I was born in 1979, in Catalonia, Spain, into a working-class family. The kind that now, between pride and fear, call themselves middle class. I grew up with tube TVs, general strikes, and summers without air conditioning. My parents worked a lot, spoke little, and when they did, it was to teach me to "behave well," to "not bother," to "not be a nuisance."

I wasn't an only child. I was the third, with a ten-year gap from the second. So, it was worse than growing up alone: it was growing up feeling like an addition, a bother, a burden. From a young age, I learned not to ask, not to interrupt, to observe "from a distance." As if existing wasn't enough, as if I always had to prove that I deserved to be there.

In that Spain of the 80s and 90s, while in other countries immigration came from abroad, here it was internal: the consequences of the great rural exodus that began in the 50s and 60s were still dragging on. Entire families moved from Andalusia, Galicia, or Extremadura to Catalonia, the Basque Country, or Madrid in search of work and dignity. But it wasn't just a job change, it was a cultural shock. Other languages were spoken, other customs were lived, and often, the newcomers were viewed with suspicion. The inequality between regions was profound, and coexistence wasn't always easy. Those who, like my parents, migrated within the same country, also experienced uprooting, forced adaptation, and the feeling of being strangers in their own land.

I grew up in an era where counterculture still smelled of gunpowder, vinyl, and freshly printed fanzine ink. In the late seventies and early eighties, counterculture wasn't a pose or a marketing label: it was a visceral response to a system that seemed immovable. In Latin America, in the midst of dictatorship or post-dictatorship, being countercultural could cost you your life. In Europe, punk exploded as a slap in the face to the disenchantment of a youth that didn't want to follow their parents' script. In the United States, hip hop began to articulate a collective voice born in the most punished margins. Everything made sense: the music, the aesthetics, the language, the body, everything was a way of saying "no" to the established order.

Those were hard times, yes, but also fertile. The enemy was recognizable: the authoritarian state, savage capital, police repression, patriarchy without makeup. Ideas circulated from hand to hand, copied, dubbed, spoken in the ear. There were no algorithms selecting your rebellion. The subversive was not sold in stores. And that, although it seems obvious, made the difference: nobody served you dissent on a platter. You had to look for it. You had to live it.

In the late 90s, in the midst of adolescence, like many young people at that age, we were looking for meaning beyond the family and social paradigm. What they told us a "normal" life should be wasn't enough for us. Many of us already carried a good backpack of pain, doubts, and disappointment, although we barely knew how to name it. The system hadn't destroyed us, but it hadn't offered us anything real either. And that hurt.

"I'm from that generation that was born without faith, that lives angry and we don't know why." — ToteKing, "Conspiracy"

A phrase that not only portrays us, but explains us. A deaf rage, without direction, but deeply true. A mixture of frustration and embryonic awareness, which made us look for answers in music, in the street, in books, in any place where the same old song wasn't playing.

Coincidentally, in the 80s, with the rise of counterculture worldwide, there was another explosion that became endemic, especially within those same circuits: hard drugs. They mixed in an unpredictable cocktail of negative and positive emotions so powerful that it did the system's dirty work, taking with it many dissidents who dreamed of a better world.

By the year 2000, I was already embracing hip hop culture like someone clinging to a life raft after days adrift. In music, above all, I found an oasis in the middle of the desert. Like water, it calmed my doubts, my emotions, and connected me with something. With a 'we' that I hadn't known until that moment.

Like me, many others embraced this and other countercultural movements during those two decades, the 80s and 90s. The discontent and disconnection were such that these "minority" movements became popular. And what was born from simple passion and survival transformed into profit.

Grunge, hip hop, heavy metal... they were all new, uncomfortable, intense languages. But as they gained ground, they became commodities. Album covers were designed to sell rebellion, not to live it. Television, the entertainment industry, and later, the internet, absorbed the symbols of counterculture and sold them prepackaged.

Amy Winehouse represented pure pain commodified until her death. Without having explicit countercultural implications, she was the ultimate expression of that pain and meaninglessness of a generation. Her life and death became a spectacle, a product.

Tupac Shakur, on the other hand, embodied something more dangerous: a voice that transcended music. He was the synthesis of rage, political awareness, and talent. That's why he was silenced. Kurt Cobain was a third vertex in that triad: an existential poet who chose to immolate himself rather than become his own enemy. The trinity of Tupac, Kurt, and Amy could represent three ways of managing the conflicts that the system generates in a person with ideals that transcend it.

Interestingly, in metal we don't find a figure that quite fits into that tragic triad. And perhaps that says more about metal than about its protagonists. Because although it was—and still is—one of the most intense forms of sonic and aesthetic rebellion, metal bothered the system less. Its dissent was more existential than political, more philosophical than structural. It wasn't a movement that sought to change the world, but to scream against it. Catharsis before transformation. Perhaps that's why it survived more intact, less consumed by the market. Or perhaps that's why it was never taken seriously by those who write the narratives of power. There were deaths, excesses, tragedies. But there were no media martyrs or collective discourses that the system needed to silence or reconfigure. Metal resisted in the margins... and stayed there.

And perhaps salvation lies in those margins. The world as we knew it may have ended in 2012. Technology and the new social and political language don't leave much room for a real counterculture. And past experiences show us that the system always wins when you play its game. But in those margins there is room to build outwards, not with the intention of fleeing or confronting, but of creating honest and healthy alternatives that give rise to new generations prepared to master and face the challenges that lie ahead.

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