Finding, joining, and deepening a connection to a music subculture required effort; you had to find the right venues, records, zines, or crowd. In that era, music was tribal

I like this framing, but entombing it in the past feels wrong. It is still true that Finding, joining, and deepening a connection to any subculture requires effort; you have to find the right venues, records, zines, or crowd. We are tribal.

The change isn’t that the rites of subculture-culture have vanished, it’s that most people no longer seek a subculture, they seek directly to coerce the whole culture, and so the whole culture is divided along more lines than ever.