I don't know if I buy this framing. The intro Pearl Jam story is only noteworthy because it's unique. Cobain wasn't one of a million examples of counter-culture; we still talk about him today because it was uniquely his brand (to be incredibly famous while seemingly rejecting the fame). Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984. Bill Cosby famously hawked Jell-O Pudding. Sports stars we…
But everything can be co-opted. When whatever real world Don Draper managed to use hippieism to sell Coca Cola in 1971, that began the discrediting of this first wave, and punk eventually emerged as a second wave. The rockers versus disco shenanigans may have included punk, but punk as its own distinct culture rejected larger scale rock and roll just as much. As a musical movement, it was a rejection of Kiss and Aerosmith more than Donna Summer.
But then punk, too, stayed underground in the hardcore movement the cited Beastie Boys were a part of in the 80s, but also influenced mainstream rock, and grunge emerged as a rejection of that, the excesses of hair metal, glam, and even something like Guns n Roses.
Then grunge softened into "alternative rock" and Nirvana became Goo Goo Dolls. The author's point is where is the reaction to that? It feels like grunge was the last true anti-consumerism rejection of musicians selling out, softening their sound to become more popular. I've been watching Daria for the first time in 30 years the past few weeks, which I watched originally but barely remembered, and it hits hard these days. It explores this exact dynamic quite well. Daria's parents are middle-aged ex-hippies questioning themselves for becoming an attorney and a consultant. Daria herself won't wear makeup and worries about replacing her glasses with contacts because it will make her more attractive and thus less authentic. She gets mad at Jane for joining the track team because of how bought-in she to the notion that a jock of any kind is already selling their soul whether they have success or not. She isn't mad at being unpopular. She wants to be unpopular. That was a very real ethos of the 90s I remember experiencing quite starkly myself. Popularity as inherently bad, aligning your incentives as a person less to being true to yourself and more to being what others want you to be.
Do teens of the 20s still experience anything like that? You'd think it would be universal, but if there's any musical movements associated with it, I'm not aware of them. There's the revival of socialism and distrust of capitalism, eat the rich, but as I think the author is getting at, Che and Castro probably wouldn't have spared Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. The remaining question for me is whether this is still true in actual youth culture. I think the author and myself are probably dating each other here. Even Taylor Swift is nearly 40. Her concerts are selling for so much because her fans are in their 30s and actually have money. I'm not sure this is what actual kids and teenagers are listening to and whatever their sentiments about culture and consumerism may be, us adults probably don't even know. It's the nature of underground movements that most of us don't learn about them until they go mainstream.