Section 1
Theories of Culture and Music
1
A Journey Through Theories of the Intersection of Music and Culture
Studies and commentary on the intersections of youth and music, subculture and music, or communities and music have been developed through a series of theoretical prisms that have made a variety of claims to explain the connection and mixing of these areas. Starting with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s and their various takes on what they called subculture, moving through a variety of post-subcultural studies to a series of neo-tribal and postmodern attempts at theorising this issue we have a bewildering number of theoretical takes that give us many different starting points for analysis. This section outlines those theoretical understandings and discusses the journeys made by those authors. Part 2 of this section develops a critique of these positions through a cultural sociological vision of how these formations can be understood in the current social context using a combination of Schutzâs phenomenology, Durrschmidtâs development of this, and Bourdieuâs âfields of cultural productionâ and Harveyâs dialectics within a Globalization framework. This forms the basis for understanding the way in which the rest of the book and its vast amount of ethnographic work, interview material. and secondary data are woven together to present an account of what I call milieu cultures within worlds of popular music.
PART 1
Identifying Subcultures: Skins, Punks, Rastas, Mods, and RudiesâThe era of self-identifying youth cults and their academic reading
Dick Hebdige in his groundbreaking and influential book Subculture: The meaning of style gives a beautiful account of the impact, meaning, and subversive nature of a variety of subcultural groupings. Punks, Mods, Skinheads, Rastas are all tackled by Hebdige mainly at the level of style and mainly through the lens of a variety of structuralist Marxism that incorporated versions of Saussure and Barthesâs semiotics, Gramsci, Althusser, and Marxâs take on ideology and Hegemony, and Kristevaâs subversive use of language and positioning. His prose also uses many literary reference points, particularly John Genet and his take on the turning of objects into codes of refusal or the reloading of their cultural signification. A tube of Vaseline is described by Genet as a key transgressive signifier that represents his gay identity and refusal to adhere to mainstream moral codes. Hebdige goes on to describe the way in which mundane objects become a âform of stigmataâ and âtokens of self imposed exile.â These objects become sites of the tension between mainstream culture and subordinate cultural groups who are defying the dominant cultural order. A safety pin, a quiff, a scooter, or a pair of Dr. Martens boots, they can all represent a refusal or a gesture of contempt. For Hebdige, there seems to be the acceptance that this is what these codes ultimately do represent; they are just a gesture.
Hebdige outlines how subcultural subversions are composed by a type of âbricolageâ that is only conscious in that its combination of particular stylistic items causes a rupture or disturbance of the norms of mainstream culture. The subculture acquires its own homology, its own set of conventions and rules; in the case of Punk this is a homology of chaos, of noise, hollering at the edges of perception of ânormalâ behaviour. Punk attempts to project a shocking combination of stylistic nihilism and rejection. Swastikas represent the Punkâs desire to shock, not a sympathy to Nazism; bin liners and safety pins are a pair of shears to the tailorâs finest cut of cloth; âNo futureâ and âPretty vacantâ are the cries of a generation experiencing creativity in the shadow of unemployment, social upheaval, and political change. Within Hebdigeâs account though is a sense that the subculturalists are not conscious of their transgressive position beyond the stylistic two fingers that they are waving at mainstream culture. Soon their subcultural revolt is incorporated by the mainstream, repackaged and resold as âinterestingâ cultural artefact and fashion for the masses.
For Hebdige, subcultures like Punk become incorporated into the mainstream via the commodity form in terms of mass-produced objects and the ideological form in terms of the way in which the press and commentators can âotherâ the subculture by trivialising, naturalising, or domesticating it. Alternatively, these social commentators can transform it into meaningless exotica that spectacularises the actions of the subculture and separates it from mainstream understanding. Both these processes tend to happen at the same time to eventually co-opt the subculture back into the fold of normal behaviour. Punk âfilth and furyâ run alongside articles about Punk mothers, babies, weddings, and good deeds. This process, for Hebdige, represents the incorporation of subculture into the mainstream, usually on the basis that culture is so open that those who complain about its limits, inequalities, and economic deficiencies can become âsuccessfulâ and rise from rags to riches. This sense was magnified as Punk bands like the Clash, Sex Pistols, Stranglers, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Damned became major players in the record industry and redefined what popular music was in the late 1970s.
The problematic nature of this account is not in its ability to provide a very nuanced and literary discussion of the development of subcultures but its lack of ability to see beyond the immediate vision and public face of the subculture. The style is âreadâ and âinterpretedâ by the theorist who cannot really understand or define it or its creators, (Hebdige, 1979, p. 139); in fact, Hebdige states that the subculturalist would find this descriptive analysis unpalatable and antithetical to his/her existence. This leads the theorist to assert a kind of negative inevitability of either the co-option of the subculture as just another stylistic or aesthetic development in popular cultures lexicon of style, or as a radical gesture that is in parts melancholic and inevitably defeatist. Hebdige again returns to Jean Genet and his discussion of the black activist prisoner George Jackson to explain this process:
This quote expresses the futility of the act of âkicking against the pricksâ or of rupturing mainstream culture. We are left with the image of two prisonsâthe relative and the symbolic, which we attack but are left mutilated by. The gloom and melancholic nature of this statement mirror the ending paragraphs where Hebdige suggests that the hope that a study of subculture would lead the analysts to a place closer to or reunited with the âpeople,â the subculturalists, with whom they may identify ends by confirming the distance between them (1979, p. 140). What happens then is the confirmation of distance between the reader and the text, the analysts and the subculture, and within that, a recognition that subculture is read in a way that the subculturalist cannot, or refuses to, recognise or understand. This in turn backs up the continued theme through the book of the limits of the subculturalistsâ own understanding of what they are producing and the effects of it.
