Subcultural Identity Quotes

By the time I was 19, punk had occurred. It had a completely different cultural dynamic to it which rejected everything and started again from the year zero.

I don't think I'm mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.

A lot of people get into alternative music as part of their identity. It's something that isn't the mainstream, that their brothers and sisters don't know about, and that their parents don't like. It's something they can have as their own.

I'm definitely incredibly attracted to the aesthetic of what is typically deemed goth stuff, but. A lot of my experience growing up was in being around that kind of thing, and it's just what sinks into a person's brain.

We used to be either punks or goths - we hate Nazis!

As a kid growing up in a lower-class neighbourhood, where everyone around me was listening to hip hop, what was I doing listening to new wave, and why was that my favourite music? I don't know why, but it just spoke to me.

Florida, bro. It's different.

Did you see him? I know the photo was grainy, but he looks like one of those death metal goth heads, or whatever they’re called. All dressed in black with long hair I took umbrage at my mother describing my boyfriend this way. John was the Lord of the Underworld. How else was he supposed to dress?

When I was designing, I had in mind Jimi Hendrix, and I could hardly find skinny indie black kids to wear my clothes. I remember one telling me he had to swap his skinny jeans for baggy ones in the subway before going home, so he wouldn't get in trouble in his neighborhood.

I can't really say how big the cult is. But I'm proud of it. I'm proud that it has a life.

I'm finding out what part of punk culture or white indie culture I actually still want to hold onto - What are the values? What are the contributions that I actually like? - and it not coming from a place of desperation or wanting to be embraced or wanting approval, essentially.

I was a snot-nosed teenage skater at one point, who listened to only punk records and hung around people that had that idea of what is okay to do and what isn't okay to do.

I was roundly criticized for being in and around rock & roll music at its inception. It was the devil's music: it would make your teeth fall out and your hair turn blue, whatever the hell. You get through that.

I never felt at home. I stuck outIn New York City, especially in Greenwich Village, down among the cranks and the misfits and the one-lungers and the has-beens and the might've beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats, I have always felt at home.

I grew up in the '90s. I listened to a lot of The Clash, Velvet Underground and Roxy Music. I wasn't into Boyzone, or anything.

Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.

The ‘black metallers’ will probably continue to ‘get loaded,’ ‘get high,’ and in all other manners too behave like the stereotypical Negro; they will probably continue to get foreign tribal tattoos, dress, walk, talk, look and act like homosexuals, and so forth.

I can't sing that well, but when punk-rock came along, it changed all that.

I have a special place in my heart for the Straight Edge Society. Never reached its full potential.

I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones.

The vamp in McMann’s stared at me. I guess he didn’t like the Goth look. Most of them don’t; somehow they think I’m making fun of them. Which I totally am.

Black eyeliner says 'You've been through stuff, you know things'.

I grew up listening to hip hop and embracing black culture, probably because it was 'outsider art.'

For me, hipsterism is for one to appropriate the codes of a social class or another milieu that wasn't theirs originally, in order to define their personality through something different and unique. Which is why a lot of hipsters live downtown, and they're dressed as farmers. Then you have the Oscar Wilde hipster: the dandy.

I knew of the Sapeur community for a long time, and they're an important influence for me.