There is (almost) no alternative: the slow ‘heat death’ of music subcultures and the instrumentalization of contemporary leisure

In this paper, the metaphor of the ‘heat death’ is used in understanding the transformation of the alternative music scene(s) since the 1980s. Popular music is a key leisure space of modernity, and has been used as a space for negotiations of identity, conformity and transgression. Since the 1960s, alternative popular music has shaped the evolution of an authentic, communicative counter-cultural leisure space. The paper will use new research on on-line fan communities of black metal and extreme metal, and goth and post-punk, to demonstrate that the ideal of the alternative music scene as a communicative leisure space is not matched by the reality of the instrumentalization of contemporary leisure. Rather, there has been a slow metaphorically entropic shift in alternative music, from a shared subcultural and counter cultural leisure space into one part of a globalized entertainment industry that has colonized the Habermasian lifeworld of leisure