Filed under: Urban Advice
The unreconstructed male? More semi reconstructed. I like boxing, I like football, I like drinking but I moisturise and am obsessive about my clothes. Whats all that about? I dunno, maybe its the sign of the times or maybe I’m just a weird fucker who likes buying ridiculous coats. How can you pigeonhole yourself these days? I don’t think you can. Goth? Well I have a Cure LP. Casual? Well I’m into my clothes in an obsessive way. Geek? Well I work in IT….
I don’t know where the quote is from, but someone once said “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth”. To some people I may come across as a Hip Hop loving ruffian with an encyclopedic knowledge of Boogie Down Productions & KRS One, to others, I’m a bookworm who has read The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy over twenty times.
Years ago youth cultures were a handy way to bracket people, if they did their hair in a certain way, you could pretty much sum them up in a sentence. Now you don’t know whether the white lad, in the skinny jeans with the Stone Island jacket on in a trucker cap, is gay, straight, casual, Hip Hop, a rocker. Fuck knows.
Whats a young lad to do these days? Everything is becoming so homogenised its unreal. Even the music cross overs, arguably started by Run DMC & Aerosmith, are blurring boundaries to the point of banality. Dizzy Rascal & Calvin Harris? What a pile of shit. So what can you do about it?
Do I want, indeed do YOU want to be associated with just one social phenomenon? I don’t think I do, but I don’t want to blend into one border crossing mass with fingers in every pie, jack of all trades, master of none. In fact you could consider me a tourist, with a home country from which I frequently visit other cultures.
The one root cause of all this is simple to identify, its the Internet. Never has it been easier for people to find out about anything. Within minutes you can become an expert on anything but without the viewpoint that years of being involved gives you. It is something thats become endemic within the whole casual thing in the past few years. Go onto any message board vaguely related to “casual” and you’ll find 16 year old lads stating “I’ve been into casual for a few years now”, without realising its not something you choose to be. They just study the forums, read some books and think its something you can be, without realising all they’re doing is emulating older lads and missing the point.
But I suppose that is the nature of the beast. As soon as anything gains any kind of populairty, people will latch on to it, even people from outside the bubble.
