Sonic the Hedgehog is a Punk Rocker

Back in the early 90s I was very proud of the fact that all of my favorite bands never got played on the radio. I felt individualized by the idea that my tastes were beyond the realm of mainstream culture. Indeed I embraced the "freak status" that came with playing and listening to loud and abrasive music. That is why I felt betrayed when I heard one of my favorite bands on TV in the early 90s. I was watching TV and an ad for a new sega game came on and the background music for the game demo was the Butthole Surfers. The surfers twisted brand of rock was being co-opted and used to sell videogames. I felt like I was being robbed. Here I had sought out and discovered some really far out music (which wasn't easy in the suburbs and without the internet) and now it was being broadcast to undeserving kids via sega game commercials. I viewed it as the bastardization of the counterculture that I had embraced - something sacred that made me feel like an individual was no longer sacred. It had become categorized, packaged marketing fodder. This was my first experience of seeing my own cultural symbols being co-opted into commercial items, but certainly not the last. The punk rock esthetic that was once characteristic only of punk albums and band flyers has been co-opted into a new youth marketing scheme. Everywhere you look something new is being advertised with the old rough-hewn cut-and-paste style graphics. If you look at a bunch of DIY punk albums from the eighties you will see the same style of graphics that are being used today to market things like energy drinks, videogames, pro sports, etc. This rough-hewn cut-and-paste esthetic used to be used just to decorate the packaging of aggressive music. Well, not anymore. Nothing is sacred. What were once antiestablishment, anticonsumer cultural symbols are now themselves being sold.