Interesting Facts On Alternative Clothing

As a result of all of this alternative music changing youths personalities, clothing for teenagers has taken a drastic turn too. Instead of the telltale layers that were around in clothing for teenagers in the '80's, with loose fitting tops covered with tighter ones and loose jeans, a new style of clothing emerged. Emos, scenes and even goths from all over the world began to take black as the new everything, emos in particular, which is how emos came to be associated unfairly with negativity and sadness. Scenes would mix in a splash of colour with their outfits, but would always stick with something black as the primary part of their outfit. Heavy black eyeliner, black nail polish and black lipstick became popular with alternative females, and sales of the brand All Star Converse footwear rocketed. Nowadays, a pair of black Converse shoes are necessary for any type of alternatively dressing youth, and other colours are becoming popular too.
Skulls, roses, guitars, rabbits and cats became popular designs for scene t-shirts, while skirts became popular again, this time coming back with less material and a lot more attitude.
Wristbands, band tees, hats, shorts and colourful tights all became factors in shaping the way scenes and emos act and think.
Nowadays, alternative youths from all over the world can be seen in their skirts, with their colourful tights underneath, their black converse and some form of band tee.

Alternative youths have adapted to this kind of clothing because of their heroes; the band members. Bands such as My Chemical Romance for example, wear army jackets on stage during their concerts, and so army style clothing has become very popular among their fans. Fall Out Boy fans will be seen in hats the same style as lead singer Patrick Stump, and fans of Paramore tend to dye their hair red or orange like Hayley Williams.

Newspaper Reports and News Articles

For the first time since the birth of punk, rock, emo and scene music, fans of the genres are spending more on attending concerts and festivals than they are on recorded music. The Glastonbury festival for example, something which was assumed to be just as successful as Download or Reading and Leeds, has been proven as being viewed a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity for concert goers, and so many are spending a lot to go to it. People in Britain spent an estimated £1.9 billion on going to festivals last year, and a measly £1.5 billion on recorded music in the form of CD's.
The number of festivals and the line up for festivals plays a big part in this dramatic change to the youth culture. In the year 2000 for example, there were only 12 music festivals to go to, and in 2009 an estimated 664 were played at and loved.

The band Green Day's best selling album American Idiot is set to appear on Broadway, shocking fans across the world. Michael Mayer and co have adapted the album and accompanying book (written by front man Billie Joe Armstrong) to come up with a brilliantly album-orientated musical that will be played in St James Theatre in April. Casting has not yet begun, but one can be sure the attendants to the show will be of the punk rock culture, and aged somewhere between 12 and 19.

Researchers at a Scottish University have recently carried out studies on music, the results of which show that playing rock music while studying may be of benefit to teenagers preparing for GCSE and A Level examinations. The researchers believe that the sound of guitar-based rock such as Red Hot Chilli Peppers, AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix improves concentration and boosts memory. In order to get their results, the researchers carried out a simple test on sixteen volunteers. Firstly, they played each of the volunteers a classical song and asked them to carry out a simple memory test. Then they did the same with rock music, static noise, and finally silence. The results showed that while classical music was better for cognitive tasks, the rock fans listening to the rock music carried out the memory task with a lot less brain power than they did when doing the test in silence. This may be bad news for long suffering parents of scene and emo adolescents, however.

bbc.co.uk -
Every year 80,000 punk rock fans gather at Donnington Park to see the Download festival. 200 was no exception. As of every year, the crowd eighty thousand well tattooed, well pierced, happy individuals filed into Donnington Park to see bands such as Faith No More, Slipknot, Limp Bizkit and the Prodigy, and they were not disappointed. Heavy metal music and rock music never go out of fashion, that is the beauty of festivals such as Download.
Hollywood Undead, the rapcore band, open the show and set the bar for the rest of the acts to live up to. Slipknot follow them well, wearing their telltale masks and doing a medley of Linkin Park songs. Emo-pop band The Blackout enthralled the emo fans the next day, followed by Korn and Limp Bizkit. Enter Shikari ended the day on a high. At the end of the festival it is agreed by all that 2009 has been one of the best years for Download.

About Alternative Music

Alternative music has had a significant effect on how today's youths act and dress. Usually shortened to 'alt-rock' or simply 'alternative', alternative rock music is a genre most famous for the fans it acquires rather than the music itself. It emerged in the '80's, but did not really catch on until mid '90's, until about the time of Nirvana.

Such a band represented a break from the innovative, hyper rational post-punk years and introduced a whole new generation of music that would change the youths of today. Alternative bands built underground followings by touring constantly and regularly releasing new songs for their small and select fan bases.

So many sub-genres of music are associated with alternative music that most of the bands have tried hard to get away from being considered in such a vague genre. Some such genres are: grunge, britpop, gothic rock, indie and emo. These genres and unified by the fact that they all have blossomed from punk rock music.

The young people identified with such genres usually refer to themselves as 'emos' or 'scene kids', something which came about from their peers intending to insult them. The names caught on, however, and to this day anyone interested in bands such as My Chemical Romance as referred to as 'Emos' and anyone interested in bands such as 3OH!3 are referred to as 'Scenes'. Associated with these stereotypes comes a very rigid style of clothing that anyone 'Scene' or 'Emo' has to stick to if they wish to be accepted within such a group.