Inside Subculture

"What motivates people to dress in a manner that marks them out as different to the conventional norm? Is it true that, with dress, 'anything goes' in our mix-and-match postmodern culture? Have easily recognizable, authentic subcultures imploded in a glut of ironic revivals and stylistic fragmentation? Does this supposed 'post-subcultural' generation actively celebrate ephemerality, transience and disposability, merely casting off and trying on one alternative identity after another in an ever-accelerating fashion frenzy? This exciting book is a considered sociological examination of such questions. By listening to the voices of the subcultural stylists themselves-their subjective perceptions of their style and the ideas that lie behind them-the author provides original insights into issues of subjectivity and identity. Situating an empirical case study within a wider consideration of postmodernism and cultural change, the author rejects cultural studies perspectives that attempt to 'read' subcultures as texts. Drawing on extensive interviews with people who dress in what might be deemed a stylistically unconventional manner, he seeks instead to establish whether contemporary subcultures display modern or postmodern sensibilities and forms. He argues persuasively that they do both-a stress on postmodern hyperindividualism, fluidity and fragmentation runs alongside a modernist emphasis on authenticity and underlying essence. He concludes that a Romantic libertarianism has permeated working-class culture and that the distinction between 'individualistic' middle-class countercultures and 'collectivist' working-class subcultures has been over-emphasized."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

What motivates people to dress in a manner that marks them out as different to the conventional norm? Is it true that, with dress, 'anything goes' in our mix-and-match postmodern culture? Have easily recognizable, authentic subcultures imploded in a glut of ironic revivals and stylistic fragmentation? Does this supposed 'post-subcultural' generation actively celebrate ephemerality, transience and disposability, merely casting off and trying on one alternative identity after another in an ever-accelerating fashion frenzy? This exciting book is a considered sociological examination of such questions. By listening to the voices of the subcultural stylists themselves - their subjective perceptions of their style and the ideas that lie behind them - the author provides original insights into issues of subjectivity and identity. Situating an empirical case study within a wider consideration of postmodernism and cultural change, the author rejects cultural studies perspectives that attempt to 'read' subcultures as texts. Drawing on extensive interviews with people who dress in what might be deemed a stylistically unconventional manner, he seeks instead to establish whether contemporary subcultures display modern or postmodern sensibilities and forms. He argues persuasively that they do both - a stress on postmodern hyperindividualism, fluidity and fragmentation runs alongside a modernist emphasis on authenticity and underlying essence. He concludes that a Romantic libertarianism has permeated working-class culture and that the distinction between 'individualistic' middle-class countercultures and 'collectivist' working-class subcultures has been over-emphasized.

This book assesses the legacy of Dick Hebdige and his work on subcultures in his seminal work, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). The volume interrogates the concept of subculture put forward by Hebdige, and asks if this concept is still capable of helping us understand the subcultures of the twenty-first century. The contributors to this volume assess the main theoretical trends behind Hebdige’s work, critically engaging with their value and how they orient a researcher or student of subculture, and also look at some absences in Hebdige’s original account of subculture, such as gender and ethnicity. The book concludes with an interview with Hebdige himself, where he deals with questions about his concept of subculture and the gestation of his original work in a way that shows his seriousness and humour in equal measure. This volume is a vital contribution to the debate on subculture from some of the best researchers and academics working in the field in the twenty-first century.

“We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being ‘writers’ gave us something to live for and ‘going all city’ gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for.” In the age of commissioned wall murals and trendy street art, it’s easy to forget graffiti’s complicated and often violent past in the United States. Though graffiti has become one of the most influential art forms of the twenty-first century, cities across the United States waged a war against it from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, complete with brutal police task forces. Who were the vilified taggers they targeted? Teenagers, usually, from low-income neighborhoods with little to their names except a few spray cans and a desperate need to be seen—to mark their presence on city walls and buildings even as their cities turned a blind eye to them. Going All City is the mesmerizing and painful story of these young graffiti writers, told by one of their own. Prolific LA writer Stefano Bloch came of age in the late 1990s amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability. He recounts vicious interactions with police; debating whether to take friends with gunshot wounds to the hospital; coping with his mother’s heroin addiction; instability and homelessness; and his dread that his stepfather would get out of jail and tip his unstable life into full-blown chaos. But he also recalls moments of peace and exhilaration: marking a fresh tag; the thrill of running with his crew at night; exploring the secret landscape of LA; the dream and success of going all city. Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them.

This book aims to revisit the notion of subculture for the 21st century, reinterpreting it and extending its scope. On the one hand, the notion of resistance is redefined and applied to contemporary practices of cultural production and entrepreneurship. On the other hand, contributors reconsider the connection of subcultures to everyday culture, exploring more mainstream forms of cultural production and consumption across a wider range of social groups. As a consequence, this book extends the scope to look beyond the white, male, adolescent, urban cultures identified with earlier subcultural studies. Contributors also examine fusions and crossovers between Western and non-Western cultural practices.

This book is the first in-depth investigation of the Goth subculture in Italy, focusing in particular on the city of Milan. It grows out of a three year research project - the first in Italy of this scope on the topic - based on the life histories of two dozen participants. In light of this, Simone Tosoni and Emanuela Zuccalà propose an innovative approach to the study of spectacular subcultures: contrarily to the most common accounts of the spectacular subcultures of the 80s, this book describes the experience of subcultural belonging as plural and internally diversified. In particular, three different variations - or 'enactments' - of goth are described in-depth: the politically engaged one; the one typical of the scene of the alternative music clubs spread all over northern Italy; and the one, common in the little towns surrounding Milan (but not limited to it), where participants used to 'enact' the dark subculture alone or in small groups. Their book argues that while these three different variations of goth shared the same canon of subcultural resources (music, style, patterns of cultural consumptions), they differed under relevant points of view, like forms of socialization, stance toward political activism, identity construction processes, and even their relationship with urban space. Yet, contrarily to the stress on individual differences in 'subcultural' belonging typical of post-subcultural theorists, the Milanese variations of goth appear to have been socially shared, as socially shared were the different 'practices of enactment' of the subculture that characterized each of them.

Rupa Huq investigates a series of musically-centred global youth cultures and re-examines the link between music and subcultures.

Lifestyles and subcultures are tools through which people say – to themselves and to others – who they think they are, who they think they are similar to, and who they think they are different from. Lifestyles and subcultures are ways which people adopt to look at their own lives, and to try to keep together different roles, different practices and different realms which they are involved in. Lifestyles and subcultures are lenses through which we, as observers, analyze society, and orientate ourselves within it, looking for similarities and differences among individuals and collectivities which allow us to understand their thoughts and their actions. This book presents the main analytical approaches through which lifestyles and subcultures have been studied, and also proposes a new interpretative perspective. Today a growing panorama of social phenomena and processes possess intermediate characteristics with regard to those which in the past were identified either as lifestyles or as subcultures. The hypothesis is that consequently these phenomena could be explained and interpreted by means of an analytical framework developed by the intersection of these two perspectives, and the last part of the book is therefore devoted to the presentation of this innovative framework. This book provides new lenses and a fresh view to try to both grasp and understand a constantly-changing reality.