In this blog entry Chris Rooney complains about things

So I was on my way out to East Van to drop off my deposit and lease for my new place and these hipster kids got on the bus--and maybe it's just that I've spent much too much time reading J.J. Ratter (aka Penny Rimbaud, drummer from Crass)--but I have never been struck by how much stupid self obsessed pretention there is in modern youth culture, and specifically Vancouver's incarnation of youth culture. This is totally me calling the kettle black here, because in my many weaker moments I'm easily just as much of a fasion victym as these people were and I'm certainly not short on pretention, but at least I'm trying to be concious of it.

I've gotten totally fucking fed up with how deeply and insidiously my generation and those younger than us are marketed to.

Punk's been dead since the seventies or eighties and we're all just too fucking sedated to care. but I'm really fucking sick of how much crap gets sold to twenty-somethings and younger folk based purely on this kind of pre-fabricated ideal of "cool" and how everyone, including myself, buys into it wholesale.

East Van (considered by most here to be the local nexus of "cool" ) is no different than Kitsilano or the other rich areas on the west side except in East Van the yuppies all have jet black hair and skulls silk screened on their "vintage" shit.

there is almost no such thing as a real thrift store in Vancouver anymore all the places that have cool second hand junk are "vintage" hangouts for fasion junkies and twink wankers who are willing to drop $50 on a third hand Clash t-shirt that looks ready to give up the ghost.

In Vancouver it's not uncommon for you to find shit like that. You can buy a second hand Nirvana t-shirt for 20 dollars and most people will do it without batting an eye, I did. And that's why I'm pissed off and ranting about it. Youth culture has gone from being something that you did yourself because you were either too poor or too angry to go with the dominant fasion trends to something that's been bought, sold, advertised and capitalised on by people twenty years past their own youth and ripped, patched, pinned and silkscreened by kids in third world sweatshops for pennies that they have to somehow live on from month to month.

the idea of a counter culture in the twenty first century has become something of a joke that everyone is too busy preening over to find funny. Every contemporary generation before mine seems to have had something characteristic about it that defined it or marked it somehow. Flappers, Beatnicks, Hippies, Punks, the grunge and apathy of Gen X; and I think that last one was the final death throes of young people defining their own culture. My generation and those younger than I are only defined by our stultifying apathy, our lack of imagination or willingness to do anything that differs from the herd, and adorned in the diy "look" that really just says "I paid $200 for a jacket I was too lazy and uninspired to mangle for myself".

There's no more rage, we're too tired and fattened by the commercial sludge we were force fed as infants to be angry, there's nothing to react to any more, free love was a bust but the "Anarchy" of punk rock fell over the day that Vivian Westwood opened her shop on Kings Road in London. The decadence is still there but it's no longer as exotic as it was when Anais Nin was fucking Henry Miller's other girlfriend on coke and writing about it. The pot's better and the Acid's worse and it's still all a waste of time.

On the other hand though the positive atributes of the straight edge movement have largely been swept away by the puritanical self righteous fucktards who's ideological cousins give Christianity a bad name.

I'm personally even sick of the idea of "cultural movements" they are just another excuse for some idiots to sell cheap shit at exorbitant prices to future generations of spoiled, disinterested children. I hope that I never think of my youth as "the good old days", I hope that my children don't get fed the same line I was for so long: that all the cool things happened before I was born. I pray and I hope that I can do something in my own life to kick a hole in this sham because I'm sick to the gills of this over-the-counter-culture. I'm sick of fooling myself into believing that I'm cool and I'm tired of pretending that I can define myself through what I own. If this rant sounds preachy I guess it is, but I bought this soap box at a "vintage" store and I feel like setting it on fire.