Millennials are killing the counterculture with kindness

“What’s with all the artist collectives springing up in Kensington Market?” asks the lead story from the winter arts magazine published by The Varsity. Good question, just like it was 20 years ago, except they didn’t call themselves “artist collectives” — and they didn’t bathe as regularly, and their wardrobes usually incorporated a chain. But, like Richard Florida figured out years ago, it always helps to keep tabs on Bohemia: and, based on reverent write-ups by these University of Toronto students, not much has changed since they were born in the late-1980s — The Varsity’s present-day idea of celebrity interview icons are filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, perennial outsider musician Daniel Johnston and Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo. You see a pattern in the attention lavished on 27-year-old writer Liz Worth for her new book Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond, 1977-1981, whose Monday night launch packed the Gladstone Hotel with nostalgists young and old. So, surely some cultural studies academic can tell you all this is a natural reaction to a decade of the commercial packaging of ’70s and ’80s subversion so that long-suffering creators could get paid. But now Fucked Up — whose millennial frontman Damian Abraham did an onstage interview with Worth for her event — are publicly beefing with Sonic Youth, whose elder members diminished their music as “dude core.” A couple of the F’ed Ups have retaliated with a parody song called “Cranking to Sonic Youth.” So, what’s changed is that professional critics are no longer confident enough to stoke such a scrap.