Imagine yourself living a typical day in ancient times. You wake up and your senses slowly begin to function. You focus more intently on different senses than you normally would. While your eyesight is the primary source of input in modern times, in our ancient scenario, you use the sense of touch, smell, hearing, and tasting in equal proportions. So, imagine you get up to walk around after waking up, and you sense the world around you: you see rock formations, a blue sky, shrubbery, other humans, maybe some animals; you feel a warm breeze; you smell other animals’ odors and other humans’ odors; you hear people communicating, animals making animal noises, soft ruffles of leaves of plant life in close proximity. You taste gross morning breath residue in your mouth. As you begin your day, you do a variety of things for survival, but you also find time to explore the world, reason with fellow humans, and figure out new methods of effective living - such as irrigating water to crops. You learn from your elders, and they teach you what has been learned about the world, how to live, and the importance of maintaining honor.

Now imagine yourself living a typical day during the first year of the 21st century. You wake up, and your senses slowly begin to function - just like they would in ancient times. A big difference between the two, however, is that there is a possibility that you were woken up with a blasting morning talk show on AM/FM alarm radio. You go upstairs to eat breakfast, and turn on a television set with morning show hosts that you do not know personally interviewing a person that you do not know personally. You eat breakfast while glancing through a newspaper which publishes stories designed to make you fear “gun-toting Arabs”, worry about your hospitals not being prepared for apocalyptic disaster, and believe that the political candidates consistently written about and photographed are by far the most reasonable. You go to school listening to Juvenile rap about women being ‘fine’ if only they ‘back dat ass up’, and you unconsciously mold yourself after the lifestyle he portrays to live. You’ve never questioned this way of life, because it has existed as long as you’ve been alive. You learn about the discoveries of the world through boring, mind-numbing lectures from teachers you fear. You learn how to live according to the behavior of television and movie characters. You maintain no honor within your family or community, and are in fact isolated from both with the help of a soft glowing screen, or a pair of headphones.

This way of life is wrong, and needs to be questioned.

An obvious reason why it should be questioned: The information being thrown into the minds of the youth through mass distribution and media networking is mostly bullshit. Its message is empty, and it subliminally makes us feel that nothing is possible - that anything worthwhile such as chasing dreams or the opposite sex is impossible. If not that, then they just stimulate fantasy with mindless action and sex scenes - providing as much nourishment to the mind as candy does to the body. But, remember, candy tastes good, and people are always begging for ice cream. The most mainstream media outlets like teen magazines ("Teen People”, “Seventeen”, etc), popular music ("Korn", “Mariah Carey”, etc), and popular movies ("Scream", “American Pie”, etc) are basically pacifiers to keep teens quiet and happy, encouraging them not to think critically about the world around them. These forms of media are circulated on a mass level, and teens who are insecure about themselves will look into it, hoping to find some answers. Knowing that these forms of media are viewed by millions of people a day, the corporations that make it all possible are sure to keep their interests met. That is why mainstream culture is not rebellious in nature, and even manages to pacify any aspect of rebellious culture that begins to surface into mainstream.

Punk and hip-hop are perfect examples of this: Two cultures that initially centered around resistance against the system and the creation of a forum to think about and discuss issues of social relevance that were altered into disgusting propaganda machines designed to maintain the status quo. Punk turned into teenage pseudo-angst over girlfriends and life in suburbia, and hip-hop was represented as “crazy negro music” that displayed a raw, unapologetic perversion and exploitation of women, and a greedy, materialistic lifestyle. With kids thinking that rebellion consists of buying a “Jay-Z” album or wearing a “Blink-182” shirt with a clever caption, they will look no further into what the invisible leaders are doing.

Resistant cultures like hip-hop and punk came from a root, though - and even today those two styles manage to push limits, along with newly sprouting styles, in the underground. The only problem is that this ‘underground’ world is presented as dark, and hard to access. The truth is that it is available by simply talking to other people, and connecting with others to teach them what’s up. The Internet presents a perfect forum to do this. The root that hip-hop and punk came from still generates new forums of rebellious culture. People everywhere continue to put out media that encourages those who participate in it to know the true self, to think critically of the system, and to create a sense of community. Luckily, these people manage to break through the mainstream in their pure form for a short time - thus sparking a possibly large amount of mental flames in teenage minds. It is necessary to realize when the dissident voices are exploited and imitated, or directly challenged by opposing cultures that work for the system. Visual artists who push the boundaries and challenge the minds, musicians who fuse spirituality, politics, and art into their music, writers who write revolutionary texts, filmmakers who challenge the norm - all these artists work to teach the root of truth.

This is done so that in the future, hopefully, we can organize a world without ridiculously organized governments that use the media to manipulate the people. When this happens, art will be pure again - and not just filler designed for radio advertisers who air commercials between 3 min. 30 sec. pop songs with hooky choruses. Books will be universal in their message, whether it be fiction, science, public interest, or philosophy. It will be a time when the mind is not bombarded with billions of pixels of information in bright colors and loud sounds - becoming desensitized to anything and everything, and becoming spiritual empty. The media is a perfect symbol of the disgusting sickness that has dominated our world - and analyzing the nature of the media is a step toward understanding the truth about our negative global predicament.

Separating yourself from the mainstream media, and feeding legitimate counter-culture is a necessary step toward understanding the nature of this machine as a whole - so limit watching the television unless it broadcasts animal documentaries (!), and embrace new, revolutionary music. The final step is to begin creating the media that represents our generation, and our cultures - which are many - as one.