The author writes about his own experience in studies of local alternative rock music scene in the north-eastern Slovenia. Using some examples from long-term ethnographic following of the scene, the author shows that ethnographic studies of modernity matter. From the perspective of developing field of anthropology of popular music, he presents 25 years of the punk rock group Center za dehumanizacijo, and the development of the local underground scene in Trate, Slovenske gorice, and discusses wider social and political transformations in Slovenia using examples from their creative confrontations with its local and wider social surrounding.