That's the problem: rock wasn't just blues recombined, nor hip hop just drum solos recombined.

And they didn't hit culturally like mere recombinations.

Blues were an "folk" art form from blacks, expressiving everyday problems, heartbreaks, poverty etc, in a speficic expressive and cultural context.

Rock even from its early days operated in a very different context (teen fun and rebellion initially), and developed into very different aesthetic and social spheres, from student protests and civil rights to anti-war and mind-expansion.

Except from understanding that it had blues as part of its musical (and only musical) heritage, it wasn't perceived as a mere recombination of blues, and it didn't serve the same social role as blues did.

>But there's always subversive, alternative sub cultures out there. A world of 8 billion, where the Internet has been a thing for over 30 years, with literal hundreds of giant cities.

The recentness doesn't really change much about how fast something can spread. For example almost everybody of age in those 8 billions has a mobile phone now (even in the poorest African countries) and yet phones have really been a thing for 25 years.

If your point is "we might not see subversive, alternative sub cultures out there" but surely there must be some in some of those "literal hundreds of giant cities" all over the world, I think it makes my point. Countercultures were major impactful movements in the western world for decades. And your answer basically amounts to "just because you can't see them doesn't mean there's not some still going on in Cairo or Okinawa".

It's like saying "shoe cobbling isn't dead, there's some such shops in New York" or "Addis Ababa has quite a few".

You are jumping over a key step in the development from blues to rock. There wasn’t just black blues followed by white rock. There was nascent rock that was still a black art form, but a very sexually expressive one (whence the very name of the genre) – the folk art wasn’t just about expressing Black hardships, but also getting down and getting nasty. Once you consider that interim stage where some rebelliousness was already present, it isn’t hard to see a smooth evolution from one genre to another, albeit early white rock intentionally purged the sexual element.

The sexual element was there in the blues from the beginning, it wasn't something that developed later and became rock. It was there even in pre-1900 century black song, as they were less constrained from the white's puritanism.

In any case, it wasn't the crucial difference between the social function (and the aesthetic development) of blues and rock.

Some counter culture movements from the US had some mainstream impact. If having mainstream impact is your criterion for the existence or relevance of counter culture, you're defining it from the point of view of the establishment. It just reinforces my belief that someone defining counter culture by the mainstream cultural narrative built post hoc around some aspects of it wouldn't be aware of the current streams in the counter cultural depths.

There's a full generation of adults who grew up taking the Internet for granted is my point. There are many orders of magnitude of information flowing there than you can even imagine. Yet you claim to _know_ counter culture isn't a thing anymore because you don't see any mainstream cultural narratives describing any aspects of it. Do you see the problem in this logic?

"Rock" is a post hoc narrative packaging something that came organically from counter cultural movements. Same goes for "blues" or "hip hop". These labels and the packaging of counter cultural (i.e. subversive of the values of the establishment) manifestations for mainstream consumption, are where counter culture goes to die. That's why I said they're just a re-packaging of something that came before and appeared organically.

Once it has a widely known name and a section in the nearest media outlet, it's by definition part of the mainstream.

So if you look around and you can't see any grand narratives about new cultural artifacts from "the youths/the minorities", how impactful they are and where you can buy an album, and conclude there's no more counter culture. I guess you're just telling on yourself at this point.

>There's a full generation of adults who grew up taking the Internet for granted is my point. There are many orders of magnitude of information flowing there than you can even imagine. Yet you claim to _know_ counter culture isn't a thing anymore because you don't see any mainstream cultural narratives describing any aspects of it. Do you see the problem in this logic?

In this logic, yes, meaning your argument :)

Counter-culture doesn't mean obscure and indiscoverable. So "there's so much internet, there's bound to be some counter-culture in there you've missed" is not an answer.

Even if it was, it would be irrelevant. What made counter-culture relevant (as opposed to "what a very small bunch a people do for their own amusement"), was the interplay at the edges of established culture, and the influence it exerted over it. Until the next one came, and so on.

So, "once it has a widely known name and a section in the nearest media outlet, it's by definition part of the mainstream" is precisely what's not been seen happening (with insignificant exceptions).

In any case, it's not like this hasn't been covered a lot. See Mark Fisher's writings for an example.