Yet in America today, there’s nothing more conformist than being a nonconformist, nothing more predictable than being a rebel, and nothing more mainstream than being alternative. Much of this is due to how our consumerist culture sells us the image of being a rebel. We live in a world where you can buy designer jeans with holes already ripped for you, and “alternative” is a genre of very popular music. As Thomas Frank writes, “We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock ’n’ roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of
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