I was randomly matched with two other freshmen in a large, undivided dorm and expected to live civilly for a full year. One guy I initially expected to get along with, since before moving we’d both thought to coordinate who should bring the turntable. Turned out his vinyl collection included mostly Phish, assorted ’90s alternative, and the compulsory classic rock albums.

He had recently begun growing dreadlocks. Each knotted, three-inch lump bobbed at an odd angle, unsure whether to be pulled up by the roots or down by gravity. When I ridiculed that he always cued Sublime when company was around, he was shocked and said, “I thought everybody likes Sublime.” He added derisively, “I guess it’s not one of those bands.”

At the time, it was clear that he couldn’t be any more wrong about my music. My CD book contained everything from folk to hardcore to jazz. I was too eclectic to grudgingly admit the truth of his statement. The truth was that both of us fell pretty neatly within opposing demographics. He was a crunch and I was a hipster. As infantile as these labels might seem, they tore us apart and made friendship impossible.

The chains of lifestyle marketing have become so pervasive that very similar musical styles can seem worlds apart to fans. The Grateful Dead lies near the beginning of a long tradition of psychedelic music. Every music fan is entitled to love the Grateful Dead without shame. Like almost any music from the Edenic 1960s, the Grateful Dead can appeal equally to high schoolers, investment bankers, artists, and jocks.

But fanship of the Dead’s progeny isn’t so simple. Along with the explosive musical growth of the 1960s came explosive music marketing growth. What marketers have gradually come to realize is that music doesn’t have to be sold by itself—it can be more effectively sold along with an entire lifestyle package including fashion, food, and even values. Where marketers once expected the usefulness or quality of a product to drive sales, marketers now target segmented portions of the market that share core values.  Their goal is to relate their brand to the values of the target demographic. This is how we train dogs.

As with most things in our modern culture, psychedelic bands descending from the era of the Grateful Dead have been divided by lifestyle categories. The most clear stylistic descendents, jam bands like Phish, are despised by fans of musically similar but demographically opposed hipster psychedelia. The Boredoms just might be the most deeply embedded example of this market segment.

This Japanese group first hit American audiences in the late ’80s when John Zorn recruited Boredoms frontman Yamataka eye for Zorn’s supergroup, Naked City. The Boredoms toured with Sonic Youth and an early Lollapalooza appearance followed. At this point in the early ’90s, the Boredoms might loosely be called psychedelic in the sense that their spastic, freaky punk minced every conceivable style and spat out records more disorienting than LSD.

By the mid-’90s, however, the Boredoms shed their mile-a-minute approach and began to release inch-an-hour psychedelic jams. With repetitive drumming, extended, phased synth melodies, and plenty of echoes, the Boredoms displaced the original idea of drawn-out psych into a futuristic setting. Instead of Bob Weir’s country-infused marathon solos, the Boredoms soloed with whirling electronic sounds.

As I see it, when the Boredoms throw their entire band through a phaser in post-production, they aren’t doing something fundamentally different than when Trey Anastasio uses a wah-wah pedal during a wanking solo. Both grow from the same psychedelic history, but the Boredoms exemplify a reactionary wave against Grateful Dead-style psychedelia. More extreme uses of similar techniques are a reactionary gesture representative of a demographic that wants to distance itself from huge jam audiences. Under the veneer, however, it’s the same substance.