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What does it mean to be alternative? What is alternativity, and how does it relate to other attempts to make sense of those on the margins? In the first part of this chapter, I will undertake a history and philosophy of alternativity, from deviance through subcultures to neo-tribes. This will focus partly on popular notions of alternativity, and partly on academic attempts to understand it in various disciplines and subject fields. In the second part of the chapter, the author will focus on how alternativity has been explored in two specific subject fields – leisure studies and popular cultural studies – to make the claim that both subject fields have failed through different means to get to groups with the idea of the alternative: leisure studies have failed through a lack of theory, and cultural studies have failed through a lack of empirical research. In the final part of the chapter, I will attempt to reconcile leisure and culture, and I will sketch out a new theory and empirical programme of alternative leisure that returns to the idea of subculture as counterculture.

In May 2016, Aleks Eror’s op-ed article ‘Dear fashion industry: Stop making up bogus subcultures’ on the HighSnobiety website accuses the fashion industry of creating ‘quasi-subcultures’, such as Normcore, Seapunk and Health Goth to promote specific fashion trends via the Internet. Eror argues that these fashion subcultures do not exist in resistance to mainstream culture (as he understands subcultures), but instead offer the specific fashions and their designers cache for being associated with a counterculture and connecting with alternative trends. Setting aside Eror’s narrow understanding of subcultures, he raises questions of authenticity and the current state of virtual fashion subcultures.

Still, there is evidence of these subcultures online and growing in substantial numbers regardless of their inception. Furthermore, persons identifying themselves with these groups practice alternativity, which delineates their scenes, artefacts, and practices from those of mainstream Western society. I pursue questions of authenticity regarding these recent fashion subcultures who appear to emerge in close proximity to the launch of specific fashions. The author explores the ways in which these fashion subcultural experiences differ from known subcultures. The author investigates notions of constructed resistance and perceived alternativity and marginalization, as well as how that positionality manifests into a fashion subculture identity.

The term Canterbury Sound emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s to refer to a signature style within psychedelic and progressive rock developed by bands such as Caravan and Soft Machine as well as key artists including Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers. This chapter explores Canterbury as a metaphor and reality, a symbolic space of music inspiration which has produced its distinctive ‘sound’.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, particularly observations and interviews with music artists and cultural intermediates (Bourdieu, 1993), we suggest that the notion of the Canterbury Sound – with its affinity for experimentation, distinctive chord progressions and jazz allusions in a rock music format – is perceived as a continuing artistic and aesthetic influence. We interpret the genealogy of the Canterbury Sound alternativity through discussions focused on the position of the ‘Sound’ within contemporary heritage discourses, the metaphorical and geographical implications of place in relation to popular music, and cultural longevity of the phenomenon.