I was born in 1979, in Catalonia, Spain, in a working class family. One of those that now, between pride and fear, call themselves middle class. I grew up among tube televisions, 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", "not to bother", "not to be a nuisance".

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

In the 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 was not only a labor move, it was a cultural shock. Other languages were spoken, other customs were lived, and the newcomers were often viewed with suspicion. The inequality between regions was profound, and living together was not 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 a time when counterculture still smelled of gunpowder, vinyl, and freshly printed fanzine ink. In the late seventies and early eighties, counterculture was not a pose or a marketing label: it was a visceral response to a system that seemed immobile. 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 did not want to follow the script of their parents. In the United States, hip hop was beginning to articulate a collective voice born in the most punished margins. Everything had a meaning: music, aesthetics, 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 may seem obvious, made the difference: nobody served you dissidence on a platter. You had to look for it. You had to live it.

In the late 90's, in our adolescence, like many young people at that age, we were looking for meaning beyond the family and social paradigm. What we were told should be a "normal" life was not enough for us. Many of us were already carrying a 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 already born without faith, that we live angry and we don't know why." - ToteKing, "Conspiracy"

A phrase that not only portrays us, but explains us. A muffled rage, without direction, but deeply true. A mixture of frustration and embryonic conscience, which made us look for answers in music, in the street, in books, in any place where the same old song did not sound.

Coincidentally, in the 1980s, with the rise of the 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 potent that it did the system's dirty work, taking down many dissidents who dreamed of a better world.

By the year 2000, I was embracing hip hop culture like someone clinging to a life preserver after days adrift. In music, above all, I found an oasis in the middle of the desert. Like water, it soothed my doubts, my emotions, and connected me to something. With a we that I had never known before.

Like me, many others embraced this and other countercultural movements during those two decades, the 80s and 90s. Such was the discontent and disconnection that these "minority" movements became popular. And what was born out of simple passion and survival, became profitable.

Grunge, hip hop, heavy metal... they were all new, uncomfortable, intense languages. But as they gained space, 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 the counterculture and sold them packaged.

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 the musical. He was the synthesis of rage, political awareness and talent. That is 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 generated by the system to a person with ideals that transcend it.

Curiously, in metal we do not find a figure that fits entirely in this 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 dissidence was more existential than political, more philosophical than structural. It was not a movement that sought to change the world, but to shout against it. Relief rather than transformation. Perhaps that is why it survived more intact, less phagocytized by the market. Or maybe that is why it was never taken seriously by those who write the narratives of power. Yes, 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 there it stayed.

And perhaps in those margins lies salvation. The world as we knew it may be over 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 outward, not with the intention to flee or confront, but to create honest and healthy alternatives that give rise to new generations prepared to master and face the challenges ahead.

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