Stop Fucking with Our Youth Subcultures

Above: Venus X (left) and Rihanna

What would you do if Spencer Matthews turned up at your clubnight? Would you get the security lads to rush his fat head straight back out through the fire door? Would you make a Vine of him, you, Jamie Lang, Joey Essex, George Lineker and Beelzebub necking Veuve Clicquot in the VIP booth? Would you simply ignore him? Or, would you berate the Jack Nicholson of Knightsbridge on Twitter, claiming that his interest in your "thing" is an affront to your personal brand, and promptly shut down the clubnight forever?

Sometimes it's difficult to know how to behave when other people jump in on a good thing you've got going on. Someone who's had to tussle with this recently is Venus X, a promoter/DJ/fashionista from New York who feels that the corruption of her personal brand is something to be taken very seriously. So seriously that, when Rihanna blatantly jacked the steez of her "Ghe20 G0th1k" clubnight for a bunch of Instagram posts – think facial piercings, bandanas, tons of black; basically anything that makes you look like you attack people in the street and then go home and listen to the Cure – Venus laid into her on Twitter, accusing Rihanna of jumping on the ghetto goth bandwagon, having "no political reference point" and being a "dumb industry sex slave bitch".

As a spat, it seems like a pretty fucking stupid one. I mean, if Venus is entitled to shut down her night because Rihanna wore a dog collar and a fishnet top, then Dani Filth probably has grounds to take her to The Hague. And whether Venus can really say much about celebrities after appearing in the video for A$AP's "Peso" herself, is something I'll leave to the MediaTakeOut comment section. But the incident does at least suggest a division between those who consider themselves "underground", and the people who suck the blood of the underground in a bid to stay relevant.

It's easy to laugh at Venus X for taking herself way, way too seriously, and tons of people already have. But maybe she's on to something. In recent years, we've seen Katy Perry go seapunk, Harry Styles go Dalston, Calum Best go deep house, Little Mix do dip-dyes, Joey Essex do Supreme, Britney do dubstep, Taylor do dubstep, Ellie do dubstep, America go EDM and OFWGKTA go ASOS. Picture a youth culture that you think is cool right now – or, if you don't think anything's cool, picture any scene that the mainstream currently seems less conscious of than Nando's and Clean Bandit. Picture that, then think about what's going to happen to it as soon as somebody your nan's heard of comes along, skins it and starts parading around in its flayed hide on Saturday night TV like some kind of youth culture assassin bug. And then perhaps reconsider your position on Venus X's hissy-fit.

Obviously the mainstream has always done this; the process just used to take a little longer. It used to be that a scene, look or sound would have the time to grow into a movement. By the time brands and celebrities cottoned on, everyone would be laughing about how over it already was, and how the mainstream would never be able to pick up on such things quickly enough, because the mainstream is inherently lame.

But now the mainstream is quick enough, which sucks, because it's still inherently lame. Scenes, sounds and subcultures are barely out of the embryo stage before they're being appropriated and corrupted by the big money boys. This is partly due to the burgeoning industry of those mercenary cultural poachers and collaborators: the trend forecasters, brand advisors, hype-spotters. The consiglieres of cool, whispering "Angel Haze so hot right now" into the ears of their moneyed overlords.

That guy in the leather cap who asked you where you got your trainers? He's probably one of them.

Mostly, these people work for brands, who are of course desperate for their energy drink, their jeans, their new beer to become forever associated with "the summer of seapunk", or whatever. But, as well as brands, celebrities also have people whose job it is to keep their ears to the ground: the stylists, the coke-carriers, the professional best friends. The people who can do the dirty work that means that Miley can dress like every girl at Bussey Building while partying at The Box. Or Katy Perry can pretend to date Riff-Raff for the kudos, and actually date John Mayer for everything else.

So often the mainstream's interpretations of the underground have been embarrassing and damaging. But when Billy Joel decided to go new wave, or when Garth Brooks became Trent Reznor, they had the shit ripped out of him. The real heads made it known that vogueing was all but over by the time Madonna got her hands on it, and that Robbie Williams, as much as he tried, would never be on Lord of the Mics. Such things used to spell the end of a scene, the absolute nadir, the moment from which we could – and should – all move on with our lives, find something else to be excited about, a new gang to be a part of. Now, it's perfectly acceptable for Miley Cyrus to become a molly-addled Magic City girl overnight – why? Because she said she was.

Harry Styles and attendant mob on the lash in Dalston, East London

Maybe we do need to take our scenes more seriously, and protect them from the bandwagon-jumpers. Because it's integrity, not money, that'll save youth culture from sinking further into the abyss. It's easy to excuse our lack of interest in preserving what is ours by gesturing flaccidly at post-modernism, or to disguise it all as apoliticism, or to tell yourself, "It's just a Dolce Vita thing; I enjoy the madness of seeing Harry Styles in Dalston." But thinking like that has caused huge damage to the grassroots of our subcultures, furthering that absence of place and difference that steers young identities off the map, sending our generation a bit mental. It's hard to really believe in anything when it's being sold back to you six months later in some kind of diluted form, perched atop Pixie Lott's boyfriend's head in a lift advert in Westfield.

For people like Venus X, this is a double-edged sword. Endorsements from people like Rihanna – or her stylists, at least – can make or break the prospect of you actually making any money from what you do, which to most, isn't unimportant – as Venus herself put it in one of her tweets, "I work so hard for some dumb industry sex slave bitch to come collect all the coins and credit for my brand?" I guess it comes back to that old toss-up – is it better to sell out or get ripped off?

It might be useful here to compare someone like Juicy J, who's been propelled to dubious late-career fame through working with pop artists, to someone like Lil B. Yeah, Lil B has made a lot of terrible tracks and more bad career choices, but whether through accident or design, this has helped him foster a kind of outsiderdom, which – in my experience, at least – makes it easier for people to really love what you do. Whereas what is Juicy J now? A trap-house jester? A bad joke? The new Flava Flav?

It's hard to say whether Venus X is brave, or arrogant, or if she just really fucking hates Rihanna. It's impossible to know whether she would have sold out had she not been ripped off first. But maybe we shouldn't be so quick to take the piss out of her claims to ownership of ghetto goth – even if her move lacks integrity, there remains a kind of individuality at the heart of it. An awareness that perhaps a scene is about more than the sum of its aesthetics, and that even if you can unpack how something looks and splay it across a few pages in a look book, you'll never be able to carry the invisible part of it – its memories, its motives, its soul – across with it.

In a world in which the corruption, appropriation and systematic pillaging of anything new, young, or different is just part of the cultural food cycle, telling Rihanna to fuck off is a brave, but probably quite stupid, move. Maybe we'll see more of it, maybe we won't. Regardless, as celebrities get more on point and brands get better at siphoning the life out of youth tribes it's difficult to see how they can avoid further decimation. To paraphrase Withnail & I, the ultimate tale of the death of a scene, "They're selling five panels in Topshop, man."

@thugclive

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