Beyond Subculture

Pop, Youth and Identity in a Postcolonial World

Rupa Huq

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134470648
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Presenting a new approach to the study of youth culture and popular music, Beyond Subculture re-examines the link between music and subcultures and asks the question; in an ageing world, can pop music still be an automatic metaphor for youth culture?

Using case studies and first-hand interviews with consumer and producers including Noel Gallagher and Talvin Singh, Rupa Huq investigates a series of musically-centred global youth cultures including hip-hop, electronic dance music and bhangra.

With 'Generation X' becoming an increasingly redundant term, this book will help students redefine their ideas of youth culture and will be an invaluable addition to their studies.

Part I
THEORETICAL OVERVIEW

1
RETHINKING SUBCULTURE

A critique for the twenty-first century

[S]pectacular subcultures express forbidden forms (transgressions of sartorial and behavioural codes, law-breaking etc).

(Dick Hebdige 1979: 91–2)

A rather dull consensus of cool has begun to form about music, culture and fashion and lifestyle, and a lot of that is a result and a reflection of the decline of tribalism, as manifested in the amorphous but nevertheless fiercely identifiable subcultures which have traditionally dominated British pop culture.

(‘Tribal Ungathering’, NME, 5 December 1998)

‘Subculture’ has in many ways come of age. The subject is a staple on many sociology undergraduate course syllabuses, commanding its own secondary texts (Frith and Goodwin 1990; Gelder and Thornton 1997; Redhead et al. 1997) alongside the primary source classics. The word, replete with subaltern, underground connotations, appears on the airwaves, in the circles of popular culture debate and the pages of popular magazines, even getting casual mentions in UK weekly paper the New Musical Express.¹ Subculture is a term that I have been aware of since at least my teenage years in the late 1980s; the word nestled in my record collection as the title of album tracks by both New Order and the Pixies. On stumbling across a copy of Dick Hebdige’s seminal 1979 work Subculture with its arresting yellow cover depicting a spikey-haired male punk in the seemingly incongrous setting of the Cambridge University criminology library while I was a law undergraduate, I later became aware of the term as an academic concept. Certainly the notion has a long history. It was initially developed by the US 1950s Chicago school of urban gang sociology and later refashioned by the 1970s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the UK’s Birmingham University in a ‘boom’ decade for the topic when a glut of British studies on subculture appeared. Yet by 1980 Stanley Cohen (1980: xxv), in the introduction to the revised edition of his earlier work Folk Devils and Moral Panics, wrote: ‘to read the literature on subcultural delinquency is a depressing business’. The prevailing orthodoxy in the study of subcultures had fallen out of fashion.

Academic concepts wax and wane in terms of their influence. Although Frith and Goodwin (1990: 41) rate the 1970s as the ‘zenith of subcultural theory’s influence’, tracing this to a 1979 review of Hebdige’s Subculture, at the time of writing a renewed academic interest in the concept appears to be upon us, with a new generation of subculture-influenced studies which offer more than a simple restatement of received orthodoxy. Indeed the adjective ‘post-subcultural’ (Bennett and Harris 2003; Muggleton 1997; 2000; Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003; Pilkington 2001) and the variant ‘post-Birmingham’ (Thornton 1995) are repeatedly emphasised by twenty-first century neo-subculturalists. Of course criticisms of subcultural theory began from within almost as soon as the ink was dry on some of the original subcultural works. This opening chapter continues in this critical vein begun by scholars such as Stanley Cohen over two decades ago. Now that a revival of academic interest in youth cultural questions is upon us, what can we use to build on from the old Birmingham subcultural studies and what elements must we challenge?

Youth culture and the succession of often musically based scenes that Redhead (1990: 1) calls ‘the subcultural chain’ has been a growth industry in the post-war period. Needless to say, youth culture’s academic shadow has lengthened along with it. It now commands an academic literature that is copious and diffuse and has appeared at an uneven rate. Part I of this book, an exploration of the content and context of the existing literature on youth culture, then, starts with the key concept of subculture which informs all the remaining chapters.

Romanticising resistance: Birmingham subculture studies

The prolific output of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from the 1970s forms British academia’s most sustained engagement with youth culture. The CCCS approach is best represented in Hall and Jefferson’s (1976) Resistance through Rituals, a multi-authored volume which provided the blueprint for CCCS subcultural studies. Here ‘authentic’ subcultural identity was understood as being expressed by youth in terms of a cohesive and collective cultural resistance to the dominant order. A number of very good secondary sources now exist on the CCCS subcultural studies and their antecedents (e.g. Gelder and Thornton 1997; Epstein 1998), so I do not wish to dwell too heavily on this subject here. Rather than labriously stating in great detail what subcultural theory was, I want instead to highlight some of its deficiencies, through which central tenets of the broad doctrine will emerge as a result.

Subcultural theory attracted numerous criticisms almost from the outset – not least from some of the Birmingham authors themselves, such as Dick Hebdige and Angela McRobbie, who are part of what Wulff (1995b: 4) defines as ‘an entire industry of critique [and] … autocritique’. The main problems of subcultural theory come under three interlinked main headings – omissions, structural overdetermination and methodological problems. If we take the first of these, in some ways it is easier to criticise the Birmingham School by highlighting the categories of youth excluded from their analysis rather than those included. Despite the emergence of subcultural theory out of wider political and cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s including feminism and antiracism, women and black youth receive at best only a partial treatment in early subcultural studies outside the obvious contributions of McRobbie and Garber (1976) and the later CCCS volume (1982) The Empire Strikes Back. The second of these criticisms relates to subcultural studies’ overly deterministic reading of youth social action, or what Kellner (1994: 37) has termed its ‘fetishism of resistance’. For the CCCS youth were social actors in highly circumscribed contexts, subject to structural constraints not of their own making and largely beyond their control. This criticism is one that is strongly connected to the third which deals with methodological concerns. The heavy emphasis on (Marxist–structuralist) theory is at the expense of the empirical grounding of the Chicago school tradition. As Frith writes (1985: 349) ‘subcultural theory is based on remarkably limited empirical research’. Indeed, despite including three chapters that focus on methodology (Butters 1976; Pearson and Twohig 1976; Roberts 1976), like much CCCS work (e.g. Hebdige 1979) the majority of the contents of Resistance through Rituals is based on media sources. Needless to say, such marginalisation of subjects such as ethnic minority youth and girls leads to distortion. I want now to discuss some of subcultural studies’ omissions in greater detail.

Youth missing in action: subcultural studies’ omissions

One of the most important criticisms of the Birmingham CCCS work is the lack of consideration given to females. Heidensohn (1985: 140) writes:

girls do flit through the pages of these books and articles, but … they are perceived and portrayed through the eyes of the ‘lads’ … in almost fifty years of theoretical and ethnographic work on deviant cultures from Whyte to Willis, nothing had changed. Skinhead girls in Smethwick, Sunderland or the East End were as invisible to contemporary researchers and as liable to be dismissed as mere sex objects as they had been in Boston.

Gillis (1974) includes a chapter entitled ‘ “Boys will be Boys”: Discovery of Adolescence 1870–1900’, making this same point in relation to an earlier historical period. Nava’s (1984: 1) frustration that youth cultural studies ‘has predominantly been about boys – usually urban white working class boys …girls are only rendered visible where they are pertinent to the experience and perception of boys’, is borne out in Willis’s (1977) description of male counter-school culture. Girls are the subject of sexual conquest by the ‘lads’ rather than presented in active agents in any way. Inuendo and machismo bravado boasts about sexual prowess are parts of their daily banter.Willis himself reports all this as a matter of fact rather than serioulsy challenging it in any way. The most he volunteers is the explanation that girls were outside the remit of the study in a footnote on methodology (Willis 1977: 159).

McRobbie and Garber’s Resistance through Rituals contribution (1976: 212) claims that ‘Female invisibility in youth subcultures then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious cycle … the emphasises in the documentation of these phenomenons [sic], on the male and masculine, reinforce and amplify our conception of the subcultures as predominantly male.’ In later work McRobbie (1980) finds that slotting girls into received notions of subcultures is problematic given the difficulties of defining any such thing as female subculture, i.e. a way in which working class girls can resist dominant cultural norms as a group of girls. Female skinheads and punks may, she claims, be rebelling against the mainstream culture of femininity, but within the subculture itself traditional gender divisions are still in place. Furthermore, young women seem to exist in spatial and social organisations from which subcultures in the CCCS sense cannot emerge. McRobbie and Garber (1976: 213) note ‘the “culture of the bedroom” – experimenting with make-up, listening to records, reading the mags, sizing up boyfriends, chatting, jiving’.This exists not as action in the public arena but is experienced often on an individual level in private spaces (see also Frith 1978) with a more sedentary focus, which is often a necessity due to the greater restrictions placed on girls. The impact/influence of gay culture on British post-war youth culture is a further CCCS omission, highlighted by Savage (1990), who argues that gay culture underpins British subcultural style from Teddy Boy to acid house. According to Savage, the absence of gays from the subcultural picture rests on the desire of academics for an idealised ‘utopia of the innocent’.

Black youth have tended to register with the social sciences under the categories of ‘race’ or ‘migrant labour’ in what Gilroy (1987) calls the ‘victim/problem’ discursive couplet. Despite the fact that the new commonwealth immigrants were a young population (as economic migrants often are), British blacks were another relative omission of early youth subcultural studies. Birmingham treatments of non-white groups included the work of Hebdige (1979) and Jones (1988) who looked at reggae, rasta and rudies. The CCCS’s main contribution to the race came in the form of The Empire Strikes Back (1982), which appeared some years after the main wave of CCCS subcultural studies. Subtitled ‘Race and Nation in 1970s Britain’, it was a multi-authored volume with content spanning the 1981 UK urban riots and the Grunwick episode which saw Asian women taking industrial action against their employers in a dispute over working conditions. Apart from this work those studies that do exist tend either to sympathise with black youth as victims of racism or to objectify them as a source of white stylistic fetishisation/appropriation (Brake 1980; Chambers 1976; Hebdige 1979; Jones 1988). Hebdige (1979) for example argued that postwar youth cultures offered a ‘phantom history’ of post-war race relations in Britain; examples given included the punk/rasta intersection. Gary Clarke (1985: 88) calls this ‘a coded recording of race relations’ where black culture itself is rather narrowly held to be consistent with Jamaican culture. Jones (1988) also undertakes a reading of the historical relationship between black culture and white youth, but importantly he sees new ethnicities as embedded in contemporary British society, and recognises inter-racial friendship. It is likely that a new generation of black intellectuals will continue to redress the balance in this area in years to come. For example Gilroy’s (1993a) reading of cultural history reconstructs a specifically ‘Black Atlantic’ culture which transcends nation-states and rejects the politics of separation.

Theoretical and structural considerations

More fundamental issue with the whole ‘essentialist and non-contradictory’ notion of subculture is taken by Gary Clarke (1981: 82–83) who writes: ‘The fundamental problem with Cohenite subcultural analysis is that it takes the cardcarrying members of spectacular subcultures as its starting point and then teleologically works backward to uncover the class situation and detect the specific set of contradictions which produced the corresponding set of styles.’ Ethnography is used then not to elaborate or illustrate but to validate or confirm pre-ordained political positions. Cohen (1980: ix) similarly blames overtheorisation: ‘The conceptual tools of Marxism, structuralism and semiotics, a left-bank pantheon of Genet, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and Althusser have all been wheeled in to aid this hunt for the hidden code.’ For example, Hebdige (1979: 18) states:

Style in subculture is pregnant with significance. Its transformations go ‘against nature’ interrupting processes of ‘normalisation’ … our task becomes like Barthes’, to discern the hidden messages inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces of style, to trace them out as ‘maps of meaning’ which obscurely re-present the very contradictions they are designed to resolve or conceal.

Although the CCCS’s studies of 1970s youth were based in Britain, theoretically they drew heavily on continental traditions, particularly Marxism and French structuralist philosophy, emphasising the role of social structure(s) in predetermining individual trajectories. The concepts of culture, semiotics and ideology and the study of language/linguistics, anthropology and literary criticism are all spanned by this broad perspective. Among theorists drawn on by the CCCS were Saussure (1996 [1915]), who linked language and its meanings to culture (learned) rather than nature (with inherent meaning in itself); Lévi-Strauss (1955; 1964), who built on the idea of binary oppositions in his work on myths in ‘primitive’ society; and Barthes’ (1973) work on semiology/semiotics, the science of signs.A cursory glance at Resistance through Rituals (particularly the first chapter and the bibliography) reveals the CCCS’s fascination with structuralism, consolidated in later works.These theoretical schools were applied to 1970s British youth. Drawing on Barthes, for example, Hebdige (1979: 2–3) terms the interplay of signs and icons in youth culture ‘semiotic guerrilla warfare’ and links this to punk:

outrage can be encapsulated in a single object, so the tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the surfaces of subculture – in the styles made up of mundane objects which have a double meaning … the most mundane objects – a safety pin, a pointed shoe, a motor cycle … take on a symbolic dimension becoming a form of stigmata.

He also employs the Lévi-Straussian concept of ‘style as bricolage’ which mixes meanings to signify resistance to, and the subversion of, traditional norms. Some punk symbolism can be explained by other factors, e.g. the use of the Nazi symbol, the swastika, as a fashion statement, its shock value increased by the relative recentness of the Second World War at the historical moment at which its use occurred.² Arguably shoehorning youth into models developed for other purposes sometimes made for an uncomfortable fit.

The Gramscian (1971) notion of hegemony, i.e. the political and ideological domination of one class over others by the agreement of the dominated (rather than by their coercion), formed perhaps the most important strand in the intellectual grounding of the CCCS (Harris 1992). Clarke et al. (1976: 15) adapted Gramsci’s ‘dual consciousness’ of the working class (an inconsistent set of values that is part-submissive, based on capitalist ideology, and part-revolutionary, determined by the experience of capitalism) to posit a ‘double articulation of youth sub-cultures’ to parent culture and dominant culture. In this way, subcultures are subordinate but autonomous; there is an acceptance of one’s situation but a simultaneous rejection of it through the adoption of styles that represent a refusal to accept the values of the dominant culture. Both Althusser and Gramsci are discussed in Clarke et al.’s (1976) chapter which serves as the ‘mission statement’ of Hall and Jefferson (1976). The Gramscian theory of hegemony foreshadows Foucault’s post-structuralist reading of culture that operates through institutional structures and clusters around the concepts of history/power/knowledge. The Foucauldian concepts of knowledge, power and control of the body were influential in Hebdige’s (1983; 1988) writing on youth surveillance and display.

Needless to say analytical rigidity breeds inconsistencies. Seeing working class subcultures as absolutes precludes the possibility of class mobility or any recognition of varying degrees of subcultural affiliation. Far from being unproblematic, coherent and sovereign, identity itself is constructed and multifaceted, with subcultural membership being only one aspect. In addition to this, conformist youths are conspicuous by their absence – take, for example, the overidentification of Willis with the ‘lads’ at the expense of the activities, opinions or voices of those less rebellious people the lads identify as the ‘ear’oles’ (also young, white working class males) who are described disparagingly.³ Cohen (1980: xix) similarly expresses reservations about ‘the obvious fascination with spectacular subcultures’. For Clarke (1981: 85) ‘On the whole, the absolute distinction between subcultures and “straights” is increasingly difficult to maintain.’ ⁴ Redhead’s more recent critique of subculture as an object created by subculture theorists will be dealt with at greater length below.

Subculture theorists’ collective obsession with class was almost exclusively limited to working class subjugation within structuring structures for youth, e.g. school. This axis is demonstrated in the title of Mungham and Pearson’s volume Working Class Youth Culture (1976), another collection of essays by many of the Resistance authors covering much of the same ground (e.g. Murdock and McCron 1976a; Murdock and McCron 1976b), and Clarke’s (1973) prototypical paper ‘The Three R’s – Repression, Rescue and Rehabilitation: Ideologies of Control for Working Class Youth’. In the tradition of educational sociology,Willis (1977) charted the transition from the last two years of school to entry into the labour force of non-academic working class boys in a Midlands comprehensive school. This rare example of ethnography from the Birmingham School finds that the oppositional cultural processes effected by the ‘lads’ ultimately, and inevitably, maintain and reproduce the social order. A similar treatment of social disadvantage and the hidden latent ideological struggle implicit in school for young working class males is provided by Corrigan (1979).

The fascination of working class youth for middle class academics existed despite the fact that a number of the branches of the post-war subcultural tree have been decidedly middle class, e.g. mod and punk, contrived by middle class students in UK art school classrooms (Frith and Horne 1987; Longhurst 1995) and 1960s student radicals.⁵ Murdock and McCron (1976a: 203) declared: ‘Subcultural styles can therefore be seen as coded expressions of class consciousness transposed into the specific context of youth and reflective of the complexity in which age acts as a mediation both of class experience and of class consciousness.’Writing more recently Frith (1985: 347–8) has concluded that subcultural theorists have over-romanticised working class resistance: ‘There has always been a tendency for sociologists (who usually come from middle class, bookish backgrounds) to celebrate teenage deviancy, to admire the loyalties of street life.’ This tendency can be seen in Hebdige’s (1988: 244) self-confessional soliloquy closing Hiding in the Light, voicing some anxieties about his roots, in the sort of very personalised prose that both Back (1996) and Dyer (1997) have also indulged in of late, the latter two in a discussion of whiteness.

Methodology

Of course no researcher can ever ultimately be neutral, and the members of the CCCS made no pretence at being so; their very logic of inclusion (and what was excluded) betraying their agenda.With their work set in the context of multiple economic crises and social and economic polarisation in Britain (Osgerby 1997: 104), perhaps then the Birmingham School is best understood as a strictly partisan political project; as a last 1960s idealist flourish in its core construction of ‘youth as a metaphor for social change’ (Clarke et al. 1976: 17).

Despite the engagement of cultural studies academics in anti-racism and feminism as individuals (Barker and Beezer 1992: 2), paradoxically the political agenda of subculture theory seems to have blinded the authors to some of the less attractive features of working class youth cultures, e.g. in explanations of ‘Paki-bashing’ as an understandable reaction by heroic working class whites (Clarke 1976; Hebdige 1979; Pearson 1976) who seek ‘a way of magically retrieving the sense of group solidarity and identity which once went along with living in a traditional working class neighbourhood’ (Robbins and Cohen 1978: 137). Clarke (1976: 100) explains skinhead behaviour as a ‘symbolic defence of (threatened) territory’ and a ‘magical attempt to recover community’ by ‘dispossessed inheritors’, identifying ‘skinhead style [as] derived from the traditional content of the working class community – the example par excellence of the defensively organised collective’. The aesthetic of cropped hair, braces and boots is seen as signifying their working class base. The fragmentation of traditional working class communities, as a result of slum housing clearance programmes,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I THEORETICAL OVERVIEW
• Part II Case Studies
• Bibliography