stimulating dialogue at Fangirl between herself and seb chan of cyclic defrost on the disappearance of independent record stores, touching on ideas related to what happens to the concept of subcultural capital when the old scarcity model of music/etc is replaced by dizzying gluttonously obscence abundance/accessibility-to-all, the decline of the public nature of music choice-as-visibilized-stance (as expressed through the "dissolving of clear modes of dress as subcultural identification") (c.f. Dick Hebdige "hiding in the light"), etc etc etc

reminded me i've been meaning to write about T-shirts and the whole thing of emblazoning your music choices on your chest, partly inspired by the recent New York Times magazine on ultra-cool T-shirt companies selling a hip/underground lifestyle as a sort of brand, but mainly triggered by a run of weird sightings e.g. a 16 year old kid in a Jaco Pastorious T-shirt, another same age in a Skrewdriver shirt (one can only hope the kid was oblivious to its connotations), and, for reason i can't quite fathom the most strangely disconcerting to me, another boy in a Tago Mago T-shirt (really yukky looking actually, like he'd spilled a carrot-and-ginger smoothy over his chest). (There was some other odd ones too but i'm blanking on 'em)

but later for that micro-thesis...