Rebel music is alive and kicking in Southeast Asia

PENANG, Malaysia -- Decades after provoking moral panic among Western parents, anti-conformist musical subcultures such as heavy metal, punk and hip-hop have largely lost their original shock value.

While they still rely on a subsystem of interconnected grassroots alternative communities, these subcultures' defiant images and messages have been tamed with age and assimilated into popular culture's mainstream -- at least in the West, where movies and television series now treat these once-rebellious musical genres as wholesome fare.