This, I feel, shows an incredibly limited understanding of the ways in which these movements of music and culture develop and the complex building of ideas and interpretations that the members of these particular subcultures go through. It is telling that Hebdige hardly ever refers to individual accounts of the Punk subculture from those involved in it. This omission limits Hebdigeâs ability to actually âreadâ the full impact of the subculture on its participants. This omission is repeated throughout most CCCS work. I now turn to the discussion of Skinhead culture by John Clarke and Tony Jefferson (Clarke and Jefferson, 1973a, 1973b, 1974) and Dick Hebdigeâs work Reggae, Rastas, and Rudies (Hebdige, 1974). These accounts further develop and show up the many problems of the theoretical analysis taken by the CCCS scholars. I have prefaced this discussion by a quote from Laurel Aitken, who many Skinheads saw as the godfather of ska:
Laurel Aitken was born in Cuba (1927), moved to Kingston, Jamaica, in 1938, and emigrated to England in 1960. His music, ska, became the musical soundtrack to the mixing of White working-class skinheads and Black Jamaican Ă©migrĂ©s in the late 1960s. Tracks like Aitkenâs Skinhead Train, Symaripâs Skinhead Moonstomp, Skinhead Jamboree, and Skinhead Girl all testified to the importance of Skinheads to Jamaican musicâs development in the UK. Skinhead was one of the first youth subcultures or cults to be analysed by academics in Britain, particularly those at the University of Birminghamâs Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
John Clarke and Tony Jefferson used Skinheads in a variety of papers on youth subcultures. They discussed the treatment of adolescence as a âsingle monolithic cultureâ (Clarke and Jefferson, 1973a, p. 1) where deviance in the form of working class delinquency is a product of âstatus frustration,â âalienation,â âanomie,â or âdissociation.â Clarke and Jefferson, like Hebdige, suggested that one area that would help this analysis that had been ignored by previous theorists was the area of âcultural symbolisationâ or âstyleâ (Ibid, p. 2). Cultural symbols (e.g., dress and music) âare attempts, by people, to make meaningful, at the cultural level, their social realityâ (Ibid, p. 2). They build on work done by Phil Cohen where he suggests that post-war youth cultures are often attempts to express and âmagicallyâ resolve the contradictions that remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture. The post-war âparentâ ârespectableâ working-class culture has been pulled in two directions: one of the traditional ideology of production (work ethic) and the other new media-promoted ideology of spectacular consumption. For the CCCS theorists, Mods were an example of those exploring the âupwardâ option of spectacular consumption and skinheads the âdownwardâ one of the celebration of more traditional working-class loyalties.
Clarke and Jefferson argue that subcultures need to be seen as particular responses to culture engendered by structural conditions that are quite specific to youth. Youth subcultures âoriginate in structural inequalities and culminate in specific historical moments: moments when the negotiation of particular subordinate class fractions both for a space and a definition of self become crystallised, for a short period, into a recognisable cultural style: a specific, symbolic systemâ (Ibid, p. 6). The social reaction to subcultures was an important element of the Birmingham approach. Stereotyping the âfolk devilsâ (as Stanley Cohen (1972) had put it) happened through media-conveyed versions of the subculture to those whose experience of the subcultures would be âoutside their immediate personal orbitâ (Ibid, p. 6). The groups themselves would be vulnerable to these portrayals as they didnât have access to âmajor channels of communicationâ (Ibid, p. 6). The groups relied upon an outsider status to the mainstream moral order.
In their conclusion, Clarke and Jefferson suggest that youth subcultures need to be âreadâ in the following way:
They then summarised skinheads in this way. Their historical location was traditional working-class areas that were undergoing substantial change. They faced the implosion of the community, an influx of middle-class property buyers and immigrants, and a disappearance of focal points for the communityâcorner shop, pub, and streets. The education system and changing employment structures meant that they were facing employment in routine âdead-endâ jobs and possibly long periods of unemployment. Skinheads then become seen by Clarke and Jefferson as an âattempt to revive a culture which was changing and entering into new negotiations of its own with the dominant culture as a response to its structural positionâ (Ibid, p. 9).
Clarke and Jefferson viewed youth culture as âa struggle for control, an attempt to exert some control over oneâs life situationâ (Ibid, p. 9). They suggest that the âsocial spaceâ afforded to youth before adulthood and responsibility are fully embraced, is important in allowing these subcultures to express varying viewpoints. The commercial leisure market that encourages the development of different teenage markets also plays a role in this subcultural space. In summary then, Clarke and Jefferson assert that youth culture is always negotiating with the dominant social order and culture. They are involved in a struggle for the âcontrol of meaning.â
Dick Hebdige gave a more complex and nuanced account of the development of specific subcultures in his account Reggae, Rastas and Rudies: Style and the Subversion of Form (1974). He starts by giving an in-depth account of the development of reggae in Jamaica and its formation through the importing of American soul and R&B (rhythm and blues) music and the complex social formation and history of Jamaica. Here is his definition of reggae as a musical form: