put: they took inspiration from across the whole board and put it together. different aspects of different subcultures were made anew. fresh and accessible, they opened their arms to everyone, speaking for the outsiders and underdogs, as long as you listened to any type of rock music. and it worked because they themselves originated from different subcultures. musically, lead guitarist ray toro himself said his biggest influence was always the metal genre. rhythm guitarist frank iero was the biggest punk rock influence of the band, and the way brothers, singer gerard and bassist mikey, were both deeply into gothic rock and britpop. of course the broad scope of new jersey’s music scene, where the band originates, made all fans and members of those subgenres of rock music interact - and therefore influence each other. 

it is a fitting example explaining why they were such a big influence and also why the alternative scene rose to popularity as it did. it also explains why it came to a fall: without new input, new influence, and gatekeeping between groups the scene stopped being accessible. it stopped growing and changing, until it stagnated and fell to obscurity again. while many of the bands didn’t stop making music and also didn’t stop being popular, the alternative scene in itself fell into obscurity. 

now, as alternative culture experiences a sudden rise in popularity, more and more gatekeeping rules start cropping up, rules about who is a real punk and which parts of different subcultures you dare not take for your own. and that is exactly why it is likely to fail again. if this ‘revival’ of the alternative scene is supposed to make an upwards trend - and i call it revival, but let’s face it some of us have been there the whole time - then something has to give.

this concludes, as i fittingly said somewhere farther up in this essay of a textpost: