Subculture

The Meaning of Style

Dick Hebdige

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134955534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

'Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style is so important: complex and remarkably lucid, it's the first book dealing with punk to offer intellectual content. Hebdige [...] is concerned with the UK's postwar, music-centred, white working-class subcultures, from teddy boys to mods and rockers to skinheads and punks.' - Rolling Stone

With enviable precision and wit Hebdige has addressed himself to a complex topic - the meanings behind the fashionable exteriors of working-class youth subcultures - approaching them with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus that combines semiotics, the sociology of devience and Marxism and come up with a very stimulating short book - Time Out

This book is an attempt to subject the various youth-protest movements of Britain in the last 15 years to the sort of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic analytical techniques propagated by, above all, Roland Barthes. The book is recommended whole-heartedly to anyone who would like fresh ideas about some of the most stimulating music of the rock era - The New York Times

Some Case Studies

Two

DOI: 10.4324/9780203139943-3

April 3, 1989, Marrakech

The chic thing is to dress in expensive tailor-made rags and all the queens are camping about in wild-boy drag. There are Bowery suits that appear to be stained with urine and vomit which on closer inspection turn out to be intricate embroideries of fine gold thread. There are clochard suits of the finest linen, shabby gentility suits … felt hats seasoned by old junkies … loud cheap pimp suits that turn out to be not so cheap the loudness is a subtle harmony of colours only the very best Poor Boy shops can turn out…. It is the double take and many carry it much further to as many as six takes (William Burroughs, 1969)

Holiday in the Sun: Mister Rotten Makes the Grade

THE British summer of 1976 was extraordinarily hot and dry: there were no recorded precedents. From May through to August, London parched and sweltered under luminous skies and the inevitable fog of exhaust fumes. Initially hailed as a Godsend, and a national ‘tonic’ in the press and television (was Britain’s ‘curse’ finally broken?) the sun provided seasonal relief from the dreary cycle of doom-laden headlines which had dominated the front pages of the tabloids throughout the winter. Nature performed its statutory ideological function and ‘stood in’ for all the other ‘bad news’, provided tangible proof of ‘improvement’ and pushed aside the strikes and the dissension. With predictable regularity, ‘bright young things’ were shown flouncing along Oxford Street in harem bags and beach shorts, bikini tops and polaroids in that last uplifting item for the News at Ten. The sun served as a ‘cheeky’ postscript to the crisis: a lighthearted addendum filled with tropical promise. The crisis, too, could have its holiday. But as the weeks and months passed and the heatwave continued, the old mythology of doom and disaster was reasserted with a vengeance. The ‘miracle’ rapidly became a commonplace, an everyday affair, until one morning in mid-July it was suddenly re-christened a ‘freak disorder’: a dreadful, last, unlooked-for factor in Britain’s decline.

The heatwave was officially declared a drought in August, water was rationed, crops were failing, and Hyde Park’s grass burned into a delicate shade of raw sienna. The end was at hand and Last Days imagery began to figure once more in the press. Economic categories, cultural and natural phenomena were confounded with more than customary abandon until the drought took on an almost metaphysical significance. A Minister for Drought was appointed, Nature had now been officially declared ‘unnatural’, and all the age-old inferences were drawn with an obligatory modicum of irony to keep within the bounds of common sense. In late August, two events of completely different mythical stature coincided to confirm the worst forebodings: it was demonstrated that the excessive heat was threatening the very structure of the nation’s houses (cracking the foundations) and the Notting Hill Carnival, traditionally a paradigm of racial harmony, exploded into violence. The Caribbean festival, with all its Cook’s Tours connotations of happy, dancing coloured folk, of jaunty bright calypsos and exotic costumes, was suddenly, unaccountably, transformed into a menacing congregation of angry black youths and embattled police. Hordes of young black Britons did the Soweto dash across the nation’s television screens and conjured up fearful images of other Negroes, other confrontations, other ‘long, hot summers’. The humble dustbin lid, the staple of every steel band, the symbol of the ‘carnival spirit’, of Negro ingenuity and the resilience of ghetto culture, took on an altogether more ominous significance when used by white-faced policemen as a desperate shield against an angry rain of bricks.

It was during this strange apocalyptic summer that punk made its sensational debut in the music press.¹ In London, especially in the south west and more specifically in the vicinity of the King’s Road, a new style was being generated combining elements drawn from a whole range of heterogeneous youth styles. In fact punk claimed a dubious parentage. Strands from David Bowie and glitter-rock were woven together with elements from American proto-punk (the Ramones, the Heartbreakers, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell), from that faction within London pub-rock (the 101-ers, the Gorillas, etc.) inspired by the mod subculture of the 60s, from the Canvey Island 40s revival and the Southend r & b bands (Dr Feelgood, Lew Lewis, etc.), from northern soul and from reggae.

Not surprisingly, the resulting mix was somewhat unstable: all these elements constantly threatened to separate and return to their original sources. Glam rock contributed narcissism, nihilism and gender confusion. American punk offered a minimalist aesthetic (e.g. the Ramones’ ‘Pinhead’ or Crime’s ‘I Stupid’), the cult of the Street and a penchant for self-laceration. Northern Soul (a genuinely secret subculture of working-class youngsters dedicated to acrobatic dancing and fast American soul of the 60s, which centres on clubs like the Wigan Casino) brought its subterranean tradition of fast, jerky rhythms, solo dance styles and amphetamines; reggae its exotic and dangerous aura of forbidden identity, its conscience, its dread and its cool. Native rhythm ‘n blues reinforced the brashness and the speed of Northern Soul, took rock back to the basics and contributed a highly developed iconoclasm, a thoroughly British persona and an extremely selective appropriation of the rock ‘n roll heritage.

This unlikely alliance of diverse and superficially incompatible musical traditions, mysteriously accomplished under punk, found ratification in an equally eclectic clothing style which reproduced the same kind of cacophony on the visual level. The whole ensemble, literally safety-pinned together, became the celebrated and highly photogenic phenomenon known as punk which throughout 1977 provided the tabloids with a fund of predictably sensational copy and the quality press with a welcome catalogue of beautifully broken codes. Punk reproduced the entire sartorial history of post-war working-class youth cultures in ‘cut up’ form, combining elements which had originally belonged to completely different epochs. There was a chaos of quiffs and leather jackets, brothel creepers and winkle pickers, plimsolls and paka macs, moddy crops and skinhead strides, drainpipes and vivid socks, bum freezers and bovver boots – all kept ‘in place’ and ‘out of time’ by the spectacular adhesives: the safety pins and plastic clothes pegs, the bondage straps and bits of string which attracted so much horrified and fascinated attention. Punk is therefore a singularly appropriate point of departure for a study of this kind because punk style contained distorted reflections of all the major post-war subcultures. But before we can interpret the significance of these subcultures, we must first unscramble the sequence in which they occurred.

Boredom in Babylon

Ordinary life is so dull that I get out of it as much as possible. (Steve Jones, a Sex Pistol, quoted in Melody Maker)

It seems entirely appropriate that punk’s ‘unnatural’ synthesis should have hit the London streets during that bizarre summer. Apocalypse was in the air and the rhetoric of punk was drenched in apocalypse: in the stock imagery of crisis and sudden change. Indeed, even punk’s epiphanies were hybrid affairs, representing the awkward and unsteady confluence of the two radically dissimilar languages of reggae and rock. As the shock-haired punks began to gather in a shop called Sex on a corner of the King’s Road, aptly named the Worlds End, David Bowie’s day of the Diamond Dogs (R.C.A. Victor, 1974) and the triumph of the ‘super-alienated humanoid’ was somehow made to coincide with reggae’s Day of Judgement, with the overthrow of Babylon and the end of alienation altogether.

It is here that we encounter the first of punk’s endemic contradictions, for the visions of apocalypse superficially fused in punk came from essentially antagonistic sources. David Bowie and the New York punk bands had pieced together from a variety of acknowledged ‘artistic’ sources – from the literary avant-garde and the underground cinema – a self-consciously profane and terminal aesthetic. Patti Smith, an American punk and ex-art student, claimed to have invented a new form, ‘rock poetry’, and incorporated readings from Rimbaud and William Burroughs into her act. Bowie, too, cited Burroughs as an influence and used his famous cut-up technique of random juxtapositions to ‘compose’ lyrics. Richard Hell drew on the writings of Lautréamont and Huysmans. British punk bands, generally younger and more self-consciously proletarian, remained largely innocent of literature. However, for better or worse, the literary sources turned out to be firmly although implicitly inscribed in the aesthetics of British punk too. Similarly, there were connections (via Warhol and Wayne County in America, via the art school bands like the Who and the Clash in Britain) with underground cinema and avant-garde art.

By the early 70s, these tendencies had begun to cohere into a fully fledged nihilist aesthetic and the emergence of this aesthetic together with its characteristic focal concerns (polymorphous, often wilfully perverse sexuality, obsessive individualism, fragmented sense of self, etc.) generated a good deal of controversy amongst those interested in rock culture (see Melly, 1972; Taylor and Wall, 1976). From Jagger in Performance (Warner Bros, 1969) to Bowie as the ‘thin white duke’, the spectre of the dandy ‘drowning in his own opera’ (Sartre, 1968) has haunted rock from the wings as it were, and in the words of Ian Taylor and Dave Wall ‘plays back the alienation of youth onto itself (1976). Punk represents the most recent phase in this process. In punk, alienation assumed an almost tangible quality. It could almost be grasped. It gave itself up to the cameras in ‘blankness’, the removal of expression (see any photograph of any punk group), the refusal to speak and be positioned. This trajectory – the solipsism, the neurosis, the cosmetic rage – had its origins in rock.

But at almost every turn the dictates of this profane aesthetic were countermanded by the righteous imperatives of another musical form: reggae. Reggae occupies the other end of that wide spectrum of influences which bore upon punk. As early as May 1977 Jordan, the famous punk shop assistant of Sex and Seditionaries was expressing a preference for reggae over ‘new wave’ on the pages of the New Musical Express (7 May 1977). ‘It’s the only music we [i.e. Jordan and J. Rotten] dance to’. Although Rotten himself insisted on the relative autonomy of punk and reggae, he displayed a detailed knowledge of the more esoteric reggae numbers in a series of interviews throughout 1977. Most conspicuously amongst punk groups, the Clash were heavily influenced not only by the music, but also by the visual iconography of black Jamaican street style. Khaki battle dress stencilled with the Caribbean legends DUB and HEAVY MANNERS, narrow ‘sta-prest’ trousers, black brogues and slip ons, even the pork pie hat, were all adopted at different times by various members of the group. In addition, the group played ‘White Riot’, a song inspired directly by the ’76 Carnival, against a screen-printed backdrop of the Notting Hill disturbances, and they toured with a reggae discotheque presided over by Don Letts, the black Rastafarian d-j who shot the documentary film Punk while working at the Roxy Club in Covent Garden.

As we shall see, although apparently separate and autonomous, punk and the black British subcultures with which reggae is associated were connected at a deep structural level. But the dialogue between the two forms cannot properly be decoded until the internal composition and significance of both reggae and the British working-class youth cultures which preceded punk are fully understood. This involves two major tasks. First reggae must be traced back to its roots in the West Indies, and second the history of post-war British youth culture must be reinterpreted as a succession of differential responses to the black immigrant presence in Britain from the 1950s onwards. Such a reassessment demands a shift of emphasis away from the normal areas of interest – the school, police, media and parent culture (which have anyway been fairly exhaustively treated by other writers, see, e.g. Hall et al., 1976) – to what I feel to be the largely neglected dimension of race and race relations.

Three

DOI: 10.4324/9780203139943-4

Are you there Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars; but I call you back this evening to attend a secret revel.

(Jean Genet, 1966b)

Back to Africa

THE differences between rock and reggae should be sufficiently obvious to render exhaustive documentation unnecessary. It is simply explained here by Mark Kidel: ‘Whereas jazz and rock often reflect an amphetamine frenzy, reggae tunes in to the slowness of ganja’ (review of a Bob Marley concert, New Statesman, 8 July 1977). Reggae draws on a quite specific experience (the experience of black people in Jamaica and Great Britain – a whole generation of young Black Britons have formed reggae bands in the last few years, e.g. the Cimarons, Steel Pulse, Matumbi, Black Slate, Aswaad). It is cast in a unique style, in a language of its own – Jamaican patois, that shadow-form, ‘stolen’ from the Master¹ and mysteriously inflected, ‘decomposed’ and reassembled in the passage from Africa to the West Indies. It moves to more ponderous and moody rhythms. It ‘rocks steady’² around a bass-line which is both more prominent and more austere. Its rhetoric is more densely constructed, and less diverse in origin; emanating in large part from two related sources – a distinctively Jamaican oral culture and an equally distinctive appropriation of the Bible. There are strong elements of Jamaican pentecostal, of ‘possession by the Word’, and the call and response pattern which binds the preacher to his congregation, is reproduced in reggae.³ Reggae addresses a community in transit through a series of retrospective frames (the Rastafarian movement (see pp. 33–9), the Back to Africa theme) which reverse the historical sequence of migrations (Africa-Jamaica-Great Britain). It is the living record of a people’s journey – of the passage from slavery to servitude – and that journey can be mapped along the lines of reggae’s unique structure.

Africa finds an echo inside reggae in its distinctive percussion. The voice of Africa in the West Indies has traditionally been identified with insurrection and silenced wherever possible (see Hall, 1975). In particular, the preservation of African traditions, like drumming, has in the past been construed by the authorities (the Church, the colonial and even some ‘post-colonial’ governments) as being intrinsically subversive, posing a symbolic threat to law and order. These outlawed traditions were not only considered anti-social and unchristian, they were positively, triumphantly pagan. They suggested unspeakable alien rites, they made possible illicit and rancorous allegiances which smacked of future discord. They hinted at that darkest of rebellions: a celebration of Negritude. They restored ‘deported Africa’, that ‘drifting continent’ to a privileged place within the black mythology. And the very existence of that mythology was enough to inspire an immense dread in the hearts of some white slave owners.

Africa thus came to represent for blacks in the Caribbean forbidden territory, a Lost World, a History abandoned to the contradictory Western myths of childhood innocence and man’s inherent evil. It became a massive Out of Bounds on the other side of slavery. But beyond this continent of negatives there lay a place where all the utopian and anti-European values available to the dispossessed black could begin to congregate. And paradoxically it was from the Bible – the civilizing agent par excellence – that alternative values and dreams of a better lif...