Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change 1443859451, 9781443859455

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
CONTRIBUTORS
1. SUBCULTURES, POPULARMUSICAND SOCIAL CHANGE

I.THEORIZING SUBCULTURESAND POPULARMUSIC
2. SUBCULTURAL THEORY IN FRANCE:AMISSED RENDEZ-VOUS?
3. “IT’SWHERE YOU COME FROMTHATMAKES YOUWHO YOU ARE”
4. YOUTH CULTURE AND THE INTERNET

II.THE CONSTRUCTION AND EXPRESSIONOF SUBCULTURAL IDENTITIES
5. “A HARMONIZING WHOLE”?MUSIC, MASS OBSERVATIONAND THE INTERWAR PUBLIC HOUSE
6. NEO-BURLESQUE
7. AMBITIOUS OUTSIDERS
8. SUBCULTURAL ENTRANCE PRACTICESIN UK PUNK CULTURE, 1976–2001
9. STARING AT THE RUDEBOYS

III.SUBCULTURES, GLOBAL FLOWSAND LOCAL CONTEXTS
10. THE STAX/VOLT REVUE AND SOULMUSIC FANDOM IN 1960S BRITAIN
11. 1968 UNDERGROUND
12. “THE LAD IS ALWAYS RIGHT”
13. AN EXPLORATION OF DEVIANCE,POWER AND RESISTANCEWITHIN CONTEMPORARY CUBA

AFTERWORDAFTER SHOCK
INDEX

Citation preview

Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change

Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change

Edited by

The Subcultures Network

Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change, Edited by The Subcultures Network This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by The Subcultures Network and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5945-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5945-5



CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Caroline Coon Contributors .............................................................................................. xiii 1. Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change: Theories, Issues and Debates ................................................................................................. 1 Bill Osgerby I. THEORIZING SUBCULTURES AND POPULAR MUSIC 2. Subcultural Theory in France: A Missed Rendez-Vous? ....................... 49 Chris Warne 3. “It’s Where You Come From That Makes You Who You Are”: Suburban Youth and Social Class.............................................................. 65 Andrew Branch 4. Youth Culture and the Internet: A Subcultural or Post-Subcultural Phenomena?............................................................................................... 89 Andy Bennett II. THE CONSTRUCTION AND EXPRESSION OF SUBCULTURAL IDENTITIES 5. “A Harmonizing Whole”? Music, Mass Observation and the Interwar Public House............................................................................................ 105 Stella Moss 6. Neo-burlesque: Striptease, Subculture and Self-commodification ...... 121 Saphron Hastie





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Contents

7. Ambitious Outsiders: Morrissey, Fandom and Iconography ............... 139 Lee Brooks 8. Subcultural Entrance Practices in UK Punk Culture, 1976–2001........ 155 Alastair Gordon 9. Staring at the Rudeboys: The Representation of Youth Subcultures in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani and John King’s Skinheads .............. 175 Nick Bentley III. SUBCULTURES, GLOBAL FLOWS AND LOCAL CONTEXTS 10. The Stax/Volt Revue and Soul Music Fandom in 1960s Britain ....... 195 Joe Street 11. 1968 Underground: West German Radicals between Subculture and Revolution......................................................................................... 219 Timothy Scott Brown 12. “The Lad is Always Right”: Street Youth Groups in Russia as Local Elites.......................................................................................... 235 Svetlana Stephenson 13. An Exploration of Deviance, Power and Resistance within Contemporary Cuba: The Case of Cuban Underground Rap .................. 251 Eleni Dimou Afterword ................................................................................................ 267 Dick Hebdige Index ........................................................................................................ 295





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the contributors and all those who attended the inaugural conference of the Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change (London Metropolitan University, 2011). Thanks, too, to London Met’s Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities for supporting the original conference, and to both London Met and the University of Sussex for supporting the production of this book. Special thanks to Richard Barnes, Pauline Black, Caroline Coon, Paul Gorman, Dick Hebdige and David Hesmondhalgh, to Jon Garland and Paul Hodkinson for their support and editorial input, to Bernard G. Mills and Nadine Fraczkowski for permission to reprint their photographs, and to Dominic Shryane for his help in preparing the manuscript.





PREFACE CAROLINE COON

When, in September 2011, Professor Malcolm Gillies, Vice Chancellor of London Metropolitan University, opened the inaugural symposium of the Subcultures Network, he drew attention to “the civil strife and riots” erupting into visibility all around us. Immediately impinging on university life was the anger expressed by young people against rising tuition fees, increased competition and cuts in higher education. Farther afield was the Arab Spring. Over the symposium weekend the Occupy Wall Street protest started, and would soon go worldwide. Extreme responses to economic desperation and political catastrophe define decades and generations, and mark high crisis moments on the wheel of revolution. We are witnessing another series of youth-led revolts that promise, like all revolts of the past, to shake established status quos and remedy the ills of the times. As I sat among international delegates prepared to give papers at the symposium there was a tangible sense of many being aware that the social, economic and political history we could see being made before our eyes from London to Athens and Los Angeles to Guangdong would soon be subject to academic research and study. A multiplicity of subcultures, scenes and tribes have always existed— even in autocracies and military dictatorships—defined according to their interaction with or rejection of prevailing zeitgeists. Usually it is the most popular subcultures—most popular because they carry the most potent political message against the status quo—that need and then create selfservice structures necessary for their welfare, communication, and pleasure. These self-service sites, magnets for the most acutely dysfunctional and dispossessed, become the most obvious targets for attack and closure by military or police forces disinhibited by characterizations of subcultural youth as, at best, “dangerous”, “antisocial”, “mindless”, “feeble”, “amateurish”, “disorganized”, “incoherent” and so on. The steps young people take to defend themselves from the purposeful trivializations, misunderstandings and dismissals of dominant culture are a



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function of their myriad subcultural groupings. In the protective collective of subculture young people can make play in, and out of, opportunity or the direst conditions, whether in liberal democracies or tyrannical dictatorships. The universal pleasure of being stylish within a subcultural style, the entertainment of display, the enjoyment of rigid demarcation and fluid intermingling, the enduring poetics of subversion and reverence for “our own” heroes and heroines, all the current and successive subdivisions; every ordinary pleasure can be enjoyed in subculture for its own sake or taken to ecstatic spiritual levels by astounding creative skills in a perfusion of aesthetic forms, particularly popular music. Today Internet social media are enabling international youth to connect, reason and spread information on their own terms as never before. But, as in the past, whenever active youth is allowed formal time in corporate media they most often find themselves silenced by experienced primetime presenters and outnumbered by “expert” defenders of the status quo. When young spokespeople do emerge to give voice to their revolt the need for precise prose and exact meaning can fail them. Aiming to explain or make impressive arguments for change over the heads of politicians to the general public is very difficult. Sites of information exchange that always spring up in times of crisis at street level, like the Occupy movements’ “university” tents, testify to young people’s conscious need to hone language. Where words fail, then popular songs succeed. It is telling of meaning and intent to hear which popular songs of the past are adopted by new subcultures as they wait for contemporary songs to be written of and by their own. The traverse between street and academia, the way subcultural concerns become refracted via universities into the mainstream, is acutely real to me. As news began filtering out of Tunisia that young people were setting themselves ablaze in protest against poverty—the vegetable seller Mohammed Bouazizi was not the only one—there was a shock of recognition. These desperate acts of martyrdom overlaid indelible images in my mind of Buddhist monks whose kerosene self-immolations against the US-backed South Vietnamese regime were a trigger for antiwar youthprotest movements of the 1960s. Release, the hippy underground welfare service I co-founded in 1967—a self-service site—was an emergency subcultural defence against dominant culture’s moral panic and resistance to our political message and style.



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We came under intense scrutiny as we tried to stay open and keep police and the criminal-justice system at bay. All aspects of social distress came through our door including addiction, trauma in the family, child neglect, prison conditions, homelessness and abortion. The joy in popular music kept up our spirits and morale. Like many volunteers in groups or organizations dealing with “the underside” of subculture I found that when I presented facts of ordinary people’s everyday lives to appropriate authorities I made little headway. Politicians and their civil-service administrators who confidently relied on established philosophical and social theory could easily reject points I made about malfunctioning and corrupt state institutions. Without a degree, in sociology at least, compared to a professor I had about as much agency as an ant. After four years of active butting up against theories responsible for immense social and economic damage I went to Brunel University to read, of course, Psychology, Sociology and Economics. Not least was I interested in methodologies that researchers used when they came to Release for raw data. Whenever I go back to university it feels poignant to be among scholars whose methods and theories I know will not obliquely but directly affect the lives of real people, especially the poor and the young who are most vulnerable to scrutiny and control. Whatever research universities choose to fund today and whatever labels scholars use to contest, frame or revise their theories will become those used in the doctrines of public policy and practice tomorrow. Propelled by rebellious subcultures, the post-World War II struggle for enlightened change is succeeding as is dramatically apparent in the makeup of contributors to the Subcultures Network. Despite the financial crisis, the ambition is to be globally inclusive. At last, male-gendered grammar is considered archaic; critical masses of women are visible, present and inside the debate; and constructions of inequality and racism are being dismantled. This stimulating collection of essays, the first from the Subcultures Network, offers us new thinking about human flourishing and celebrations of difference, new readings of “girl power” and popular manifestations of feminism, examinations of sites of recreation and ferocious political argument, with heroes and villains seen from positions of liberal hedonistic optimism to puritanical dystopian doom. It is a fine net cast wide across nations—Europe, America, Asia, Russia and Cuba—for insights into how people perpetually react to, adapt and make change.





CONTRIBUTORS

Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research at Griffith University in Queensland. He has authored and edited numerous books including Music, Style and Aging, Popular Music and Youth Culture, Cultures of Popular Music, Remembering Woodstock, and Music Scenes (with Richard A. Peterson). Bennett was lead Chief Investigator on a three-year, five-country project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled “Popular Music and Cultural Memory” (DP1092910). He is also a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University. He is author of Martin Amis: Writers and Their Work (Northcote House, 2013); Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (Peter Lang, 2007); and editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (Routledge, 2005). He has also published articles and chapters on Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, Zadie Smith, Sam Selvon, Alan Sillitoe, and the representations of youth subcultures in fiction. He is currently working on two books: Contemporary British Fiction: The Essential Criticism (Palgrave, 2014); and one on the representation of youth subcultures in fiction and film from 1950–2010. Andrew Branch is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of East London. A cultural sociologist and geographer published in the fields of youth cultures and popular music, his research focuses on the representations of social class by those media which seek to regulate its hierarchical structure. He is particularly interested in how working-class subjectivities are embodied, formulated and negotiated in this respect, and in how specific sites of cultural incubation work spatially. Lee Brooks is Programme Director of the Media Arts degree at St Mary’s University College in Twickenham. As a former graphic designer, Lee divides his teaching time between practical disciplines such as motion graphics, film and online production and theoretical specialisms in the cultural significance of popular music and the social impact of Disney



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theme parks. He has previously published about Morrissey’s artful use of appropriation and is currently collaborating on a collection of essays about Englishness and popular music, and working on a book that unites a series of themed essays with an exhaustive chronology of Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom theme park. Timothy Scott Brown is Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University. His research focuses on twentieth-century German and Transatlantic political and cultural history, radical mass movements, popular music and youth subcultures, the revolt of 1968, and alternative spirituality. His books include The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt (Palgrave, 2014), West Germany in the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978 (Cambridge, 2013), and Between the Avantgarde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe, 1957 to the Present (Berghahn, 2011). Caroline Coon, artist and political activist, was at Central St Martin’s School of Art and Design in the 1960s when she founded the antiprohibition, drug-information and civil-rights organization, Release. She published The Release Report: Drug Offenders and the Law in 1969, and 1988: The Punk Rock Explosion in 1977. When Coon went to the Sex Pistols’ second gig in 1976, she found the answer to this question: with the 60s psychedelic revolution dead and buried and hippies derided as “boring old farts”, what will youth do now? Johnny Rotten personified the nihilistic fury of a generation untouched by peace and love. At first, Coon’s editor at Melody Maker didn’t want to know. Determined anyway to write the story of the emerging “hate and war” counterculture, and thrilled by the music, Coon’s seminal punk piece in MM on 28 July 1976, was the first to tackle the subject of the new “punk rock”. Coon currently lives and works in London. Eleni Dimou is an Assistant Lecturer in Criminology at Kent University. She finished her PhD research in 2013 titled “‘Revolutionising’ Subcultural Theory: The Cases of Cuban Rap and Cuban Reggaeton”. Her research focuses on music subcultures, power, resistance, ethnography, affects, ideology and the “de-colonial” perspective in social sciences. Keith Gildart is Professor of Labour and Social History at the University of Wolverhampton. He has published widely in the field of twentiethcentury Britain, industrial relations, working-class history and youth culture. He is an editor of the long-established Dictionary of Labour



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Biography. His most recent book is Images of England Through Popular Music: Class, Youth and Rock ‘n’ Roll, 1955–1976 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Alastair Gordon is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Leicester De Montfort University. His current research is based around genre authenticity and hierarchy across international networks of DIY punk, with a specific focus on Japan and Europe. He co-founded the Punk Scholars Network with Mike Dines in 2012, and records and plays internationally with his two bands, Geriatric Unit and Endless Grinning Skulls. Anna Gough-Yates is Professor and Head of Ealing School of Art, Design and Media at the University of West London. Her research has focused mainly on the magazine and television industries, and has examined the ways in which the economic processes and practices of production are also phenomena with cultural meanings and effects. She has published a number of articles in this area, and is also the author of two books: Understanding Women’s Magazines: Publishing, Markets and Readerships, and Action TV: Tough Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks, co-edited with Bill Osgerby. Saphron Hastie is a policy and process analyst at Swinburne University of Technology and a graduate of the University of Auckland’s Sociology department. Her research interests are varied and include the intersection of subcultures, communities, and niche performance industries as well as the effects (and affects) of capitalism on bodies and concepts of the self. Dick Hebdige is a Professor of Art and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Director of the UC Institute for Research in the Arts. His current research interests include desert studies and performative criticism and he has written extensively on contemporary art, design, media and cultural studies. He has published three books: Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Cut ‘n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music and Hiding in the Light. On Images and Things. Recently published essays include “Lucifer Setting: Art, Engineering and the Dawn of the Stadium Rock Light Show” in Bullet-Proof I Wish I Was: The Lighting and Stage Design of Andi Watson (Chronicle Books, 2011), and “Hole: Swimming … Floating … Sinking … Drowning” in Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945– 1982 (Prestel, 2012).



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Siân Lincoln is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research interests are around contemporary youth culture, young people and private space, teenage “bedroom culture” and young people and the media. She has recently published a monograph entitled Youth Culture and Private Space (Palgrave Macmillan) and an edited collection entitled The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture (with Yannis Tzioumakis) (Wayne State University Press). Stella Moss is a Teaching Fellow in Modern British History at Royal Holloway, University of London. A historian of popular culture, her research focuses on drinking cultures and social spaces of alcohol consumption in twentieth-century Britain. She is currently completing a monograph on women’s drinking in England in the period 1914–39, based on her University of Oxford doctoral thesis. Other publications include articles on the regulation of children’s presence in pubs, and the control of women’s drinking during the Great War. She is also developing new research into the history of alcohol advertising, with a particular focus on Guinness. Bill Osgerby is Professor of Media, Culture and Communications at London Metropolitan University. His research focuses on twentiethcentury British and American cultural history and he has published widely in the fields of youth culture, gender, sexuality, popular film and television, music and popular literature. His books include Youth in Britain Since 1945, Playboys in Paradise: Youth, Masculinity and LeisureStyle in Modern America, Youth Media, and a co-edited anthology, Action TV: Tough-Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks. Lucy Robinson is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Sussex. Her first monograph, Gay Men and the Left in Postwar Britain: How the Personal Became Political (MUP, 2007), included analysis of the relationship between gay politics, popular culture and the wider Left. Since then Lucy has been working largely on the 1980s, with a focus on the relationship between identity, popular culture and politics. This includes a project on the Falklands War, particularly looking at historical ideas of trauma, as well as a JISC-funded digital project “Observing the 1980s”.



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Svetlana Stephenson is Reader in Sociology at London Metropolitan University. She is the author of Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia (Ashgate, 2006) and Youth and Social Change in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Routledge, 2012), with Charles Walker. Her work has been published in Radical Philosophy, Criminal Justice Matters, Journal of Youth Studies, the Sociological Review, Europe-Asia Studies, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Slavic Review, Social Justice Research and Work, Employment and Society, among others. Her research has involved studying street-level social organization in Russia, as well as perceptions of social justice and human rights in a comparative context. Joe Street is Senior Lecturer in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. His research focuses on African-American radicalism, African-American cultural history, and the San Francisco Bay Area. His published work includes The Culture War in the Civil Rights Movement (Gainesville, 2007) and articles on Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Dirty Harry. He is currently working on a cultural history of the Dirty Harry films and a history of the Black Panther Party. John Street is Professor of Politics at the University of East Anglia. His books include From Entertainment to Citizenship: Politics and Popular Culture (co-authored with Sanna Inthorn and Martin Scott), Music and Politics, and Mass Media, Politics and Democracy. He is a member of the editorial group of Popular Music. His current research includes a Leverhulme Trust project with Matt Worley on the history of punk in the UK. Chris Warne is Lecturer in French History at the University of Sussex. His research has focused on material and popular cultures in France since 1945, with particular attention on the representation of youth and youth cultures, and on forms of youth activism. He has recently published articles on punk, media and graphic art in France. He is currently working on a project that uses youth culture to investigate the significance of the 1970s as a turning point in contemporary European history.



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Pete Webb is a researcher and lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. His main areas of interest are popular music, globalization, new technology, cultural theory and the links between popular music and outsider politics. He is an author, writer and commentator mainly in the field of the sociology of popular music. He is also a published musician and has worked in the music industry and with theatre and film companies. Matthew Worley is Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading. His past work focused on British political history between the wars, though he is currently exploring the relationship between youth culture, popular music and social change in Britain during the 1970s and 80s.



1. SUBCULTURES, POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE: THEORIES, ISSUES AND DEBATES BILL OSGERBY

Ripping Through the Atmosphere of Their Decade: The Social Significance of Subcultures The Times has never been renowned as an ardent patron of subcultural exploits. But in 2012 the august British newspaper’s award for International People of the Year went to the Russian anarcho-feminist punk band, Pussy Riot. The group had made worldwide headlines earlier that year by performing an incendiary “Punk Prayer” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour as a protest against the Orthodox Church’s support for President Vladimir Putin’s election campaign. Subsequently, members of the group became a global cause célèbre when they were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”. International celebrities and politicians rallied to the women’s defence; The Times speaking for many when it denounced Pussy Riot’s imprisonment as evidence of Putin’s “determination to crush popular opposition” and hailed the band as “true and important figures of political protest” (The Times, 29 December 2012). Clearly, Pussy Riot’s protest was an episode of political import. The event pointed to a groundswell of concern about a Russian regime sliding into autocracy. But the mode of the group’s dissent was also significant. Pussy Riot’s raucous performance art was inspired by Bikini Kill, Bratmobile and other bands associated with the American 1990s feminist/ punk riot-grrrl movement; together with “lumpen punk” bands from Britain’s Oi! scene of the early 1980s. “All those folks”, a member of Pussy Riot explained, “had incredible musical and social energy, their sound ripped through the atmosphere of their decade, stirred trouble around itself” (cited in Langston 2012). This passion for punk rebellion testifies to the way distinctive styles, fashions and music pulsate with political and cultural energy. Myriad recent examples also affirm the potency of sub-

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cultures as bearers of meanings, values and identities. Burma’s ruling junta, for instance, has faced defiance from the leather-jacketed followers of local punk bands like No U Turn and Rebel Riot. Indonesia’s punk scene is also alive and kicking despite facing a conservative crackdown in 2011 that saw some sixty-five punks arrested and detained for a process of “re-education”. In Botswana, meanwhile, bands like Metal Orizon and Overthrust lead a passionate heavy-metal scene whose black-clad followers draw curious looks in the Kalahari heat. And, amid Mexico’s vicious drug wars, the city of Monterrey is home to the Colombianos—an urban youth scene that combines a love of Colombia’s mellow cumbia and vallenato music with a distinctive “look” of baggy pants, plaid shirts and religious prints, complemented by fringes that are plastered resolutely down and spectacular sideburns that stretch to the chin. It was the rich historical and cultural significance of phenomena such as these that prompted the launch of the Subcultures Network: The Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change—a cross-disciplinary research association for scholars and students interested in subcultures and their relation to processes of social, cultural and political change.1 Bringing together theoretical analyses, empirical studies and methodological discussions, the network explores subcultures’ relation with their historical contexts, and their various meanings for participants, confederates and opponents. The network considers experiences across a variety of global sites and locales, examining these in relation to such issues as class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, creativity, commerce, identity, resistance and deviance. This book grows out of the network’s inaugural symposium (held at London Metropolitan University in September 2011), which brought together a wide variety of contributions to this vibrant, interdisciplinary field. The volume comprises new empirical studies and critical discussions that demonstrate how the ideas and paradigms that have hitherto characterized the area can be applied, developed and moved beyond. While it is impossible to provide an exhaustive survey of such a rich and diverse field, this introduction offers an overview of the chief perspectives and main contours of debate that form the context of the chapters that follow.

The Roots of Subcultural Analysis: Deviance, Youth and Social Change Scholarly research on what have come to be known as “subcultures” traces its roots to the early twentieth century and American sociologists’ attempts to understand juvenile crime. In the forefront were ethnographic studies

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undertaken by researchers associated with the University of Chicago (later known as the Chicago School). Frederic Thrasher’s (1927) research, for instance, explained the rise of Chicago’s juvenile gangs as a product of the conflicts and weakening of social controls that characterized neighbourhoods undergoing processes of transition. Thrasher’s arguments were reinforced by William Foote Whyte’s (1943) participant observation of Italian-American gangs in Boston, which depicted gang membership as a source of support and prestige for those whose circumstances offered uncertain (or negligible) social and economic prospects. In these terms, then, the delinquent gang was seen as a collective response by the economically or ethnically marginalized to the conditions of their disadvantage. Subsequent American researchers also placed emphasis on the meanings gangs held for their young, working-class members. Albert Cohen (1955), for example, argued that the underprivileged social position of working-class youths excluded them from the mainstream culture and its avenues to status and success. As a consequence, Cohen argued, youngsters gravitated to the gang subculture as a source of prestige that replaced the core values of the “straight” world—sobriety, ambition, conformity—with an alternative value system that celebrated defiance of authority and illicit thrills. Howard Becker (1963) also saw deviant subcultures as a product of wider social forces and relationships. For Becker, “deviance” was not a quality inherent to particular behaviour, but was a socially constructed category, a pejorative label applied to the actions of certain individuals who then come to identify with the negative categorization. In this way, Becker argued, the application of a “deviant” label becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as people thus designated come to see themselves in terms of the way they have been classified and stereotyped. After the Second World War American academia’s interest in youth was boosted as the social profile of the young was thrown into starker relief by a combination of factors. In demographic terms, wartime increases in the birth rate and a postwar “baby boom” rocketed the US teen population, while an expansion of the education system further accentuated the profile of youth as a distinct generational group. But perhaps more important was the increase in young people’s disposable income. A consumer boom brought a general rise in living standards, but young people’s spending power was especially boosted. In response, the range of media and consumer products geared to the young proliferated as the music industry, film-makers, magazine publishers and an army of eager entrepreneurs scrambled to stake a claim in the teenage goldmine.2 As a consequence, the perception of the young as inhabiting a gener-

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ationally distinct culture of their own became a common feature of both popular discourse and academic analysis. Notions of youth as a distinctive phase in life were not new. Modern concepts of “youth” as a discrete, transitional stage between childhood and adulthood took shape during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the work of psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall (1904), who popularized ideas of adolescence as a distinct (and inherently volatile) developmental phase that began with puberty and ended in mature adulthood.3 Hall emphasized the biological and psychological transformations that characterized adolescence, but by the mid-twentieth century many theorists began to focus on the social and economic conditions that seemed to set youth apart as a discrete social group. During the 1940s, for example, Talcott Parsons (1942; 1943) coined the term “youth culture” to denote what he saw as a distinct set of values and behaviour shared by the young. Parsons stressed the positive role of youth culture as a formative stage between childhood and the responsibilities of adult life and other American researchers followed his lead. Erik Erikson (1950), for example, presented adolescence as a confusing (though not especially deviant) phase of identity formation, while S. N. Eisenstadt (1956) emphasized the way adolescent peer culture eased young people into their adult roles. James Coleman’s The Adolescent Society (1961) was also influential. Coleman portrayed American youth as increasingly divorced from the wider adult world in terms of its interests, attitudes and values; though he was optimistic in his conclusions, arguing that prudent adult intervention could guide the peer culture towards socially beneficial goals. But more disconsolate accounts also surfaced. For some commentators, the rise of teenage consumption was the lamentable nadir of society’s more general slide into a shallow, debased world of “mass culture”. David Reisman, for example, condemned a pop-music industry that he saw as wielding the power “to mold popular taste and to eliminate free choice by consumers” (Reisman 1950, 361), while Dwight Macdonald saw the young generation as falling easy prey to the wiles of commerce. “These days”, Macdonald dolefully reflected, “merchants eye teenagers the way stockmen eye cattle” (Macdonald 1958, 70). Throughout the 1950s America was also gripped by the perception that juvenile delinquency was spiralling out of control, with a surge in the indices of youth crime. But James Gilbert has shown how this “juvenile crime wave” was, in fact, a statistical product of new strategies of law enforcement and changes in the collation of crime data. Rather than being a response to a genuine eruption of adolescent vice, Gilbert argued, the alarm surrounding juvenile

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delinquency served as a symbolic focus for broader anxieties in a period of rapid and disorienting change—the concerns about youth crime articulating “a vaguely formulated but gnawing sense of social disintegration” (Gilbert 1986, 77). Indeed, debates about youth often serve as a cipher for wider issues and questions. It is, perhaps, inevitable that conceptions of “youth” and “generation” feature in attempts to make sense of social change, but many authors point to the way this “symbolic” capacity is powerfully extended at moments of profound transformation—the “youth question” coming to encapsulate more general hopes and fears about trends in cultural life.4 As Joe Austin and Michael Willard explain, “public debates surrounding “youth” are an important forum where new understandings about the past, present, and future of public life are encoded, articulated and contested”, so that “youth” functions as “a metaphor for perceived social change and its projected consequences” (Austin and Willard 1998, 1). On the other side of the Atlantic youth attracted similar attention. In Europe the war’s greater economic destruction ensured that the development of modern consumer economies was slower, partial and more uneven than in the US—and, as a consequence, the rise of European “teenage” spending was more hesitant than in America. Nevertheless, by the late 1950s a commercial youth market was blossoming in many European countries. In Britain, for example, Mark Abrams’ widely reported market research proclaimed an explosion of adolescent consumerism that represented, he argued, “distinctive teenage spending for distinctive teenage ends in a distinctive teenage world” (Abrams 1959, 10). As in America, however, this “teenage world” drew mixed responses. Many films, magazines and newspapers of the period projected a positive imagery of youth as a shorthand signifier for flourishing modernity and a refreshing challenge to the dead hand of tradition. But some commentators were critical. Richard Hoggart, for example, echoed American “mass culture” critics when he singled out contemporary youth as a benchmark of what he saw as an increasingly pervasive cultural paucity. Denouncing modern youth as a “hedonistic but passive barbarian”, Hoggart poured scorn on “the juke box boys” with their “drape suits, picture ties and American slouch” who spent their evenings in “harshly lighted milk bars” putting “copper after copper into the mechanical record player”—a social world that, Hoggart argued, represented “a peculiarly thin and pallid form of dissipation” (1957, 248–50). Britain, like America, also saw a wave of concern about juvenile crime. During the early 1950s these anxieties crystallized around the figure of the Teddy boy, whose style of long, “Edwardian” jackets and

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drainpipe trousers was configured by the media as symbolic of a “new” form of vicious delinquency. By the early 1960s the Teddy boy’s drapesuits and brothel-creeper shoes had been displaced by the chic, Italianinspired fashions associated with the mods; but mod style was also a focus for concern. Like the Teddy boys before them, the mods’ appearance was often presented by the media as a symbol of national decline—an approach that peaked in press responses to the “battles” between the mods and their leather-clad, motorcycle-riding rivals, the rockers, at British seaside resorts during 1964. At the same time, however, academic accounts were emerging that took issue with the media’s stereotypes. During the 1960s a rising generation of British sociologists were shaped by the period’s political, social and cultural convulsions. The escalation of the Vietnam war, the rise of student protest and new countercultural movements, together with the emergence of a strident second-wave feminism, all raised sharp questions about the status quo. In response, a cohort of young academics allied themselves with radical political activism and the emerging counterculture, becoming fierce critics of the establishment. It was a critique that found focus in 1968 with the formation of the National Deviancy Symposium (or National Deviancy Conference (NDC)). The NDC was established by young sociologists who rejected traditional criminology, which they saw as pervaded by positivist assumptions that effectively bolstered existing mechanisms of social control. In place of this orthodoxy, the NDC looked towards the work of the American theorists Albert Cohen and Howard Becker (see above). Drawing on these ideas, the NDC members argued that “criminality” should be seen as a socially constructed and historically dynamic category whose nature and constitution was shaped by the responses of the law, politicians and the media. As a consequence, Jock Young (an NDC founding member) later explained, the object of study was effectively reversed: The focus of the problematic shifted; where meaning was taken from the deviant, it was returned appreciated, and whereas the powerful had somehow magically been seen as existing outside the world of explanation, their activities and the impact—often self-fulfilling—of their activities became the centre of attention (Young 2009, 8).

Young’s (1971a) study of social reactions to drug use in London’s Notting Hill (then a hub of hippiedom) exemplified the approach. A wave of media concern about drug crime in the area, Young argued, had a reinforcing or “snowballing” effect. A “great panic over drug abuse”, he contended, had resulted in the setting up of specialized police squads to target drug crime

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which, in turn, produced an increase in drug-related arrests (Young 1971b, 37). In these terms, the surge in statistical indices of drug crime did not point to a genuine leap in the scale of illicit drug use, but was an outcome of media concern and consequent shifts in policing strategies. Perceptions of a growing “drug problem”, therefore, were misplaced. Instead, there was a “mythical” quality to the “great panic”. It was a “fantasy crime wave” or “moral panic” generated through the interaction of the media, public opinion and the institutions of law enforcement. Stanley Cohen (another NDC founding member) credits Young with the first published use of the term “moral panic” (Cohen 2002, xxxv), yet it is Cohen who most systematically enunciated and popularized the concept in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, his classic analysis of the 1960s “battles” between mods and rockers. Originally published in 1972, Cohen’s study highlighted the way the media’s exaggerated and distorted portrayal of mods and rockers had generated a “moral panic”—an episode of heightened public alarm out of all proportion to the actual threat posed by real or imagined deviant groups, or what Cohen termed “folk devils”. For Cohen, the overdramatic press reports of “seaside invasions” by mods and rockers had not been a neutral “window” on events, but had actually been a crucial factor in their creation. The “mods and rockers” had initially been fairly ill-defined youth styles, but were given greater form and substance in the sensational news stories. And the two subcultures steadily polarized as youngsters throughout Britain began to identify themselves as members of either camp—the mods or the rockers. Media reports also influenced the agencies of social control. Sensitized by the press stories, police forces began cracking down on the slightest hint of “mods and rockers” trouble. As a consequence, arrest rates soared and magistrates (keen to show they were “getting tough” with the tearaways) imposed harsher penalties. Media attention and exaggerated press reports, therefore, fanned the sparks of an initially trivial incident, creating a selfperpetuating “amplification spiral” which steadily escalated the social significance of the events. Folk Devils and Moral Panics dealt specifically with the 1960s mod/ rocker episode, but its particular focus was, in many respects, unimportant. Indeed, even in the book’s first edition, Cohen asked “who on earth is still worried about the Mods and Rockers?”; while in an introduction to the second (1980) edition, he observed that the book had been “‘out of date’ even when it originally appeared in 1972”. More important than its account of the mod/rocker affair was the study’s wider implications. The book’s crucial contribution was the way it illustrated the processes a moral panic passes through as a threat takes shape, is disseminated and

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caricatured by the media, is seized upon by moral crusaders and experts, and is eventually resolved through the adoption of special measures. Moreover, Cohen observed, youth culture had been recurrently central to these outbursts of disproportionate dread. Since 1945, he contended, youth groups had “occupied a constant position as folk devils”—Teddy boys, mods and rockers, skinheads and hippies all lining up in the “gallery of types that society erects to show its members which roles should be avoided and which should be emulated” (Cohen 2002, 1–2).5 Cohen’s analysis neatly highlighted the media’s role in creating social phenomena and escalating their impact. But it had less to say about the relation of these phenomena to their wider social and political context, or the meanings they held for those involved. Indeed, Cohen himself was aware of some of these omissions. In the introduction to his study he acknowledged that his focus was more on moral panics than on folk devils, and that “... the Mods and Rockers are hardly going to appear as ‘real, live people’ at all. They will be seen through the eyes of societal reaction and in this reaction they tend to appear as disembodied objects, Rorschach blots onto which reactions are projected” (Cohen 2002, xlvii). However, much closer attention to both the “Rorschach blots” and their historical context was to follow from authors associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) based at Birmingham University.

Subcultural Theory: Style, Resistance and the CCCS Originally founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart, under the directorship of Stuart Hall (who succeeded Hoggart in 1968) the collective research of the CCCS contributed (along with that of the NDC) to Britain’s surge in radical intellectual output during the late 1960s and 1970s. The numerous authors associated with the CCCS were influenced by the work of Raymond Williams and his view of media and cultural texts as being not simply the creation of individual authors, but as being forged through a series of complex relationships between authorial intent, institutional process and aesthetic form. The CCCS authors were especially influenced by Williams’ critique of “mass culture” perspectives that valorized a meaningful and creative “high culture” against a “low” culture that was disparaged as vulgar and facile. Instead, adopting Williams’ (1958) view of culture as “a whole way of life”, the CCCS authors saw popular, massmediated texts and the ordinary practices of everyday life as being just as relevant and meaningful as the provinces of “high” culture or “great art”. These insights, moreover, were combined with ideas drawn from a battery

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of American and European sociological, political, philosophical and semiotic theorists as the CCCS authors explored a formidable array of themes—including the form and meaning of media texts, the structures of working-class culture, power and gender relations, and the political dimensions of racism. The “CCCS approach” was never a unified set of arguments or a common analytic perspective. But issues of class-based conflict and control were common to much of their work, which drew on a range of sophisticated Marxist theories. Particularly influential were the ideas of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and his view of ideology as being not simply a mechanism that worked to inculcate an illusory “false consciousness” among the subordinate class, but a conceptual framework “through which men interpret, make sense of, experience and ‘live’ the material conditions in which they find themselves” (Hall 1980, 33). Another key influence were the ideas of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci and his view of capitalist societies as being characterized by an ongoing, class-based struggle for hegemony—or the moral, cultural, intellectual (and thereby political) leadership of society. While dominant groups were often able to secure their power through this struggle, Gramsci argued that subordinate groups were also active social agents, and were always able to challenge and resist the dominant hegemony. The CCCS team explored these ideas in relation to a broad range of issues, but the analysis of youth culture and its relationship with broader social structures and political relationships was a prominent concern. The CCCS authors were influenced by Phil Cohen’s (1972) seminal attempt to relate shifts in the form of postwar British youth culture to more general transformations in the ecologies of working-class neighbourhoods. Focusing on developments in London’s East End, Cohen argued that postwar patterns of redevelopment, combined with the collapse of traditional labour markets and changing patterns of consumption, had disrupted the material basis of working-class life. For Cohen, the various youth styles of the 1950s and 1960s could be understood as collective symbolic responses to this dislocation. Stylistic subcultures, Cohen argued, were “magical” attempts by working-class youth to bridge the gap between traditional patterns of working-class life and the new cultural attitudes and practices emerging in postwar Britain. By fusing together key concerns of their working-class “parent” culture (for example, an emphasis on local identities and collective loyalties) with the new products of the developing media and culture industries (most obviously fashion and pop music), youth subcultural styles such as those of the mods and skinheads served to:

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1. Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change … express and resolve, albeit “magically”, the contradictions which remain hidden and unresolved in the parent culture ... [each subculture attempts] to retrieve some of the socially cohesive elements destroyed in their parent culture and to combine these with other class fractions symbolising one or other of the options confronting it (Cohen 1972, 23).

Instead of dismissing youth subcultures as trivial fads, then, Cohen presented the styles of groups such as Teddy boys and skinheads as important purveyors of social meaning, intrinsically linked to wider patterns of cultural change. In these terms, for instance, the 1960s mods represented an exploration of new, consumption-oriented working-class lifestyles; while the skinhead style of the later 1960s represented a symbolic reassertion of more traditional working-class values. Cohen’s approach was extended by the CCCS team. In Resistance Through Rituals (1976), the CCCS authors presented a range of different studies that, collectively, suggested subcultural style represented a symbolic, or “ritualistic” expression of working-class youth’s social experiences. Like Cohen, the CCCS team argued that working-class youth constructed a cultural, or subcultural, response pertinent to their life experiences by fusing together elements of their “parent” culture (for example, working-class argot, neighbourhood ties and particular notions of masculinity and femininity) with elements derived from other cultural sources—in particular, the products of the various media and consumer industries. Crucially, however, the CCCS introduced a neo-Marxist, “Gramscian” account of young people as locked into class-based struggles and conflicts. Whereas Cohen had seen subcultural style as an “ideological solution” to contradictions assailing the parent culture, the CCCS were more forthright—interpreting youth subcultures as symbolic (or “ritualistic”) strategies of resistance to ruling-class power structures. In what became known as “subcultural theory”, the CCCS authors argued that young people’s subcultural styles (those of Teddy boys, mods and skinheads, for example) were strategies of symbolic resistance to rulingclass power structures. Youth subcultures were interpreted as forms of cultural insubordination, expressions of defiant rebellion in which working-class youths appropriated the articles, artefacts and icons generated by the media and the commercial market, and symbolically reworked them to take on new, threatening and subversive meanings. For the CCCS theorists, moreover, it was possible to differentiate fairly precisely between subcultural groups of working-class youth and the countercultures of their middle-class peers (Clarke et al. 1976, 60–1). For the CCCS team, subcultures (Teddy boys, mods, skinheads etc.) generally reproduced traditional working-class values and tended to be leisure-

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oriented, fairly temporary, episodes in young people’s lives. Countercultures (beats, hippies, etc.), in contrast, placed more emphasis on individual experience, while the stark polarity between work and leisure characteristic of working-class subcultures was much less pronounced in the bohemian and non-conformist world of the counterculture. More fundamentally, the CCCS authors argued that working-class subcultures represented a revolt against the status quo from “below”, while the middleclass countercultures were a more politically conscious attack from “within” (Clarke et al. 1976, 62–3).6 The emphasis the CCCS model placed on the symbolic dimensions to these struggles effectively turned subcultural styles into “texts”, and strategies of semiotic analysis were keenly deployed in attempts to “read” the subversive meanings seen as ingrained in the skinhead’s boots and braces or the punk’s bondage trousers and spiky hairstyle. Here, two concepts (both derived from the French anthropologist, Claude LéviStrauss) emerged as especially important—bricolage and homology. “Bricolage” referred to the way the meanings of particular objects and media texts were transformed as they were adopted and recontextualized by subcultural groups. According to Dick Hebdige, for example, the 1960s mods appropriated the motor scooter (“a formerly ultra-respectable means of transport”) and transformed it into “a weapon and a symbol of solidarity” (Hebdige 1976, 93). “Homology” denoted the way disparate stylistic elements—music, clothes and leisure activities—coalesced to form a coherent symbolic expression of a subcultural group’s identity. Using the example of biker culture, for instance, Paul Willis identified a “homological” relationship between the physical qualities of the motorcycle and the subcultural ethos of the biker gang. The “solidity, responsiveness, inevitableness [sic], the strength of the motorcycle”, Willis argued, corresponded with “the concrete, secure nature of the bikeboys’ world” (Willis 1978, 53). Developing this approach, Hebdige produced an especially deft analysis of late 1970s punk rock in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). Here, Hebdige presented punk style as akin to “semiotic guerrilla warfare” (1979, 105), an exercise in sartorial defiance that went “against the grain of a mainstream culture” and transformed the “naturalized” meanings of everyday cultural artefacts and media texts into something alien, spectacular and threatening (1979, 100–1).

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The Limits of Subcultural Theory The CCCS authors always acknowledged the limits to subcultural “resistance”. Confined to specific realms of social life—most obviously leisure, style and media consumption—the subcultural challenge was always partial and tangential and, as Hebdige himself put it, “no amount of stylistic incantation can alter the oppressive mode in which the commodities used in subculture have been produced” (1979, 130). For some, however, the heavy attention given to symbolic meanings was problematic. According to Hebdige, style could be analysed as an autonomous text, with “resistance” taking place at a level independent of the consciousness of subcultural participants—and Hebdige conceded that it was “highly unlikely” that members of any subcultures would recognize themselves in his account (Hebdige 1979, 139). But this lack of attention to the actual intentions behind young people’s use of cultural artefacts provoked criticism. “It seems to me”, Stanley Cohen conjectured, “that somewhere along the line, symbolic language implies a knowing subject, a subject at least dimly aware of what the symbols are supposed to mean” (2002, lvii–lviii). In relying on an “aesthetics which may work for art, but not equally well for life”, Cohen warned, subcultural theory risked “getting lost in the forest of symbols” (Cohen 2002, lx). Admittedly, a section of Resistance Through Rituals had been devoted to “Ethnography” but, even here, there were only limited attempts to understand and represent the meanings young people themselves gave to their subcultural styles and patterns of media consumption. In his (1977) study of working-class secondary school pupils, and his (1978) account of hippy and biker subcultures, Paul Willis did devote significant attention to ethnographic fieldwork. Yet, as Andy Bennett observes, even here there was an uneasy tension between Willis’s ethnographic observation of subcultural actors and the considerable space devoted to his own analysis of their style and its cultural meanings (Bennett 2002, 454). The CCCS theorists’ focus on issues of social class also provoked criticism. The polarity constructed between working-class subcultures and middle-class countercultures, for example, could oversimplify groups whose composition has often been complex and multifaceted. According to Peter Clecak, for instance, the 1960s counterculture was composed of diverse movements and ideas that allowed people from a variety of social backgrounds “to find symbolic shapes for their social and spiritual discontents and hopes” (Clecak 1983, 18). Gary Clarke, meanwhile, pointed to the contradictions between Hebdige’s emphasis on punk’s “workingclass creativity” and the movement’s origins among the art-school avant-

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garde (Clarke 1990, 86); and Sheryl Garratt highlighted the heterogeneity of the late 1980s acid-house scene, arguing that there was a degree of truth to the oft-repeated cliché that “bankers were dancing next to barrow boys” (Garratt 1998, 160). The CCCS model was also criticized for allowing social class to overshadow other systems of power relations. Angela McRobbie (1981), for example, was quick to draw attention to the gendered assumptions detectable in aspects of subcultural theory. McRobbie was, herself, affiliated with the Birmingham group, but she was critical of the way some of her colleagues’ work rendered the category of “youth” as unproblematically masculine. Indeed, the studies produced by many subcultural theorists seemed to marginalize young women, concentrating almost exclusively on male experience. In contrast, rather than seeing girls’ experience as a mere footnote to male subcultures, feminist researchers argued that young women’s cultural activities were qualitatively different to those of young men. As McRobbie and Jenny Garber explained, the crucial question was not “the absence or presence of girls in male subcultures, but the complementary ways in which young girls interact among themselves and with each other to form a distinctive culture of their own” (McRobbie and Garber 1976, 219). For some theorists, young women’s distinctive cultures were primarily elaborated in the realm of the “private”. As McRobbie argued, young women’s disposable income has generally been less than their male peers, while (especially for working-class girls) childcare and domestic responsibilities have meant leisure time has often been structured around the family and the private sphere of the home (McRobbie 1978). This home-centredness of young women’s culture, moreover, was accentuated by the greater parental regulation of girls’ leisure time. As a result, some theorists suggested that girls’ cultural spaces were concentrated within the home—the bedroom, especially, cited as a key site “where girls meet, listen to music and teach each other make-up skills, practice their dancing, compare sexual notes, criticize each other’s clothes and gossip” (Frith 1978, 64). Indeed, subsequent ethnographic work by researchers such as Sarah Baker (2004) and Siân Lincoln (2012) further highlighted the importance of “bedroom culture” for both young women and young men; this work demonstrating not only how young people use the décor and possessions in their “physical” bedrooms to explore and express their identities (practices that extend into the virtual worlds of socialnetworking sites), but also how the more general use of physical and virtual spaces is a crucial dimension to youth cultures and subcultures.

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While some researchers explored the “private” dimensions to young women’s cultures, others challenged the idea that women have been absent from, or marginal to, the more “public” world of subcultures and countercultures. Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo (2009), for instance, has demonstrated how women played a significant part in the American counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. Lauraine Leblanc, meanwhile has shown how punk subculture has been drawn upon by many young women “to resist the prescriptions of femininity, [and] to carve out a space where they can define their own sense of self” (Leblanc 1999, 219–20), and an array of commentators have championed the “riot-grrrl” movement of the 1990s (an offshoot of American punk) as a powerfully rebellious example of young women’s cultural agency.7 Britain’s dance-music scene of the late 1980s and 90s has also been seen as a site for the expression of feminine identities that challenged traditional models of feminine passivity. For instance, in contrast to views that club culture was “dominated by the lads” (Thornton 1995, 25), Maria Pini argued that the club circuit afforded women the “possibility for … adventure, exploration and discovery” through the opportunities it offered for “taking drugs, going ‘mental’ and dancing through the night without sexual harassment” (2001, 13; 34). Alongside constructions of femininity, articulations of masculinity were also relatively marginal to the CCCS accounts of subcultures. Indeed, across the social sciences and humanities, the analysis of masculinity was relatively underdeveloped until the 1980s when an increasing body of research began to interrogate the nature of masculine identities and their associated power relations across a wide variety of cultures, historical periods and institutional settings. Constituent in this shift has been an increasing range of studies of masculinity in youth culture and subcultures. Nancy Macdonald (2001), for example, explored young men’s search for respect and status in the graffiti subcultures of London and New York, while Karen Lumsden (2013) analysed the elaboration of both masculine and feminine identities in the world of Scottish “boy racers”. Anoop Nayak and Mary Jane Kehily (2008), meanwhile, integrated research on masculinity and femininity in their examination of the ways young men and women define themselves, and the ways these definitions are embedded in national and local cultures, institutional sites and settings and everyday social relationships. Like questions of gender, issues of sexual identity were also peripheral in subcultural theory. As Judith Halberstam (2003; 2005) observed, subcultural theory’s presumed heterosexual framework meant that consideration of sexuality and sexual styles was either omitted altogether,

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or was relegated to the fringes of analysis. From the late 1980s, however, such assumptions were challenged by a burgeoning body of work inspired by, and constituent in, the rise of “queer” studies. Informed by such theorists as Michel Foucault (1978) and Judith Butler (1988; 1990), queer perspectives see identity not as an unchanging “essence” but as discursively constituted and “performative”. In these terms, gender and sexual identity are not natural or essential, but are brought into being only through the repetition of stylized acts—for example, the association of femininity with female bodies, nurturing and particular codes of dress and social behaviour. “Queer” subcultures and identities, on the other hand, deconstruct and subvert conventional notions of gender and sexuality, challenging their hierarchies and associated systems of power. While Halberstam did not do away with the term “subculture”, she argued that studies of queer subcultures demanded recognition of their distinctive features. Queer subcultures, Halberstam argued, were not simply “spin-offs” of wider formations like punk or hip-hop. But neither were they simply taste cultures allied with those lesbian and gay movements that sought assimilation within a heteronormative culture rooted in home and family. Instead, queer subcultures offered a potent critique of both hetero- and homo-normativity. Queer subcultures like riot dyke and queercore bands, drag kings and queer slam poets were, Halberstam contended, “alternative temporalities” that allowed participants “to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of the conventional forward-moving narratives of birth, marriage, reproduction and death” (Halberstam 2003, 314). Halberstam’s arguments set the tone for a range of subsequent research on queer subcultures. Studies charted, for example, the distinctive identities and expressive styles of queercore (Ciminelli and Knox 2005), dykecore (Shoemaker 2010) and homo-hop (Wilson 2007).8 But other researchers also highlighted the fluidity of queer subcultural practice. Susan Driver, for instance, pointed to the way queer-girl subcultures were characterized not by the consistency or coherence of their tastes and sensibilities, but by “a mobility and heterogeneity that constitutes group affiliations and self transformations” (Driver 2007, 215).9 Along with its lack of attention to issues of gender and sexuality, the CCCS view of subcultures as “authentic”, unmediated expressions of identity was also problematic. Focusing their analysis on what they saw as the creative “‘moment’ of originality in the formation of style” (Clarke and Jefferson 1976, 148), the CCCS theorists tended to equate intervention by commercial business with the “neutralization” of an authentic subculture—market intercession seen as returning once meaningful and

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“oppositional” subcultural styles to the fold of bland consumerism. As John Clarke and Tony Jefferson put it: The “main stream” youth cultural response represents ... the “incorporated” version of the “deviant” style: the version that has been bought up, sanitized, “made safe” and resold to the wider youth market: the “deviant” lifestyle become consumption style: the commercial version of the “real” (Clarke and Jefferson 1976, 148).

This model of “commercial incorporation”, however, has been seen as problematic. For some theorists, the relationship between subcultures and the commercial media is not a simple, linear progression that begins with “grass-roots authenticity” and ends with “sanitized product”; but is a more “circuitous” and symbiotic process of mutual interaction. Stanley Cohen’s early study of mods and rockers, for instance, had highlighted the way media coverage gave greater form and definition to subcultural formations that were initially vague and indistinct. This theme was developed in Sarah Thornton’s (1995) analysis of 1980s rave culture. Like Cohen, Thornton argued that the representational power of the media was crucial in shaping a subculture’s identity and its members’ sense of themselves. Subcultures, Thornton explained: … do not germinate from a seed and grow by force of their own energy into mysterious “movements” only to be belatedly digested by the media. Rather, media, and other cultural industries are there and effective right from the start (Thornton 1995, 117).

While acknowledging the role of the media in the development of rave culture, however, Thornton was still keen to emphasize that the ravers themselves had still been “active and creative participants in the formation of club cultures” (Thornton 1995, 161). Although “authentic” subcultures were, in essence, media constructions, Thornton argued they remained powerful sources of meaning and self-identity for their participants. Here, Thornton borrowed from French theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “cultural capital”. For Bourdieu (1986) “cultural capital” denoted the forms of knowledge, cultural artefacts and modes of behaviour that bestowed prestige and social advantage on those social groups that possessed them. Adapting the concept, Thornton argued that “subcultural capital” represented the knowledge, tastes and artefacts that conferred status in the eyes of subcultural members. “Just as books and paintings display cultural capital in the family home”, Thornton explained, “so subcultural capital is objectified in the form of fashionable haircuts and well assembled record collections … Just as cultural capital is personified in “good” manners, so

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subcultural capital is embodied in the form of being “in the know”, using (but not over-using) current slang and looking as if you were born to perform the current dance styles” (Thornton 1995, 11–12). But distinctions between “meaningful” youth subcultures and “incorporated” media fabrications have always been difficult to sustain. As Simon Frith noted in an early critique, attempts to elaborate a clear-cut divide between the “subcultural” and the “mainstream” have invariably lead to a “false freezing of the world into deviants and the rest” (1978, 53). Moreover, relatively few youngsters ever entered the “authentic” subcultural scenes described by the CCCS team. As Gary Clarke pointed out, subcultural theory was preoccupied with “the stylistic appearances of particular tribes” and focused only on the “stylistic art of a few” (Clarke 1982, 1); and the CCCS theorists, themselves, conceded that “the great majority of working-class youth never enters a tight or coherent subculture at all” (Clarke et al. 1976, 16).10 Indeed, rather than making a wholehearted commitment to a subcultural lifestyle, most youngsters tended to adopt only a limited range of subcultural trappings or insignia (perhaps wearing a “mod” jacket or buying a “punk” record). As Steve Redhead wryly observed, “‘authentic’ subcultures were produced by subcultural theories, not the other way around” (1990, 25). Rather than focusing on spectacular subcultural styles, the late 1980s and early 90s saw many theorists switch their attention to young people’s everyday practices of media consumption. In Common Culture (1990), for example, Paul Willis highlighted young people’s cultural production across a range of media and cultural forms. Seeing commodities as cultural catalysts rather than as ends in themselves, Willis used the term “grounded aesthetics” to denote the ways young people manipulated the goods and resources made available by commercial industries, youngsters rearticulating products’ meanings to generate their own cultures and forms of self-representation. Drawing illustrative examples from a range of ethnographic studies—dealing, for instance, with TV advertisements, cinemagoing, teen magazines, pop music, fashion and hairstyles—Willis argued that commercial media were used by young people as raw materials for creative expression, youth’s patterns of consumption representing “a kind of self creation—of identities, of space, of cultural forms—with its own kind of cultural empowerment” (Willis 1990, 82). From this perspective, young people did not consume commercial goods and media texts uncritically, but actively appropriated the products available in the market, recontextualizing and transforming their meanings—often in ways that challenged or subverted dominant systems of power relations.

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Willis’s approach was constituent in broader shifts within media and cultural studies. The emphasis Willis placed on concrete fieldwork was indicative of a more general “ethnographic turn” during the 1980s and early 90s that saw researchers give greater attention to people’s own understandings of their cultural practices and media use. Moreover, Willis’s accent on the creative dimensions to media use reflected wider moves towards recognizing audiences as “active” participants in processes of consumption. Rather than seeing consumers and audiences as helplessly manipulated by commercial interests, many researchers sought to highlight dimensions of active “creativity” within practices of media use and consumption. This theme was especially pronounced in studies of fans, where writers such as Henry Jenkins (1992) rejected stereotypical depictions of fans as mindless consumers and social misfits. Instead, Jenkins argued, fans of pop stars, films and TV shows were actually skilled manipulators of media texts. Fans, Jenkins contended, were adept “textual poachers” who appropriated materials made available by the commercial market to construct their own identities and collective cultures, often in ways that challenged producers” attempts to regulate textual meanings. For some critics, however, claims for the “transgressive” possibilities of popular culture could be overcelebratory. Jim McGuigan (1992) offered an especially scathing critique, giving short shrift to ideas that, in his assessment, amounted to little more than an “uncritical endorsement of popular taste and pleasure” (McGuigan 1992, 6). While he was happy to accept that people were active agents in the formation of their own culture, McGuigan was critical of what he saw as a drift towards a “cultural populism” that gave inadequate regard to the historical and economic conditions under which these processes took place. In response to such criticisms, research in the field of youth culture sought to retain recognition of young people’s capacity as active agents in the authorship of their culture, but with a greater awareness that these processes took place within (and often constrained by) a wider field of economic and political power. Steven Miles (2000), for example, characterized the relationship between youth culture and the commercial market as “mutually exploitative”. Young people’s identities, Miles argued, were forged through the appropriation, transformation and recontextualization of media texts; though these processes of creativity and expression always took place within boundaries set by commercial interests. “Young people”, Miles observed, are “liberated and constrained by the mass media at one and the same time—it provides them with the canvass, but the only oils they can use to paint that canvass are consumerist ones” (Miles 2000, 85).

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Lifestyles, Scenes and Neo-Tribes: The “Post-Subcultural” Turn and Beyond The perceived weaknesses of the CCCS model, combined with apparent shifts in the form of subcultures themselves, prompted many researchers to adopt alternative perspectives. For some, the plurality and mutability of the 1990s dance-music scene seemed to exemplify a wider cultural trend towards “postmodern” social fragmentation and cultural hybridity. These developments were explored in a series of “club cultures” studies produced by authors affiliated to the Manchester Institute of Popular Culture. Drawn together by Steve Redhead (Redhead (ed.) 1993; Redhead, Wynne and O’Connor (eds.) 1997), this research was varied in focus but generally pointed to the way (post)modern club cultures seemed to defy attempts at uncovering a concrete sense of “meaning” behind their styles and appeared, instead, to be “free-floating” sets of images that were not locked into any specific historical moment or location. Other research, too, developed new critical perspectives in what Rupert Weinzierl and David Muggleton (2003) dubbed a move towards “post-subcultural studies”—a diverse field of work that encompassed both challenges to subcultural theory and attempts to revise, adjust and update the CCCS authors’ original arguments and approaches.11 The concept of lifestyle became especially influential in analyses of young people’s patterns of consumption. The idea of lifestyle was originally developed during the early twentieth century in the work of Max Weber (1978), who argued that social stratification depended not solely on patterns of economic relation, but also on the degree of “status” attached to the patterns of living and cultural preferences of different social groups. During the 1990s notions of lifestyle attracted renewed interest amid an explosion of research dealing with consumption and identity. Here, the work of Anthony Giddens (1991) was especially influential. For Giddens, many of the beliefs and customary practices that guided and defined identities in traditional societies (organized religion, for instance) wielded less influence in the “posttraditional” age. Instead, people were faced with a cavalcade of choices in their lives—not just about aspects such as appearance and lifestyle, but more broadly about their life destinations and relationships. As a result, Giddens suggested, modern individuals had become constantly “self-reflexive”, continually making decisions about what they should do and who they should be. In this context, the self became a kind of project that individuals constantly worked upon; people engaging in continuous processes of lifestyle choice as they elaborated a coherent biographical “narrative” and a consistent identity.

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Such perspectives informed a number of studies of youth culture, consumption and identity. In Sweden, for example, Bo Reimer’s fieldwork appeared to show that young people’s tastes in entertainment were affected by factors such as “class, gender, education, income and civil status”, but none of these appeared to be as significant as a common lifestyle oriented around leisure, entertainment and media consumption which existed “almost independent of socio-economic background” (Reimer 1995, 135). In Britain, the work of Steven Miles and his associates (Miles 2000; Miles 2002; Anderson and Miles 1999; Miles, Dallas and Burr 1998) also drew on the concept of lifestyle, combining it with ideas derived from Ulrich Beck’s (1992) notion of the “risk society”. For Beck, uncertainty and “risk” were features increasingly endemic to contemporary western societies; a trend which, Miles and his colleagues argued, was especially pronounced in the lives of the young. Youth, Miles et al. contended, faced a world in which their life experiences—in terms of family structure, educational opportunities and routes to employment—were becoming increasingly tenuous. In response, young people sought a sense of stability by drawing on the symbolic values of the products they consumed. Young people, Miles et al. suggested, used their practices of consumption to develop a lifestyle they felt “fitted in” with their peer group, but which also gave them a sense of distinctive individuality in a world characterized by instability, flux and change. Notions of lifestyle were influential in the sociological field, but in the study of popular music the concept of “scene” was more prevalent. Musicians and music journalists had often used the word “scene” as a loose description of distinctive tastes or groups of artists, but it was developed as a theoretically grounded term of analysis by Will Straw. For Straw, “scenes” denoted the associations and communities that cohered around specific forms of music; modes of connection that “actualiz[ed] a particular state of relations between various populations and social groups, as these coalesce around specific coalitions of musical style” (1991, 379). Scenes, Straw argued, could crystallize around either spatial locations or common sets of musical sensibility, potentially cutting across factors such as class, gender or ethnicity. For its proponents, the concept of the “scene” constituted a broader and more dynamic set of social relationships than those encompassed in subcultural theory, offering the possibility to analyse the myriad ways music was both produced and consumed across local and transglobal settings. In local terms, for example, Barry Shank’s (1994) study of Austin, Texas highlighted the continuities between networks of social relationships and the creation of a local music scene, and pointed to the

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way a single “scene” might comprise a plurality of overlapping (sometimes contradictory) factions. A more translocal approach was taken by Keith Kahn-Harris (2000) in his study of “extreme” heavy metal. For Harris, “extreme metal” was constituted by a series of distinctive local scenes that were bonded globally through a vibrant exchange of musical influences and styles. Other researchers explored the way the Internet had fostered the growth of “virtual” music scenes. Andy Bennett (2004), for instance, showed how fan websites had forged a mythology of a late 1960s “Canterbury Sound”; with online discussion groups spawning collective myths of how the experience of growing up in Canterbury had imbued distinctive artistic influences and “a certain Englishness” among the musicians of the historic cathedral city. For critics, however, the concept of “scene”, was flawed by its haziness. David Hesmondhalgh, for instance, found much to commend in individual “scene” studies but argued the term had been used “for too long in too many different and imprecise ways” (2007, 43). Writers such as Straw, for example, had used the term “scene” to denote a cultural space transcending locality whereas figures such as Shank had used the same term to term denote music practices within a particular town or city. According to its advocates, such variation demonstrated the inherent flexibility of “scene” as a tool of analysis, Straw defending “the term’s efficiency as a default label for cultural unities whose precise boundaries are invisible and elastic” (Straw 2001, 248). Hesmondhalgh, however, was more dubious, arguing that the discrepancies and disparities made for conceptual weakness and a lack of analytic precision. Alongside the notions of “lifestyle” and “scene”, the idea of the “neotribe” was also deployed as an alternative to subcultural theory. Originating in the work of Michel Maffesoli (1996), the concept of the neo-tribe denoted the way individuals were seen as increasingly expressing collective identities through distinctive rituals and consumption practices. According to Maffesoli, these “neo-tribal” groups were not formed according to “traditional” structural determinants—for example, class, gender or religion—but through diverse, dynamic and often ephemeral consumption patterns. Moreover, the fluid boundaries of “neotribes” allowed members to wander through multiple group attachments, so that collective identity was “less a question of belonging to a gang, a family or a community, than of switching from one group to another” (Maffesoli 1996, 76). Both Andy Bennett (1999a) and Ben Malbon (1999) drew on these ideas in their analyses of dance music. For both authors, the apparently fluid membership of the dance-club crowd was indicative of a neo-tribal sensibility. This sensibility was seen as a product of both the

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increasingly fragmented universe of youth style and the “fragmented” texture of dance music itself—characterized by DJs’ techniques of digital sampling, mixing and “mashing”. The implication of these arguments was that young people’s consumption of popular music was no longer determined by conformity to rigid subcultural genres, but by changing individual repertoires of taste rooted in the “unstable and shifting cultural affiliations which characterize late modern consumer-based identities” (Bennett 1999a, 605). The various versions of “post-subcultural” research neatly brought out the complexities of style, taste and attitude in an increasingly mediasaturated, commodity-driven cultural landscape. Moreover, those studies rooted in ethnography offered much fuller accounts of “lived experience” than had often been the case with subcultural theory. According to some writers, however, any announcement of the “demise” of distinctive subcultural formations was unduly premature. David Muggleton (2000), for example, judged that distinctive, style-based subcultures were not a phenomenon of the past, but continued to exist as “a liminal sensibility that manifests itself as an expression of freedom from structure, control and restraint” (Muggleton 2000, 158). In his interviews with people who consciously identified themselves as punks, goths and skinheads, Muggleton found little evidence of the “highly cohesive, group-centred, working-class” entities outlined by the CCCS authors during the 1970s. But nor did his findings support “the more excessive postmodern claims”. Instead, for their adherents, subcultures represented “collective expressions and celebrations of individualism” (Muggleton 2000, 79). Regardless of their social background, Muggleton argued, subcultural members saw their tastes in style and music as a bohemian-like expression of “freedom—freedom from rules, structures, controls and from the predictability of conventional lifestyles” (Muggleton 2000, 167). Paul Hodkinson’s (2002) study of British goths also challenged claims that distinctive subcultural styles had fallen by the postmodern wayside. Hodkinson acknowledged that, amid the frenetic media flows of contemporary culture, stylistic boundaries had become less clearcut; but he insisted that goths were still “characterized more by their substance than by their fluidity”, with many goths feeling “there was some sort of link between their style and certain general qualities they shared with other goths, including individuality, creativity, open-mindedness and commitment” (2002, 196; 62). Indeed, for some, the emphasis post-subcultural theories placed on fluid tastes and individual consumption amounted to another example of “cultural populism”. Hesmondhalgh was especially scathing, arguing that

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Bennett’s model of neo-tribes was effectively a “celebration of consumerism” that glossed over the way structural inequalities work to limit and constrain both people’s access to cultural commodities and the ways such commodities were ultimately used to fashion identities (Hesmondhalgh 2007, 39). Others advanced similar critiques. Shane Blackman (2005), for example, argued that “post-subcultural” theories lacked “theoretical coherence and explanatory power at the level of the social” and so were “unable to access the broader social processes that subcultures inhabit” (Blackman 2005, 17; 15).12 Tracy Shildrick and Robert MacDonald (2006) were more forthright. Post-subcultural studies, they argued, had tended to focus on “the stylistic exploits of minority music/dance ‘scenes’ and ‘neotribes’” and had largely ignored the lives and identities of “ordinary” and less advantaged youth. As a consequence, post-subcultural approaches had underestimated the significance of class and other social inequalities in contemporary youth culture. Instead, marshalling a battery of research dealing with youth transitions and young people’s leisure, policing and the night-time economy, Shildrick and MacDonald surmised there was ample indication that “not all young people share equally in a new, postmodern, global youth culture”: The overriding conclusion of these studies of less flamboyant, less stylistically spectacular youth is that the sorts of free cultural choice described by more postmodern, post-subcultural perspectives tend to be reserved for the more privileged sections of dominant cultural groups. There is enough evidence … to demonstrate how social and economic constraint reverberates through the youth cultural and leisure experiences of less advantaged young people (Shildrick and MacDonald 2006, 133).

Christine Griffin concurred, arguing that much post-subcultural work missed (or actively avoided) any active engagement with issues of class. Griffin was especially critical of the notions of “individualization” and “self-reflexivity” that had underpinned much post-subcultural theorizing. Such approaches had interpreted shifts in advanced industrial societies as resulting in an erosion of traditional anchors for social and personal identities; but, according to Griffin, there was “little evidence that the macro-economic structurations of class have changed substantially since the 1960s and 1970s”, while in Britain there had actually been “a dramatic increase in social and economic inequalities around health, employment and education”. As a consequence, Griffin argued, the emphasis placed on “consuming oneself into being” by discourses of individual freedom and self-expression woefully overlooked the fact that:

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1. Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change … some simply do not have access to the “right” cultural resources and techniques to construct and display themselves in appropriate ways, with the result that many working-class young people can only display a “lack” of possession of culturally valued resources (Griffin 2011, 255).

Members of the original CCCS team, too, were critical of some of the post-subcultural studies that had followed, and which had critiqued, their own work. In an introduction to a new (2006) edition of Resistance Through Rituals, Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson admired some of the rich, ethnographic explorations of “lived experience” that had emerged within post-subcultural research, but were critical of what they saw as a general failure to show how these experiences were grounded in their political, economic and socio-cultural contexts. In contrast, they argued, making connections “between lived experience and structural realities” had been a central concern of what they termed the “youth sub/cultures project” (Hall and Jefferson 2006, vii; xiv; xxxii). They emphasized, nevertheless, that “a simple class explanation” of subcultures had never been part of this project, and much of their theorizing had arisen “precisely as the result of a sustained effort to think and make connections between subcultures and class without simply reducing the one to the other” (Hall and Jefferson 2006, xv (original emphasis)). At the same time, however, they also stressed how class should still be recognized as a factor that exerts “massive influence on life-chances and opportunities in every sphere of life”. Hall and Jefferson recognized that contemporary post-industrial societies had become more individualistic, socially fragmented and pluralistic since the 1960s and 70s, with the result that “class and culture are much more disarticulated than they were, and the whole subcultural field has become much more diffuse than it once was” (Hall and Jefferson 2006, xv). But they also stressed that class should remain a fundamental category in attempts to understand the social order, quoting Angela McRobbie’s succinct observation that while class had, by the 1990s, become “a moving macro-structure” of life chances, “it still provided an overall map of opportunities, expectations and outcomes” (McRobbie 1998, 3–4). According to many researchers, therefore, the concept of subculture retained salience. Shildrick and MacDonald, for example, acknowledged that the CCCS subcultural model needed “theoretical refinement and empirical renewal” but argued that its broader goals remained valid, observing that the model’s “emphasis upon the relationship between social structure and culture in youth cultural formation and, particularly, the ways in which individual biographies intertwine with, and between, the two seems curiously timely” (Shildrick and MacDonald 2006, 137).

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Griffin also argued that the legacy of the CCCS “youth sub/cultures project” offered significant benefits for the analysis of young people’s lives and cultural practices, not least of which was the attention it drew to “the continuing significance of class in the neo-liberal social order—both within and outside the UK—as it intersects with social relations around gender, race and sexuality” (Griffin 2011, 256). Andy Bennett, too, seemed to acknowledge that mileage remained in subcultural theory. A move towards an approach that combined elements of both subcultural and post-subcultural theory, Bennett argued, might initiate “a more effective mapping of a contemporary youth cultural terrain in which youth identities forge an increasingly complex mix of global and local cultural influences” (Bennett 2011, 502). Though little progress had yet been made toward that goal, Bennett envisioned how a large-scale, multimethod approach—incorporating both qualitative and quantitative data-sets—might represent a way forward. Such a project, he argued, might allow subcultural and post-subcultural researchers to fruitfully collaborate, addressing the limitations of their respective approaches and “prepare the way for a clearer, more nuanced and locally sensitive analysis of where and how patterns of consumption, leisure and lifestyle map onto the structural experiences of class, gender, race and so on” (Bennett 2011, 503).

Global Flows, Local Subcultures and “New Ethnicities” While British and (to a lesser extent) Western European research has been central to debates about the nature and significance of subcultural groups, other global contexts have also produced rich (and steadily expanding) collections of literature. A developing body of work, for example, has explored the place of subcultural affiliation in the lives young people growing up in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as they negotiate a range of identities and transitions in their personal lives against a backdrop of the thoroughgoing transformation of their societies.13 Elsewhere, recent studies of subcultures have ranged from South Africa (Mooney 2005) and Indonesia (Baulch 2008) to Australia (White 2012) and Japan (Kawamura 2012); and North America, of course, has also produced an expansive literature related to subcultural groups, produced by scholars working across a wide variety of fields and disciplines. Rap and hip-hop has been a particular focus for analysis, authors such as Tricia Rose (1994), Michael Dyson (1996) and Russell Potter (1995) all highlighting the way rap music has served as both a meaningful response

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to the experience of inner-city life in modern America and an expressive critique of the history of US race relations. Since its emergence in New York’s South Bronx during the late 1970s, rap’s idioms and practices have circulated worldwide. Rather than spawning a legion of inferior imitations of the American original, however, the global flow of rap and hip-hop has seen the genre reworked and reconfigured as new, identifiably local, forms of cultural expression. Studies of rap in France (Durand 2002), Africa (Charry 2012; Osumare 2012), Japan (Condry 2006) and Australia (Mitchell 1996; 2001), for example, have all shown how the musical form has been appropriated and reworked in distinctive ways by young people in different geographic locales. As Russell White argues, groups of people worldwide have “adapted African American hip-hop for their own purposes” and, while local hip-hop scenes may be part of a “transnational hip-hop community”, each scene also has “its own identity, addresses nationally specific issues and employs its own culturally and linguistically specific markers” (White 2010, 169). The global circulation and local adaptation of rap and hip-hop is indicative of the more general ways in which modern youth cultures and subcultures are not formed in isolation. Rather, they are generated through complex processes of connection, interface and interrelation; with Sunaina Maira and Elisabeth Soep coining the term “youthscapes” to denote the ways modern youth cultures spawn through “the intersections between popular culture practices, national ideologies and global markets” (Maira and Soep 2005, xv). These processes, however, are always framed by issues of inequality in terms of power, ownership and control. For example, historically, the global flow of media texts and cultural forms has predominantly been from west to east and north to south. Yet this imbalance does not necessarily constitute a relationship of simple domination and homogenization. “Indigenous” cultures and “alternative” media, for example, often exist as powerful counterweights to the influence of “globalized” or “Americanized” cultural products. Local and regional audiences, moreover, often reconfigure the meanings of “global” commodities, images and texts; authors such as James Lull (1995) and John Thompson (1995) highlighting the way local audiences appropriate and inscribe new meaning into global media forms, reworking them to take on fresh cultural significance. Contemporary youth cultures exemplify these processes, with local audiences often appropriating “transglobal” media forms, inscribing them with new collective meanings and integrating them within their own, localized, cultures and identities. Hilary Pilkington and her colleagues, for example, have vividly

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demonstrated that, although western media are pervasive in the lives of young people in post-Soviet Russia, local attachments and identities also remain important. So, while Russian youth draw upon global commodities in their styles and subcultures, this receptiveness to Western media forms existed alongside a careful guarding of local identities (Pilkington 1994; Pilkington et al. 2002). Processes of appropriation and fusion, then, underpin the development of modern youth cultures. The proliferation of global communication networks and media flows has been crucial in facilitating these processes, but patterns of population movement and settlement have also been important. As Avtar Brah has argued, processes of diasporic movement have generated new forms of cultural identity that “are at once local and global”, being composed of “networks of trans-national identifications encompassing “imagined” and “encountered” communities” (Brah 1996, 196). Such cultures are not tied down to particular places, but are better conceptualized in terms of motion and contingency. Or, as Paul Gilroy has put it, they are a matter of routes rather than roots—patterns of movement and diffusion that involve the formation of “creolized, syncretized, hybridized and chronically impure cultural forms” (Gilroy 1997, 335). Associated with the CCCS during the 1970s and early 1980s, Gilroy’s early work represented a multilayered analysis of the complex struggles around “race”, class and nation in contemporary Britain (CCCS 1982; Gilroy 1987). His later work gave particular attention to black “expressive culture” and its relation to processes of diaspora and political struggle, Gilroy arguing that black culture and experience could only be understood in terms of its transatlantic connections. Gilroy eschewed notions of a panglobal, homogeneous black identity, but he also resisted notions of distinctly British, American or West Indian black culture. Instead, he introduced the concept of the “Black Atlantic” to denote the history of intercultural connections linking globally dispersed black peoples (Gilroy 1993a). For Gilroy, a series of forced and voluntary migrations (including the slave trade, but also the free movement of people and cultural forms back and forth across the Atlantic) had spread black people across the globe, but they remained linked by a long history of cultural connection and exchange—so that no one part of the Black Atlantic could be understood without considering its relation to the others. This process of cultural dialogue, Gilroy argued, produced a plurality of hybrid identities and cultural forms within and between the various locales of the black diaspora. Hip-hop culture and rap music, Gilroy suggested, were preeminent examples:

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1. Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change Rap is a hybrid form rooted in the syncretic social relations of the South Bronx where Jamaican sound-system culture, transplanted during the 1970s, put down new roots and in conjunction with specific technological innovations, set in train a process that was to transform black America’s sense of itself and a large proportion of the popular music industry as well (Gilroy 1993b, 125).

Both Gilroy and Stuart Hall used the term “diasporic culture” to explore the complex intercultural exchanges and transnational linkages through which ethnic identities are translated and transmitted, and in which “new ethnicities” are made and remade (Gilroy 1993a; Hall 1992a). Gilroy, for example, highlighted musical genres such as bhangra as a space of intercultural dialogue where “new ethnicities” have taken shape. According to Gilroy, through its fusion of Punjabi and Bengali folk music with hip-hop, soul and house, bhangra could be seen as “the opening up of a self-consciously post-colonial space in which the affirmation of difference points forward to a more pluralistic conception of nationality” (Gilroy 1993b, 62). Other researchers have also explored the configuration of “new ethnicities” in contemporary youth culture. Les Back (1996), for example, drew on extensive ethnographic research to analyse how new ethnic identities had taken shape within the syncretic forms of music and cultural expression that emerged in urban Britain during the 1990s. Drum‘n’bass, Back argued, stood as a prominent example of a cultural sphere where “the aesthetics of the nation [were] recomposed, resulting in more inclusive translocal notions of what it means to reside within UK boundaries” (1996, 233). In his survey of these developments, Back also underlined the importance of the Asian diaspora. For Back, the coming together of Asian and African diasporic cultures in Britain represented an important intersection in the creation and articulation of new, distinctly syncretic, identities: This process takes on further transnational nuances when South Asian lexical and cultural elements are introduced into these syncretic processes. The modes of expression that are produced possess a kind of triple consciousness that is simultaneously the child of Africa, Asia and Europe (Back 1996, 185).

Many authors have developed this sense of youth culture and popular music as important centres of creative cultural synthesis and “syncretic” identity formation. The various contributors to the (1996) anthology, DisOrienting Rhythms, for example, argued that the wave of Asian dance music that emerged in Britain during the 1990s could be read as “a cultural

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form that narrates diasporas, dynamically affirming, transforming and mutating both imagined and material linkages” (Sharma et al. 1996, 9). Sunaina Maira also identified elements of fusion and mélange (albeit shot through with tensions and ambivalence) in her (2002) study of the way second-generation Indian-American youth in New York negotiated the politics of ethnicity, “race” and gender in their daily lives; while Paul O’Connor (2011) has shown how “cultural mix and fusion” characterize the commonplace experiences and expressions of Muslim youngsters in Hong Kong.14 Such studies demonstrate how young people’s subject positions operate across, and within, multiple cultural sites—their identities constituted by the intersection of criss-crossing discourses of age, ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality. “Syncretic” cultural identities, moreover, are not necessarily a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. The open-ended, dynamic and “hybridized” cultural forms and identities that many theorists see as a trait of the late modernity have, perhaps, always been a feature of the subcultural world.

Histories, Transitions and Cross-Generational Subcultures Writing in 1980, Stanley Cohen expressed scepticism about the viability of new historical studies of youth culture and subcultures. “To re-examine the subject of post-war British youth subcultures”, Cohen suggested, “is not the same as constructing, say, a revised historiography of World War II: there are no new archives to be opened, no secret documents to be discovered, no pacts of silence to be broken. There are just the same (rather poor) sources of information from the same (often inarticulate) informants” (Cohen 2002, xlviii). But Cohen’s doubts have proved ill founded. Rather than being a corpus of elemental “truths”, history is a constructed discourse that is constantly being re-evaluated and reconstructed in the light of fresh information and intervention by new ideas, debates and critical perspectives. And, in the analysis of youth culture and subcultures, historical developments have been examined and reassessed by a range of new studies and research. On both sides of the Atlantic, for example, work has highlighted the existence of nascent commercial youth markets and groups analogous to subcultures during the early twentieth century. In Britain David Fowler has identified a “hard-sell youth market” that began to blossom during the 1920s as cinemas, dancehalls and magazine publishers all courted the growing spending power of young workers (Fowler 1995, 170); while Paula Fass has charted the interwar rise of “the first modern American

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youth culture”—a collegiate universe that formed around student fraternities, dancehalls, cinemas, cafeterias and other campus hangouts (Fass 1978, 122). Jon Savage (2007) has also provided an expansive survey of the subcultural youth groups that emerged in Europe and America from the late nineteenth century until the arrival of the “teenager” amid the economic boom following the Second World War. For the post1945 period, impressive new studies have also abounded. In Britain, for instance, Adrian Horn (2009) has explored the impact of Americanization on domestic youth culture; Carol Dyhouse (2013) has chronicled the successive social concerns surrounding the behaviour of young women; and George McKay (1996) has plotted the history of subcultures of social protest. America has also seen a wealth of excellent historical studies, including analyses of the ethnic and gender dynamics of the 1940s “zoot suiters” by Luis Alvarez (2009) and Catherine Ramirez (2009); examinations of the relationship between youth culture and the rise of consumerism during the 1960s by Thomas Frank (1998) and Kirse May (2002); and a number of impressive studies of the 1970s disco explosion and its place in the transformation of sexual and ethnic identities.15 By the early twenty-first century, however, the social and economic conditions that begat the proliferation of modern youth cultures and subcultures were undergoing profound transformation. From the 1980s research increasingly suggested that, while there were some national differences, throughout the western world changes in labour markets, educational provision and family structure meant that the “youth” life stage was being extended—a development indicated by lengthened careers in education, later entry into full-time employment and rises in mean ages of first marriages and births to women.16 Moreover, alongside this extension of “youth”, young people also seemed to be experiencing less overall stability in their transitions to “adult” life, with an increased complexity of different pathways (in terms of educational courses, training, temporary and part-time jobs, and social relationships) into the roles and responsibilities traditionally associated with adulthood. For theorists such as American sociologist Jeffrey Arnett (2004; Arnett and Tanner 2006), these changes amounted to a profound shift in the lifecycle of industrialized societies. Citing increased dependency on the family for post-compulsory education, housing and financial and emotional support, Arnett argued that a new, distinctive period in the life course had taken shape between adolescence and adulthood. Dubbed “emergent adulthood” by Arnett, this phase was seen as period when individuals “paused” their social development to enjoy a prolonged youth so that, for Arnett, (young) adulthood did not begin much before the age of

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thirty. Critics, however, observed that Arnett’s claims for the universality of “emergent adulthood” failed to recognize both significant national variations and the huge diversity of individual experience. Furthermore, the concept of a relatively uniform phase of “emergent adulthood” seemed to overlook the extent to which inequalities such as class and gender continued to frame processes of transition, John Bynner noting how Arnett’s model tended to “play down the old structural determinacies and polarizing aspects of young people’s experience that, if anything, … are getting stronger in late modern conditions” (Bynner 2005, 380).17 Nonetheless, most research concurs that, while structural factors still restrict choices and shape lives, the boundaries dividing adolescence and adulthood have become less distinct and less dependent on chronological sequence. For some individuals at least, processes of transition have become protracted so that, as Andy Furlong observes, “many researchers have begun to appreciate the inadequacy of the term ‘youth’ for understanding processes that may shape the lives of individuals well into their twenties and beyond” (Furlong 2009, 2). Indeed, the notion of youth subcultures has, itself, become increasingly problematic as the composition of such formations becomes increasingly cross-generational. In her analysis of queer subcultures, Judith Halberstam noted how such groups were not always youthcentric. “Queers”, Halberstam argued, “participate in subcultures for far longer than their heterosexual counterparts”, so that at a time when heterosexual men and women “are spending their weekends, their extra cash and all their free time shuttling back and forth between the weddings of friends and family, urban queers tend to spend their leisure time and money on subcultural involvement” (Halberstam 2003, 328). Increasingly, however, it seems urban queers are in good company. Ethnographic research across a range of subcultural groups, including punk (Bennett 2006), goth (Hodkinson 2011) and northern soul (Smith 2009) has suggested that many people (queer and heterosexual) continue to invest heavily in subcultural practices well beyond their “youth”.18 This apparent increase in the longevity of subcultural involvement is partly rooted in the general extension of transitions into “adulthood”; with young people maintaining subcultural identities as part of a wider delay in taking on “adult” responsibilities such as marriage, childbearing, home ownership and commitment to a career. But, as Andy Bennett and Paul Hodkinson (2012) argue, prolonged participation in subcultures is not simply a facet of delayed transitions into adulthood since subcultural involvement can often extend well into later life and can take place alongside “adult” commitments to careers and family life. Instead, Bennett and Hodkinson argue, the incorporation of

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traditionally “youthful” subcultural activities into ageing lifestyles can be seen as constituent in the broader strategies through which people construct and articulate their identities via the embrace of distinctive consumer lifestyles (Bennett and Hodkinson 2012, 3). In these terms, then, the notion of subcultures as age-specific formations is becoming increasingly dated as ageing individuals continue to express their sense of self through subcultural tastes and affiliations acquired during their teens and early twenties. **** It would be impossible for the contributions to this book to cover the entire range of theories and issues that characterize the contemporary analysis of subcultures and popular music. Collectively, however, they build upon the broad perspectives and debates outlined in this chapter. The collection is divided into “themed” sections, though there are obvious connections between and within the chapters of each segment. The contributions to the first section, make a range of interventions in debates surrounding the character of subcultures and the contribution of subcultural theory. Chris Warne begins by considering why, despite being informed by many French intellectual currents, subcultural theory was relatively slow to gain traction in France. Exploring this absence, Warne both surveys those approaches that did hold sway in French youth studies during the 1970s and 80s, and considers the ways subcultural theory might be usefully applied to a French context. The question of social class and subcultural practice is reviewed by Andrew Branch via his case study of Southend-onSea’s Junk Club scene. Insisting that social class remains a key influence in the dynamics of contemporary British youth cultures, Branch nevertheless moves away from the cultural materialism that characterized the work of the CCCS. Instead, he draws on the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu to argue that the Junk Club scene established its sense of collective identity via practices of self-valorization and “distinction”. Andy Bennett, meanwhile, considers the impact of the Internet on youth culture. Revisiting the ongoing debates about subcultural and post-subcultural theory, Bennett contends that aspects of youth’s online behaviour display characteristically “post-subcultural” traits; particularly the “reflexive” way in which young people weave narratives of subcultural belonging in and out of their personal accounts of identity. The book’s second section comprises a range of case studies dealing with the construction and expression of subcultural identities. It begins with Stella Moss’s examination of musical performance and the forging of

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communities of sociability in British public houses during the interwar period. Drawing on research undertaken by the Mass Observation organization in Bolton, Moss shows how the pub was a hub for a plurality of different cultures based around musical consumption and performance. Issues of performance also feature in the two chapters that follow. Saphron Hastie’s analysis of the contemporary neoburlesque scene shows how neoburlesque artists navigate the tensions between individual agency and objectification within a commodified “raunch culture”. Lee Brooks, meanwhile, considers the role of bricolage in the articulation of Morrissey’s public persona; Brooks exploring Morrissey’s recurring appropriation of the iconography of the outsider and its appeal for his fans. The section’s final two contributions discuss areas seldom considered. Issues of subcultural entrance are analysed by Alastair Gordon, who examines the processes of learning, participation and peer identification that have underpinned induction to the world of British punk. Nick Bentley focuses on the representation of subcultures in narrative fiction. Examining the proliferation of “subcultural” novels in Britain since the 1990s, Bentley identifies two key generic forms. The first, exemplified by Guatam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), is located in the contemporary moment and addresses specific “state-of-the-nation” concerns articulated via a plotline set in a subcultural environment. The second, typified by John King’s Skinheads (2008), is rooted in a “critical nostalgia” for subcultures of the past and the social and cultural contexts from which they emerged. The contributions to the book’s third section deal with the global flow of subcultures and their manifestation in specific local contexts. It commences with Joe Street’s analysis of the Stax/Volt Revue that toured Britain in 1967 and its impact on British soul fans. Street outlines the variety of ways the Revue appealed to British fans and shows how, for some, it sowed the seeds of a developing political consciousness, while for others its cool cachet offered a sense of subcultural status and prestige. Timothy Brown examines the West German protest movement(s) and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, chronicling both their processes of self-theorization and the way they translated elements of subcultural style into movements of political activism. This is followed by Svetlana Stephenson’s analysis of the urban territorial youth networks of contemporary Moscow. Based on extensive fieldwork, Stephenson’s account demonstrates how, despite being vilified by the authorities as social and cultural “others”, these groups conceive of themselves as “masters of the local space”, neighbourhood elites with responsibility for policing and protecting their home turf. Finally, Eleni Dimou uses her analysis of

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underground rap in Cuba to explore the ways the divide between subcultural and post-subcultural theories might be productively bridged. The book concludes with a compelling Afterword by Dick Hebdige. Nearly thirty-five years after the publication of Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Hebdige scans contemporary media culture and reflects on both the continuities and differences between the art, lifestyles and politics of today and those that triggered the eruption of punk during the 1970s.

Notes 1. For information on the Subcultures Network and news of its activities, see www.reading.ac.uk/history/research/hist-subcultures.aspx. A Facebook page and associated discussion group is also available under the name “Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change”. 2. For a more detailed analysis of the development of the commercial youth market in America, see Osgerby (2008). 3. A critical survey of competing theories of adolescence is provided in Coleman (2010). 4. Examples exist in Clarke, Hall, Jefferson and Roberts (1976); Davis (1990) and Smith, Immirizi and Blackwell (1975). 5. For more detailed accounts and critical appraisals of the concept of moral panic, see Critcher (2006), Garland (2008), McRobbie and Thornton (1995), Thompson (1998) and Young (2009). For a historical survey of moral panics specifically focused on youth culture, see Springhall (1998). 6. Other contemporary theorists also saw the counterculture as an attack by disaffected middle-class youth against their parents’ culture and ideology. See e.g. Musgrove (1974), Reich (1971) and Roszak (1969). 7. Examples include Bock (2008), Marcus, (2010) and Monem (2007). 8. Overviews of the history of gay, lesbian and queer subcultural style can be found in Cole (2000) and Geczy and Karaminas (2013). 9. Taylor’s (2012) ethnographic research on a variety of queer music scenes also pointed to dimensions of “aesthetic heterogeneity” in which punk, pop, rock and other music genres were borrowed, manipulated and reconstituted. 10. Richard Jenkins’ (1983) study of youth in Belfast also questioned the relevance of subcultural forms to most working-class youngsters who, he argued, did not identify with any specific subcultural group. 11. Contributions to, and commentaries upon, these developments were brought together in several notable edited collections. See Bennett and Kahn-Harris (2004), Bennett and Peterson (2004), Hodkinson and Deicke (2007) and Muggleton and Weinzierl (2003).

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12. For Bennett’s response to these criticisms, see Bennett (2005). 13. See e.g. Pilkington, Omel’chenko and Garifzianova (2010), Gololobov, Pilkington and Steinholt (2014) (forthcoming) and the various contributions to “Punk in Post-Socialist Space”, a special issue of the journal Punk and Post-Punk, 1 (3), 2012. 14. See also the various contributions to Nilan and Feixa (eds.) (2006). 15. See e.g. Echols (2010), Lawrence (2003) and Shapiro (2005). 16. See e.g. Sanders and Becker (1994). 17. See also the critique elaborated in Hendry and Kloep (2010). For general discussion of the continuing importance of structural determinants for young people’s transitions to adulthood, see Furlong and Cartmel (1997). 18. See also Holland (2004) for discussion of the ways “alternative” women negotiate the tensions between the expectations traditionally associated with middle-aged femininity and their commitment to goth, punk and other subcultures.

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I. THEORIZING SUBCULTURES AND POPULAR MUSIC

2. SUBCULTURAL THEORY IN FRANCE: A MISSED RENDEZ-VOUS? CHRIS WARNE

Introduction In May 2008, Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style was published for the first time in French (Hebdige 2008): the translation was issued by Zones, an imprint of the leftist Parisian publisher Éditions de la Decouverte, dedicated to creating “a space for publishing resistance” (“un espace de résistance éditoriale”) (Zones 2007). Given the obvious influence of French thinkers and philosophers on the development of Hebdige’s ideas (works by Lévi-Strauss, Kristeva, Genet, Breton, Barthes and Lefebvre are all listed in his bibliography), it would seem fitting that the cross-Channel exchange of ideas appeared to have come full circle at last. Indeed, it can be argued that the significance of Hebdige’s work for subcultural studies lay in its capacity to fuse the more sociologically oriented work of some of his peers at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies with elements of art, structural and poststructural theory derived from his reading of such French thinkers. Furthermore, it is undoubtedly within this hybrid space that the wider Anglo-American cultural studies project has developed in the years since Hebdige’s text was first published. Given the foundational character of Hebdige’s work for the study of contemporary youth cultures, its relatively late appearance in France raises some intriguing issues. The first is the obvious one of explaining the time lag: why did it take so long to cross the Channel? The second arises at a more fundamental level, in that the absence of the book in the French setting actually highlights a broader absence of the approach to youth cultures exemplified by Hebdige’s book, especially in the first twenty years after its initial publication. In other words, the late translation of Hebdige’s seminal text underlines the fact that subcultural analysis has historically been generally absent from youth studies in France. This too requires explanation.

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This absence can be illustrated in a quite straightforward way by underlining the relatively few French translations of the works of key names associated with the subcultural approach, especially into widely available forms. This lack of translation is important—until relatively recently, the self-sufficiency of the French intellectual world meant that it was unusual for the typical French specialist to expect to access work in English, so a reliance on translation from the Anglo-Saxon context was paramount. No translation effectively meant no access. Conversely, translation also means more than just availability: it also implies a certain conferring of intellectual legitimacy. In this context, the appearance of the Hebdige translation can be seen as part of a wider if belated engagement with cultural studies in France, notwithstanding its immediate association with a publisher that sees itself as swimming against the mainstream. Alongside Hebdige, works by Stuart Hall appeared in 2007 (a translation of his writings on authoritarian populism, and Questions of Cultural Identity), by Paul Willis in 2011 (a translation of Learning to Labour), whilst Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic was translated as “early” as 2003. However, with regards to the specific study and analysis of youth culture, as opposed to cultural studies more broadly, works that would be regarded as significant for understanding a subcultural approach appear to remain unknown in France: there are no translations of the works of Stanley Cohen or Angela McRobbie for example. This chapter is therefore concerned with exploring this gap. In doing so, it raises some wider issues for subcultural approaches to the understanding of youth cultures. Are such approaches merely expressive of Anglo-Saxon contexts, or can they travel successfully out of their places of origin? Are they themselves in some way expressive of an academic subculture, or can they, in a fashion analogous to the borrowed “foreign” influences that inspired them in the first place, shed new light on local contexts distinct from their places of elaboration? However, before addressing the more specific question of why subcultural studies failed to gain a footing on the French intellectual scene, it is vital to outline precisely what is being understood in this chapter as a subcultural approach to youth social practices, so we can be more precisely clear about what is missing. Despite initially having diagnosed the issue of absence in France through a lack of translation of specific writers and theorists into French, it is important to underline that what is being identified here is more than just the fact that certain writers and the concepts with which they are associated have not been specifically adopted or applied in the French setting. The lack of translation actually points to a more fundamental gap in the development of youth studies in

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France from the middle 1970s onwards. The broader subcultural approach is based on a few presumptions, and it is the possible absence of these presumptions in the French context that is in fact more striking. In the first instance, the subcultural approach lends a certain dignity to the groups under consideration. It takes them seriously as cultural producers, and acknowledges that their behaviour is worthy of intellectual analysis, or that it has political importance. While studies of youth in general have often explicitly or implicitly justified their own significance with reference to understanding future developments and trends in society (“the young are our future”), subcultural analyses go further than this, presenting the activities of specific groups as important for what they tell us about the state of society in the present, reversing an implicit hierarchy that sees adults as more socially significant than the young. Of course, this challenge of age hierarchies is frequently connected within subcultural studies with a challenge to social hierarchies, in that it is often marginal or working-class groups who sit at the centre of them, again questioning ideas of where one goes to read a given society. Underpinned to a greater or lesser degree by Gramscian notions of cultural hegemony, this foregrounding of the broader political and social significance of cultural practices is of course the key move behind the growth of cultural studies more widely. Secondly, within youth subcultural studies there is a concern with the idea of codes, language and styles as a way of understanding or unlocking the social significance of the practices under consideration. With the pioneers of the Birmingham School, of course, this produced a readiness to deploy ideas and theories drawn from structural and post-structural modes of thought, and a focus on semiotics in particular. This is connected to a third aspect. There is the need to decode because the observer is necessarily in the position of outsider or interpreter of a culture that is in part an autonomous or even resistant response to normative forces of social and economic organization. Indeed, the existence of subcultures points to the potential limits of these normative forces. So why did this outlook not gain an immediate hold in France, and what difference might it have made if it had? In order to answer these questions, the chapter is broken down into two parts. The first presents explanations as to why the subcultural approach was, on the whole, not mobilized in French youth studies. These explanations are derived from a broader understanding of the French intellectual field as it developed from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, especially in the area of sociology and the dominant paradigms that shaped the sociological understanding of youth culture. The second part of the chapter considers what difference a

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subcultural approach to youth practices might have made had it been mobilized earlier in the French setting. It does this through a brief consideration of the emergence of hip-hop in France. Historically, the origins of hip-hop in France can be traced to the early 1980s, but it was not until the mid-1990s that it was seriously studied as a youth cultural form, whether that be with reference to its wider political importance, or with the need for outsiders to decode its social significance.

Why Subcultural Theory Failed to Take Hold in France It is worth remembering that the work of the Birmingham CCCS group was, in important ways, itself inspired by an encounter with ideas drawn from outside of the immediate British academic and intellectual context. In particular, Hebdige’s specific development of subcultural style was posited on a reading of continental approaches to the structural analysis of culture, most notably exemplified by works such as Roland Barthes’ Mythologies or the early work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. It is perhaps significant that another significant time lag exists here: just as Hebdige’s texts took a while to arrive in France, so too Barthes’ work, which was originally written and published France during the mid-1950s was only translated into English for the first time in 1972. To a potential French audience for the CCCS’s subcultural theories of the 1970s and 1980s, these kinds of structuralist underpinnings would immediately appear to belong to a different, pre-1968 era. The intellectual climate in 1970s France was very much shaped by an ambition to find the cracks and gaps in the structure, to recover the space for agency beyond the ability to simply diagnose its overarching, even over-determining reach. This is not to say that the Birmingham School theorists were not themselves also driven by such ambitions: indeed, the focus on the marginal groups of late capitalism such as those that produce youth subculture was just one aspect of this ambition. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that for French audiences, the presumption after 1968 was that structural theory was considered something of a dead end rather than a route to developing social analyses that could both promote intellectual insight and social liberation. However, more fundamental explanations are needed. British subcultural theory may have taken ideas seriously that were beginning to fall out of fashion in France, but in other ways it was perfectly suited to the French intellectual climate noted above, especially in its ability to offer forms of leftist analysis that were not beset by a profound disconnection or even bafflement in the face of the fast-evolving forms of popular and media culture. These more fundamental explanations can be found in the

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institutional patterns and forces that organized French intellectual life, especially in the field of the social sciences. While not a new intellectual discipline in France, sociology was still a relatively novel institutional, research and political presence even in the 1970s: the first university course was only implemented in the late 1950s for example, while the first national society of sociologists was founded in 1964 (Ardoino 1997; Berthelot 2000). Perhaps for strategic purposes, this had produced a situation where sociology had been rather defensively established in universities, research centres and teaching institutions with reference to clearly delineated, rival schools of thought, each built around the influence of a dominant thinker or personality, and matched by the weight of a specific institutional presence through which a line of succession could be guaranteed by the training and production of disciples dedicated to promoting the particular approach of the school. Movement between schools was rare; much less efforts to synthesize the different approaches, or see them as complementary. Younger researchers in particular found it difficult to swim outside these institutional structures and their existence, doubtless necessary for the wider promotion of sociology as an established discipline perhaps further militated against the sometimes maverick interdisciplinary mix of sociological, anthropological and media-studies approaches which underpins the subcultural analysis. Consequently, for any specific perspective or approach to be adopted in France, especially if it came from outside, it would probably need the validation or approval of one of these schools of thought. It would be wrong to present the situation in France as deliberately isolationist. The point is that ideas developed outside France could be widely adopted and promoted. We could point for example to Bourdieu’s ambition to denationalize sociology and more specifically his promotion of Weberian ideas in France from his position within the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, exemplified by his creation of the Centre for European Sociology (Robbins 1999). However, this only reinforces the obverse of this promotion, that without such weighty and specific support from one of the dominant schools of sociology, ideas were more likely to remain perceived as irrelevant, or at best the province of the idiosyncratic outsider. With specific regard to the understanding of youth subcultures as politically and intellectually significant forms of social resistance, there were isolated intellectuals working in France during the 1970s and 1980s whose approach might be aligned to a degree with that of the Birmingham School. Such individuals would include Michel de Certeau, who predicated his 1979 L’Invention du quotidien on notions of everyday resistance (1990), or Henri Lefebvre, whose 1974 La Production de l’espace sought

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to analyse the contemporary urban space as the site of concrete political struggle over social and cultural meaning. However, it would not be an exaggeration to say that de Certeau and others like him gained rather more credibility outside of France, especially in the US where Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) became a mainstay of graduate school cultural studies programmes. Returning, then, to the question of why the subcultural approach made little headway in 1970s and 1980s France, we need to explore in more precise detail the obstacles that prevented it doing so. If subcultural theory was to be adopted, it was most likely to be so within the field of youth studies in France, itself a relatively undeveloped area during the 1970s and 1980s. Two sociological schools of thought were prominent in shaping that nascent field. The first of these was the so-called Touraine or Social Movement School. Developed out of a specific analysis of 1968 in France (Touraine 1968), it produced an analysis of social change built around the idea of the social movements as a focal point for collective agency. In the particular context of post-1968 politics, this meant significantly that the social analyst needed to be attentive to the motor of change driven by groups who were not covered by the “traditional” Marxist category of the proletariat. In a series of studies produced during the 1970s by sociologists associated with this perspective, this meant successively students (Dubet et al. 1978), the anti-nuclear and ecology movements (Dubet et al. 1980), and activists committed to recovering regional identities as a challenge to the Jacobin and centralized republican state (Dubet et al. 1981). Furthermore, for those working in this perspective, the sociological analysis is also an intervention, designed to bring its subjects to a point of self-awareness. This perspective became increasingly more important during the 1980s, when attention turned away from specific active groups who at the time already appeared to have the tools of the political process in their hands, and towards a range of broader social problems that seemed less susceptible to immediate resolution: racism (Wieviorka 1992), social exclusion and the reform of republican institutions (education, law, policing (e.g. Dubet and Martuccelli 1996)). In the hands of those working around figures like Michel Wieviorka and François Dubet, the process of analysis and the interaction between researchers and participants were designed to bring the actors to a consciousness of their own social position, and to a realization of how these positions could be translated into solutions within the broader context of more coherent political movements. This translation into politics required in part that the subjects think outside of their immediate social confines and transcend their

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particular cultural and spatial contexts. It seems clear that this aspiration to transcendence is the very opposite of the subcultural approach. This distinction can be seen most clearly in the work of François Dubet, who produced what rather quickly became a seminal study of youth in France’s outer-city suburbs and housing estates (or banlieues) which he titled La Galère (1987) (or prison ship). The concept of la galère came from its frequent evocation by the subjects of his study, who used the term to capture the essence of their daily struggle for survival and social recognition. At first glance it appears that Dubet’s analysis of the situation facing the young, ethnically mixed populations growing up in la banlieue starts with that impulse to dignify the cultures of the marginalized that earlier in the chapter was presented as being central to subcultural perspectives. It seems that the insider’s perspective (and language) is required for the outsider to grasp the full implications of the social issue under consideration. However, in other ways Dubet resolutely rejects this idea of giving primacy to the subcultural perspective. His work repeatedly and explicitly expresses an aversion to subcultural theory, and specifically its origins in the Chicago School of criminology: this forms a consistent part of a wider rejection of notions of “the ghetto”, or “the gang” as American ways of understanding what is seen as a specifically French social issue, terms which are strictly non-transferable. He is keen to underline how the young people he encountered in no way constituted a separate or autonomous population, with its own codes, values and systems of self-regulation. Despite repeated evocation of the existence of coherent and organized gangs from the inhabitants of the suburbs who participated in his survey, Dubet stresses how these reports of close-knit gangs were never supported by empirical observation, but remained at the level of rumour, gossip and report, used as a largely rhetorical device to characterize young people as a social problem that existed elsewhere, usually on a neighbouring estate, or as a means of rendering coherent the otherwise baffling experience of apparently random criminality. However, Dubet’s rejection of subculture goes deeper than simply dismissing a theoretical perspective that is unable to make sense of the empirical data. To allow the existence of subcultures is also to allow the existence of autonomous, “alternative” cultures that would rule its participants out of connecting with the wider shared republican values of civic equality and sameness. In other words, there is no future in a subcultural identity for a social movement. While the young are tied to their “galère” identity, they remain cut off from political solutions: overall, Dubet’s youth are presented as introverted and mute, turning their social exclusion in on themselves in self-destructive forms of

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behaviour such as petty criminality, drug use and ultimately in a refusal to engage in meaningful discourse with the various agents of adult society whom they encounter, whether that be in the school, the police, or indeed in the figure of the sociologist him- or herself. If there was no room for subcultural analysis in the Touraine or Social Movement School, attention must turn to the other school of sociology in France that has engaged most closely with youth and marginal groups, namely the Structural School that developed around Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu himself was more resolutely interdisciplinary than many of his French peers, and certainly far more aware of work in English and German. His approach was also directly concerned with cultural practices, and was especially and acutely conscious of the stratified nature of culture in France, and the social handicaps that are allied to a lack of cultural capital and opportunity. In the late 1970s for example, he used Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977) to develop notions of social reproduction persisting in the apparently more fluid contexts of social declassification and reclassification that he observed amongst French youth of the 1970s (Bourdieu 1978). He underlined how careers advice, the subtle inflation in number and deflation in the value of educational qualification, and the protection of socially prestigious educational streams by their members, all act as ways of normalizing and regulating youth, redirecting them towards their class destinies. All this occurs despite the stated ambition of institutional and educational reform in this period to promote social equality through widening opportunity. The point here, of course, is it takes the sociologist to unpick and reveal the real consequences of these changes to the social structure in France; although whether this is merely due to the law of unintended consequences that plagues all efforts at social reform, or a more sinister conspiracy to bolster the social hierarchy against the impact of social changes flowing out of the 1960s is not always made clear by Bourdieu. Nonetheless, the centrality of these themes of declassification and reclassification to Bourdieu’s work in this period is indicated by the fact that what initially appeared as a short article in the European Sociology Centre’s house journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales later became a key chapter in the full working out of this perspective on the uses and abuses of cultural capital that would become Bourdieu’s key work for the 1980s, La Distinction (1979). This use of Paul Willis’s work would suggest that the subcultural approach would appear to have clear affinities with Bourdieu’s broader conception of the social field. However, in practice, Bourdieu or those working from his premises generally did not follow the subsequent step

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taken by the Birmingham School in their analysis of the social position of the young. While both would appear to insist that young, working-class groups in particular were placed in dominated positions in the social structure, the subcultural analysis then goes on to examine youth cultural practice in these contexts as a form of creative resistance to this dominated position that has at least some possibility of challenging it. It is noticeable in Bourdieu’s work that he seems much more pessimistic about such possibilities of resistance. Indeed, in general he was more likely to characterize contemporary expressions of youth culture as derived from essentially impoverished forms passed down the cultural hierarchy. This is coupled to a strong aversion to what he saw as journalistic approaches to social realities: he famously dismissed youth as “just a word” (Bourdieu 1978) insisting on its demagogic character as a social construction, and he was witheringly dismissive of what he termed “pop sociologists” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1963). There is clearly hostility here to “incrowds”, especially in the intensely fad-conscious world of the Parisian mediatized intellectual. Bourdieu personally felt he played a rather ambiguous role in this world. He was therefore apparently unwilling to view a sustained interest in tracking contemporary developments in mediated youth and popular cultures as representative of anything other than the cynical manipulations of an intellectual class seeking to escape its own dominated position in the media-political structure. So, unlike the Birmingham School, the ideas of social stratification through culture coupled with analyses of intensive social regulation were not used to examine whether particular youth groups in France sought to resist this process of social domination through subcultural practice. Indeed, it was not until the 1990s that Bourdieu himself explicitly applied the paradigm of cultural capital to youth cultures at all. He did this in the context of an observation-interview with a suburban rapper that appeared in La Misère du monde (Bourdieu 1993). Despite the evident admiration that Bourdieu felt for the individual and the empathy he expressed for the latter’s personal battles fought through his chosen medium, overall the tone remained regretful that the subject of the study was somehow shortcircuiting his social and cultural opportunities by a type of self-imposed exclusion within a subculture. This encounter underlines how Bourdieu himself, and by extension those working within the framework of his school of thought, continued to view youth culture as expressing impoverishment rather than liberation. This would appear to be a major obstacle in the way of viewing youth cultures as in themselves worthy of social analysis, a key element ascribed to the subcultural approach set out above. Given the weighty influence of both Bourdieu’s position, and that

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of the Touraine School described earlier, it is perhaps not surprising that little effort was made to graft the subcultural perspective into the field of youth studies during the 1970s and 1980s in France.

How Subcultural Theory Might Have Made a Difference in France Up to this point, this chapter has sought explanations for the failure of subcultural analyses to gain a footing in France in the dominance of rival intellectual positions that were in specific ways inimical to the suppositions that underpinned the subcultural paradigm. A particular approach to social and cultural phenomena simply failed to pertain in France in the 1970s and 1980s because it was not fitted to the intellectual frameworks within which it had to operate. On the other hand, it might be suggested that this exaggerates the power of intellectual and cultural gatekeepers patrolling the national boundaries of thought, deliberately keeping out ideas considered unsuitable. A simpler, more empirical explanation might be offered: the lack of subcultural approaches in France is easily explained by a lack of subcultures in the first place. Without getting into some of the wider debates about French cultural exceptionalism, and whether this extends to the character of popular culture in France, it is easy to find evidence that would refute the idea that the French setting was somehow alien to the formation of youth subcultures. The development of specifically French forms of rap and hiphop during the 1980s and 1990s, frequently emerging in the very banlieues or suburbs that had been the subject of Dubet’s study cited above is only one example of such a subculture. Impinging on national consciousness during 1984 in the form of a television-mediated breakdance craze (known in France as le smurf and promoted via nightclub DJ Sydney’s weekly Sunday lunchtime “Hip-Hop” broadcast on the main state television channel TF1), by the early 1990s hip-hop in France was well established in a number of local scenes, groups and associations, some with a very strong sense of local or regional identity, and all covering the different practices associated with the culture (rap, graffiti, dance and street performance). The relatively conservative music industry in France was beginning to adjust to the presence of French-speaking rappers, as were the networks of youth workers, social and cultural mediators working in the expanding state-sponsored third sector to the need to update their programmes to take account of new artistic processes such as street art and sampling.

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In this respect, social analysts were rather slower on the uptake. The first academic study of the phenomenon appeared in 1985, but the two linguists concerned were exclusively interested in the variations of patois and language use expressed by a particular rap performance rather than viewing this as developing within the context of an overall subculture with wider social or political implications (Bachmann and Basier 1985). Apart from an isolated study by social psychologist George Lapassade that appeared in 1990 (Lapassade and Rousselot 1990), which developed from an encounter with some of his students at Paris University, and where the analysis is again restricted to the poetic or textual qualities of rap, it was not until the mid-1990s that the French hip-hop movement was considered as a whole by sociologists and ethnologists. A wave of studies broke in the mid-1990s in particular (Barreyre and Vulbeau 1994; Bazin 1995). Given that 1995 was also the year when French rap made its national breakthrough as an acceptable music form through the consecration of Marseille rap group IAM and the Parisian rapper MC Solaar at the music industry awards ceremony the Victoires de la musique (generally seen as otherwise rather slow to acknowledge new musical areas), this apparent intellectual legitimation should be viewed as part of a wider social authentication. It would seem in this case that the earlier failure of subcultural approaches to embed themselves in the French situation were a contributory factor in the fact that social analysts were inattentive to some important social realities of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Furthermore, as some of these mid-1990s studies were keen to point out, the dominant paradigm through which French hip-hop had hitherto been understood was essentially dismissive of it. Its emergence was frequently read as indicative of a social group whose lack of culture and identity led them to falsely adopting someone else’s. In other words, French hip-hop was often viewed as nothing more than an unfortunate American import, and a poor copy of the original. As such, it could have no lasting relevance to the social situation of those engaged with it. This outlook was in continuity with the approach adopted by both Dubet’s La Galère, and Bourdieu’s La Misère du Monde mentioned earlier: as already stated, in the latter an encounter with a young rapper is marked by an admiration for his linguistic dexterity, but an emphasis on how his adopted culture renders him even less fitted for survival in the specifically French experience of social and cultural domination. Studies such as those produced by Alain Vulbeau (1992), Hugues Bazin (1995) and Manuel Boucher (1999) set out to challenge this view, and establish the cultural, political and social significance of French hiphop, with important ramifications for institutional practice and for the

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wider reading of social relations. It is noticeable that in this respect they were adopting at least the first of the three characteristics of a subcultural approach that were outlined earlier, namely the will to challenge presumptions about the naturalness of cultural hierarchy and hegemony. Furthermore, while in practice perhaps emphasizing different areas of hiphop culture, these studies have in common a starting point that they were dealing with what was in some important sense an integral culture, with its own codes, values and interconnections, and that it was only within that overall context that individual practices such as tagging or rapping took on meaning. Without systematically resorting to the kind of semiotic procedures characteristic of Hebdige’s approach, in interpreting such practices they nonetheless gave high prominence to notions of meaning creation and symbolic work. It is perhaps only in the third area that there was less evidence of the influence of subcultural analysis, namely in the general absence of any assertion that such practices were capable of constituting forms of resistance to social domination and exclusion. At most, there seems to be an acceptance that hip-hop represented a compensation for the social position of the groups concerned (and in contrast to Dubet or Bourdieu, not a sign of their impoverishment), but that hip-hop culture was not of itself in a position to do much more than highlight the social question rather than resolve it. Space precludes a detailed examination of French hip-hop as a subculture here. However, aside from the implicit recognition of its value that would have occurred earlier had the subcultural analysis been adopted in France in parallel with approaches to youth studies taken on in the Anglo-Saxon context, a subcultural emphasis also reveals some of the fundamental factors that explain both hip-hop’s emergence and its importance. Three aspects are worth underlining, each of which is covered to a greater or lesser degree in the studies highlighted above. In the first instance, it means that any analysis of hip-hop culture in France needed to take seriously the identification with other global marginal cultures that runs through it. Rather than approaching borrowing from transnational cultures as a sign of cultural impoverishment, or as a threat to national cohesion, it shows that the development of French hip-hop was an important factor in renegotiating the everyday relationship between local, national and global at a time when these were issues that were being debated intensively in a more abstract way in France, especially concerning the politics of language, concerns about Americanization and globalization, and the reassertion of the so-called cultural exception. In that sense, hip-hop was a counter-hegemonic response to efforts to regulate the diversity of language, affiliation and cultural identification.

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Secondly, by dignifying French hip-hop as a creative response to particular social settings, subcultural analysis emphasizes how hip-hop constituted a very specific riposte to the fundamentally spatial nature of exclusion in France. The local adaptability of the global practices of hiphop is frequently recognized in many studies: in the French setting, it was their capacity to generate mobility in the otherwise frozen social arrangements of the contemporary urban space, challenging the relationship between centre and periphery. It is in this respect that French hip-hop perhaps took on its most overtly political dimensions, especially in the various ways that hip-hop practices sought to invest interstitial spaces with value and meaning, or how they intermittently raised questions about the origins and legitimacy of violence, whether symbolic or actual. Thirdly, the obvious ethnic diversity of hip-hop practitioners in France (the famous “black, blanc, beur”), coupled with the playful manipulation of a variety of linguistic and cultural registers, codes and dialects challenges the supposed invisibility of ethnic identification in the French Republic. The discourses of French rap frequently highlight, for example, how the Republic’s colour blindness can translate into systematic racial domination at the level of everyday lived experience; an idea that was still being experienced as something of a revelation even as late as 2005 when a wave of riots hit France’s outer city suburbs in the autumn of that year (SSRC 2006). In conclusion, then, we can see that subcultural approaches can transcend their origins, and in doing so can bring fresh perspectives to new locations. This is perhaps not a surprising claim, but this chapter has also argued overall that in making the move across borders, subcultural analysis can not only be used to explore a French “blind spot” regarding the development of a specific youth culture, but it can also reveal something of what is at stake in the construction of the intellectual field within which subcultural ideas circulate. In particular, it has highlighted the role that institutional settings can play in the outward transfer of approaches to subculture developed in one context, whether successful or not. Of course, while it is easy to point outwards, and highlight areas of rigidity or resistance in the reception of ideas occurring elsewhere, we might equally ask the question in reverse: are there aspects of subcultural theory that act just as effectively to mask social realities “at home” as to reveal them?



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References Ardoino, Jacques. 1997. La Sociologie en France. Paris: La Découverte. Bachmann, Christian and Luc Basier. 1985. “Junior s’entraîne très fort ou le smurf comme mobilisation symbolique”. Langage et société 34: 57– 68. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil. —. 1972. Mythologies. London: Jonathan Cape. English translation. Barreyre, Jean-Yves and Alain Vulbeau, eds. 1994. La Jeunesse et la rue. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Bazin, Hugues. 1995. La Culture hip hop. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Berthelot, Jean-Michel, ed. 2000. La Sociologie française contemporaine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Boucher, Manuel. 1999. Rap, expression des lascars: signification et enjeux dans la société française. Paris: L’Harmattan. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1978a. “Classement, déclassement, reclassement”. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 24: 2–22. —. 1978b. “La ‘jeunesse’ n’est qu’un mot”. Interview with Anne-Marie Métailié in Les Jeunes et le premier emploi. Paris: Association des Ages. 520–30. —. 1979. La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. —. 1993. La Misère du monde. Paris: Seuil. Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1963. “Sociologues des mythologies et mythologies de sociologues”. Les Temps modernes 211: 998–1021. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. English translation. —. 1990. L’Invention du quotidien 1. Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard. New edition. Dubet, François. 1987. La Galère: les jeunes en survie. Paris: Seuil. Dubet, François, Zsuzsa Hegedus, Alain Touraine and Michel Wieviorka. 1978. Lutte étudiante. Paris: Seuil. Dubet, François, Zsuzsa Hegedus, Alain Touraine and Michel Wieviorka. 1980. La Prophétie anti-nucléaire. Paris: Seuil. Dubet, François, Zsuzsa Hegedus, Alain Touraine and Michel Wieviorka. 1981. Pays contre l’état: luttes occitanes. Paris: Seuil. Dubet, François and Dnilo Martuccelli. 1996. A l’École: sociologie de l’expérience scolaire. Paris: Seuil.

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Gilroy, Paul. 2003. L’Atlantique noir: modernité et double conscience. Lille: Éditions Kargo. Translation of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Hall, Stuart. 2007. Identités et cultures: politiques des cultural studies. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam. Translation of Questions of Cultural Identity. —. 2007. Le populisme autoritaire: puissance de la droite et impuissance de la gauche au temps du tchatchérisme et du blairisme. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London/New York: Methuen/Routledge. —. 2008. Sous-culture, le sens du style. Paris: Zones. Lapassade, Georges and Philippe Rousselot. 1990. Le Rap ou la fureur de dire. Paris: Loris Talmart. Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. La Production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos. Robbins, Derek. 1999. Bourdieu and Culture. London: Sage. SSRC. 2006. “Civil Unrest in the French Suburbs, November 2005”. Accessed 2 July 2012. http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/. Touraine, Alain. 1968. Le Mouvement de mai ou le communisme utopique. Paris: Seuil. Vulbeau, Alain. 1992. Du Tag au tag. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Wieviorka, Michel. 1992. La France raciste. Paris: Seuil. Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough: Saxon House. —. 2011. L’école des ouvriers: comment les enfants d’ouvriers obtiennent des boulots d’ouvriers. Marseille: Agone. Translation of Learning to Labour. Zones. 2007. “A propos de Zones”. Accessed 2 July 2012. http://www. editions-zones.fr/spip.php?page=a_propos.

3. “IT’S WHERE YOU COME FROM THAT MAKES YOU WHO YOU ARE”: SUBURBAN YOUTH AND SOCIAL CLASS ANDREW BRANCH

Introduction: Us vs. Them The summer 2011 riots in London, Manchester and other English cities provoked much hyperbolic media commentary, with reports demonizing an underclass of “feral” youth competing successfully for discursive space with muted pleas to recognize the economic hardship facing young people in these recessionary times. Thus the debate, such as it was, tended to reproduce a traditional political binary in which the irresponsible, immoral social actor was pitted against the structurally positioned subject.1 In this chapter I will focus on the question of social class and youth practice in a slightly different historical, geographical and theoretical context by looking at Southend-on-Sea’s Junk Club scene and the primary band associated with it, the Horrors. In reflecting upon the emergence of Junk and the Horrors as signifiers of middle-class youth practice—through a textual analysis of how they were represented in media accounts and through interviews conducted with key participants—my reading will be opened up to include an assessment of how and why the dialogic relationship between working-class and middle-class youth is inimical, a defining characteristic alluded to by many of the working-class rioters of summer 2011, for whom middle-class youth were a source of resentment.2 Such an account will necessarily draw, in large part, on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu in order to explore how working-class youth—so often discursively constructed as lacking the various forms of capital conceptually captured in his work—functions primarily as the inferior Other middle-class youth measures itself in opposition to; thus processes of distinction contribute to the making of the middle class (Bourdieu 1984). Indeed, Bourdieu’s schema is crucial to my argument as it allows us to move away from a model of class differentiation based on classes which

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each have a specific, distinctive employment relation (Goldthorpe et al. 1980) to one which, whilst continuing to recognize conflicting economic interests, takes into account subjective questions of, “identifications, perceptions, feelings” (Medhurst 2000, 20). And as Beverley Skeggs reminds us, questions of (dis)identification are as important as questions of identification here: people define themselves as much by what they are not as what they are (Skeggs 1997, 79–82), evidenced as we shall see in the testimonies of the Junk Club participants I incorporate in this chapter, a disroportionate number of whom were educated at either private or selectionbased educational establishments. According to Medhurst and Skeggs, then, when seeking to understand how social class is made and performed, we must recognize not only the economic activity that people undertake but also the social and cultural practices they engage in and the choices and (dis)affiliations they feel entitled to make. Bourdieu’s (1993) theorization of “fields” is useful in this respect because it recognizes that value is symbolically organized across them: only those in possession of the right form(s) of capital— educational, social, cultural, aesthetic etc.—will feel naturally disposed to make such value claims. Thus class differentiation will be with us for as long as the status claims made by specific classes result in the marginalization of other classes; the hierarchical mapping of such differences may change over time but the distinctions which underpin them do not. This approach therefore necessitates a theoretical move away from the form of cultural materialism practised by the scholars at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, under the leadership of Stuart Hall in the 1970s and early 80s. It is worth reminding ourselves here of the Centre’s conceptualization of social class in relation to youth practice in order to illustrate the relevance of Bourdieu’s arguments to this chapter. This is particularly necessary given the fact that the central claims made by these theorists—regarding the counter-hegemonic symbolic creativity of “spectacular” working-class sub-cultures—still echo in many contemporary middle-class accounts of alleged working-class resistance.3

Working-Class Revolt The CCCS writers, especially in the influential edited collection, Resistance Through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson 1976), drew on Phil Cohen’s (1972) political reading of working-class male subcultures, in which he argued that their rituals betrayed an attempt to “magically resolve” contradictions endemic in the parent culture as a result of fundamental

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economic and social structural changes. The work of these authors and, slightly later, Hebdige (1979), sought to identify symbolic resistance within these subcultures, mostly through their reappropriation of particular fashions and/or identification with certain forms of counter-hegemonic practice. Clearly, the work of these researchers was groundbreaking in its desire to reconstruct youth practices as creative rather than “deviant”. However, even within the Birmingham School itself, critics were raising key objections early on. Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber (1975, 209– 22) voiced concern in Resistance Through Rituals itself that girls were largely invisible in the subcultural accounts proffered by their male colleagues. Moreover, McRobbie’s (1978) later work on the culture of femininity in relation to working-class girls developed the critique further by suggesting that subcultural theory was perhaps not the most suitable means by which to interrogate the practices of resistance enacted by female youth. On the question of race, the early Birmingham work was again critiqued from inside. Paul Gilroy (1987), a former student at the Centre, argued that one of his aims was to correct what he perceived to be an ethnocentric bias at play in the early texts produced by the Centre, which focused on class dynamics at the expense of a more nuanced reading of the interrelations between class and race. The criticisms of these authors, whilst significant and valid, were still made from “within” as it were, with each retaining a belief in the importance of analysing the potential radicalism of youth. Adopting an “outsider’s” perspective, Skeggs (2004, 47–52) has argued, for example, that it is interesting to note how class was quickly dropped by many of the Birmingham School with the onslaught of what she refers to as the “new individualism” of the Thatcherite 80s. Her argument is that class no longer mattered largely because the “fantasies of authenticity and revolutionary potential that the middle classes projected on to, usually male, members of the working class, failed to materialize” (2004, 47). This led, Skeggs contends, to a reactionary, introspective move to new sites of inquiry that sat more comfortably with the lifestyles of these scholars. Hence a shift from an analysis of the working class to an analysis of cultural practices with which they could more readily identify through their own consumptive practices and mobility. One plausible theoretical explanation for the absence of working-class revolt Skeggs identifies—particularly within the context of the argument I set out in this chapter—is located in Sarah Thornton’s (1995) Bourdieuinspired account of youth practice. Thornton argues that the perception the CCCS writers held regarding the need for youth to “win space” from the parent or mainstream culture, is deeply problematic as it rests on the

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misplaced assumption that such a binary division between mainstream and subculture actually exists. In this sense, Thornton contends, these spaces are perhaps better understood as discursive ones that are constructed—by youth formations in collusion with the media they feign to despise—in order to facilitate the awarding of (sub)cultural and social capital to those promoting the subculture they belong to: “coolness” is attributed to those who differentiate themselves from a “square” mainstream. For Thornton, a feminist reading of the politics of these subcultural spaces—inhabited, she argues, by a range of social classes as subcultural knowledge is accrued outside of the conventional status-defining institutions—thus shifts the focus from viewing them as potential sites of class struggle to viewing them as spaces in which young women struggle to remain visible in a male-dominated arena, in which the play for status is all. If class is a factor, it is at the point at which particular female youth groups are targeted as lacking the requisite cool of their (male) peers, usually because they are perceived to lack subcultural knowledge. The theoretical position I adopt in this chapter then, like Thornton’s, finds inspiration in Bourdieu’s conception of the struggle for status at the root of social relations between classes, which are always in dialogue. However, I want to retain a more pessimistic reading of the practices of youth vis-à-vis social class than the one Thornton proffers. This is on account of, as I read it, the spatial construction of boundaries erected by middle-class youth which, due to its privileged status in terms of the educational capital accrued by its members, wishes to set itself apart from a working-class youth it constructs as being both a source of fear and fascination. In this schema, class flux still operates at the margins, but is less fluid than Thornton’s thesis suggests.

“Weeds: The Origin of the Species”4 I have proposed that classed youth factions are always in dialogue, constructing each other through mediated processes of discursive categorization. Part of this dialogue has historically involved acts of borrowing between “races”, particularly from “black expressive culture” (Gilroy 1993, 35), in which new hybrid forms of language and practice emerge: codes of speech, styles of clothing and musical tastes are appropriated and reworked. In commenting on white America’s fetishization of black culture, Greg Tate (2003, 1–14) has argued that such processes of borrowing invariably leave black youth with only the political burden of a racialized identity. In a British context I would contend that a similar degree of disenfranchisement is experienced by a section of white

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working-class youth, which is also marginalized as racially Other. Indeed, such marginalization has a long and complex history in which those able to pass judgement have withheld whiteness from “white” British workingclass youth as a privileged classificatory marker (Nayak 2009, 28–35). As Nayak’s ethnographic study suggests, the likelihood of white workingclass youth misrecognizing such injurious processes of marking—exemplified, in a forlorn attempt to secure social status, by their allegiance to the mythical form of reactionary white identity which has historically ironically excluded them—means that the anger they feel as a result of their invisibility in positive media representations of “acceptable” whiteness, constructed in contemporary discourse as liberal and middle-class, is often misdirected at the “exotic” working-class ethnic minorities which their political disenfranchisement would ordinarily align them with. These complex processes of appropriation and (dis)identification, then, allow us to acknowledge that neither the alienated youth I alluded to in my introduction, nor the more privileged youth that are the focus of this chapter, possess an authentically “pure” culture. In each case, their cultural practice is always the result of complex racialized, gendered and classed mappings of influences and resistances, tastes and distastes in which the alterity of the Other is endlessly fetishized. Moreover, such mappings are framed by the broader question of agency: working-class people make history, but not, to echo Marx, “under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx 1978, 595). This account forces us to resist the more romanticized accounts of working-class youth practice discussed above in relation to the CCCS scholars at Birmingham. However, this does not mean that we should undervalue the often vibrant and creative output emanating from such practice. A cursory glance at the history of British popular music, for example, would confirm that the contribution made by working-class youth has been considerable: from those who benefited from an art school education (Frith and Horne 1987) or the limited mobility afforded by entry to grammar school (Branch 2012), to contemporary artists such as Dizzee Rascal and Wiley. This history has been largely the tale of (mostly) working-class white young men, for whom such journeys have necessitated a reworking of their working-class habitus, the term Bourdieu (1977) uses to capture the dispositions we internalize from early childhood. However, recent research data indicates that artists whose educational capital is considerably more notable than their predecessors have reversed this trend as a consequence of their appropriation of the field; a development, I would argue, arising because of the importance increas-

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ingly placed on an artist’s social and economic capital.5 As Owen Hatherley laments, a snapshot comparison between 1990 and 2010 revealed that the percentage of public school/privately educated individuals represented in the UK top ten had increased from 1 to 60 per cent (Hatherley 2011, 2); a trend that has led some contemporary musicians to selfconsciously deliberate over their acts of creative appropriation (Hann 2012).

Suburban Desires Suburbia is one space in which the dialogic encounter between British youth is played out; a space Simon Frith (1997, 269–79) attaches a particular sensibility to in his historical account of British rock and pop output. For Frith, such output has invariably “articulated suburban pretension, suburban claustrophobia, suburban discontent” (1997, 271). Here the art-school educated, upwardly mobile youth discussed above view suburbia as a negative space in contrast to an inner city they mythologize as “edgy”. In this pitching of the homogeneous suburbs against the more cosmopolitan centre, there are echoes of the main tenets of Frith and Savage’s (1993) indictment of a reactionary populism they locate in English public discourse. In the work of John Carey (1992), for example, rather than share the author’s defence of “the masses” against the snobbishness of British tastemakers, they detect in his thesis an antiintellectual valorization of the ordinary and mundane, “a celebration of small horizons and smaller ambitions which ill conceals its own uneasy violence” (Frith and Savage 1993, 109). Frith and Savage go on to argue that whatever class loathing Carey attributes to these aloof intellectuals, they still inspired ordinary people to be extraordinary (1993, 115–16). Moreover, the desire of these suburban “ordinary folk” to fantasize about processes of reinvention has historically had the effect of producing, “generations of anti-suburban pop-artists” (1993, 116). What are we to make of these suburban desires in the context of the Bourdieusian concept of class struggle that I have used as a framing device for the argument I set out in this chapter? In the next section I want to consider my case study—Southend’s Junk Club and its figurehead band, the Horrors—in order to provide some tentative responses to this question.

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Southend-on-Sea, Essex: The Seaside Town That They Forgot to Close Down6 Southend-on-Sea is currently recorded as the 106th (out of a total of 326) most deprived place in England.7 Surrounded by pockets of relative affluence, generally housing employees of London’s financial institutions, the town itself is largely reliant on tourism as a source of revenue. Politically, its two parliamentary constituencies have been Conservative Party strongholds for generations and its educational policy is exemplified by its retention of the eleven-plus admissions system, administered by its four grammar schools, all of which are affiliated to the Consortium for Selective Schools in Essex. In terms of its cultural standing, Southend has been derided as lacking value.8 This is due to the fact that it lies at the end point of a line of estuary towns steeped in vulgarity. The discursive construction of the eastern and southern borders of Essex in this respect is a classed caricature with a long history: from the sexually promiscuous “Essex girl” and “loadsamoney” culture of nouveau-riche builders of the 80s, to the “personalities” populating the recent television reality show, The Only Way is Essex (Lime Productions 2010). Such class hatred is replicated in the work of Essex’s most famous musical export, Damon Albarn—of the influential band Blur—for whom the working-class Other appeared to be both a source of fear and fascination.9 These stereotypes have become so pervasive that the dominated groups they discursively position, in a paradoxical move recognized by Bourdieu (1990, 155), embrace and reproduce them. They also become, in the most extreme example of the contemporary folk devil (Cohen 1972), the “chav”, fixed as unmodern and morally responsible for their own narrow horizons. Matthew Poole, for example, when discussing anti-institutionalism and iconoclasm in Essex, proposes that, The Chav community is a community that has not realized that it no longer exists. It is a kind of ghost community perhaps, trapped in limbo, frustrated by its own non-understanding of its impotence in the face of much more mobile and increasingly powerful vectors of the larger society to which it increasingly seems to be on the margins of … Predictably, these groups continue to use the empty anachronistic symbols of never to be retrieved past communities … (Poole 2010).

I have some sympathy with Poole’s contention that chav culture is moribund but his argument pays insufficient attention to how this social group’s self-identity is always in a process of dialogic construction: one

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cannot escape—move on, recreate—if one continues to be defined by the more powerful Other. If large parts of Essex have suffered from the stigma of tastelessness and vulgarity, Southend itself has sought to reposition itself, drawing in part on its historical association with many of Britain’s most visible subcultures: Teds, mods, skinheads and ravers have all converged on the town at various points. This fact, coupled with the fact that the town has an abundance of entertainment venues, befitting its status as a leisure destination, has meant that it has maintained a relatively thriving music scene. It is to this aspect of Southend’s cultural production that I now wish to turn.

A New Career in a New Town In April 2012, Southend-on-Sea Borough Council promoted an Arts Council-funded exhibition—entitled Thames Delta—which set out to artistically map the influence the town has had as an incubator of musical talent.10 This move should be seen in the broader context of its efforts to reposition itself as a creative locale, home to that most tenuous of economic developments, the cultural industries.11 Indeed, this move is itself part of a national trend, embraced in particular by coastal towns marked by economic decline and thus in competition with each other.12 I would like to pause at this juncture to reflect on the extent to which the marketing of Southend in these terms is perhaps also indicative of its ongoing gentrification: in recent years young mobile middle-class professionals have arrived in the more affluent parts of the area seeking family-size properties and “good” schools after sojourns to London during their child-free twenties. This demographic shift requires statistical validation of course, but there is sufficient anecdotal evidence to support the contention that this newly arrived petite bourgeoisie has been supportive of—and actively participated in—the town’s rebranding as a vibrantly “cutting-edge” place. This desire, and the anxieties which underpin it, is captured in the mission statement of the town’s free arts magazine, Level 4 is a new magazine that seeks to promote arts and culture in and around Southend-on-Sea as the nexus for the different cultural threads that exist in our town and county. Southend and Essex as a whole have historically suffered from negative connotations in terms of their association with promoting culture, however, recent regeneration activities have led to the development of a fledgling, and rapidly expanding, arts scene. Our intention is to promote this surge of creative activity to the

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community … and to overturn the prejudices and stereotypes that Essex has become unfairly coupled with … (Level 4 2010).

The problem with this account, as well-meaning and inclusive as it strives to be, is that in its latent yearning to distance itself from the unpalatable practices it sees as contributing to the myth of Essex vulgarity—and thus undermining the status of the area—it ends up reproducing the very hierarchies of taste that it claims to challenge. Self-appointed, middle-class cultural gatekeepers, inculcated with those forms of commodified knowledge conferred with value, endorse an art-for-art’s-sake sensibility which conceals the exercising of power, utilized to award status. I would suggest, though, that the need to acquire such knowledge necessarily requires the suppression of the potential affective allure of unfamiliar cultural practices as the subject’s body must be disciplined until s/he has cogitated which practices hold symbolic value and which do not. Thus “legitimate” cultural practice for the middle classes is recognized only when it conforms to certain of their expectations, rather than confounds them, hence the need for middle-class tourists to patronizingly raid the cultures of the working classes for inspiration, in a move akin to the one made by the scholars at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies discussed above.13 This incessant need to evaluate is evidenced in the accounts of the emergence of Junk Club and the Horrors to which I will now turn.

Junk: “Britain’s Hottest Music Club”14 In assessing Junk’s legacy I want to retain a dialogue with the dominant discourse which currently frames it, namely its facilitation of a space in which normative codes of gender performance and outdated middle-class expectations of conformity could be subverted by hip outsiders challenging mainstream conservatism.15 In doing so I will necessarily test the strength of the Bourdieusian theoretical framework I draw on in this chapter, which, as I have argued, insists on locating the pursuit of class distinctions at the heart of the value-making processes which inform cultural practice. But it is important to note here that Bourdieu also wanted to account for such moments of subversion, by recognizing the potential moment of heterodoxy within an emerging field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1993). For Bourdieu (1977, 159–70), such moments allow for the conservatism of orthodoxy to be challenged and thus for the doxic attitude (taken-for-granted presuppositions about the world) of the field’s participants to be potentially modified. Drawing on this schema, I would suggest that a paradox lies at the heart of Junk Club: it was both a space in which status claims were made by those seeking Junk’s consecration as a

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seminal subcultural moment and a space in which, perhaps at its margins, the doxic attitudes of colliding classed youth factions were reformulated, however momentarily. This paradoxical reading of Junk is one I would like the reader to remain mindful of in the account that follows. One of the key bands associated with Junk—and therefore representative of its values and aspirations—was the Horrors. By early 2007 the band had departed Southend in preparation for the launch of their debut LP, with at least two of their members making the well-trodden journey eastwards to the rarefied confines of the Shoreditch/Whitechapel borders, an urban area of east London discursively constructed as “edgy” and home to the “hipster”, a particular type of middle-class cultural tourist.16 They were soon followed by Jack and George Barnett, founders of Junk Club contemporaries, These New Puritans, who described Southend respectively as, “a vacuum” and “a horrible place” (Boden 2008). The motivation for forming Junk Club, then, appeared to be a desire by its chief architects, Oliver Abbott, Ciaran O’Shea and Rhys Webb (of the Horrors), to create distance between themselves and what they read as the moribund, predictable mainstream popular culture of their local town. Dean Chalkley, Junk Club’s “official” photographer, summarized the origins of Junk thus,17 The town had been homogenised, it was very dissatisfying with the bland all encompassing blanket of smooth R‘n’B and that kind of thing. It steamrollered out everything else, and then this group of kids started doing something different for no other reason than they felt a magnetism for it. It was an organic process. Rhys [Webb] and some of those guys would come up to London and were quite big on the mod scene, but it would go back to Southend and transmogrify into something else and then influence other people (Lane 2010).

This sense of being an outsider, of feeling marginalized from an ethnically hybrid street culture, is interesting because it raises questions concerning the degree to which Junk’s aesthetic was an attempt to bleach out the “black expressive culture” discussed above in the context of exploring the influences that inform British youth practice. Chalkley’s account is also fascinating because of the way in which he insists on the “organic” development of Junk, a label that I would argue is attached to the scene in order to define it as authentically pure in its aspirations and thus unsullied by claims for status. These are issues which merit further discussion. When I interviewed Ciaran O’Shea (May 2012) to discuss the genesis of Junk Club he spoke candidly and self-reflexively about the desires that motivated the formation of what started out as a regular club night for a group of friends, bonded by the sense of alienation they felt from the

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town’s dominant youth pursuits.18 The group’s initial aim was to locate a space which allowed for the expression of an eclectic taste they couldn’t detect in existing local clubs. This was due to such clubs—particularly long-running ones like Talk of the South on the town’s seafront—having playlists and dress codes which rigidly adhered to specific genres and styles. What Junk’s instigators yearned for was a replication of the music policy and dress codes some of them had witnessed at London clubs, specifically Erol Alkan’s Trash night, which had commenced in 1997 (O’Shea, interview with the author, 2012). Interestingly, cultural routes were being retrodden here: many of the original 60s mods had made the same journey eastwards, from the Essex hinterlands to the (often black) clubs of east and west London such as the Flamingo.19 Chris Hill, legendary soul DJ at Canvey Island’s Goldmine club and the Lacy Lady in Ilford, has argued that this journey can be mapped as a line which connects central and north-east London, Ilford, Romford and Southend; one Hill sees as central to the formation of virtually every London-based subcultural moment since the 1950s.20 With a Trash-inspired aesthetic embraced, Junk Club’s originators sought out venues which would be prepared to house them. This meant for the most part securing basements or backrooms in rundown pubs appreciative of the extra revenue, if not the look of the new clientele, who were routinely denigrated for their desire to be different (O’Shea, interview with the author).21 The club finally found a permanent home in the basement of the Royal Hotel, situated at the seafront end of the town’s high street, whose “shabby” architectural aesthetic was in keeping with Junk’s aesthetic of faded seaside glamour and thus the antithesis of the shiny, chrome-infested venues favoured by the town’s “mainstream” youth. The allure of a run-down decadence also extended to the naming of the club, as O’Shea notes, We wrote down a tonne of names after that first teenage kicks night, one being “There’s a Dinosaur Under my Bed” … also Korova Milk Bar and some other hippie sounding ones … Junk was Burroughs, Junkie, Heroin, that 77 punk aesthetic ... (O’Shea, interview with the author, 2012).

Retro Omnivores This dipping into the past—the Korova Milk Bar is a nod to Stanley Kubrick’s seminal youth cult film, A Clockwork Orange (Warner Bros., 1972)—is, I would argue, an essential requirement for those seeking recognition for their “hip” choices.22 To comprehend the iconography of Junk bestowed good taste upon the knowing viewer, the marker of

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distinction required to gain entry. Framed in these terms, Junk’s referencing of seminal, and thus well-documented, countercultural moments acted as a barrier to those for whom such an aestheticized aesthetic seemed alien and intimidating. Thus Rhys Webb’s (of the Horrors) declaration that, “I look at Junk like the Bromley contingent at the beginning of punk” (Lynskey 2006), helps contextualize the scene’s incorporation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories (reworked via an appreciation of Bowie); the foppishness of Waugh’s Bright Young Things; and the military paraphernalia utilized by punk as a shock aesthetic, as inspirations. More troublingly—for those unimpressed by the supposed ironic distance—pornographic images and films were stagily employed, echoing the same moves people like Chris Sullivan made during the era of Billy’s and the Blitz in the late 70s British clubland.23 The whole aesthetic of Junk, then, was premised on an eclecticism that functioned to distance its participants from the reactionary working-class “straights” its members viewed as populating mainstream culture, thus replicating the cultural omnivore/univore division identified by Featherstone (1987). This antagonistic position was highly gendered, with Junk’s core (male) bands dismissing non-scene bands as loutish lads, by definition uneducated and musically conservative. The lingering influence of Britpop featured heavily here, with the Guardian’s Sarah Boden noting approvingly that the work of These New Puritans, for example, was in stark contrast to an indie aesthetic which meant “dopey blokes, the sort who look like plumbers, with guitars” (Boden 2008). In a Tim Burrows interview with the Horrors’ Rhys Webb to promote the band’s first LP, a similar sentiment is expressed, “Our influences are way outside the mainstream”, says Webb. “It’s a natural thing for us, not contrived. Everything that we’re doing is a reflection of what we love.” In today’s dizzyingly multifarious music scene, where there no longer exists a behemoth such as prog rock to fight against, their enemy is the banal and the overpackaged. Just as Webb and those involved with Junk refused to be submerged in the work/pub/fight/bed routine that dominates Southend, so the Horrors exude a cool distance from their peers. It’s where they’re most comfortable, in their own world, untarnished by the infecting elements of modern life. As Webb puts it, “you won’t hear us played in McDonald’s” (Burrows 2007).

Thus Junk’s manifesto deliberately eschewed the reactionary, down-toearth bonhomie it detected in a post-Britpop hegemony by declaring with an air of self-deprecation that, “The essential elements of our music will create a wanting to seek out the unexplained answers of our time”. How-

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ever, this preoccupation with resisting reference points viewed as too obvious, belied the fact that the records played at Junk, for example, and cited as influences by its associated bands, were by their very status as “underground classics”, equally predictable. Junk was thus overreliant on the iconography of the past, a hipster disposition knowingly mocked by James Murphy in LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” (EMI, 2005), a regular Junk Club track. These New Puritans, too, were at pains to continually reference in interviews their aversion to what they read as predictable reference points and when they did approvingly invoke “mainstream” culture—Britney Spears’ Blackout (Jive, 2007), for example—it was with the caveat that the record needed “depth” (Kharas 2010). Skeggs (2004, 135–54) has argued that one of the central resources the middle-class self draws on to secure its privileged status is the ability to recognize the value certain goods and forms of knowledge hold in systems of symbolic and economic exchange. We have just seen how Junk’s members were able to mark out a space for themselves in which they were able to accrue and display knowledge of the subcultural lexicon. Skeggs goes on to argue that it is far more likely that the middle classes, because of their social and educational capital—in short, their resources—are able to convert this cultural knowledge into economic advantage. I want to consider now the processes by which such conversions took place in relation to Junk.

Selling the Scene Junk Club’s visual iconography—by definition of its form readily translatable into codes of cool—was the most effective way to promote the scene’s particular aesthetic and, to this end, Dean Chalkley’s status as Junk’s curator was fortuitous: in 2006 Chalkley promoted an exhibition of photographs of Junk’s members—Southend’s Underground—at the then über-fashionable Spitz Gallery in Commercial Street, London.24 This followed a visit to Junk during its last days by Hedi Slimane, who detected in the fashion worn by the scene’s leading members an aesthetic that resonated with the “cutting-edge” look he wanted to capture for Dior’s next collection. Likewise, the video for the Horrors single “Sheena is a Parasite” (Loog Records, 2006), was directed by the critically lauded Chris Cunningham and starred the equally hip British actress, Samantha Morton. Junk’s extraordinary rise in terms of its appeal to select tastemakers merits discussion here as the club was referenced in a number of influential publications in the mid-2000s (see Lynskey 2006). In O’Shea’s account, this was invariably the result of the social capital of such

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tastemakers, whose knowledge exchange would often be conducted in the various London-based colleges, including Central St Martins, that various members of Junk were then attending as students (O’Shea, interview with the author, 2012).25 Again, we are able to see here how Junk’s members had the self-confidence—and sense of entitlement—required to panegyrize their experiences in order to contribute to the mythmaking required to locate the story of Junk within a longer British history of (white) “spectacular” subcultures; a history repeatedly canonized by contemporary youth magazines keen to market associated fashion and music trends. When reviewing the portraits utilized in the Southend’s Underground exhibition, this sensibility is strikingly evident and recalls George Walden’s (2002) historical analysis of dandyism. The qualities Walden associates with dandyism—“the detachment, the irony, the impertinence, the nihilism, the provocation”—resonated strongly with the form of selfhood that seemed to be embraced at Junk and embodied in Chalkley’s photographs. The connection between the ideology of dandyism and hip middle-class youth is further cemented in Walden’s account of the “democratic dandy” of the twenty-first century, a portrayal which could just as readily apply to Junk’s dilettantes, He or she would be a stylish creature, ultra-conscious of clothes, elegantly rather than outrageously dressed … They would be “smart” rather than intellectual, at once laid-back yet hedonistically engaged with life. And their vanity and detachment would entail a relentlessly sardonic view of the world (Walden 2002, 46).

But as Walden goes on to argue, there is a political ambivalence that lies at the heart of dandyism; while proclaiming a nonchalant radicalism it is in reality heavily reliant on the system it purports to critique. For Walden, therefore, … dandies as a type are not what they seem, and it is important to look beneath the postures. The dandy’s relation to power and authority … is deeply ambiguous. [Dandies] present themselves as outsiders, aloof, superior, a living provocation … [and] make their careers in the system … and it would be a mistake to take their impertinences too seriously (Walden 2002, 53–4).

Keen to control the media representation of itself, Junk announced its own demise at the tail end of 2006 with the specious proclamation, “It’s better to remain underground than become a target for the commercial bomber”. Such speciousness arises from the fact that, as we have seen, Junk’s claim for “underground” status rested uneasily on the construction of an unhip, mainstream Other. Moreover, Junk’s key members were always in a

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process of converting their cultural and social capital into an economic capital that would serve them well in reproducing the forms of middleclass selfhood privileged in neo-liberal discourse.

Conclusion: Middle-Class Revolt By way of concluding this chapter, I will summarize its central argument and touch on the implications it holds for any appraisal of future British youth scenes. In keeping with Thornton’s (1995) thesis, there is nothing inherently politically radical about the youth scenes that have served as anchor points in the history of British youth cultural practice. Such radicalism that they have possessed has been very much dependent on the hegemonic practices they sought to subvert and position themselves against at particular historical moments. Moreover, with the language of subcultures and scenes now incorporated in the language of the everyday, the temptation to view them as vehicles for self-promotion, as in the case of the Junk club scene, is almost overwhelming. In this respect, I want to suggest that we must ask a set of questions pertaining to social class. These must centre on what kind of self is best disposed to take advantage of the processes by which subcultural status can be accrued; to understand the value of acquiring subcultural cool and utilizing it as a currency, requires a self that is predisposed to flexibility and change. Perhaps ultimately, then, the relevance of social class to the formation of scenes and their attendant subcultures lies in its continued ability to structure them. In the case of the dehumanized feral youth that I alluded to at the start of this chapter, I would argue that social class functions as a means by which the mass media and political establishment identify their folk devil in a muzzled underclass unable to gain access to the institutions with which it might develop and articulate a counter-discourse. However, social class is also relevant in the sense that the active formation and representation of contemporary scenes is now largely undertaken by middle-class, aspirant youth, imbued with a sense of entitlement and motivated by the quest to secure status through association with the iconography of previous subcultural moments. I would contend that this division will continue until such time that difference ceases to be valorized as a form of currency, exchanged in order to distinguish “us” from “them”. To envisage such a moment requires the reining in of the bourgeois individualism which underpins the values of the middle classes and remains so integral to neo-liberal thinking. It also necessitates an increased reflexivity on the part of disenfranchised

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working-class youth, especially in respect of the politics of gender and race, which continue to be defensively employed as fixed rather than fluid classificatory categories. However, in order for such reflexivity to flourish, societal changes such as the erosion of public spaces historically associated with childhood need to be reversed: tomorrow’s “scene makers” will have very different experiences of their childhood environment—and comprehension of different social classes—than earlier generations, with anxious middle-class parents increasingly directing their children towards structured activities, taking place either in the home or in prohibitively expensive clubs, whilst working-class children are left to win space where they can (Lester and Russell 2008, 131–56). In the context of all our major institutions moving inextricably towards a two-tiered system of provision—in education especially but also health, housing and employment—we need to argue for a genuine mixing of social classes in which differences of ethnicity are re-evaluated in the light of their close proximity. This isn’t to promote a conservative agenda in which a morally superior middle class is tasked with the responsibility of helping a less fortunate working class unable to help itself; such an agenda maintains rather than dismantles hierarchical social relations. Instead, it requires a genuine coming together and mixing in which certainties on both sides are challenged. Here I return to the title of this chapter, one I borrowed from a magazine published by the Jack Daniel’s drinks company as part of a branding campaign to promote a cluster of 2012 concerts linking cult bands to the town or city which acted as their cultural incubator.26 In the magazine the Horrors are linked to Southend-on-Sea in order to illustrate that “It’s where you come from that makes you who you are”. In a series of vignettes by members of the band, key locales in the town— independent record shops, music venues, certain bars etc.—are identified as inspirations and sites of value. In a final piece, by Junk Club co-founder Oliver Abbott, the town itself is compared to another seaside resort which has selectively undergone gentrification in recent years, Coney Island, Brooklyn, a place mythologized in the work of Junk Club inspiration, Lou Reed.27 Such comparisons invite associations to be drawn in respect of the subcultural capital extracted from each place by the “hip” youth destined to leave them by dint of their social class. The title of the magazine resonates, for me, in a more troubling way in its unintentional allusion to Bourdieu’s work, particularly his notion of the habitus as a set of durable dispositions framing our life expectations. It reminds us that the class divisions Junk relied upon—which have been central to my analysis in this chapter—will remain for as long as they are

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reproduced in the government-imposed economic, cultural and social policies implemented in suburban towns like Southend; policies which, by capitulating to the tenets of neo-liberalism, hold a middle-class form of selfhood as normative. We may concur, then, with the proposition that where you’ve come from really does make you who you are, but we should then loudly protest, this need not be always so.

Notes 1. Two examples to illustrate this point: on 9 August 2011, the day after the second night of rioting, the Daily Mail front-page commentary stated, “To blame the [financial] cuts is immoral and cynical. This is criminality pure and simple”. On the same date, the Guardian’s more tempered headline was “The battle for London”, with the paper subsequently considering the extent to which poverty was a causal factor: “England riots: was poverty a factor?” (6 December 2011). Accessed 7 December 2011 (www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/aug/16/riots-poverty-mapsuspects). 2. As has been noted—one suspects in an effort to deflect attention away from the complex causal factors leading to the riots—a minority of those charged with criminal offences were “middle class”: “The middle class ‘rioters’ revealed: The millionaire’s daughter, the aspiring musician and the organic chef all in the dock” (Daily Mail, 2 September 2011). Accessed 3 September 2011 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article2025068/UK-riots-Middle-class-rioters-revealed-including-Laura-JohnsonNatasha-Reid-Stefan-Hoyle.html#ixzz24TMf91UG). Leaving to one side, as the Daily Mail does, the problematic question of how one classifies different classes, recognition of this claim does not detract from the fact that in the explanations of criminal behaviour proffered by many workingclass rioters, resentment was often expressed towards the affluent middle class, especially towards the members of this class who had colonized and gentrified spaces adjacent to working-class neighbourhoods (see Mohammed Abbas, “London Rioters Resent Media Image of Hooded Teen Thug” (Reuters, 10 August 2011). Accessed 3 September 2011 (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/10/us-britain-riots-hackneyidUSTRE77946F20110810). Indeed, one might reasonably speculate that the motivation of many “middle-class rioters” was rooted in a form of class tourism, recuperated by the Daily Mail as a “moment of madness” in the case of Laura Johnson, the Exeter University student and daughter of a millionaire.

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3. See Dan Hancox’s “Pow!: anthem for kettled youth” (Guardian, 3 February 2011). Accessed 5 February 2011 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ music/2011/feb/03/pow-forward-lethal-bizzle-protests). Hancox’s excitable prose unintentionally lays bare his own fascination for, and idealization of, (black) working-class youth. His piece prioritizes a romanticized account of the London student protests of 2010—by positioning “radical” youth in opposition to a conservative “mainstream”—at the expense of a selfreflexive account of his own privileged position as an Oxbridge-educated, white, middle-class commentator. 4. A reference to Pulp’s 2001 album track, “Weeds II: The Origin of the Species” (Island, 2001), an acerbic commentary on the fascination the middle classes display towards elements of the working class, from whom inspiration is sought. 5. In an era in which the cost of a non-vocational arts education is becoming prohibitive (as we have seen, the route historically taken by many of pop’s most acclaimed working-class artists), it is now only the economically privileged—and socially well-connected—who can afford the time and space to develop their artistic habitus, without having to worry about ensuring that their basic material needs are met. For workingclass youth, the opportunity for artistic expression is reduced increasingly to appearing on televised reality shows such as The X Factor (SYCOtv), which rely on judging working-class people for their alleged lack of moral worth as the basis for their appeal. 6. A line from Morrissey’s John Betjeman-inspired “Everyday is Like Sunday” (EMI, 1988), the video for which was filmed in Southend. 7. See “The English Indices of Deprivation”, published 24 March 2011 (ISBN 9781409829249). Accessed 24 August 2011 (http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/statistics/indices2010). 8. The town registers high scores at two websites seeking to find humour in the mocking of working-class “vulgarity”. Accessed 1 May 2012 (http://idler.co.uk/category/crap-towns/page/3/ and http://www.chavtowns. co.uk/2004/12/southend-on-sea-the-place-to-be/). 9. It is worth recalling that at the commercial height of Britpop, Albarn’s public persona positively revelled in a self-conscious appropriation of characteristics perceived to be authentically working class: loutish behaviour, dropped vowels and an affected Thames estuary accent. He even proclaimed, in a wearisomely ironic move, Martin Amis’s fictional working-class caricature, Keith Talent, as a role model: “Keith Talent was so English and I wanted to be him”, quoted in Arena Magazine, 1996. Accessed 7 June 2012 (http://damonalbarn. tumblr.com/post/13356898 706/i-didnt-get-into-martin-amis-by-choice-when-i).

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10. The reference to “Delta” is in acknowledgement of the comparison Wilko Johnson has made between his birthplace, Canvey Island, Essex and the Mississippi Delta, home of the blues music that inspired his and, Dr Feelgood. Accessed 25 June 2012 (http://www.focalpoint.org.uk/exhibitions/current/39/). 11. Southend has been the beneficiary of an Arts Council-funded Thames Gateway regeneration policy. The Director of Leisure’s report supporting the policy can be located here. Accessed 25 June 2012 (http://minutes.southend.gov.uk/akssouthend/images/att8304.doc). 12. Accessed 25 June 2012 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/mar/10/travelnews.uk). 13. As Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker scathingly put it, such middle-class cultural tourists, “will never understand how it feels to live your life, with no meaning or control and with nowhere left to go” and are, “amazed that they [the working class] exist and they burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why …” (“Common People” (Island, 1995)). 14. Quoted in Lynskey 2006. 15. This reading of Junk is echoed in virtually every media account of the scene’s emergence and demise. See e.g. Boden (2008), Burrows (2008) and Lysnkey (2006). 16. This caricature is best captured in the satirist Chris Morris’s television series, Nathan Barley (Channel 4, 2005). In many ways the hipster is as mythical as her/his bête noire, the chav, except of course that the former inhabits the very media spaces that allow for such caricatures to be contested and recuperated. The contemporary version is also, in a typically postmodern move, devoid of any of the genuine “outsider” status that may have marked earlier incarnations. 17. The origins of Junk Club were discussed at length by Chalkley in his capacity as a guest speaker at a series of public talks I co-organized: “Listen To This: Tribalism and Difference: Subcultures and Scenes at Metal Culture” (April 2012). See: http://www.metalculture.com/archive/listen-to-this.html 18. I am thankful to Martin Dodd here for reminding me, in an engaging debate at a “Listen To This” talk (June 2012), that the need for youth to win their own space has many determinants, of which the struggle for social status is but one. Dodd’s own status as a grammar school alumnus, and parent of one of Junk’s regular attendees, meant that he was in a unique position to observe the complex familial relations and negotiation of racial, class and sexual identities that also prompted this need. 19. In responding to an invitation to attend the “Listen To This” series of talks, the writer Ken Warpole repeated a quote that perfectly captures this

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link between the unfashionable suburbs and the cosmopolitan West End: the first time Anthea Joseph, the folk-music entrepreneur who ran the Troubadour Club in the 1960s, saw Bob Dylan she recalled: “I was on the door at the Troubadour and I saw this pair of high-heeled boots coming down the stairs and thought, ‘Oh God, another Southend cowboy!’” (email to author, 10 January 2012). 20. Hill made this point as a guest at “Listen To This: Everybody Dance: Music, Meaning and the Body” (May 2012). 21. Bourdieu’s (2007, 89) account of his fear of being misinterpreted is pertinent here: the gruff exterior central to the defensive performance of a particular form of working-class masculinity, can often be misrecognized as outright hostility. 22. Bowie, Echo and the Bunnymen, Heaven 17, Moloko and I’m sure many others, all sort inspiration from Kubrick’s masterpiece. 23. Sullivan made this point as a fellow guest of Dean Chalkley at “Listen To This: Tribalism and Difference: Subcultures and Scenes” (April 2012). I am also thankful to Sophia Deboick for discussing her first-hand account of this aspect of Junk’s promotion at the same event. 24. Accessed 3 May 2010 (http://www.deanchalkley.com/html/southend_press_release.htm). 25. Martin Dodd’s “insider” knowledge is again helpful here: a number of Junk’s central players have family members who possessed key contacts in the music and fashion industries, thus supporting Bourdieu’s emphasis on the centrality of social capital to processes of social reproduction. 26. J. D. Roots, “It’s where you come from that makes you what you are” (Spring 2012). 27. Coney Island Baby (RCA, 1975).

References Boden, Sarah. “Schooled in Cool”, Observer Music Monthly, 20 January 2008. Accessed 21 January 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/ 2008/jan/20/popandrock.features4. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: CUP. —. 1984 [1979]. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. —. 1990. “The Uses of the People”. In In Other Words, 150–5. Cambridge: Polity.

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—. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity. —. 2007 [2004]. Sketch for a Self-Analysis, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity. Branch, Andrew. 2012. “All the Young Dudes: Educational Capital, Masculinity and the Uses of Popular Music”. Popular Music 31(1): 25–44. Burrows, Tim. 2007. “Ghouls Roar Out of the Basement”, The Telegraph, 1 March. Accessed 3 March 2008. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture /music/rockandjazzmusic/3663486/Ghouls-roar-out-of-the-basement. html. Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber and Faber. Cohen, Phil. 1997 [1972]. “Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community”. In Rethinking the Youth Question by Phil Cohen, 48–63. London: Macmillan. Cohen, Stanley. 1973. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: Paladin. Featherstone, Mike. 1987. “Lifestyle and Consumer Culture”. Theory, Culture and Society 4(1): 55–70. Frith, Simon. 1997. “The Suburban Sensibility in British Rock and Pop”. In Visions of Suburbia, edited by Roger Silverstone, 269–79. London: Routledge. Frith, Simon and Howard Horne. 1987. Art into Pop. London: Methuen. Frith, Simon and Jon Savage. 1993. “Pearls and Swine: The Intellectuals and the Mass Media”. New Left Review I (198), March–April, 107–16. Gilroy, Paul. 1987. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London: Hutchinson. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent’s Tail. Goldthorpe, J., with Catriona Llewellyn and Clive Payne. 1980. Social Mobility and the Class Structure in Modern Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson, eds. 1976. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson. Hann, Michael. 2012. “Hot Chip: ‘We’re middle class white kids, and we’ve never tried to hide that”, Observer, 27 May 2012. Accessed 27 May 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/may/27/hot-chipinterview-middle-class. Hatherley, Owen. 2011. Uncommon. Hants: Zero Books.

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Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Kharas, Kev. 2010. “Interview: These New Puritans”, The Stool Pigeon, 21 February. Accessed 10 January 2011. http://www.thestool pigeon.co.uk/features/these-new-puritans-interview.html. Lane, Amica. 2010. “Through the Lens: an interview with Dean Chalkley”, Amelia’s Magazine, 15 March. Accessed 24 April 2011. http://www.ameliasmagazine.com/art/through-the-lens-an-interviewwith-dean-chalkley. Lester, Stuart and Wendy Russell. 2008. “Children’s Play Patterns”. In Play for a Change, 130–55. Play England/National Children’s Bureau: London. Level 4’s My Space page. 2010. Accessed 1 September. http://www. myspace.com/level4magazine. Lynskey, Dorian. 2006. “The beach boys”. Guardian, 1 September. Accessed 2 September 2006. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2006/ sep/01/popandrock2. Marx, Karl. 1978 [1852]. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”. In The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton. McRobbie, Angela and Jenny Garber. 1975. “Girls and Subcultures: An Exploration”. In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 177–88. London: Hutchinson. McRobbie, Angela. 1978. Working Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity. London: CCCS/Hutchinson. Medhurst, Andy. 2000. “If Anywhere: Class Identifications and Cultural Studies Academics”. In Cultural Studies and the Working Class, edited by Sally Munt, 19–35. London: Cassell. Nayak, Anoop. 2009. “Beyond the Pale: Chavs, Youth and Social Class”. In Who Cares about the White Working Class?, edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, 28–35. London: Runnymede Trust. Poole, Matthew. 2010. “From Chavs to Contemporary Art: Antiinstitutionalism and Iconoclasm in Essex”. Presented at the Burrows Lecture, University of Essex, 9 March. Skeggs, Beverley. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge. —. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage. Tate, Greg. 2003. “Nigs R Us, or How Blackfolk Became Fetish Objects”. In Everything But The Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture, edited by Greg Tate, 1–14. New York: Broadway Books.

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Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity. Walden, George. 2002. Who’s a Dandy? London: Gibson Square Books.



4. YOUTH CULTURE AND THE INTERNET: A SUBCULTURAL OR POST-SUBCULTURAL PHENOMENA? ANDY BENNETT

Some twenty years after the emergence of the Internet and the so-called digital revolution, discussion and debate regarding the impact of digital online media on young people and their collective cultural practices continues to be a significant aspect of the youth-research brief. Key topics explored and debated range from the ways in which digital online media has reframed communication among young people, to questions about youth identity and the extent to which this has been reshaped by the Internet and associated digital media platforms (Davis 2012). Underpinning these and other modes of academic inquiry is the larger question of how online digital media have altered the nature of youth culture itself. If youth researchers have long been involved in critical debates concerning how to frame the concept of youth culture as both theoretical and methodological fields of inquiry, the Internet and related online media forms have brought new questions to bear on this debate (Bennett 2004). Thus, for some youth researchers, the Internet serves to personify and accentuate a number of those pivotal qualities that have traditionally been theorized as enabling particular youth groups to set themselves apart from mainstream norms and values; to organize themselves into socio-cultural groupings that have often been referred to as “subcultures”. For other researchers, the Internet presents as the ultimate foil to such subcultural categorizations of youth. In this context, the Internet is regarded as a medium for new forms of “post-subcultural” connection between young people in which associations of style and taste become more fluid and are informed by other forms of lifestyle preference and aesthetic sensibility (see, for example, Robards and Bennett 2011). The purpose of this chapter is to critically analyse and evaluate the impact of digital online media on youth culture and its associated forms of collective cultural practice. The chapter begins by briefly sketching for the reader some of the key ways in which youth culture has been theorized in



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the pre-digital age. This is followed by an examination of more recent debates concerning the nature of youth culture and how these have been impacted by the emergence of digital online media and its ready and rapid appropriation by youth in the context of their everyday lives. The chapter then goes on to present its own critical evaluation of the relationship between youth culture, the Internet and related online media forms. Specifically, this section of the chapter will revisit the subculture–postsubculture debate and consider if and how the Internet has served to shape new understandings about the nature of youth culture and how this should be conceptualized in academic research.

Youth Culture in the Pre-digital Age There is an extensive literature that both examines and offers a series of critical perspectives on youth culture in the pre-digital era. As such it is necessary to provide only a relatively brief sketch here, both as a means of situating the chapter and providing some contextual background for the reader. The study of youth as a cultural category whose collective articulations of identity centres upon interactions with specific forms of cultural consumption dates back to the seminal work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) (see Hall and Jefferson 1976 and also the Introduction to this book). Using a sophisticated form of visual and textual analysis and combining this with a cultural Marxist approach drawing on the work of Gramsci (1971), the key CCCS premiss was that the spectacular working-class youth styles of post-Second World War Britain, for example, the Teddy boys, skinheads and the mods and rockers, could be interpreted as signs of an ongoing class struggle. These styles were, according to the CCCS, symbolic of working-class youth’s “all dressed up and nowhere to go” status, a situation that these youth cultures, or “subcultures” as the CCCS named them, attempted to resolve through traditional working-class gang-related behaviour such as turf wars, vandalism and other forms of antisocial behaviour (see Jefferson 1976 and Clarke 1976). As illustrated more fully in the Introduction to this book, although it constituted a major paradigm shift in academic work on youth and youth culture, the CCCS work also attracted robust criticism from different quarters. To briefly reiterate a few of those more salient criticisms, these extended to, among other things, the CCCS’s lack of attention to the role of girls in youth cultures (McRobbie 1980), CCCS subcultural theory’s metropolitan centredness (Clarke 1981)1 and its failure to engage with empirical research (Cohen 1987). During the mid-1990s, a new vein of



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empirically informed work began to offer a different series of challenges to the subcultural theory of the CCCS. Thus, researchers such as Bennett (1999) and Muggleton (2000) argued that the entire concept of “subculture” was fundamentally flawed due to the fact that it tried to categorize youth culture too narrowly and essentialized the significance of youth style as a mere reflection of youth’s stratified existence and experience. In the same vein, Miles (2000) argued that what has previously been theorized as subcultures were, in fact, collectively shared lifestyle projects, the latter produced through the reflexive agency of young social actors who creatively appropriated and reinscribed consumer objects with their own meanings. A critical influence on this new approach to the study of youth was the cultural turn, a school of academic theory within the humanities and social sciences that contested existing theorizations of everyday life as economically determined. Alternatively academic writers influenced by the cultural turn retheorized everyday life as a reflexive, pluralistic and potentially transgressive space within which individuals are able critically to engage with and negotiate aspects of their socio-cultural existence (see Bennett 2005; Chaney 1994; 1996). Core to the argument of what has been collectively termed postsubcultural theory is the notion that subculture-dominant culture binaries hold little weight in a late modern context due to critical changes evident in the wake of the cultural turn. Because of the increasing role of leisure and consumerism on the formation of identities, including youth identities, it is maintained, contemporary culture is becoming ever more fragmented and pluralistic to the extent that concepts such as “sub” and dominant culture are inherently difficult to define. This point is cogently summed up by Chaney: … if values, relationships and identities are being constructed in the manipulation of vocabularies of style, then material culture becomes the terrain—albeit an unstable, relative terrain—though which social order is constituted. This, it seems to me, is one of the most important aspects of the rise of lifestyles as “sites and strategies” for new forms of affiliation and identification … that is, culture becomes more clearly a resource than an inheritance. Thus, what were once described as subcultures could now be regarded as collective lifestyle statements, which reflexively negotiate rather than directly mirror the experience of social class (2004: 41–2).

Chaney’s reinterpretation of the cultural sphere as comprising a diverse series of lifestyle sites and strategies, in which aspects of class, race, gender and sexuality may converge in lifestyle projects articulated through shared notions of taste and other expressions of aesthetic sensibility signifies a potentially important shift in our understanding and inter-



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pretation of style- and music-based youth cultures. The Internet, as a more recent form of communication technology, emerged at a time when the effects of the cultural turn were being mapped and cultural theorists were becoming increasingly interested in what Giddens (1991) has termed a process of “reflexive modernity”. It is significant, then, that, despite the existence of the Internet for over twenty years, little research focusing on youth culture and the Internet has been concerned with the potential significance of post-subcultural theory for our understanding of the ways in which young people respond to the Internet and use it in the context of their everyday lives. On the contrary, work that focuses on youth culture and the Internet largely continues to adopt subculture as a central theoretical framework. This has been evident since the early days of Internet research when studies not strictly connected to the youth-culture field, but squarely within the fields of media and cultural studies (from whence “subcultural theory” initially had its greatest outreach), used the concept of subculture to position Internet users. Thus, for example, Healy describes the Internet “as a loose collection or ‘ecosystem’ of subcultures”, while Bassett refers to Internet chat rooms as “subcultural spaces” (1997, 65; 1997, 538). Friemund and Queen consider the Internet a new space for connection and dialogue between what they refer to as “wilderness” subcultures, a broad category which they take to include “wilderness visitors, managers, scientists, academia (including students), environmental advocates, and policy makers”. The Internet, argue Freimund and Queen, functions “to facilitate communication among these subcultures at an international scale” (1996, 33). In such work it is clear that “subculture” is being taken on an essentially “face-value” basis. Unconcerned with the theoretical legacy of subcultural theory, these early studies of Internet users appear to regard subculture as a catch-all term to describe what were then relatively novel forms of interaction that took place, at least according to the tenor of this work, in exclusively virtual domains. As the theorization of the Internet matured and came to encapsulate work from a broader range of researchers, including those with an interest in and theoretical expertise of music- and style-based youth cultures, so the ways in which the Internet was conceptualized as an everyday form of technology and a medium for cultural practice became more diverse. For example, in an early study of the Australian rave scene, Gibson argues that the Internet significantly enhances the subcultural properties of the latter through acting “as a support mechanism for a series of subversive activities in real physical space, a “Web” that draws on strategies of spatial fluidity to construct “otherworlds” and “imaginary landscapes” (1997, 5).



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This notion of the Internet as a potentially subversive tool with consequent subcultural cachet is also key to other work including that by Kahn and Kellner who rationalize the capacity of the Internet to draw the attention and use of subcultural groups in new forms of subversive liaison bound up with the increasing struggle for civic participation in a world where democratic process is often seen to be compromised and under threat: “The global internet, then, is creating the base and the basis for an unparalleled worldwide anti-war/pro-peace and social justice movement during a time of terrorism, war, and intense political struggle” (2004, 88). Two significant points emerge from Kahn and Kellner’s work. First, it seems clear from their description of the Internet as a means of staging protest that those drawn to this may originate from a broader range of sociocultural and socio-economic contexts than was originally envisaged in subcultural theory. Indeed, what Kahn and Kellner describe here seems broadly analogous to Clecak’s interpretation of the so-called counterculture of the late 1960s which, he argues, was actually a convenient umbrella term for broad ranging clusters of individuals “to find symbolic shapes for their social and spiritual discontents and hopes” (1983, 18; see also Bennett 2012). A further point relating to Kahn and Kellner’s study is their contextualization of online political protest as a translocal phenomenon. In this respect, Kahn and Kellner’s work aligns with that of other researchers interested in the impact of the Internet on forms of youth-cultural practice. For example, in his study of straightedge and the Internet, Williams (2006) argues that Internet technology has opened up avenues for members of locally situated straightedge scenes to communicate translocally with straightedgers in other parts of the world. According to Williams, a key discursive theme characterizing such forms of connection relates to aesthetic understandings of straightedge and legitimate articulations of straightedge identity. Hodkinson (2003) explores similar territory to Williams in work that examines the use of Internet technology by goths. Just as Williams sees the Internet as a space for the sustaining of particular notions of identity as these pertain to straightedge, for Hodkinson, the Internet articulates and promotes issues of subcultural “boundary work” as this applies to the translocal goth scene. The concept of translocalism has a history that predates the emergence of the Internet. Moreover, as is effectively illustrated by Straw’s (1991) pioneering work on music scenes, even in the pre-Internet age the concept of translocalism was already being utilized as a means of arguing against concepts such as subculture and community and the hermeneutic qualities they inscribe in contemporary forms of social life that are increasingly less circumscribed by the constraints of locality, community and class. One might question



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then the extent to which subculture, as it is being deployed in the above work is an accurate descriptor for forms of social action that transcend the local in their modus operandi? Applying a post-subcultural perspective, subculture, as it has been applied to youth and the Internet, is also open to scrutiny on other accounts as well, notably the extent to which the activities being routinely described using the conceptual lens of subculture actually align with the conceptual parameters of subcultural theory as these have been formerly established in CCCS and post-CCCS studies (see, for example, Brake 1985). A pertinent case in point here is Milner’s study of “To Write Love on Her Arms” (TWLOHA). As Milner explains, TWLOHA “is a social-justice non-profit combating suicide, self-infliction, addiction and depression, particularly in American Youth” (2012, 423). According to Milner, TWLOHA draws much of its inspiration, and support, from the American indie-rock subculture, whose core values of tolerance and understanding resonate keenly with TWLOHA’s aims. Quite apart from the fact that the concept and characteristics of indie remain very difficult to define in absolute terms, while TWLOHA may take inspiration from indie values there is no clear sense in which indie, either as a music genre or discursive construct, seamlessly corresponds with the motivation and values of those who embrace TWLOHA. Indeed, it could equally be the case that TWLOHA’s concern with issues of physical and emotional harm as these relate to young people connects with and encourages participation from a broader subset of young people than fit neatly under the indie banner or within the parameters of an indie “subculture”. Likewise, Baker’s otherwise highly instructive work on youth net-radio in Australia and the United States could be argued to present a similar range of issues in terms of its adopted theoretical underpinning. Thus, according to Baker, netradio “can be seen as a form of alternative-radical media that encourages subcultural activity” (2012, 409). For Baker, a key aspect of net-radio’s subcultural quality is the fact that its presence is located exclusively on the Internet. According to Baker, producers, presenters and listeners all view this as an oppositional stance to mainstream radio which, although often having an online presence, also uses more conventional broadcasting mediums. Against this claim, however, it is clear from her work that Baker is actually discussing a reasonably broad range of groups whose only common point of convergence would appear to be their use of net-radio as a means of expression based on a rejection of what they perceive to be the narrow confines of the mainstream radio format. Whether or not each of these distinctive, if related, forms of net-radio activity could reliably be



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categorized as “subcultural” is unclear and is certainly not something directly addressed in Baker’s work. In each of the forgoing studies, a common and core aim is to explore how specific “subcultural” values are collectively endorsed and upheld using the more recent channels of communication afforded by Internet. While justification is given in each case as to why subculture is being applied as a conceptual framework, it could be argued that each of the examples examined above exhibit traits that are characteristically postsubcultural. Indeed, in this sense the established branding of the Internet, in academic terms, as a “subcultural” space could be argued to be quite problematic. As such, adequate consideration needs to be given to how we might also conceptualize the Internet as a “post-subcultural” space, that is to say, a space in which some of those traits identified among youth by Bennett (1999), Miles (2000), Muggleton (2000) and others manifest themselves in an online context? The following part of this chapter considers how insights offered by more recent work on youth and the Internet may offer possibilities for such a conceptualization.

Youth Culture, the Internet and Reflexive Individualism As discussed above, researchers examining the relationship between youth culture and the Internet have tended on the whole to apply subcultural perspectives in their work. As such little attention has been paid to how the Internet may function as a medium for post-subcultural expressions of identity and belonging. Bennett, in an early study of youth culture in the context of the online interactions afforded by the Internet, highlights the possible limitations of a purely subcultural approach. Thus observes Bennett: … we can no longer take it for granted that membership of a youth culture involves issues of stylistic unity, collective knowledge of a particular club scene, or even face-to-face interaction. On the contrary, youth cultures may be seen increasingly as cultures of “shared ideas”, whose interactions take place not in physical spaces such as the street, club or festival field but in the virtual spaces facilitated by the internet (2004, 163).

Building on his earlier concern with critically addressing the dominance of subculture as a theoretical concept in the study of youth culture (see Bennett 1999; 2000), Bennett is here extending this mode of analysis to youth culture and the Internet. Underpinning Bennett’s argument is the contention that, through allowing youth to engage in translocal, virtual communications, the Internet may also serve to accentuate those qualities



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of fluidity and temporality associated with post-subcultural youth in a nondigital context. Evidence that the Internet can and does facilitate such postsubcultural trends among youth is seen, for example, in post-rock, a scene whose community of fans around the world have little in the way of a physical basis for their collective investment in the post-rock genre. Rather, the post-rock scene is largely maintained through zines, blogs and other forms of online exchange (see Hodgkinson 2004). In this sense, the Internet could be seen to actually give rise to a scene for which no basis for collective expression previously existed. But the Internet’s accentuation of post-subcultural traits among contemporary youth may extend further than the realm of the purely virtual. Indeed, just as some theorists, including those discussed above, suggest that contemporary youth subcultures may have both online and offline dimensions, so the same case can be made in relation to post-subcultural youth. A case in point here is Cummings’s (2008) work on audiences for indie-music festivals in Australia. Thus, according to Cummings, while indie and its audience have often been theorized as a subcultural phenomenon, the indie scene in Australia, particularly as this manifests at festivals, appears broad, eclectic and neo-tribal. The indie scene, and by definition the indie festival space, comprises clusters of fans whose attachments to indie music and culture involve varying levels of investment in the core politics of indie music. Moreover, as Cummings explains, as the indie festival season has become a focal point for the Australian indie scene, so the Internet has become a basis through which those neo-tribal groups or clusters that Cummings identifies as holding the scene together continue to interact in sporadic bursts outside the festival season. It could, at one level, be argued that some of the traits identified in post-subcultural studies of the Internet have implications for online research that continues to deploy a subcultural perspective. Thus, we may accept that some of this work does, indeed, identify particular uses of the Internet by youth cultures whose unity in terms style and musical taste cohere with accepted (in some quarters at least) notions of subculture. Even here, however, it could be argued that there are critical issues of distinction to ponder. Thus, given the Internet’s capacity to link individuals and groups translocally, it stands to reason that “subcultural” manifestations on the Internet may in certain instances involve young people from different national, ethnic, linguistic, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. While these young people may claim a common subcultural identity and heritage by virtue of a stylistic descriptor—punk, hardcore, metal, goth, etc.—there is a question mark over the extent that this can be termed subcultural in the conventional understanding of the



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term? Thus, many of the characteristics claimed by western subcultural theorists and researchers to define a subculture in a western (though often by implication global) context, may be widely different or non-existent in other local settings. Pilkington (1994) warned nearly twenty years ago of the inherent danger of attempting to apply Anglo-American concepts of subculture in regions where access to associated cultural commodities is restricted and particular forms of youth expression might be sanctioned. If such questions have long pertained as to the extent to which AngloAmerican youth subcultural perspectives relate to youth in other parts of the world then they surely pertain in equal measure to the subcultural scholarship focused on youth and the Internet. A further aspect of post-subcultural theory that may have some critical resonance with research on youth culture and the Internet relates to issues of commitment and investment in particular youth-cultural styles. Bennett (1999; 2000), Muggleton (2000) and Miles (2000) have each contributed to this debate in an offline context through bringing questions of individualism to bear on how youth-cultural identities are constructed and reconstructed. Certainly, recent examples of Internet research have criticized the earlier contention that the Internet enables actors to construct “online” identities that are radically detached from their offline selves (see, for example, Robards 2012). While arguments for the continuity between online and offline identities appear to have substance (see, for example, Miller and Slater 2000; Brown and Gregg 2012) it seems equally feasible that the more individualized traits of youth identity construction observed by Bennett et al. (op. cit.) in relation to the appropriation of youth style may also assume enhanced dimensions when articulated via Internet technology. While this may not amount to a complete fragmentation of youth’s stylistic and aesthetic alliance, as has sometimes been mooted in post-subcultural theory (see, for example, Redhead 1990), the ways in which young people affectively associate with online forums may lead to more fluid understandings of “membership” together with affective associations with a range of “subcultures” or “scenes”—the latter in any case increasingly being self-branded, and self-inscribed, by participants in late modern society (see Hodkinson 2007). This point is illustrated in a recent study by Robards and Bennett in which young people on Australia’s Gold Coast were interviewed regarding their everyday uses of online social network sites and the connections they perceived between their online and offline identities. While interviewees often referred themselves as involved with particular “subcultural” groups, none “identified themselves as strictly belonging to a single subculture, although they did state that they recognized elements of subculture within



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their own self-narratives” (2011, 312). Significantly, the reflexive manner in which interviewees weaved narratives of subcultural belonging in and out of their personal accounts of identity and belonging seemed heightened through their use of online social network systems. In this context, the interviewees were constantly able to explore, evaluate and reposition their identities. As such, the narratives of subculture that these young people rehearsed appeared inherently post-subcultural in terms of how the reflexive meaning of subculture played out in their everyday lives. In effect, these young people used online digital media to interact with a range of different groups, “subculture” taking its place alongside “scene”, “community” and a range of other descriptors as a means though which the young people were able to construct and present narratives of identity, belonging and lifestyle.

Conclusion This chapter has examined how young people’s uses of the Internet in the construction of youth-cultural identities connects with and contributes to the ongoing subculture–post-subculture debate. The chapter began by outlining the central tenets of subcultural theory. This was followed by a brief account of some of the criticisms that have been levelled against the concept of subculture focusing in particular on those put forward by postsubcultural theorists. Attention then turned to how youth-cultural scholars have engaged with the emergence of the Internet. The point was made that, thus far, much of the resulting scholarship has deployed subcultural perspectives with little attention being given to the potential place of postsubcultural theory as a means of explaining the significance of the Internet for contemporary youth cultures. Consideration was then given to how certain aspects of young people’s uses of the Internet display characteristically post-subcultural traits and tendencies. Indeed, it was argued, emerging scholarship is beginning to suggest that even notions of subculture and subcultural identity may be taking on increasingly malleable qualities by dint of young people creatively playing with these concepts in both online and offline spaces to the extent that perceptions of subcultural belonging may often be expressed in ways that are post-subcultural in character. In this sense, it could be argued, there is much to be gleaned from applying post-subcultural perspectives to youth’s everyday engagement with the Internet.



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Note 1. In this study Clarke famously takes to task Hebdige’s (1979) analysis of punk on the grounds that it wholly fails to take into account the sociocultural meaning of the late 1970s punk style beyond London-based contexts such as Soho and Carnaby Street.

References Baker, Andrea, J. 2012. “Exploring Subcultural Models of a Discursive Youth Net-Radio Hierarchy”. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 26(3): 409–21. Bassett, Caroline. 1997. “Virtually Gendered: Life in an On-line World”. In The Subcultures Reader, edited by Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton, 537–50. London: Routledge. Bennett, Andy. 1999. “Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship Between Youth, Style and Musical Taste”. Sociology 33(3): 599–617. —. 2000. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave. —. 2004. “Virtual Subculture? Youth, Identity and the Internet”. In After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, edited by Andy Bennett and Keith Kahn-Harris, 162–72. Basingstoke: Palgrave. —. 2005. Culture and Everyday Life. London: Sage. —. 2012. “Réévaluer la contre-culture”, Volume! 9(1): 19–31. Brake, Michael. 1985. Comparative Youth Culture: The Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth Subcultures in America, Britain and Canada. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Brown, Rebecca and Melissa Gregg. 2012. “The Pedagogy of Regret: Facebook, Binge Drinking and Young Women”, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 26(3): 357–69. Chaney, David. 1994. The Cultural Turn: Scene Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural History. London: Routledge. —. 1996. Lifestyles. Routledge: London. —. 2002. Cultural Change and Everyday Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Clarke, John. 1976. “The Skinheads and the Magical Recovery of Community”. In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 99–102. London: Hutchinson. Clarke, Gary. 1981 (1990). “Defending Ski-Jumpers: A Critique of Theories of Youth Subcultures”. In On Record: Rock, Pop and the



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Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 81–96. London: Routledge. Clecak, Peter. 1983. America’s Quest for the Ideal Self: Dissent and fulfilment in the 60s and 70s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, Stanley. 1987. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd edn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Cummings, Joanne. 2007. “Sold Out! An Ethnographic Study of Australian Indie Music Festivals”. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Western Sydney, Australia. Freimund, Wayne and Lloyd Queen. 1996. “Wilderness @ Internet: Enhancing the Potential for Wilderness Electronic Communication”, International Journal of Wilderness 2(1): 33–6. Davis, Katie. 2012. “Tensions of Identity in a Networked Era: Young People’s Perspectives on the Risks and Rewards of Online Selfexpression”. New Media & Society 14(4): 634–51. Gibson, Chris. 1997. “Subversive Sites: Rave, Empowerment and the Internet”. Unpublished paper originally presented at the IASPM ANZ conference “Sites and Sounds: Popular Music in the Age of the Internet”, University of Technology Sydney, July 21–3. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections From the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson, eds. 1976. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson. Healy, Dave. 1997. “Cyberspace and Place: The Internet as Middle Landscape on the Electronic Frontier”. In Internet Culture, edited by David Porter, 55–71. London: Routledge. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Hodgkinson, James. 2004. “The Fanzine Discourse Over Post-rock”. In Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, Virtual, edited by Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, 221–37. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 2003. “‘Net. Goth’: Internet Communication and (Sub) Cultural Boundaries”. In The Post-subcultures Reader, edited by David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl, 285–98. Oxford: Berg. —. 2007. “Interactive Online Journals and Individualisation”. New Media & Society, 9(4): 625–50. Jefferson, Tony. 1976. “Cultural Responses of the Teds: The Defence of Space and Status”. In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures



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in Post-War Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 81–6. London: Hutchinson. Kahn, Richard and Douglas Kellner. 2004. “New Media and Internet Activism: From the ‘Battle of Seattle’ to Blogging”. New Media and Society, 16(1): 87–95. McRobbie, Angela. 1980 (1990). “Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique”. In On Record: Rock Pop and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 66–80. London: Routledge. Miles, Steven. 2000. Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World. Buckingham: Open University Press. Miller, Daniel and Don Slater. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford. Berg. Milner, Ryan M. 2012. “To Write Love Through the Indie Imaginary: The Narrative Argument of a Mediated Movement”. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 26(3): 423–35. Muggleton, David. 2000. Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford: Berg. Pilkington, Hilary. 1994. Russia’s Youth and its Culture: A Nation’s Constructors and Constructed. London: Routledge. Redhead, Steve. 1990. The End-of-the-Century Party: Youth and Pop Towards 2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Robards, Brady. 2012. “Leaving MySpace, Joining Facebook: ‘Growing Up’ on Social Network Sites”. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26(3): 385–98. Robards, Brady and Andy Bennett. 2011. “My Tribe: Postsubcultural Manifestations of Belonging on Social Network Sites”. Sociology 45(2): 303–17. Williams, J. Patrick. 2006. “Authentic Identities Straightedge Subculture, Music, and the Internet”. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(2): 173–200.



II. THE CONSTRUCTION AND EXPRESSION OF SUBCULTURAL IDENTITIES

5. “A HARMONIZING WHOLE”? MUSIC, MASS OBSERVATION AND THE INTERWAR PUBLIC HOUSE1 STELLA MOSS

Music is ... a vital element in pub culture, one which ... transforms[s] the individual units of drinkers into a harmonizing whole, who send themselves often into a sweat with laughter and melody ... They love singing (Mass Observation 1943, 259).

The public house was a major feature of the popular-cultural landscape of interwar England and, for many, music was a significant part of its appeal. Across the country, many pubs offered a vibrant musical experience. While some landlords employed musicians and singers, long-entrenched practices of communal music-making among customers helped to forge bonds of sociability in local communities. The pub music of the 1920s and 1930s was associated with a rich heritage of musical tradition. Early- to mid-Victorian pub music had a notable impact on the rise of music hall. As Peter Bailey has noted, in the 1830s and 1840s the first halls were attached to public houses, while “free and easy” pub sing-songs shaped the communal singing culture which developed (Bailey 1986, ix). Into the interwar years, music-making forged and sustained pub sociability, and alongside games, conversation and, of course drinking, shaped its cultural vitality. Despite the vibrancy of these cultures, historians of the public house have paid them scant attention, often concentrating on more specifically drink-related themes, such as the regulation of alcohol consumption (see, for instance, Nicholls 2009, 180–98). Emerging in many cases via social histories of leisure, scholarly interest in interwar popular music has tended to coalesce around themes of commercialization and new forms of mass culture. James Nott has expanded our understanding of the widening appeal of dance and jazz music, while Claire Langhamer, among others, has illuminated the dance hall as a venue central to the recreational practices of young people, which both shaped and reflected the appeal of new musical genres (Nott 2002; Langhamer 2000, 63–70). Peter Bailey’s work

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on the continued popularity of variety theatre has debunked entrenched historiographical misconceptions about the demise of music hall in the years after the First World War (Bailey 2007, 495–509). Overall though, while Nott has acknowledged that pubs were “one of the most important sources of live music”, it is evident that that scholarly interest in interwar music has been preoccupied with other settings and contexts (Nott 2002, 122). More broadly, it is abundantly apparent that research into popular music is markedly more developed in relation to the second half of the twentieth century compared with the first. As is well known, a diverse multidisciplinary body of scholarship has traced the contours of popular musical cultures in the years after the Second World War, delineating a vast plethora of emergent rock and pop styles, and their manifold subgenres.2 As part of an influential trope emphasizing music’s profound capacities in shaping the construction and contestation of identities, wideranging exploration has illuminated the multiple and varied associations between music, youth culture and consumption.3 One small strand of this post-World War II research has explored the significance of pub music in the context of the 1970s pub-rock genre. As Andy Bennett (1997, 97–108) has noted, especially in the London venues which dominated the genre’s emergence, the small-scale intimacy of the pub became highly prized in contrast with what were perceived as the excesses of stadium performance praxis among many leading rock bands.4 The pub was noted as an important venue for grassroots rock cultures in Ruth Finnegan’s study of 1980s Milton Keynes (1989, 230–3). Drawing on this (narrow but fruitful) body of research relating to the later twentieth century, this chapter seeks to illuminate the diverse participation in, and varied reception of, pub music in the interwar era. Analysis centres on those pubs identified by many contemporaries as “traditional”: that is, premises built in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.5 Associated primarily with working-class urban communities, these pubs would draw patrons from the immediate surrounding streets, with the result that customers would ordinarily be known to each other (Mass Observation 1943, 109). While historians have emphasized typically masculine practices of heavy drinking and betting in delineating the pub’s social significance, it is also clear that widespread and entrenched cultures of women’s drinking and mixed-sex sociability also shaped the pub’s cultural dynamics (Davies 1992, 61–73). This chapter focuses on a close study of pub life in the Lancashire town of Bolton, drawing on the findings of the social research organization Mass Observation (MO) (see Hubble 2006). Founded in 1937, at the heart

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of the MO venture was an ambitious attempt to illuminate the everyday lives of ordinary citizens, and so develop an “anthropology of ourselves” (Madge and Harrisson 1938, 100). As the well-developed literature on the organization has noted, a major aspect of MO’s research was an in-depth exploration of working-class life in the industrial town of Bolton, which it styled as “Worktown”. Conducted in 1937–9, a key facet of this research involved the investigation of drinking cultures, including via extensive participant-observer surveys of the town’s 300 public houses (Mass Observation 1943, 17). Consternation about standards of methodological rigour was voiced from MO’s early days, especially in relation to the somewhat haphazard sampling common to many surveys, but today scholarly discussion tends to focus on how, not whether, MO’s research findings can be usefully analysed (Pollen 2013, 213–35). While certainly shaped by the organization’s left-leaning social-documentary politics, MO studies offer perhaps unparalleled insights into twentieth-century pub culture. Based on findings from the “Worktown” study, the 1943 publication The Pub and the People remains among the richest available historical sources on modern English drinking cultures. In drawing on MO’s published works and archival papers, this chapter seeks to interrogate MO’s assumptions and contentions about pub music-making, as well as illuminating the particularities of the musical soundscape of Bolton’s pubs. Additional contextual evidence is drawn from localauthority records, social surveys, and autobiographies. Analysis proceeds with a discussion of the key characteristics of pub music-making, followed by a discussion of MO’s interpretive preoccupations. There follows an exploration of the performance and reception of pub music, with particular emphasis on the multifaceted emotional connectivities pub music produced and reflected. “Traditional” public houses in Bolton, as elsewhere, featured several bars and drinking rooms, each characterized by particular behavioural norms, with social status and gender two formative influences. In its detailed taxonomy of the spatial configuration of pub spaces, MO emphasized the vault as a key site for masculine cultures of heavy drinking, while the taproom was widely regarded as a more “respectable” space, preferred by male drinkers with higher incomes who engaged in associational cultures fostered, for instance, by games such as dominoes (Mass Observation 1943, 94–5). MO identified the lounge as the most salubrious room in the pub. Also known variously as the “parlour” or “best room”, the lounge was noted for its cultures of mixed-sex sociability, and an atmosphere of comparative refinement which was shaped by its superior decoration and reflected in the higher prices charged there (Mass

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Observation 1943, 95–7). Crucially, the lounge was also the key site of music-making. Indeed, in some premises the term “music room” was in use. Music was most common at weekends, when pubs were busiest (Mass Observation 1943, 256). Under legislation of 1890, landlords permitting the playing of music were required to be in possession of an additional licence, over and above that required for the sale and consumption of alcohol.6 Across the interwar years, the number of premises in Bolton with such licences rose from 35 in 1921 to 85 in 1938 (Bolton Archives and Local Studies: “Bolton County Borough General Annual Licensing Meetings, Report of Chief Constable” (1925), 5). This growth is indicative of both the vitality of pub cultures, and landlords’ attempts to offer additional attractions beyond drink, in an era when new forms of mass recreation such as the cinema were reconfiguring the wider popular cultural landscape.7 Pub music revolved primarily around piano-playing and singing. Most lounges possessed a piano, while occasionally individuals might bring along instruments such as violins and accordions.8 In the main, musicmaking consisted of pub regulars playing and singing informally, in a voluntary and unpaid capacity, for mutual entertainment. Willingness to take to the floor was no guarantee of talent, though, with MO noting numerous occasions when customers were seen “knock[ing] the hell out of a piano”.9 Many pubs, however, boasted regulars known for their musical gifts. Recognizing its importance in maintaining a pub’s popularity, many licensees encouraged music-making, and upheld a Lancastrian tradition whereby landlords rewarded those performing two or more songs (skilfully or otherwise) with a free drink (Mass Observation 1943, 256). Paid performance was also a feature of Bolton pub life, with professional and semi-professional pianists engaged by licensees to provide instrumental background music, and to accompany individual and ensemble singing. MO asserted that it was a mistake to “assume that nothing but trash” was to be heard: indeed, the “high[est]-calibre” pianists could draw in drinkers from across the town.10 MO contended that these different facets of music-making together formed a dynamic and varied musical culture. Any discussion of MO’s representations of pub music-making does, however, benefit from contextualization in relation to the organization’s overarching cultural critique. No historical source can offer an entirely clearcut lens through which to view the past, and in this context maintaining clarity about MO’s interpretive preoccupations does lend a productive critical ballast. Underpinning much of MO’s approach was the contention that pub music, and indeed pub cultures more broadly, represented a form of “authentic”

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popular culture, still widely discernible in working-class communities, but very much under threat from the unremitting onslaught of new forms of commercialized mass entertainment. A key trope here was the notion that pub cultures fostered a creative individual agency, for while “in the cinema man is individual and passive; in the pub he is part of a group and active” (Mass Observation 1943, 218). That radios were a rare feature in Bolton pubs was a source of some satisfaction, though reports pessimistically predicted their impending arrival (Mass Observation 1943, 260). The regulation of pub music, and the control of paid performance in particular, was a source of consternation. In the mid-1930s, Bolton’s chief constable tightened the observance of statutory regulations about the possession of music licences. Particular concerns were also aired followed a spate of variety “concerts” held in a handful of premises, thought to be run entirely by professional musicians. Wishing to emphasize a differentiation between the kind of music found in the town’s theatres and in its pubs, the chief constable stipulated a preference that in the latter music should be performed solely by unpaid amateurs for the mutual entertainment of other patrons.11 As part of their regular inspection of licensed premises, local police were required to check whether performers were being paid, and in many premises licensees began to display notices stating “Only Voluntary Playing Allowed.”12 MO’s interpretation of these developments revealed its critical preoccupations, for it described this regulation of paid performance as a “ban” on music that “hit a vital element in pub culture.” (Mass Observation 1943, 259). Downplaying the particularities of police provisos, MO jettisoned a more representative depiction in favour of a sustained polemic, anchored in a rebuttal of the cultural value of new forms of mass recreation. Ironically, of course, in stipulating a strong preference for voluntary playing, local police encouraged a shift away from commercialized practices; but MO sidestepped these issues, preferring instead to develop its critique about the corrosive impact of mass culture. Notwithstanding the significance of this discourse, it is nonetheless clear that the MO’s exploration of pub music went well beyond the confines of this cultural critique, revealing a rich matrix of evidence about the vitality and variety of pub music. Particular stress was placed on the emotional freight of music, and its potential in shaping affective bonds; themes to which analysis now turns. In recent years, across and between a range of scholarly disciplines, growing attention has been paid to the study of emotion and its profound influence, including both in shaping individual psycho-social agency, and forging affective ties among social groups. The increasing focus on

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histories of emotion has begun to pay rich dividends, though certainly scope for further research remains in the field of modern British history (see Plamper 2010, 237–65). Among scholars of music, an innovative body of research has emerged, illuminating the multiple and varied emotional facets of musical culture.13 Drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum, David Hesmondhalgh has, for instance, argued persuasively about music’s capacity to “enhance our sense of sociality and community”, including via “shared experiences that are corporeal, emotional and full of potential meanings for the participants” (Hesmondhalgh 2012, 371). Certainly such assertions offer fruitful avenues of exploration in relation to interwar music-making: MO offered extensive and nuanced reflection on the emotional dynamics of musical culture, with performing and listening posited as mutually constitutive of a range of affective modes and experiences.14 In probing the ways in which individuals engaged with, and were shaped by music, recognition of the varied and unstable influence of drink on music-making is certainly of salience. Alcohol has varying and often unpredictable influences on individual consumers, and there can be no way of tracing in anything like an accurate manner its impact on the drinkers of interwar Bolton. Nonetheless, recognition of the influence of alcohol, and differing degrees of drunkenness, on performing and listening to music adds a useful analytical dimension. In a seminal argument about “constructive drinking” the anthropologist Mary Douglas contended that alcohol consumption has powerful potentialities in relation to the forging and consolidation of social bonds (Douglas 1987, 3–15). Here striking links might be made with MO’s emphasis on the potent influence of alcohol in sustaining sociability, whether linked to the mildest inebriation or the most pronounced drunkenness. Group intoxication, or “social drunkenness” was posited as a notable feature of the conviviality of pub music, especially in relation to communal sing-songs (Mass Observation 1943, 245). Recognition, then, of the potential implications of the altering of consciousness via alcohol consumption merits consideration. Overall, the lounge (and indeed the pub more widely) was a site of emotional expression, transaction and contestation, with music a powerful influence in shaping the multiple and changing connectivities between individuals and across social gatherings.15 In exploring these dynamics, MO devoted considerable attention to investigating the kinds of music played and heard in Bolton’s lounges, and found that preferences were varied. Typically an evening’s performance would span from Victorian and Edwardian music hall to jazz and Tin Pan Alley numbers of recent vintage (Mass Observation 1943, 283).16 This

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diversity indicated the vitality of the pub as a site of cultural interplay and exchange. Beyond noting its performance, MO offered little commentary on the popularity of new music: presumably any preference for jazz and Tin Pan Alley would have been dismissed as evidence of the encroachment of mass culture. Interpretive contestations notwithstanding, it is certainly apparent that the pub was a forum for the playing of, and listening to, music from a range of periods. MO considered that, in many ways, the popularity of songs was moulded more by their style than their date of origin. Crucially, a deepseated and ubiquitous preference for “sentimental” music was noted among both performers and audiences (Mass Observation 1943, 212). Other historical sources, including autobiographies, confirm that “sentimental” songs and instrumentals were widely embraced as pub “standards” (Roberts 1973, 151). More broadly, Nott has observed that the majority of popular songs written in the interwar years “dealt with the universal theme of ‘love’, either as romantic comedy, sentimental love songs, or ballads” (Nott 2002, 212). For MO the preference for sentiment was confirmation of the pub’s potentialities as a site where music helped individuals to “overcome self-consciousness”, thereby catalysing “selfexpression”.17 Among the most popular songs were Victorian and Edwardian ballads, including “Bird in a Gilded Cage”, a 1900 song about the loneliness of a woman who had married not for love, but money.18 Older songs were considered by MO to convey particular cultural resonance, their popularity underpinned by a coded invocation of nostalgia and memory. It was stressed that “old-time songs” were often preferred, especially at the end of an evening (Mass Observation 1943, 261).19 Sentimental music also encompassed songs of more recent vintage.20 Noel Coward’s 1928 song “A Room with a View” was popular. Evoking a sense of escapism—“A room with a view | And no-one to worry us | No-one to hurry us”—the song’s appeal was rooted in a romanticized wistfulness.21 In a striking example of the varied strands of cultural influence at work in the pub, MO noted with interest the playing of sentimental film songs. One report noted that “3 times” in one evening a pianist played “Look for a Silver Lining!” from The Great Ziegfeld (1936), the MGM musical then showing at the town’s Capitol cinema. One of Jerome Kern’s best-known songs, the lyrics centred on making the best of difficult times: “Look for the silver lining | When e’er a cloud appears in the blue”.22 Considering the powerful cultural resonance of sentimental songs, Simon Frith has contended that “It is not strong feelings that determine ... how we sing, but that how we sing gives us the experience of these sorts of

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feeling” (2001, 103). Such assertions recall MO’s invocation of the impact of emotive lyrics and evocative melodies. Audiences’ responses were portrayed as often vividly visceral: “the pianist comes more sentimental ... the whole room speaks up and swings its eyes—water-white with an escape, each individual and the whole glistening happily.”23 Such contentions revealed not only MO’s cultural preoccupations with the pub as a site of “authentic” corporate sociability, but indicated the potential form and depth of reaction. Indeed, as Ruth Finnegan (2012, 357) has asserted, the complexity of musical experience is linked to the interwoven nexus between “mind, body, movement, environment [and] sensation”. Once again, the material context of these cultures was significant, for the small-scale nature of the pub lounge invoked an additional context of intimacy. That the lounge was frequented by many couples, both courting and married, also helped to shape the dynamics of a room where the more explicit articulation of emotion was condoned and encouraged. For MO, together these factors compounded a sense of situated experience, and confirmed the lounge’s significance as a site of emotional engagement and expression (Bailey 2007). While sentimental music often dominated, more upbeat songs were also popular. Music-hall numbers like “Burlington Bertie”, a comic song about an idle toff, were commonplace, along with fashionable “dance tunes” and “jazz songs” (Mass Observation 1943, 260–1).24 “Snappy choruses of recent date” featured in communal sing-songs, including “Goody, Goody”, made popular by band leader Benny Goodman.25 The potential influences were conspicuous, these kinds of music being a “powerful stimulant to good humour”. For MO the value of these songs was their carefree levity—“free & easy sums up the entertainment”— compounding its assertions about the positive impact of pub musicmaking.26 It was not just the styles and genres of music that shaped emotional engagement and expression but, interlinking with this, the dynamic interactions between players, singers and listeners—themes now considered in more detail. The fluidity between positions of performance and spectatorship was a defining characteristic of lounge practices, and while by no means universal, the emphasis on participation, in varied and multiple forms, was striking. Other musical traditions offer examples of a rich interplay between musicians and audiences: nineteenth-century music hall was characterized by an emphasis on communal singing for at least some songs, while parallels might also be drawn with the late twentiethcentury performance culture of karaoke, where singing for mutual entertainment prevails (Bailey 1986; Kelly 1998, 83–101). More broadly,

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however, the plurality of roles, and flexibility between them, found in the interwar pub stands in contrast with the more boundaried divisions between performing and listening that were characteristic of much twentiethcentury popular music. MO drew particular attention to the fluidity of boundaries in relation to singing. Typically, individuals either volunteered willingly, or responded to encouragement from others. On occasional formal evenings, a more organized code of invitation for individual singers was often apparent. In a report of an all-male pub gathering hosted by a local sporting club, MO noted singers performed in turn at the invitation of the club’s chairman, generous applause following each song.27 On regular music nights often entrenched expectations demanded that popular and/or talented patrons would take to the floor, though there was no clearly defined code of ordered performance.28 Sometimes the role of lead vocalist would pass from one patron to another, with “different individuals starting [songs] and the others taking them up.”29 Communal singing was linked to varied practices: sometimes the whole room singing entire songs; sometimes individual verses interspersed with communal choruses (Mass Observation 1943, 23). Participation was, however, by no means uniform, and MO recorded with interest the ways in which individuals and group would shift their attention away from the music, either momentarily, or for a longer period of, say, conversation.30 Overall, though, presence in the lounge, as opposed to another bar-room, was usually indicative of some degree of enthusiasm for the music found there. The multiple and shifting connectivities between performance and reception were thus shaped by a range of practices, with MO emphasizing the ways in which participatory dynamics were emotionally enmeshed. Illumination of these cultures emerged in a report on a wedding party. When a young couple repaired to their local pub to celebrate after getting married, music was a principal feature of the festivities. “Noises of merriment” swelled, with “singers vie[ing] ... for the best applause.”31 In the music’s slipstream bubbled a “confusion” of other sounds, “loud laughter and free conversation.” After an evening of singing, once the couple departed, a quieter atmosphere prevailed: “old people ... talking of struggles when they were married and bringing up families” (Mass Observation 1943, 283). Following Tia de Nora (2000, 107), here music operated as “a resource for producing and recalling emotional states.” The collective musical expression of sentimentality, underscored by the significance of the occasion, induced a nostalgic reflection where individual experiences were articulated as part of a wider discourse that

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privileged a range of emotive memories, with poignancy and catharsis two leading influences. A host of MO reports observed the varied experiences of conviviality found in the lounge. One survey emphasized the ensuing “merriment” when a group of young men took to the floor singing “jazz” songs. One of their number, a “terrific high tenor”, was “applauded by everyone.” There followed some “funny stuff”: as the tenor sang, “his pal did a kind of Charleston in the middle of the room, very fast, movements wellcontrolled, but not much to do with the time of the song.” Banter added to the soundscape, with “different groups” shouting across the room to each other: “[The] youths were playing the comedian, plenty of ‘patter’.”32 The interweaving strands of music, dance, repartee and conversation combined to produce a rich experience of pub culture, with MO’s emphasis on the corporeal an important stress. Indeed, the modes by which conviviality and amusement were experienced and articulated were often linked to a sense of spectacle. Humorous songs were a standard feature, their popularity linking to, and stemming from, the music-hall traditions of the nineteenth century, as well as the interwar variety stage (Bailey 2007). Particular interest was paid to the performance of a “red-faced, cheerful looking middle-aged woman, respectably dressed”, who, when asked for a song, entertained fellow patrons with a short ditty: “I had a dog called Pompey | Pompey he were call | And when he went to pee | He peed against the wall.” MO’s report continued: Red in the face, her hat sliding off, she leaped with extraordinary agility on to a bench, and standing there, sang the song again, even louder, banging time on the floor with a walking stick. Later, when the observers left, everyone shook hands with them [and] said it had been “good company”. In fact a pleasant time was had by all (Mass Observation 1943, 212).

A sense of ribaldry was manifest, predicated partly via the contrast between her “respectable” appearance and the mildly bawdy humour of her song, while the sense of embodied spectacle both shaped and reflected the prevailing amusement. Common to many reports reflecting on conviviality was a discussion of alcohol’s impact. One survey of communal sing-songs noted that, while few were noticeably drunk, a “cheerful alcoholic atmosphere” prevailed.33 High days and holidays saw alcoholic indulgence often readily condoned, as during celebrations marking the 1937 coronation, with MO noting: “lounge very full, lots of old women wearing red, white and blue hats, singing drunkenly.”34 Recognition of the multivalent impact of drink was a

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notable feature of reports, together with a pronounced sense of alcohol’s potential to influence involvement in, and enjoyment of, pub music. A further strand of cultures of conviviality was linked to shared codes of knowingness. A report on a local Irish pub noted: “the company was lively and struck up with ‘Does Your Mother Come from Ireland?’, but the joke is the shamrocks don’t sing, they leave it to the others” (Mass Observation 1943, 153). The sense of playfulness was patent, derived not just from the sounds from (non-Irish) voices, but especially, via the silent spectatorship of those not singing. Knowingness had long been recognized by both performers and audiences as a key influence in music hall, but in this spatially intimate setting, its impact was perhaps heightened (Bailey 1994, 138–70). Humour, then, was an influential dynamic, often compounding the channels by which music forged and extended affective bonds. The manifold positive associations drawn between music and sociability were not, however, universal or uncontested. Benevolent encouragement of performers was by no means guaranteed. Especially if a singer did not display particular talent, ensemble singing might overshadow individual performance. One report recorded an occasion when a “young working-class chap got up and sang songs in a very weak voice. No-one took much notice, except when there was a chorus to join in.”35 Moreover, when associated with unpopular individuals or poor performance, audience responses could give rise to practices of public shaming. MO noted one occasion when “a small old man was playing the violin ... stamping heavily to keep time, making a revolting noise [...] No-one cared about it, and when his back was turned people made derisive gestures.” The man’s attempt to elicit “a few pennies” by shaking hands with the crowd consolidated antipathy towards him, and, empty-handed, he had little alternative but to leave.36 The impact of ritualized public shaming stemmed from, and was emphasized by, the physical proximity of patrons. Moreover, given the social influence of public houses, subjection to such public censure would readily have had an impact on an individual’s social status in the local community. Sometimes hostility towards performers related to their drunken state, which was seen less as a marker of conviviality than as a sign of disgrace. One survey noted that on the evening of the coronation, a drunken woman “got up and sang God Save the King right through in a loud voice. No-one joined in at all, some looked embarrassed, and there was a general feeling as if the woman had committed a breach of taste.”37 While inebriated renditions of the national anthem were received more positively elsewhere, in this instance drunken performance consolidated a sense of the woman’s conduct as out of kilter

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with the prevailing mood. Overall, recognition of the varied and contested links and relationships between performers and audiences was a pivotal feature of MO’s research, its detailed observations offering valuable evidence about the pluralities of emotional experiences of, and responses to, music within the historically specific setting of interwar Bolton. Contrary to MO’s anxieties about the impending demise of pub culture, many of the practices of the interwar years continued after the Second World War, casting a wide cultural arc across the mid-century. In 1961 MO revisited the Bolton pubs it had studied in the late 1930s, and found that many of its earlier observations remained “valid”. Particularly striking were the continuities in terms of musical preference. MO asserted that “no post-war tunes were sung or played”, as patrons preferred “tunes from the thirties”. Radio was an increasing presence, while a handful of premises boasted jukeboxes. One landlord had bought a television, but insisted that at weekends, it was turned off at 8 p.m. because that was when “the pianist arrives” (Harrisson 1961, 168–80). Perhaps not surprisingly, there are strong echoes here of the interpretive preoccupations that had informed MO’s earlier cultural critique, but such continuities notwithstanding, it is clear that many aspects of pub life retained striking resonances across the mid-century. In tracing the contours of the pub’s musical soundscape, this chapter has added to understandings of interwar popular music. Though largely ignored by historians and other scholars of popular music, pub culture exerted a notable influence on quotidian experiences of performing and listening. Further research would, it is hoped, reveal more fully the nuances of the gendered, sexual and age-related dynamics that shaped musical cultures of the pub, but this chapter has indicated something of the plurality of social norms and codes of conduct at work. In illuminating the emotional resonances of pub music, this chapter has confirmed the lounge as a site of affective experience and articulation. The diversity of emotional praxis in the lounge was striking, with individuals and groups engaging with, and contesting, a variety of coded social performances via multiple positions of performance and spectatorship. Overall, the interweaving influence of these diverse “cognitive, emotive and bodily” experiences both shaped and reflected music’s potent influence on both performers and audiences—and, for MO at least, all this was little less than confirmation of the “magic of music” (Finnegan 2012, 362; Mass Observation 1943, 283).

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Notes 1. In loving memory of my father, Gerry Moss (1930–2012), and his “Pastoral-Associative-Mathematical” schema of musical appreciation, as originally conceived in his local pub. Many thanks to Dick Hebdige, David Hesmondhalgh and Bill Osgerby for their helpful responses to the conference paper on which this chapter is based. Particular thanks to Keith Gildart for his patience and editorial assistance. 2. For a useful overview, see Frith, Straw and Street 2001. 3. Leading works include Frith 1983 and Bennett 2000. 4. Popular histories have emphasized pub rock’s influence on new wave; see Blaney 2011. 5. Numerous contemporary pub surveys classified pubs into two main types: “traditional” and “improved”. “Improved” pubs (including many “roadhouse” premises) were often located in suburban areas, and offered attractions such as food and gardens in an attempt to encourage moderate drinking. Beyond the confines of this chapter, music was sometimes a feature; see Gutzke 2006. 6. Public Health Acts Amendment Act 1890 (53 & 54 Vic. c. 59), Part IV. 7. Cinema was especially popular in Bolton; see Richards and Sheridan 1987, 19–136. 8. In some premises, the piano was to be found in an upper room; see University of Sussex Special Collections, MO Archive: Worktown Collection, Box 3, 3-B, “Saddle 5.1.38”. 9. MOA: 3-A, “The George, Gt. Moor St.”. 10. MOA: 3-A, “Discourse on Cultural Place of Pubs”; MOA: 3-A “Tuesday After Easter”; MOA: 3-D, “Aug. 1, 1937.” 11. “Bolton Annual Licensing Meetings, Report of Chief Constable” (1925), 5. 12. MOA: 3-B “Saturday July 17”. 13. For recent overview and discussion, see Juslin and Sloboda 2011. 14. For insightful recent discussion of MO and emotion in other contexts, see Langhamer and Gazeley 2013, 159–89. 15. The impact of drug use on musical experience has received varied scholarly attention, often in relation to youth cultures; see e.g. Malbon 1999. 16. The terms “Tin Pan Alley” and (especially) “jazz” were often used imprecisely by both MO observers and pub-goers. Both were often employed to infer a general sense of the “new”, rather than anything more precisely stylistic. 17. MOA: 3-A, “Discourse on Cultural Place of Pubs”.

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18. MOA: 3-D, “Country Pubs, 21.5”. 19. On sentimental songs as performance finale, see Frith 2001, 103. 20. MOA: 3-B, “Pub Wedding”. 21. MOA: 3-A, “Good Samaritan, Gt. Moor St.”. 22. MOA: 3-A, “Star and Garter”. 23. MOA: 3-A, “Good Samaritan, Gt. Moor St.”. 24. MOA: 3-B, “Monday April 19, Grapes, Lounge”. 25. MOA: 3-B, “Sat. 17 July”. 26. MOA: 3-A, “Discourse on Cultural Place of Pubs”. 27. MOA: 3-D, “Waterloo Hotel”. 28. MOA: 3-B, “Pub Wedding”. 29. MOA: 3-B, “Old Horseshoe April 19”. 30. MOA: 3-B, ‘Moses Gate 2”. 31. MOA: 3-B, “Pub Wedding”. 32. MOA: 3-B, “Old Horseshoe April 19”. 33. MOA: 3-B, “Moses Gate 2”. 34. MOA: 3-B, “Pub Coronation”. 35. MOA: 3-B, “Moses Gate 2”. 36. MOA: 3-B, “The Grapes”. 37. MOA: 3-D, “Pubs, Coronation”.

References Bailey, Peter. 1986. “Introduction: Making Sense of Music Hall”. In Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, edited by Peter Bailey, viii–xxiii. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. —. 1994. “Conspiracies of Meaning: Music-hall and the Know-ingness of Popular Culture”. Past and Present, 144: 138–70. —. 2007. “Fats Waller Meets Harry Champion: Americaniz-ation, National Identity and Sexual Politics in Inter-war British Music Hall”, Cultural and Social History, 4(4): 495–509. Bennett, Andy. 1997. “‘Going Down the Pub!’: The Pub Rock Scene as a Resource for the Consumption of Popular Music”, Popular Music, 16(1): 97–108. —. 2000. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Blaney, John. 2011. A Howlin’ Wind: Pub Rock and the Birth of New Wave. London: Soundcheck Books. Davies, Andrew. 1992. Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–1939. Buckingham: Open University Press.

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de Nora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1987. “A Distinctive Anthropological Perspective”. In Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology, edited by Mary Douglas, 3–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finnegan, Ruth. 1989. Hidden Musicians: Music-making in an English Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2012. “Music, Experience and the Anthropology of Emotion”. In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton, 353–63. London: Routledge. Frith, Simon, Will Straw and John Street, eds., 2001. The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1983. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock. London: Constable —. 2001. “Pop Music.” In The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street, 93–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gutzke, David. 2006. Pubs and Progressives: Reinventing the Public House in England, 1896–1960, DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press. Harrisson, Tom. 1961. Britain Revisited. London: Victor Gollancz. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2012. “Towards a Political Aesthetics of Music”, in The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton, 364–74. London: Routledge. Hubble, Nick. 2006. Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Juslin, Patrik N. and John A. Sloboda, eds., 2011. Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research and Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelly, William H. 1998. “The Adaptability of Karaoke in the United Kingdom”. In Karaoke Around the World: Global Technology, Local Singing, edited by Tǀru Mitsui and Shnjhei Hosokawa, 83–101. London: Routledge. Langhamer, Claire and Ian Gazeley. 2013. “The Meanings of Happiness in Mass Observation’s Bolton”, History Workshop Journal, 75(1): 159– 89. Langhamer, Claire. 2000. Women’s Leisure in England, 1920–60. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Madge, Charles and Tom Harrisson, eds., 1938. First Year’s Work 1937– 38. London: Lindsay Drummond. Malbon, Ben. 1999. Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality. London: Routledge. Mass Observation. 1943. The Pub and the People: A Worktown Study. London: Victor Gollancz. Nicholls, James. 2009. The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nott, James. 2002. Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plamper, Jan. 2010. “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns”, History and Theory, 49(2): 237–65. Pollen, Annebella. 2013. “Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present: ‘Scientifically, About as Valuable as a Chimpanzee’s Tea Party at the Zoo’?”, History Workshop Journal, 75(1): 213–35. Richards, Jeffrey and Dorothy Sheridan, eds., 1987. Mass Observation at the Movies. London: Routledge. Roberts, Robert. 1973. The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

6. NEO-BURLESQUE: STRIPTEASE, SUBCULTURE AND SELF-COMMODIFICATION SAPHRON HASTIE

Introduction: Setting the Stage The performer prances on stage in a long sequined ballgown, her hair is wound into an elaborate headdress of feathers and she sheds glitter as she starts to peel off her gloves. She dances to a Johnny Cash song while the audience hollers and wolf whistles. Making her way through the song dropping layers of clothing; smiling, winking and laughing out over a mixed audience of students and young professionals, many of whom are as extravagantly dressed as she started out. Finally she drops the final layer, a glittering corset, and stands proud before us in nothing but sparkling nipple pasties and a rhinestone-covered g-string. This is a neo-burlesque1 show. To borrow from Debra Ferreday’s description of a similar show “[t]he scene described above could be taking place in many contexts: in the music halls of 19th-century London, the supper clubs of pre-war Berlin, or the striptease shows of 1950s America” (2008, 47). However, as Ferreday goes on to argue, context is important and the contemporary context of this performance is very different from those earlier striptease performances and from some other forms of contemporary striptease as well. This art form is nostalgic for earlier fashions, theatre forms, and the interpretations of femininity and womanhood that they represented. At the same time it is informed by contemporary ideals about what a woman is and how she should be. The neo-burlesque artist has a very specific relationship to, and meaning in, contemporary society. Neo-burlesque shares, and recreates, the history of other forms of contemporary striptease such as poleand lap-dancing strip clubs, but is played out in a different context and often defined through contrast to those other strip performances. The history of European and particularly North American burlesque, and its evolution into contemporary strip and nude dance, is well

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documented (e.g. Allen 1991; Shteir 2004); from the tableaux vivants and the evolution of danse d’école ballet (Shteir 2004, 11), commedia dell’arte (Nally 2009, 622) or even Ancient Greek comedy (Fargo 2008, 6). The link between burlesque and sexual display, and the start of the evolution of striptease, is generally traced to when Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes burlesque troupe arrived in New York in 1886 to perform bawdy, scantily clad parody and variety acts under the burlesque banner (Shteir 2004, 28–32; Fargo 2008, 6–8; Allen 1991, 3–24; Nally 2009, 622). From the Blonde’s tights, cross-dressing and sexualized humour, the burlesque variety circuit of the 1920s to 1950s, with their sexy skits and striptease performances would develop. As burlesque theatres were competing with the more socially acceptable vaudeville shows, striptease and sexual humour became their main point of difference. Soon striptease performers were headlining the burlesque variety bills swapping place with the comedians in the line-up (Fargo 2008, 4). In the 1960s striptease and strip acts started to change (Shteir 2004, 317–35; Fargo 2008, 18). With the rise of full-nude dance bars, pole dancing and a range of social changes that allowed these clubs to flourish, the burlesque theatre circuit was moving toward “its final shabby demise” (Allen 2004, xi). By that time burlesque was synonymous with an old style of striptease and the showgirls of a bygone era. In the 1990s neo-burlesque shows started to develop concurrently in the New York performance art scene and in some high-end Los Angeles strip clubs (Sohn 2005; Nygaard 2003). Corsets, opera gloves and feather boas made their way back into striptease acts, some on strip-club stages and some in theatres, cocktail bars, art galleries and cafes. This new but old, nostalgic aesthetic and performance style would soon make its way into the mainstream where it continues to grow in popularity. There are now thriving local and international burlesque performance scenes, including international conventions like Tease-o-rama and Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend in the United States and the London Burlesque Festival in the UK. The burlesque aesthetic is also becoming popular on a massmarket scale with films like Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann 2001) and Burlesque (Antin 2010), the popularity of “corset”-style fashions, and the rise to fame of former Las Vegas-dance-troupe-turned-singers the Pussycat Dolls and burlesque diva Dita von Teese. Neo-burlesque performance is even becoming part of contemporary high culture: Dita von Teese recently performed a striptease act in the middle of a high-fashion show (CartnerMorley 2010), you can see burlesque in London’s West End (Letts 2010) or in comedy and theatre festivals across the world (e.g. the Festival Fringe Society Ltd 2010; Auckland Fringe 2011).

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The popularity and mainstreaming of striptease and sexual performance in general has particular relevance for contemporary feminism as discussed by theorists and critics such as Ariel Levy (2005), Natasha Walter (2009), and Feona Attwood (2010). This generation of feminist writers are concerned with the “pornification” (Paul 2005) of mass media and what Levy (2005) calls “raunch culture” in which a very particular form of public sexual display, as typified by media products like Girls Gone Wild, is becoming normalized and porn stars are being held up as models of female sexuality and public behaviour. Levy argues that objectification has been rebranded as empowerment and that raunch culture is less about sexuality than it is about commodification. Neoburlesque is part of this social shift whereby sex and sexuality is moving out of bedrooms and backroom clubs and out into the public eye. Jacki Willson’s The Happy Stripper: Pleasures and Politics of the New Burlesque (2008) uses discussions of both new and old burlesque as a way to explore debates and factions within contemporary and historical feminisms, and the role of women and women’s bodies in society, over time. Willson uses the lives and popularity of three burlesque performers to tease out the complex relationships between individual agency and political change which have plagued feminist scholarship. Willson’s burlesque dancer is both a problem for and symbol of feminist change; sexual commodified object on stage with a self-empowered active subject behind it. The mainstream press are also interested in neo-burlesque. Some question if this new medium is exploitation (Penny 2009; Pool 2008) or empowerment (Haze 2009; Nally 2007; Nygaard 2003), although the approach is different to the academic debates, the questions asked are similar. Invariably they try to describe neo-burlesque to an uninitiated reader often using a contrast between burlesque-style stripping and the implicitly less palatable strip-club stripper. The stripper trope becomes part of the subcultural narrative of neo-burlesque by her very exclusion. As with many subcultures, scenes or potentially deviant groups there is an effort in both academic and mainstream press to describe and understand this cultural phenomenon. This description takes the form of certain stories or narratives about what neo-burlesque is and about what it is not. Ken Gelder’s monograph on subcultures (2007) traces the study of subculture and similar groupings in a semi-chronological manner and in so doing investigates a range of ways that subcultures have been studied, communicated and understood. For Gelder “every narrative by and about a subculture is a matter of position-taking—both within that subculture and outside it” (ibid. 2). This chapter starts by exploring such a narrative

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within and about the neo-burlesque subculture which compares neoburlesque, in a hierarchical relationship, to contemporary commercial strip clubs. This narrative then demonstrates some of the values which define neo-burlesque as a subculture, particularly the neo-burlesque performers’ often active and self-defined relationship to commodification and mainstream consumption practices. I then consider those narratives and values in light of feminist interests about the commodification of the female form.

Striptease But Not Stripping? As demonstrated primarily by mainstream media representations, the stripclub stripper works as a foil for neo-burlesque. The way in which stripjoint stripping is constructed for neo-burlesque is very specific and reveals more about neo-burlesque than it does about stripping. Michelle L’amour is an American neo-burlesque performer and former Miss Exotic World2 who has performed on a number of popular American television shows including performance game show America’s Got Talent. In a 2005 interview she said: “it’s not just stripping” and “I’m not doing lap dances, I’m not doing drugs […] there’s an art to this” (Michelle L’amour in Rosenberg 2005). Through her television appearances L’amour is a publicly identifiable neo-burlesque performer and her Miss Exotic World win demonstrates her subcultural success. This quote exemplifies the way in which the “stripper” works as a foil for neo-burlesque. The stripper, for neo-burlesque, is portrayed as “just stripping”, implying that there is more to neo-burlesque than “just stripping” without rejecting the striptease element entirely. Lap dances and drugs are relegated to the strippers’ domain and used to implicate the lower worth of “just stripping” while the “art” is reserved for neo-burlesque. Another American performer and burlesque producer, Bunny Bravo, also contrasts neo-burlesque with other strippers: Burlesque is more the whole tease, what’s coming off, what’s underneath? Strippers are just in it for the money […] We’re obviously not in it for the money, or we would be strippers. We don’t make any money. We usually lose money between the costumes and putting on the shows and everything (Bunny Bravo in Schwind 2008).

Strippers are portrayed as “in it for the money” while neo-burlesque performers “don’t make any money”. For Bravo neo-burlesque artists are not strippers and this is qualified by the assertion that burlesque is not about “making money”. There are two key implications in this quote. The stripper foil is cast as commodified and commercial while Bravo raises the expense and effort that goes into creating a neo-burlesque act, the not

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making money, to define neo-burlesque as more artistic and separate from the economic transaction of showing your body for money. The cost of neo-burlesque comes up in other performer interviews as well, often in response to questions about advice for new performers or people interested in, but unfamiliar with, the genre. Clara Cupcakes had been performing neo-burlesque for four years and was a contestant in the Western Australia state heats for Miss Burlesque Australia 2010, which she would go on to win, when she was quoted as saying: It’s actually very expensive to be a burlesque dancer, that’s a big part of the problem. Most of the time for our shows my outlay on money for acts will be more than I’ve actually got coming in. To create a new costume can cost upwards of $500 and you will generally get paid between $50 and $150 per performance. So to kind of lay that money out and not get it back straight away you really need another source of income to support your burlesque habit (Buck 2010).

Another example is New Zealand performer Eva Strangelove, who was interviewed for the NZ Pin-up Blog in 2010 and, when asked what advice she had for others wanting to get into burlesque, said: Do not get into burlesque if you are looking to make a quick buck…there are no high earnings until you are really really good […] if anything, burlesque is an expensive hobby. Costumes are not cheap […] Crystals, sequins, fringe, trim, it all costs … and this is where your creativity and patience comes in. Costumiers charge by the hour, so ideally, this sequin stitching we do hour after hour should be a labour of love (Stephens 2010).

However, neo-burlesque performers do not reject commercial success as inauthentic and will happily claim a professional identity at the same time as describing most burlesque as an “expensive hobby”. In the same interview cited above Strangelove was asked “What are the most standout moments of your career so far?” and answered: “Being able to call myself a professional model and burlesque performer, as a career, and more than just a hobby” (Stephens 2010). Moving beyond the hobby stage is celebrated not rejected despite the potential of being “in it for the money” implies such a move. As I will discuss later, many neo-burlesque performers present a highly professional image, although if most of them are actually able to make a living through their neo-burlesque identity is still unclear. The strip-club stripper archetype helps to define what neo-burlesque is by demonstrating what it is not. An artificial stripper is imagined who incorporates the commercialized and exploited aspects which neo-burlesque then rejects. Ferreday, who ultimately argues for the transformative and

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subversive possibilities of neo-burlesque, also uses a contrast between strip-club-style stripping and neo-burlesque: The new burlesque troubles mainstream notions of femininity on multiple levels. This can be seen in its appropriation of the striptease performance. Striptease clubs are traditionally an example of hyper normativity. Taken out of context, then, it would clearly be impossible to claim striptease as a site of subversion. However, taken in context, new burlesque performances work to disrupt the normative economy of gender in which female nakedness is staged before a heterosexual male spectator by reclaiming the space of the strip club for a female audience (Ferreday 2008, 61).

In Ferreday’s account it is the structure and context of the strip club which is contrasted with the burlesque stage, but the rhetorical work is similar. For Ferreday the gender of the audience and the performers’ attitudes are the key contextual factors. Dahlia Schweitzer, on the other hand, highlights the role of monetary transaction and power in the stripper-to-audience relationship: To be able to buy is the same thing as being in control, which becomes the same thing as being sexually desirable […] Because [the strip-club customer] is paying for the fantasy, he is controlling it, thereby creating the illusion that the fantasy is a response to him (Schweitzer 2000, 69).

For Schweitzer the problem with the strip-club context is not gender but commodification; commercial transactions and the power that goes with that relationship. In the commentary I have looked at neo-burlesque against a very specific, imagined version of the strip-club stripper in the strip-club context. Research shows that there are, in fact, a wide range of experiences housed within strip-club contexts that can range from exploitative and hostile to empowering and social, and that these experiences vary from club to club, from person to person (for a detailed discussion, see BradleyEngen and Ulmer 2009). Mindy Bradley-Eagen’s work develops a detailed typology of strip clubs, which she uses to demonstrate the ways that structural factors within the clubs generate different kinds of stripper experiences and conflicting readings of stripping in other studies (BradleyEngen 2009; Bradley-Engen and Ulmer 2009). In the rejection of association with strippers, neo-burlesque references a specific idea of strippers and strip clubs most closely aligned with what Bradley-Eagan calls the “Hustle Club” (Bradley-Engen and Ulmer 2009, 37–42). The Hustle Club is a high-turnover, “sex-oriented” (Bradley-Engen and Ulmer 2009, 40) type of club where “dancers primarily use conning, or “hustling,” to make money [and] also anticipate that customers will try to

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‘get as much sex as they can’” (ibid., 37). This is exactly the “in it for the money” stripper imagined and rejected by Bunny Bravo (Schwind 2008). So, what can the apparent dichotomy between neo-burlesque and the hustle-club-style strippers tell us about how neo-burlesque represents itself? By contrast with a stripper who is “in it for the money” it could be assumed that commercialization is being rejected but professional success is not rejected by neo-burlesque. I argue that it is a very specific kind of commercialized stripping that is seen as problematic for neo-burlesque, while other forms of successful commodification can be highly valuable.

History, Strippers and Striptease Not all neo-burlesque performers reject the stripper label although the type of stripper with which they align themselves is a more historical or performance-based concept than the commercialized archetype in earlier examples. Striptease and the act of stripping clothing are generally seen as an important aspect of neo-burlesque. Dita von Teese, for example, regularly aligns herself with the stripper label and in a 2008 interview said: I don’t really like to say that burlesque and stripping are totally different. I know a lot of burlesque dancers like to make sure you know that they are not strippers, they are burlesque artists, but I don’t really agree with that. I don’t think the term stripper is a bad word. Gypsy Rose Lee called herself a stripper, so if it was good enough for her it is good enough for me (Dita von Teese in Pool 2008).

She is not the only performer to make a point about valuing the striptease elements in neo-burlesque. Melbourne-based burlesque performer and venue owner Madame “Mama” Natalia, makes a similar statement: I’ve heard so many arguments from the snobby “aficionados” in the local industry about how burlesque doesn’t have to involve striptease and in the 1800s it was this, that and the next thing … but the last time I checked it was 2011 and these days, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your viewpoint, modern burlesque involves a high element of strip tease (Notes from the Burlesque Underground: An Interview with Madame Natalia 2011).

These quotes highlight an internal conflict about what a stripper is in relation to neo-burlesque and the value of strip in striptease. In these statements other “snobby” performers are described as rejecting their stripper genealogy, whereas embracing that history is a more authentic position for neo-burlesque. Von Teese talks about 1940s performer Gypsy Rose Lee while Madame Natalia describes neo-burlesque “aficionados” talking

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about burlesque in the 1800s (which would have been before striptease became a dominant aspect of burlesque theatre). An awareness of and admiration for earlier performers is important to neo-burlesque. Rejecting the stripper label is sometimes seen as a rejection of, or lack of respect for, the historical performances and performers which inform the neo-burlesque striptease style. In these examples a new foil is being created in the form of other “snobby” burlesque performers however an imagined other stripper is still the medium through which the contrast is made. Neoburlesque performers are aware of this ongoing contrast and do discuss the implications. Jo Weldon, a neo-burlesque teacher and author of The Burlesque Handbook, asked readers of her blog, Burlesque Daily, to comment on the difference between strip-club stripping and burlesque. Bird of Paradise responded: To me, the main difference between strip joint stripping and burlesque is that stripping is performed with the goal of stimulating or satisfying the audience (not the performer), whereas burlesque allows for a level of selfexpression that serves the needs of the performer first and the audience second (Bird of Paradise in Weldon 2008).

Another commenter, Mary, repeats a statement by another performer: “The best sound bite I’ve heard on this subject comes from Torchy Taboo […] She said ‘Stripping is about performing other people’s fantasies, burlesque is about performing your own’” (Mary in Weldon 2008). In these examples control and intention is central to the debate. For these commenters context, audience and even commodification are not the question.

Mass Production and Mainstream Appropriation Defining neo-burlesque and its relationship to stripping is a point where tension arises between neo-burlesque performers themselves, but also between neo-burlesque as a genre and the mainstream. One of the foremost criticisms that neo-burlesque performers have for the 2010 film Burlesque (Antin) is that it lacked striptease acts and as such has given the general public an unrealistic or inauthentic view of neo-burlesque. The film features pop singers Cristina Aguilera as a rising neo-burlesque artist, and Cher as an ageing burlesque star and club owner. It shows a number of choreographed dances and musical numbers which are meant to represent neo-burlesque performance but, retaining its PG rating, none of these rely heavily on striptease or other traditional burlesque imagery.

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A New York Post article about the film’s reception by burlesque performers quotes performer DeeDee Luxe: It had nothing to do with burlesque, and that’s a shame because people will see it and say, “Oh, that’s burlesque,” […] It’s definitely not educating anyone (Niemietz 2010).

The same article also quotes neo-burlesque teacher and author, Jo Weldon, talking about Aguilera’s performance “She doesn’t strip, and to me burlesque is striptease. That’s what makes it unique” (ibid). Interviewed just before the film was released, Dita von Teese again aligned herself and neo-burlesque with a striptease history: “Hollywood has taken burlesque and turned it into something else—they keep stripping away the strip tease […] take away the strip and there’s no art—you really have nothing” (Please Teese Me! 2010).

And: I don’t think it’s right that the modern mainstream media is trying to erase burlesque’s true history and I really don’t like them insulting the women in history who’ve made burlesque what it is today. It’s insulting. The only vendetta I have in life is against those trying to sanitise burlesque and turn it into a fashion style rather than the glamorous, beautiful, opulent, elegant striptease show it should be. To say “I like feathers and rhinestones and red lipstick … but I don’t like taking my clothes off”? It’s so simple minded (ibid.).

A lack of respect for the history of striptease burlesque is again posed as problematic, although this time in relation to mainstream media rather than other performers. For von Teese the mainstream media are stripping the strip out of burlesque and, with the use of the term “vendetta”, she positions herself in strong opposition. The mainstream is also evoked by other performers, who wish to distance neo-burlesque from strip-club stripping. Bombshell Betty responded to the early Bunny Bravo interview in her blog, It’s a Bombshell’s World: Many people responded with outrage and annoyance about the question of how burlesque is or isn’t stripping and how this comes up in the media all the time. Personally, I am glad that this is a question that is addressed in most articles that come up about burlesque in the mainstream media. Why? Because most people in the mainstream culture still don’t know the difference between pole dancing and burlesque! (Betty 2008).

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In both of these quotes the mainstream, specifically mainstream or massproduced media, are set up as not understanding the relationship between neo-burlesque and stripping; although in both quotes the relationship is defined differently. For neo-burlesque the mainstream is not a threatening Other but rather is seen as a misguided potential audience. Thornton’s account of clubbers’ perception of the mainstream might be relevant, she says that their “main antagonist is not the police (who arrest and imprison) but the media who continually threaten to release its cultural knowledge to other social groups” (Thornton 1996, 90). For neo-burlesque, the issue is less about releasing the knowledge as it is about misrepresenting it. The mainstream is not an antagonist instead it is portrayed as misguided, out of the loop, but not inherently Other. Claire Nally goes so far as to say that there are two types of neoburlesque: the subcultural, with performers who are primarily known in neo-burlesque circles and less associated with commercial brands or mainstream performance venues, and the mass-produced version of the films and performers like Dita von Teese appearing in commercially produced advertising campaigns (Nally 2009). For Nally: It is important to make a distinction between the subcultural and the mainstream forms of burlesque in order to ascertain any possibility for political radicalism in the genre (ibid., 630).

However, Willson (2008) argues that it is this very ability to succeed in the mainstream that makes Dita von Teese a potentially feminist figure. While Nally looks at the ways in which neo-burlesque performers are being representative, looking for normative and non-normative representations, Willson considers the lives of individual performers when making this argument. Willson uses examples of how the three burlesque performers she focuses on (both historical and contemporary) achieved economic and commercial success in social systems which would normally deny women such opportunities, and have done so by disrupting that very system through striptease. By incorporating striptease and nudity and reclaiming it for herself the performer exists as both “bad” girl and “good” girl simultaneously, embodying the mother/whore dynamic (Willson 2008, 94). The questions that researchers ask of neo-burlesque can result in very different readings. Nally is looking at wider representational and radical social possibilities; looking for ways that neo-burlesque challenges contemporary mainstream values. For this she needs to separate out the performers who are seen as doing it for themselves or their social group, from those who do neo-burlesque in a more mainstream way. Willson, on

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the other hand, is considering the iconic potential of burlesque and looking at what makes it popular and how the performances and performers of burlesque reflect or represent contemporary mainstream and/or feminist values. For Nally neo-burlesque’s commercial successes and compromises are problematic, while for Willson they are emblematic. I argue that both resistances to, and congruence with, mainstream values and commercial success are in fact secondary to neo-burlesque. The mainstream is not an enemy for neo-burlesque and performers are more involved in defining themselves, within the subculture and in the mainstream, than they are about defying commodification or “selling-out”.

Control and Self-objectification New Zealand neo-burlesque performer and producer Miss La-Vida summarized her perception of why neo-burlesque performers distance themselves from strip-club strippers: “I think criticism of strippers comes from people’s perception of the ‘sleaze’ of strip clubs. And again, fair enough because some clubs are pretty sleazy. But the sleaze element isn’t actually in the stripper’s control. And I think this is best illustrated by [a local strip club’s] ‘No Pussy Touching’ policy. It’s the men introducing the sleaze by their behaviour. […] Crucially, [strippers] aren’t in control of their music, they just have to dance to whatever is on. One stripper who also does burlesque told me she did wear her burlesque costumes on stage at work once and noticed that she couldn’t land any lap dances. She guessed this was because she looked too ‘expensive’. They have to dress a certain way in order to get the customer to spend. So again, the strippers aren’t really in control of what goes on in the club. That’s all dictated by what the punter wants.” (Miss La Vida 2012).

For Miss La Vida the problem isn’t around the commodification or sale of sexual performance, the problem is around a loss of control over that performance. Strippers and stripping is not problematic and what makes strip clubs “sleazy” is the performer’s loss of control over her act. Control is demonstrated in a number of ways. Dita von Teese is regularly interviewed. She often chooses to highlight that she is her own stylist: “I don’t think people realize that I do everything myself. I’m the producer, director and stylist and I invest my own money and decide my own direction.” (Please Teese Me! 2010)

Or, in another interview:

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In these examples von Teese demonstrates her control over her image and active self-construction. In so doing she disassociates herself from the “sleazy” elements of strip-club stripping. Artifice is not a problem for neoburlesque but loss of control is. Objectification is a concept often used to challenge neo-burlesque. For Nicole Deagan, of online feminist radio programme, The F Word, neo-burlesque is a question of “who has enough privilege to get up there and play with being an object” (The F Word 2011). Even Striptease historian Rachel Shteir raises concerns about “what kind of protest” burlesque can really represent and cites Marilyn Yalom’s “History of the Breast” which asks: “where is the line between the empowerment of the individual woman paid for showing her breasts and the victimization of numerous other women all lumped together as sex objects” (Marilyn Yalom quoted in Shteir 2004, 339). However, these arguments assume that objectification can be resisted and that such resistance should be the goal of performers. Being on stage will always have an element of objectification and artifice with which neoburlesque performers seem to be comfortable. After being challenged by an interviewer for “encouraging people to see women as objects”, Dita von Teese said: “How am I being objectified more than an actress? When they sit down and they make a deal about their role in a film, the attorney says: ‘If we see a nipple, how much is that worth?’ […] It’s worked out to the dime. How is that different?” (Pool 2008)

Von Teese does not argue that she is not objectified but rather that she is equally objectified as an actress. Again the issue is one of control. She is negotiating how much her flesh is worth in both economic and entertainment value. She does not mind that she is being commodified so long as it is self-commodification.

Identity as Product Self-commodification is the act of creating and marketing your own identity as a product. Neo-burlesque performers create an alter ego or persona, often with individualized signatures or “gimmicks”, which can be read as a form of branding. A successful neo-burlesque identity is a marketable and consumable brand as well as a performance medium. Most

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neo-burlesque performers use a pseudonym and construct elaborate characters and points of difference for their stage persona. Weldon devotes two chapters in The Burlesque Handbook to creating an individualized persona: “7 Character: Getting Into It” and “11 Identity: What Makes You So Special” (Weldon 2010, 157–74, 221–35). The idea of creative persona comes up in interviews too. For example, part of Eva Strangelove’s advice to beginners includes: “A gimmick, something the gal performing before or after you is not doing. A particular skill that sets you apart from the rest. Burlesque performers these days are a dime a dozen—it seems all you need is the guts to get undressed in public … but the cream always rises to the top, and those girls with their own creative expression are the ones that last” (Stephens 2010).

Individuality and branding is presented as paramount to creating a successful neo-burlesque identity. In late 2011 I conducted a detailed content analysis of thirty-nine websites dedicated to forty-two individual neo-burlesque performers. The sample was drawn from two sources: the 2011 London Festival of Burlesque performer line-up (London Festival of Burlesque 2011) and the Neo-burlesque Performers listing on crowd-sourced encyclopedia project Wikipedia. The sample included websites for high profile and celebrity performers such as Dita von Teese, Dirty Martini and Immodesty Blaize as well as other active but less well-known performers such as Millie Dollar and Fifi Fatale. The Association of Internet Researchers have ethical guidelines (2002) which discourage the use of password-protected data as public, including websites such as MySpace and Facebook, so the sample was restricted to dedicated public websites only. This changed the nature of my research because dedicated websites involve a commitment of resources which the other free, but password-protected and potentially personal, services do not require. The project was intended to examine what Ferreday calls the “complex web of intertextual links [that] allows new burlesque to ‘speak back’ both to feminism and to mainstream” (Ferreday 2008, 61). Unfortunately performers’ websites are not where this resistance is taking place. However, what I did observe is the commercial and economic work which neo-burlesque identities do. Seven performers (17.94 per cent) sold branded merchandise and signed photographs through their websites while Dita von Teese had a range of licensed products available from various other sites or stores. Two performers (5.12 per cent) mentioned their availability to make costumes for other performers with Catherine D’Lish even devoting a whole page to detailing and showing images of costumes

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she made for other performers. Nine sites (23.07 per cent) had a section devoted to classes or courses in burlesque and three others mentioned being available to be booked for or having taught classes. Three sites (7.69 per cent) had a pay-walled section. Each activity has its own implications which are not discussed here, yet when considered as a whole what is obvious is that the neo-burlesque persona is a brand and is unselfconsciously commodified and even celebrated. The value that neo-burlesque is wearing on its digital sleeve, and which really seems to constitute a distinction between neo-burlesque and the forms of stripping it is compared to, is a form of active and cognizant commodification of self on the performer’s and the subculture’s own terms.

Conclusion So, is neo-burlesque a resistance to, or a part of, raunch culture? Levy says that “raunch culture is not essentially progressive, it is essentially commercial” (2005, 29). Neo-burlesque seems to have embraced this commercialization of sexuality and, to an extent, appropriated it. The legitimacy of such a position can be questioned, as Deagan (The F Word 2011), Murphy (2011) and even Shteir (2004, 339) have done. Yet, ultimately, most performers are not arguing that they are resisting the hegemonic order or making the world a better place for all women. They simply present themselves as being in control of how and when they are commodified and objectified. As an active reappropriation of objectification it is a resistance, of sorts, to raunch culture’s cookie-cutter forms of femininity. I give the final word to von Teese: “Part of what I love about burlesque is that it is risqué and some people should be offended by it. I don’t try to be anyone’s role model. I don’t think I’m right and I don’t think that I’m wrong. I think everyone has to decide for themselves. All you can hope for is at least to have the choice” (Pool 2008).

Notes 1. The term “neo-burlesque” is used within this text to indicate the contemporary nostalgic striptease revival based on usage by Ferreday, Fargo and others. Some contemporary performers use the term to refer specifically to acts using modern music in contrast with “classic” routines (which use more nostalgic style, choreography and music) or “unique” acts (which include other performance elements such as circus or theatrical

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plots); my usage of neo-burlesque, and that of other academics, should be seen as inclusive of all of these performance types and is only used for succinctness and contrast to traditional (1920s to 1960s) and theatrical usage of the term burlesque (parody). 2. The Miss Exotic World Pageant is a burlesque competition held at the annual Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend in Las Vegas. It is one of the highlights of the international burlesque calendar and a very well-regarded title within neo-burlesque.

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Fargo, Emily Layne. 2008. “The Fantasy of Real Women”: New Burlesque & the Female Spectator. MA thesis, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Ferreday, Debra. 2008. “‘Showing the girl’: The new burlesque” Feminist Theory no. 9(1): 47–65. doi: 10.1177/1464700108086363. Gelder, Ken. 2007. Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Haze, Starla. 2009. “Enjoying burlesque is part of female sexuality, not a betrayal of it”. Guardian Unlimited, 9 June. Letts, Quentin. 2010. “Miss Polly Rae’s Hurly Burly Show: Retro fun with the good time gals”. Daily Mail Online, 25 February. Levy, Ariel. 2005. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. New York: Free Press. London Festival of Burlesque. 2011. London Festival of Burlesque Performers 2011 [cited 22 April 2011]. Available from http://london burlesquefest.com/performers. Luhrmann, Baz. 2001. Moulin Rouge! Miss La Vida. 2012. Attitudes Towards Burlesque & Stripping in New Zealand. In Miss La Vida Burlesque Performer. Murphy, Meghan. 2011. Burlesque: They tell me it’s just for fun … Except I’m not having any. In The F Word. Nally, Claire. 2007. “There’s more to burlesque than meets the eye”. Guardian Unlimited, 30 November. —. 2009. “Grrrly hurly burly: neo-burlesque and the performance of gender”. Textual Practice no. 23 (4):621-643. doi: 10.1080/0950 2360903000554. Niemietz, Brian. 2010. “Strip cheese”. New York Post (13 December), http://www.nypost.com/f/mobile/entertainment/strip_cheese_Jfz6xCK SHiLjyuQdgfXwRN. Notes from the Burlesque Underground: An Interview with Madame Natalia. 2011. In Melbourne Burlesque Hub. Nygaard, Sandra. 2003. “Bawdy Beautiful: New Burlesque shakes up San Francisco”. SFGate.com, 7 November. Paul, Pamela. 2005. Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families. New York: Times Books. Penny, Laurie. 2009. “Burlesque laid bare”. Guardian Unlimited, 15 May. Please Teese Me! 2010. Time Out Sydney, http://www.timeoutsydney .com.au/clubs/dita-von-teese--interview.aspx. Pool, Hannah. 2008. “Question time: Dita von Teese, the ‘queen of burlesque’, on fame, fortune and feminism”. The Guardian, 28 June.



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Rosenberg, Stuart J. 2005. Oh, L’amour! Chicago Magazine (December), http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/December-2005/OhLamour/. Schweitzer, Dahlia. 2000. “Striptease: The Art of Spectacle and Transgression”. Journal of Popular Culture no. 34(1): 65–75. Schwind, Gary. 2008. Bunny Bravo: Burlesque is Not Stripping. BrooWaha, http://www.broowaha.com/articles/3162/bunny-bravo-burl esque-is-not-stripping. Shteir, Rachel. 2004. Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show. New York: Oxford University Press. Sohn, Amy. 2005. “Teasy Does It”. New York Magazine. Stephens, Talia. 2010. An Interview with Eva Strangelove. The Great NZ Pinup Blog, http://nzpinup.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/an-interviewwith-eva-strangelove/. The F Word. 2011. Burlesque: Part 2 in a 2 Part Series. Rabble.ca. The Festival Fringe Society Ltd. 2010. Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2010 Programme. Leicester: Artisan Press. Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Hanover: University Press of New England. Walter, Natasha. 2009. Living Dolls. London: Virago. Weldon, Jo. 2008. “What’s the Diff? Request Your Input!”. In Burlesque Daily. —. 2010. The Burlesque Handbook New York: Harper Collins. Willson, Jacki. 2008. The Happy Stripper: Pleasures and Politics of the New Burlesque. London: I. B. Tauris.

7. AMBITIOUS OUTSIDERS: MORRISSEY, FANDOM AND ICONOGRAPHY LEE BROOKS

The story of Morrissey is, on every level, a story of fandom. From the visual homage of the Smiths’ iconic cover art, which acted as a virtual directory of Morrissey’s heroes, to his obsessive use of quotation and allusion in his celebrated lyrics, we can trace an image of a body of work influenced, inflected and in some cases almost entirely constituted by varying degrees of fan worship. This level of appropriation in his work is rivalled by the personal bricolage that has for so long been an active component in the construction of his physical iconography. This, combined with his willingness to make controversial pronouncements in place of revealing anything of himself in interviews and from the stage further paints a picture of a public Morrissey that uses his own fandom as a way to construct a persona that at once conceals as much as it discloses. That he, like artists such as Madonna or Prince, is known simply by a single name, reveals something of his stardom, but the fact that he should choose his last name rather than his first is perhaps an indication of a careful avoidance of familiarity. It is even possible that this choice could offer an insight into his oft-repeated insistence that the public Morrissey had subsumed the private Steven Patrick after the formation of the Smiths. It may be tempting to wonder if the presentation of a rather evasive public persona, carefully constructed from his own fandom rather than a welcoming, confessional nature towards his private existence might act as a barrier between the singer and his own fan community. However there are few performers who have been able to inspire a level of loyalty, verging on devotional fan worship for a more extended period than Morrissey. There is perhaps no more apposite visual example of this phenomenon than the video shoot directed by Tim Broad for the Smiths on 18 October 1987. The shoot focused on Morrissey along with a group of lookalike fans, found via the Bristol-based fanzine, Smiths Indeed, cycling around various Manchester landmarks that had come to be associated with the band. The footage from this shoot formed the promotional video for the Smiths’ sixteenth, and penultimate, single release, “I Started Something I

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Couldn’t Finish”, despite the fact that the band had actually split up two months earlier. Indeed, the fact that bassist Andy Rourke has suggested that “A bunch of Morrissey clones following Morrissey? It’s not a Smiths video is it? It’s a Morrissey video” (Goddard 2009, 184) simply serves to underline the “cult of Morrissey” that had, and continues to exist amongst the band’s fans. That Morrissey should unilaterally participate in a shoot that would appear to site the Smiths within his person is interesting in the sense that it would seem to begin a process of reclaiming the band’s legacy as his own, even before it was officially disbanded. However, perhaps the most interesting thing about the “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish” video was that WEA1 should decide to redub the visuals with another single, “Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before” for their 1992 release of the Smiths video compilation, The Complete Picture. The decision to repurpose this existing material can be read as an ironic, if perhaps unwitting, comment on the nature of Morrissey’s tendency to appropriate and recycle material to form the basis of his own very particular pop-cultural lexicon. That WEA should choose this video, with its tribe of bequiffed and bespectacled fans quite literally following Morrissey through the landscape of his former glories offers a tantalizing glimpse at the way that his fans have, for over a quarter of a century, embraced and emulated his carefully cultivated persona as “the outsider’s outsider” (Young 2009). As much as any performer of his generation, Morrissey has inspired an intense level of devoted fandom. This chapter will investigate the various ways in which Morrissey has constructed his particular take on the image of the outsider through an almost pathological process of bricolage that has included virtually every aspect of his public persona. Within this exploration I will consider the compulsive, artful appropriation of material from a range of literary, film and popular-cultural sources that have both informed and constructed his celebrated lyrics. Furthermore, I will reflect upon his use of visual imagery both in the modification of his physical appearance and in the production and promotion of his work. It is, however, important at this stage to stress that it is not enough to simply see Morrissey’s work as the product of this process. The construction of Morrissey would seem to be inextricably bound up with the habitual collaging of a mélange of influences and images. Perhaps Morrissey himself touched upon this when he rather enigmatically told Keith Cameron in a 2004 interview for Mojo magazine that he felt the need to perform “Because, unfortunately, I don’t really exist anywhere else in life” (Morrissey in Cameron 1994). There is surely a sense in which the denial of self that he has continually returned to in various interviews implies the possibility that the performance has, over

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time, become the construction. In short, a study of Morrissey beyond his work is of little use because the core of his work is being Morrissey. To understand this, it is necessary to return to the opening premiss of this chapter: that the story of Morrissey is a story of fandom. When Henry Jenkins discusses Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on heteroglossia in the context of fan-produced mash-up music videos the terms he uses could just as easily be read as a description of the process that I have alluded to above: “In his account, writers, just as readers, are poachers, since their words come not from the dictionary but out of other people’s mouths” (Jenkins 1992, 224). In this context I will attempt to analyse the extent to which the public Morrissey persona is itself a mash-up. Beyond this I will further focus my attention on the constitution of a fan community that continues to adopt and adapt its identity from within this peculiarly individual portmanteau of cultural plunder. As part of this analysis I will contemplate the implications of an audience who have largely grown with Morrissey from teenage disaffection to a middle age in the mainstream. Within this discussion I will look at the expression of views on the large number of online Morrissey fan forums that have effectively taken up the functions that were once served by innumerable fanzines. I will discuss the ways that many members of these forums read meaning into all aspects of Morrissey and his work and attempt to draw conclusions upon the way that some sections of these online communities appear to have taken a line of absolute acceptance of even the most controversial aspects of this construct. In doing so I hope to offer some illustration of the level and nature of devotion of at least a section of Morrissey’s fans. Before beginning any assessment of the way that Morrissey has constructed his work and himself through a process of appropriation it is important to acknowledge the deep heritage that such a process has throughout the history of popular music. Indeed, entire genres such as folk and country music have been built on the traditions of recycling melodies and reusing lyrics. Woody Guthrie’s 1940 classic “This Land is Your Land” for instance borrows heavily from the melody of a much earlier Baptist hymn “Oh, My Loving Brother” which had been recorded by the Carter Family under the title “When the World’s on Fire”. Similarly, the twelve-inch version of Morrissey’s 1990 solo single “November Spawned a Monster” featured, as one of its B-sides, a collaboration with his old Smiths bandmate Andy Rourke entitled “Girl Least Likely To”, the structure of which was lifted almost note for note from the 1963 Cookies song “Only to Other People”. The purpose of mentioning this, rather obscure, Morrissey song is not to suggest that it was an act of plagiarism intended to dupe his audience into thinking it was an entirely original

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composition, but rather that it was a nod to a congregation, so well versed in the gospel according to Morrissey, that they should know it was not. After all, Morrissey has often mentioned his admiration for the 1960s girlgroup scene, more than once mentioning the Cookies by name, and within the mythos of the Smiths the performance of another Cookies track, “I Want a Boy For My Birthday” at the band’s first official gig at the Manchester Ritz in 1982 is well known among the band’s followers. Could Morrissey’s compulsion towards appropriation therefore, simply be an overt example of his need to constantly refine his own persona against those of his heroes? Indeed, when considering this idea, one is reminded of the character in “Cemetry [sic] Gates” who cautions us not to “plagiarize or take on loan” (Morrissey 1986) and left to wonder how his creator squares this with his insistence that the credo “talent borrows, genius steals” be etched in the runout groove of “Bigmouth Strikes Again” in the same year. The answer of course is that while, as we have seen, Morrissey is not unique in employing these methods and techniques, his apparent need to define his persona against those of his heroes has led to an almost constantly updated process of juxtaposition and redefinition.

Found, Found, Found: Morrissey the Bricoleur Claude Lévi-Strauss suggests that: The characteristic feature of mythical thought is that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the task in hand, because it has nothing else at its disposal (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 17).

So it is with Morrissey as bricoleur. While his work is a collage of images, drawn from a seemingly unending range of influences, the diversity of this field of reference is somehow circumscribed by an unshakeable connection to his own, very particular sense of place and time. That these boundaries appear to expand or contract depending on the specific focus within individual works, simply serves to reinforce the impression that Morrissey’s “repertoire” of images and influences at any given moment, constitute an adaptable subset of a fixed whole. Morrissey’s “intellectual bricolage” (Levi-Strauss 1962, 17) is constituted by a mélange of images, that, while on a universal level appear to be unrelated, obey the internal logic of the particular project to which he has subordinated them. These collected groups of images move back and forth along a finite timeline creating temporary montages of meaning that, for the duration of the project constitute, not just the overarching signification of a particular album,

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but the very construction of Morrissey himself. Since the public disclosure of, and fan reaction to these “montages” usually centre around the release, and active periods of albums and singles, it would therefore be most illustrative to focus on some specific examples. Perhaps the clearest visual illustration of Morrissey’s eclectic but ultimately limited frame of reference can be found in the covers of the Smiths’ albums and singles from the release of their debut single “Hand in Glove” in 1983 through to the issue of the live album Rank, a year after the band split in 1988. With the exception of their third single: “What Difference Does it Make”, which, for legal reasons, for a brief pressing featured a photograph of Morrissey replicating, Terence Stamp’s pose from the 1965 film The Collector,2 each of the Smiths’ twenty-five singles3 and seven albums featured cover stars chosen by Morrissey. All but four of these covers used photographs that dated from between 1950 and 1969. Of the remaining four, “Big Mouth Strikes Again” featured a 1948 photograph of James Dean, whose major motion-picture successes were all in the 1950s, and who was the subject of a book that Morrissey published in 1983 and the theme of the promotional video for his first solo single “Suedehead”. “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” starred a 1949 photograph of novelist Truman Capote, who arguably published his most influential works in the 1950s and 60s. “Sheila Take a Bow” used a 1971 still of transgender actress Candy Darling from Andy Warhol’s Women in Revolt, who also appeared in Warhol’s 1968 movie Flesh, a film that provided the cover star for the band’s eponymously titled debut album. The one major exception to the nostalgia for this twenty-year period was the cover of “William, it Was Really Nothing” which used a photograph from a 1982 advert for a speaker company, and it is worth noting that while this is the more common cover image for this single, later pressings replaced it with a 1967 still of Billie Whitelaw4 from the British film Charlie Bubbles. It is also notable that eighteen of these photographs were either stills or promotional shots from films or television series, a fact that seems to underscore Morrissey’s own admission that “most of the way I feel comes from the cinema” (Van Poznack 1984). While it is true that a desire to “move away from the modern and current and towards a safer version of the past” (Robinson 2011, 385) was certainly a feature of much of the popular culture of the 1980s there are few artists for whom LéviStrauss’s description of the bricoleur’s primary impulse being “retrospective” (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 18) fits more precisely than Morrissey. However, when considering Morrissey’s use of bricolage it is important to understand that his frame of reference, while clearly within Lévi-Strauss’s description of a world that is at once heterogeneous and

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limited, cannot be measured purely by his use of visual imagery. In many ways each of his studio albums can be seen or, perhaps even more pertinently, heard as a snapshot of his current level of nostalgia for a remembered, or in many cases reimagined past. It is possible, as Gavin Martin suggested in the NME, to look at Morrissey’s third solo album, Your Arsenal, as the moment in which he exorcized his obsession with: the Ealing comedy and bomb site chic of the ’50s ... the kitchen-sink drama and it-were-all-Dusty-Springfields-round-’ere-when-I-were-a-lad infatuation with the ’60s ... [and] moved his nostalgia-telescope focus forward and lighted on the ’70s (Martin 1992).

This idea was further endorsed by the fact that the album was produced by glam-rock legend Mick Ronson, a man described by perhaps Morrissey’s ultimate musical hero, David Bowie, as the “perfect foil for the Ziggy character” (Bowie in 1994, quoted in Davies 2012). That multiple levels of signification that can be found within many of Morrissey’s recordings is underlined by Ronson playing a guitar riff on “Certain People I Know” that was directly lifted from Bowie’s principal glam rival and fellow Morrissey idol Marc Bolan’s first UK hit record “Ride a White Swan”. The focus on the 1970s was continued rather more controversially in “We’ll Let You Know” and “The National Front Disco” which dealt respectively with themes of football hooliganism and the loss of a son to far-right politics, and sparked a furore in the British music press about Morrissey’s alleged flirtation with extreme nationalist politics and racism. This controversy was exacerbated in Finsbury Park on 8 August 1992 during Morrissey’s ill-fated appearance at the Madness reunion concert, “Madstock”, in which he performed in front of a stage backdrop depicting two skinhead girls, wrapped himself in the union flag and promptly stormed off stage after being pelted with missiles. While we will return later in this chapter to the various controversies that have engulfed Morrissey, and more importantly the way that some members of his fanatically devoted fanbase have responded to them, the real significance in understanding Morrissey as the arch bricoleur here is in his choice of source material. Dick Hebdige uses the work of Levi-Strauss, John Clarke and even the dada and surrealist movements to isolate the significance of the rearticulation of the otherwise mundane object within the context of subcultural style. Within this work he suggests that this collision of object and meaning constitute the production of a sign. In the pages of his seminal 1979 work Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the bricolage of punks, skinheads and glam rockers occupy a great deal of Hebdige’s focus. It is

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interesting to note that at various stages of his career, each of these groups has loomed large within Morrissey’s own “intellectual bricolage”. I am not, of course, seeking to suggest that Morrissey has made a conscious effort to follow a pattern laid down by Hebdige’s work; indeed, there is no evidence to suggest that Morrissey has even read it. There is nevertheless, a clear connection between the way that Hebdige characterizes these spectacular subcultures articulating their own style, and my own reading of the construction of the world of Morrissey. While the “explosive junction” (Ernst 1948 in Hebdige 1979, 106) of the punk bricoleur may have been in the juxtaposition of the safety pin with an image of the Queen, and the skinhead’s in the number of laceholes in his steeltoecapped boots, with Morrissey the detonation occurs when all of this already value-laden symbolism is combined, to form a new montage of meaning. In short, Morrissey’s bricolage is not a moment in which object and meaning become sign, but rather a process through which he creates a collage from the meanings imbued in the acts of bricolage of whatever group or individual he happens to be intellectually engaged with at any given moment in time. Once again, in this process it is possible to see Morrissey the fan as conforming to Jenkins’ description of the textual poacher “transforming ‘borrowed materials’ from mass culture into new texts” (Jenkins 1992, 223). Through this kind of secondary bricolage we can almost see Morrissey living up to the wailing, repeated lyrical claim from the end of “Vicar in a Tutu” that he is himself “a living sign” (Morrissey 1986). There is certainly an element of this idea within the devoted fervour of a fan community who have, for many years pored over every reference and piece of symbolism in the most minute level of detail.

I Keep Mine Hidden: Morrissey Fans and the Search for Meaning In a previous essay that I wrote for the book Morrissey: Fandom, Representations and Identities on the ways that Morrissey has used appropriation in his work, I raised the subject of his use of a character called “Bunnie” in the 1994 song “Now My Heart is Full”: The initial temptation is to assume that Bunnie, alongside Dallow, Spicer, Pinkie and Cubitt has leaked from his subconscious via the pages of the novel, or given his self-professed love of the film (Movieline 1993), perhaps the celluloid of the Brighton Rock (Brooks in Devereux et al. 2011, 265).

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The fact that no such character exists in either book or film has not escaped the attention of the online fan community morrissey-solo.com who have variously offered answers to the mystery in the form of George Rose’s character in the 1957 Lewis Gilbert boxing film, The Good Die Young; Morrissey’s one-time companion Jake Walters; the 1965 Otto Preminger movie Bunny Lake is Missing; and even the owner of the allnight chemist mentioned in the song. In the context of this study the actual identity of “Bunnie” is far less interesting than the way that a detail, as seemingly minor as one mention of an unknown name within a body of work so saturated with diverse imagery, should prompt pages of occasionally heated debate. The discussion over “Bunnie” is certainly not an isolated or unusual incident, indeed it is in many ways entirely characteristic of the kind of macro focus on meaning within every aspect of his work by Morrissey’s fan community. Clearly this level of debate has become more visible with the emergence of online forums such as, but certainly not limited to, morrissey-solo.com. But, even before this period, a glance through the letters pages of the mainstream music press or any of the innumerable Smiths fanzines would reveal a similar level of interest in the hidden codes and oblique meanings within Morrissey’s lyrics, pronouncements and style decisions. It would of course be wrong to suggest that this is a phenomenon unique to Morrissey fans. The elaborate and continued conspiracy theories surrounding the alleged death and replacement of Paul McCartney in the Beatles in the late 1960s is just one example of exactly this kind of obsessive fan interest. However, perhaps the thing that marks out Smiths and Morrissey fandom as being subtly different is the fact that these deconstructing, letter-writing obsessives are simply following a pattern of behaviour that was modelled by the subject of their obsession. The fact that Morrissey himself published two books about the New York Dolls and James Dean in the early 1980s is a testament to his own need to articulate his fandom, while his 1970s, pre-fame letter writing to the NME in praise of Johnny Thunders, Sparks or the general significance of “punktitude” has become so much a part of his, and the magazine’s legend that they reprinted a page full of his missives in celebration of their fortieth anniversary edition. Indeed, not only does Pat Long’s history of the NME feature Morrissey on its cover alongside David Bowie and John Lydon, but he also observes within that “Under the direction of Danny Kelly in the early Nineties, the NME became known colloquially as the New Morrissey Express”. (Long 2012, 190) The devotion of this ever-loyal fan community is a subject of curiosity when deconstructing lyrical allusions and discussing the significance of Morrissey’s use of gladioli on Top of the Pops but a deeper question is raised when, as

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he has periodically done, their hero becomes embroiled in more serious, public controversies. In his article “Fanatics, Apostles and NMEs”, Colin Snowsell has discussed the Morrissey fan response to issues such as the 1990s racism controversy, sparked by a combination of the previously mentioned “Madstock” appearance and a “five-page examination of his lyrics and interviews” (Long 2012, 193) in the NME. Snowsell has suggested that a more militantly fanatical element has emerged within a number of online Morrissey fan forums that has come to consider that “there is no greater idea beyond the individual as the embodiment of the idea ... there cannot be any greater philosophical value than loyalty at all costs” (Snowsell in Devereux et al. 2011, 84). The increasingly controversial nature of Morrissey’s public pronouncements has continued to polarize his fan community and develop the more extreme and blindly loyal faction to which Snowsell refers. In the immediate wake of Anders Breivik’s terrorist atrocities in Norway in July 2011 Morrissey took to the stage for a gig in Warsaw and proclaimed that “We all live in a murderous world, as the events in Norway have shown, with 97 dead. Though that is nothing compared to what happens in McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Sh*t every day” (Morrissey in Willis, 2011). This incident was reported on morrisseysolo.com under the heading “Once again he shoots himself in the foot” and drew a number of critical comments that attempted to either distance themselves as fans from his sentiments or contextualize them by citing his previous statements on animal cruelty. However, the fifth poster to the thread anonymously stated that: The original remarks are classic Morrissey. He’s always been a dangerous and subversive person when he’s been at his best, and all the outrage against him on this site lately just shows that the site’s patrons are a lot of middle-of-the-road, fat, American conservatives who became fans at a late age as some pathetic form of 80’s nostalgia (Anonymous 2011).

Snowsell characterizes this kind of extreme and abusive contribution to the debate as being that of a fanatic and suggests that “[f]anatics serve as a sort of mirror. They are unable to prevent themselves from doing exactly as they imagine their admired would do, or has done” (Snowsell in Devereux et al. 2011, 88) This is of particular relevance when considering fanatics connected to an artist who has a history of producing colourful, if rather disproportionate responses to a perceived slight, such as his insistence, when questioned about Johnny Rogan (author of what was, in reality, a reasonably balanced history of the Smiths) that “I hope, more so, that he dies in a hotel fire” (Deevoy 1992). Perhaps the ultimate visually ironic

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statement on this issue though, came at St George’s Hall, Bradford in June 2011 when Morrissey and his band came onstage wearing t-shirts bearing the legend “FUCK morrissey-solo.com” in protest at the fact that they viewed the site as being too critical. As if to endorse Snowsell’s view that “many fans have reacted to Morrissey not as rational actors, or as apostles, but rather as fanatics” (Snowsell in Devereaux et al. 2011, 86) the Guardian article covering the t-shirt story entitled “Morrissey Wages War on Own Fan Site” featured the views of a poster on the site known as Skylark who insisted that “the fans here are rabid ... in good and bad ways” (Michaels 2011).

Now I am a Was: Looking For Morrissey From the earliest public appearances of the Smiths, Morrissey’s performance has been characterized by the employment of a number of iconic visual props. Perhaps the most consistent among these icons has been the trademark quiff that, while no longer piled as high as in his youth, remains to this day. The classic Morrissey look during the early Smiths period of his career often saw the extreme quiff variously complemented by the addition of ill-fitting blouses, National Health spectacles, flowers, either held in hand or placed in the back pocket of his jeans, and even, rather famously, the adoption of a hearing aid. Indeed, it is in the use of the very visible and outmoded5 hearing aid that Morrissey wore during a 1984 Top of the Pops performance of “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” that we can identify yet another multilayered reference to Morrissey’s commitment to fandom. The origins of Morrissey’s use of the hearing aid are uncertain, but, as Simon Goddard has suggested in his Mozipedia “Morrissey would later account for his use of the prop as being a signal of solidarity to a deaf girl who had written him a fan letter, many commentators note its possible homage to hearing-impaired crooner Johnnie Ray” (Goddard 2009, 162). The existence of conflicting stories explaining the uses of such an unorthodox stage prop are, in many ways more significant as a comment on Morrissey’s complex relationship with both his fans, and fandom itself. That Morrissey should explain to Gary LeBoff in a 1987 Melody Maker interview that the hearing aid was a way that “The Smiths reached out to a certain part of the public who never felt they fit the perfect mould of ‘pop fan’” (LeBoff 1987) adds further weight to the idea of Morrissey’s development of, and his fans association with, the persona of the outsider. There is, perhaps, no better expression of the way that Morrissey’s “rabid” fans have embraced this outsider iconography than the fact that, even though the mature Morrissey is much more

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likely to appear on stage in a well-tailored designer suit sans flora, the audience for such a performance remains heavily composed of flowerwielding imitators of the bard of the bedsit, frozen, with all his 1980s significations intact. It is interesting to note in this context that, for all its continued resonance with fans and his association with the practice, Morrissey himself only used flowers as a stage prop from February 1983 until the end of 1984. Probably the figure most analogous to Morrissey in many ways was, perhaps unsurprisingly, his greatest hero, David Bowie. Goddard has mused that “no gene is more vital to the quintessence of Morrissey than the Jean Genie himself” (Goddard 2009, 43). Indeed, the mere fact that the title of one of his most popular tracks has long been accepted to have been a pun on the name of French novelist, playwright and poet Jean Genet gives us some insight into the similar ways in which the two men have playfully approached and appropriated their heroes. There has clearly been an admiration for Bowie from Morrissey who, as we have previously noted, sought out Mick Ronson to produce Your Arsenal, wrote the foreword for a biography of Bowie producer Tony Visconti, and has covered Bowie’s “Drive-in Saturday” during a number of live performances. It is interesting to note though, that this admiration has not been entirely one way as Bowie himself covered a Morrissey track, “I Know it’s Gonna Happen Someday”, on his 1993 album Black Tie, White Noise and the pair even duetted on a live version of Marc Bolan’s “Cosmic Dancer” in Los Angeles in 1991.6 Hebdige’s assessment that “Bowie’s meta-message was escape—from class, from sex, from personality, from obvious commitment—into a fantasy past” (Hebdige 1979, 61) adds further emphasis to the comparison. While on the face of it, for all his flower-twirling and sporting of odd stage props, Morrissey’s visual image has been far less flamboyant and has certainly not undergone a process of continual reinvention in the same way as Bowie. However the themes and characters in his work have closely followed many of the defining concepts that Hebdige has ascribed to his hero. The idea of escape into a “fantasy past” is a particularly evident theme woven throughout Morrissey’s lyrics and one that has frequently found expression in the aesthetics of his recorded releases and live performance. Throughout his career in the Smiths and his extensive solo work there are countless examples of Morrissey’s mythologizing of an England to which he yearns to return even though it is, in most cases, a nation that is the product of an imagined memory. When the narrator in “The National Front Disco” tells David that “There’s a country, you don’t live there, but some day you would like to” (Morrissey 1992) it is to the cobbled streets of Coronation Street in the

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Weatherfield of Elsie Tanner and Ena Sharples rather than the Salford of his own memory that Morrissey wishes to be transported. This overwhelming desire for a past that never was and will therefore always be is, as noted previously, found in visual terms in the emphasis on the film and television characters of the 1950s and 60s that find themselves peering out, in nostalgic and muted duotones from the covers of Smiths records and the similarly romanticized figures that have been frozen as stage backdrops whenever Morrissey performs live. In conclusion, Bowie’s very visual sexual ambiguity finds its counterpart in the juxtaposition of Morrissey’s high-profile celibacy and the repeated use of overtly sexual imagery in his lyrics. The cry of “A boy in the bush is worth two in the hand”7 and the question of “when we’re in your scholarly room, who will swallow whom?” (Morrissey 1983) in “Handsome Devil” are just two examples of a range of sexually equivocal exhortations that appear almost as readily in Morrissey’s lyrics as his more nostalgic urges. Add to this the steady stream of, almost exclusively male and progressively older, fans who invade the stage at virtually every Morrissey gig with the desire to do no more than briefly embrace their hero, and despite his own celebrated insistence of sexual indifference, there is a homoerotic charge that underpins much of Morrissey’s work. More pertinently though, the fact that Morrissey has seemed entirely comfortable to allow, and even encourage this phenomenon over many years suggests a reciprocal element to their devotion. That this should exist is hardly surprising when we consider the impact that fandom has had on Morrissey. Once again Jenkins’ discussion of the nature of fan culture could almost be read as a blueprint for Morrissey’s career: A fan aesthetic centres on the selection, inflection, juxtaposition and recirculation of ready-made images and discourses. In short, a poached culture requires a conception of aesthetics emphasizing borrowing and recombination as much or more as original creation and artistic innovation (Jenkins 1992, 224).

However, while Jenkins’ discussion is of fans recontextualizing existing imagery to form the basis for the “construction of an alternative cultural community” (Jenkins 1992, 223) Morrissey has, throughout his entire career, used the same techniques to construct himself. As I have attempted to display, he has created collages from the “explosive junction[s]” (Ernst 1948 in Hebdige 1979, 106) that have occurred from the bricolage of the various other subcultural styles that have periodically fascinated him. While this may sound, in some senses like the kind of opportunism that

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Hebdige might suggest would “ultimately lead to the diffusion of the subculture’s subversive power”, (Hebdige 1979, 95), Morrissey does this, not in an attempt at populism, but because, as a fan and a bricoleur, it is his “primary impulse” (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 18). Jenkins talks of fan artists creating “artworks to share with other fan friends” (Jenkins 1992, 279). While of course Morrissey’s work certainly doesn’t transcend profit in the way that Jenkins describes, there is perhaps an element of this at play here. There are few mainstream artists as rooted in this fan aesthetic as Morrissey, who before he found fame wrote and published fan appraisals of his own heroes and regularly contributed to the letters pages of pop magazines, which, along with fanzines were effectively the online forums of their day. It is therefore hardly surprising that his fan communities should develop similarly obsessive fascinations with all aspects of his persona and performance. It is also not entirely surprising that these obsessions should occasionally spill over into fanaticism. After all, as Snowsell suggests, such fanatics simply adopt the behaviour that they expect to see in their heroes. This is magnified by the fact that in this instance we are addressing a hero who has gone as far as integrating the rejection of criticism made by one of his own fan forums into his stage performance in much the same way that a section of his online fans have reacted to anyone daring to question his more controversial pronouncements. Indeed, perhaps such pronouncements are simply another indication that the performance of being Morrissey, with all that being the outsider’s outsider now entails, has circumscribed his public persona such that controversy has become the only legitimate response.

Notes 1. Warner Bros, Elektra, Atlantic. 2. Terence Stamp originally refused permission for the use of the photograph, but when he later gave his consent the original photograph was reinstated for later pressings. 3. This number includes “There is a Light that Never Goes Out” (France and USA only) and “Stop Me if You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before” (Germany, Holland, USA and Japan only). 4. Billie Whitelaw also appears in the promotional video for Morrissey’s second solo single “Everyday is Like Sunday”. 5. Goddard also reports that the hearing aid was actually a non-functioning display model that Morrissey borrowed from a shop in central London. 6. Bowie and Morrissey teamed up again for a 1995 arena tour promoting their respective albums Outside and Southpaw Grammar but this ended

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acrimoniously when Morrissey left the tour accusing Bowie of being more interested in business than music. 7. As well as highlighting Morrissey’s use of sexual ambiguity in his lyrics this may be another example of his use of appropriation as A Boy in the Bush is a 1924 novel by D. H. Lawrence.

References Anonymous. 2011. “Thread: Article: Morrissey: “Norway Attacks Nothing Compared To Actions Of Fast Good Giants”. Morrissey-solo.com, 28 July. Accessed 12 August 2013 http://www.morrissey-solo.com/ threads/116572-Article-Morrissey-Norway-massacre-is-quot-nothingquot-compared-to-the-actions-of-fast-food-chains Cameron, Keith. 2004. “Who’s the Daddy?”, Mojo, May. Accessed 12 August 2013. http://motorcycleaupairboy.com/interviews/2004/mojo0 4.htm Davies, Lucia. 2012. “AnOther’s Lovers: David Bowie and Mick Ronson, UK, 1973 by Mick Rock”, AnOther Magazine, 13 January. Accessed 9 August 2012. http://www.anothermag.com/current/view/1685/David _Bowie_and_Mick_Ronson_UK_1973_by_Mick_Rock Deevoy, Adrian. 1992. “Ooh I Say!”, Q, September. Accessed 12 August 2013. http://motorcycleaupairboy.com/interviews/1992/isay.htm Devereux, Eoin, Aileen Dillane and Martin J. Power (eds.). 2011. Morrissey: Fandom, Representations and Identities. Bristol: Intellect. Goddard, Simon. 2009. Mozipedia: The Encyclopaedia of Morrissey and The Smiths. London: Ebury Press. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. LeBoff, Gary. 1987. “Goodbye Cruel World.” Melody Maker, 26 September. Accessed 12 August 2013 http://foreverill.com/interviews/1987 /goodbye.htm Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. The Savage Mind. Paris: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Long, Pat. 2012. The History of the NME: High Times and Low Lives at the World’s Most Famous Music Magazine. London: Portico. Martin, Gavin. 1992. “Caucasian Rut.” NME, August. Accessed 12 August 2013. http://motorcycleaupairboy.com/interviews/1992/caucasian.htm

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Michaels, Sean. 2011. “Morrissey wages war on own fansite”. Guardian, 29 June. Accessed 12 August 2013 http://www.theguardian.com/music /2011/jun/29/morrissey-wages-war-fansite Morrissey, Steven and Johnny Marr. 1986. “Cemetry Gates”, The Queen is Dead. Rough Trade. Morrissey, Steven and Johnny Marr. 1986. “Vicar in a Tutu”, The Queen is Dead. Rough Trade. Morrissey, Steven. 1992. “The National Front Disco”, Your Arsenal. HMV. Robinson, Lucy. 2011. “‘Sometimes I like to stay in and watch TV …’: Kinnock’s Labour Party and Media Culture”. Twentieth Century British History, 22(3): 354–90. Van Poznack, Elissa. 1984. “Morrissey: The Face Interview”, The Face, July. Accessed 12 August 2013. http://foreverill.com/interviews/1984/ mozface.htm Willis, Amy. 2011. “Morrissey compares fast food to Norway massacre”. The Telegraph, 28 July. Accessed 12 August 2013 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/norway/8667682/Morrisseycompares-fast-food-to-Norway-massacre.html

8. SUBCULTURAL ENTRANCE PRACTICES IN UK PUNK CULTURE, 1976–2001 ALASTAIR GORDON

Introduction This chapter sets out to answer three questions: how do people enter into punk subculture; why do they become involved in punk subculture; and what was their experience of entry? It presents the case that subcultural entrance is primarily a heuristic investigative practice propelling the participant towards an authentically styled knowledge based around the discovery of what is deemed to be authentic punk rock. The chapter pursues such questions through the construction of an explanatory model detailing the social role of music and peer-group relations within punk subculture. Previous research on subcultures since the 1960s has generally avoided questions of subcultural entrance, preferring to treat members either as coherent, readymade individuals or unified blocs. In both cases, qualitative participant expression and accounts of their previous pre-subcultural identity are absent. In the early literature, subculturalists appear magically out of thin air, ready to be dissected, glossed and read through competing theoretical lenses (Cohen 1955; Becker 1963; Cohen 1972; Pearson 1983). Questions of subcultural entrance, if evident at all, are only widely drawn. Specifically the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) neglected discussion of the issue, even though its underlying approach focused on how—and in what ways—young people resisted/amplified their parental culture to “solve problems” within a neo-Marxist, structuralist model of social class, gender and ideology (Hall and Jefferson et al. 1976; Clark 1981; McRobbie 1991). Similarly, the attention given to sartorial style tended to present subculturalists as neatly defined groupings or “homologies” of differential clothing styles to be read semiotically as “bricolage” (Hebdidge 1979). Consequently, the research left questions of subcultural entrance and micro details of ethics and authenticity out of its discussion. The following model is designed to address these absences.

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A partial solution to the oversights of the CCCS has already been offered within the corpus of 1990s post-subcultural research. This approach purposely distanced itself from the over-deterministic accounts of the CCCS, instead embracing conditions of postmodernity and the micro. Methodologically, attention centred on subcultural detail via ethnographic methodology, conversation/discourse analysis, and the revisionist deployment of Bourdieu (Widdicombe and Woofitt 1990, 1995; Thornton 1995; Muggleton 2000; Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2002; Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003; Huq 2006; O’Connor 2008). Much was achieved by this; in particular, the ethnographic detail of various subcultures shone through. However, with the exception of Widdicombe and Woofitt and O’Connor, the issue still remained as to why and how do people enter a subculture. Ethnography provides one answer to this. As a methodology, it first came to the fore in post-subcultural writing once subculturalists with an experiential history of membership/practice began to produce research that offered a closer fit between participant and theory (Cohen 1992; Hodkinson 2002; Fonorow 2006; Milioto-Matsue 2009; Ryan Force 2009; Furness 2012). This current chapter is a case in point, drawing as it does from thirty-five years of my own subcultural experience as a participant and punk musician. The aim, moreover, is to inspire future research on subcultural entrance practices. A rich tapestry of experience awaits documentation and explanation; what follows is intended as an introduction to this area. A final opening point: questions of punk authenticity loom large in the background of this chapter and the model presented below goes some way to driving questions of how authenticity is initially perceived and how moral/ethical compasses are formed by participants. Whilst circling such questions, previous research has not really examined how conceptions of subcultural authenticity are initially encountered and formed by participants (Hebdidge 1979; Widdicombe and Woofitt 1990; Muggleton 1999; Ryan Force 2009; Lewin and Williams 2009).

Method The world has fundamentally changed since my research was conducted between 2000 and 2005 (Gordon 2005). Most of the data I discuss here recalls pre-Internet culture, where information regarding subcultural investigation activities took substantially more effort to acquire. Webblogs, chat rooms, Web 2.0, social networks and sharing MP3 files through torrents and downloads are clear examples of change, though this has also eased the speed with which the punk subculture can spread and

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amalgamate previously difficult connections. Such general ease of access has been a “game changer” in terms of subcultural entrance and has alleviated the previously troubling practice of finding information on subcultural minutiae. That said, while the hypermobility of social communication has advanced social networking, most of what follows still applies to subcultural entrance. The original research was undertaken in 2001 as part of an ethnographic study on “authenticity” within the long-standing DIY punk subcultures of Leeds and Bradford (see McKay 1998; O’Connor 2002a, 2002b, 2003a, 2008). The principal aim of the study was to examine dilemmas of “authenticity” for participants of two subcultural sites. Focus was placed on underground DIY practices such as putting on shows, releasing records and running an anarcho-syndicalist social club, the Bradford 1in12 Club (Gordon 2012). Attention was also concentrated on how subculturalists entered, practised, aged within and exited the subculture. In terms of methodology, I undertook participant observation, focus groups and forty in-depth interviews with people aged 21–43 over a four-month period.1 The explanatory model used here draws analytically from the sociological tradition of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1969; Strauss and Corbin 1990). Rather than gloss participants of the study with previous theoretical explanations (CCCS structuralism, for example), such an approach allows participants a “voice” and engineers from this an effective theoretical model for how young subculturalists enter punk subculture. In my research, I distinguished between different types of subcultural involvement, identifying three “levels”. Firstly, the core—those participants who engage with and perform core daily organizational punk tasks and maintain skills central to the reproduction of the subculture. Secondly, the semi-peripheral—those who regularly attend punk events and have occasional involvement. Finally, peripheral members—those who engage with the subculture at a level of liminality and have little involvement with core and semi-peripheral tasks/activity. Entrance into the punk subculture is then examined in terms of a two-stage model that highlights what I have called “primary” and “secondary” subcultural investigation. As noted above in relation to the CCCS, subculturalists have to heuristically progress to a “knowing” position before they can participate in a subculture: this means that the initial stages of subcultural entrance entail participants finding things out through a process of investigation that is set against a backdrop of resistance to wider social constraints such as age, school and parental regulation. As their involvement in the subculture develops, participants begin to select and form peer

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groupings as well as a sense of differentiation from other social groups. This is combined with deepening subcultural commitment, activity and cultivation of specific subcultural knowledge through experience and the repetition of subcultural activity. Before exploring this process, however, certain questions of contact and subcultural awareness arise.

Punk Subcultural Awareness What kind of person enters punk subculture? When asked how they first became involved with punk, a number of interviewees claimed that they had always been “critical outsiders” in the sense that they had a predisposition towards disenchantment with their life experiences prior to first engaging with punk. Feelings of a prior orientation have been found to be commonplace in previous studies of punk. Fox, for example, revealed similar disenchantment and claims to authentic feelings of rebellion in her ethnographic study of US punk: “Punk didn’t influence me to the way I am much. I was always this way inside. When I came into punk, it was what I needed all my life. I could finally be myself” (Fox 1986, in Adler and Adler 1993, 378). Similar sentiments were expressed by my interviewees. Anth was clear on the issue: “regardless of punk I always knew things were a bit shit anyway.” Paula reflected upon her reservations of mainstream culture: “I already had alternative ideas, I guess, to the mainstream and on how people should run their lives and treat other people: punk opened me up to a whole other world”. One of the younger interviewees, Ewan, summed up his feelings of difference thus: “I’ve always had the feeling that stuff wasn’t quite right but punk gave me the information”. Another of the younger interviewees, Sheep, talked of his alternative pre-punk sensibilities: “before I came into contact with the DIY-hardcore-punk-rock movement, I would have thought of myself as a bit more conscientious than the average Joe Bloggs because I was into recycling”. Finally, Kathy claimed a rugged individualism: “punk hasn’t altered me because I kind of thought that way for the past ten years anyway.” These accounts have similarities with those found by Andes (1991), whose punk ethnography concluded that “almost all the informants consistently perceived themselves as being ‘different’ from those in their reference group: ‘normal others’, i.e. their peers, parents and mainstream society in general” (1998, 221). The studies of Fox and Andes do not locate such utterances within the realm of claims towards subcultural “authenticity”, focusing instead upon the life-transforming capacities of the subculture. What is important here, however, is how all of these interviewees describe themselves as always

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feeling this way, depicting a sensibility of difference that is “predisposed” to punk entrance. These subculturalists make rhetorical claims for the existence of innate/essentialist capacities for rebellion: they are “authentic” rebels. Punk is recognized by them as a potential conduit for investigation, expression and articulation of feelings of difference. Apart from this sense of difference, what other factors led interviewees to become aware of and enter into the punk subculture? One factor seemed to be the general punk “aesthetic”—the subcultural framework of social critique and its alienated commentary. This acted as a magnet for young people experiencing feelings of difference and disenchantment and was actively sought out by the interviewees. A number of them reported feelings of loneliness and peer isolation. Respondents remembered experiencing such feelings at school. Jim stated he was “on me own for a few years”, citing a lack of contact with punk peers. Anth personally reflected that “I have always been a bit of a loner”, whilst Helen commented on the fact that she “didn’t really gel with people at school.” Such feelings led the young subcultural entrant to search out a subculture in which they can share these emotions. Their sense of difference is affirmed within a community of outsiders. Nick referred to the punk subculture as a “mixed bag of freaks”. Personal factors, then, offer one possible catalyst for punk subcultural entrance: an attractive grouping of rebellious peers with similar sensibilities provides affinity in a collective sense of difference. However, it would be naïve to suggest that my interviewees’ sense of loneliness and isolation were solely responsible for punk subcultural entrance. It fails to explain how other subcultures are, or are not, entered by those who do not share such disenchantment and isolation. What unites these accounts is a sense of difference from what is considered mainstream or “normal” culture, but it does not always follow that the potential entrant enters a subculture through feelings of loneliness and isolation. In one of my interviews, initial entrance to punk was articulated through a need to adopt a new “hip” form of rebellion (see Thornton 1995). Sheep discussed his entrance to the punk subculture as a process of jettisoning his pseudo-rebellious peers, which established his role as an original, “authentic” trendsetter with a new involvement in hardcore punk. Rather than complaining about loneliness and lack of acceptance, Sheep described his full inclusion by his peer group as a catalyst for entrance into the punk subculture. Sheep claimed that he had introduced a “rebellious attitude” to his peer group. However, once his peers adopted this too it rendered him “inauthentic” as it was an attitude that was now too popular! Sheep then advanced his existing status as a “trendsetter” by becoming a

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more “authentic” subcultural member through heuristic examination of contextually relevant, obscure punk. This marked him out as different and more “authentic” than his school-peer groupings: I liked being a rebel at school. I was always trying to be the first to do everything. I was the first to grow my hair long, first to dye it, to get sent home from school for having scraggy jeans. It got to the point where suddenly loads of people would do it and, wanting to be a cool trendsetter at the time, I was like I have to get into something different! I was like right, what’s cool? OK, I’m going to be a skater and listen to hardcore.

It is clear that loneliness and isolation were not motivating factors in Sheep’s entry into punk subculture. He established outsider status and a sense of difference as “hip” practice to gain acceptance and esteem from his peers, while simultaneously establishing “cool” distance from them. As his initial rebellious example becomes “hip” amongst peers, Sheep’s authenticity was deemed to have been undermined and “sold out”: his rebellious “trendsetting” status was negated and he sought new subcultural entrance strategies. These sentiments collide with the rhetorical position of the lonely, isolated outsider as the primary factor for entrance into punk rock. Here Sheep establishes critical distance from his peers by striving for a deeper, more “authentic” subcultural identity. Entering punk subcultural groupings rests on a fulcrum of disenchantment with the establishment: a feeling of being at odds with one’s peers, wishing “cool” distance from them, or with society in general: in short, a sense of difference. Where loneliness is produced by such feelings it has the immanent potential to propel the subculturalist to seek out similar peers. But the opposite of loneliness, peer celebration, may also provide the conditioning ground for punk. In a sort of heroic individualism, Sheep set out to examine punk by investigation of existing underground punk culture. This practice rested on assumptions of rebellion against established authority, but was also rebelling against a subculture he deemed to have become “inauthentic” through popular subscription. A sense of rebellion against social conformity can therefore be directed outwards, to false standards or forms of sociality, or inwards, to “fake punks”. Having established that antecedent conditions of subcultural entrance are centred on a pre-established sense of either disenchantment, loneliness, isolation, individualism or some combination of these, so constituting the central theme of difference, I now explore how subcultural entrants first encountered the punk subculture. Pressing questions thus arise: how is the initial investigation of the subculture carried out in ways that allow the actor to progress towards becoming a full participant? What are the

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initiating factors that introduce the subculture to the potential participant and vice versa?

Primary Investigation Early teenage experiences of contact with punk subcultures are vital to subsequent subcultural membership. The participant entering a subculture with feelings of difference (whether popular with or isolated from peers) is inhibited by age, experience and legal restrictions from full subcultural participation. It is important not to denigrate early subcultural participation during this period as trivial or, indeed, “inauthentic”. Indeed, these experiences are central to what I have termed “primary investigation”. Most interviewees reported “primary investigation” of punk in their early teens, an age that has been documented in previous studies (Andes 1991, 216; Leblanc 2001, 69–76). There are three key points of primary investigation into punk subcultural entrance: media interaction, introduction to the punk subculture through peer and family groupings, early concert attendance. Primary investigation offers great excitement, yet it can also involve occasional distress in terms of resistance from significant others (e.g. immediate peers) and conflict with established structures of authority such as teachers, parents and siblings (see Leblanc 2001, 1–5). Media coverage of punk culture up to 2001 provided inspirational and influential entrance catalysts for most of my interviewees. In a previous study by Leblanc (2001, 70), she reports that one of her interviewees was exposed to punk aged six, seeing the Californian band Fear play on The Saturday Night Live Show in 1984: her informant’s parental response was “you’d better not get into that shit!” (2001, 70). Entrance to the subculture was eventually made at the age of fourteen. My interviewees expressed similar memories of punk media coverage. Older interviewee, Sned, stated he came across punk by reading a Sex Pistols article in the Sounds music paper on scout camp in 1977. Pete saw television reports of the Sex Pistols on the BBC programme Nationwide in the same year, leading him to buy the band’s records. Protag’s first contact came through the BBC Radio 1 John Peel Show in 1977, which played the Ramones and the Damned. Younger participants, Jim and DL, cited 1980s UK heavy-rock magazines Kerrang and Mega-Metal Kerrang. Special features covering underground hardcore bands offered impetus to investigate the subculture further. Jim comments: I got into hardcore specifically around the age of eleven through looking through metal magazines and seeing the interviews with hardcore bands and from there going and picking up these records and checking them out.

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Identified here is the practice of primary investigation in terms of age and engagement with punk articles in metal magazines. The fleeting glimpses of obscure bands covered there led to Jim’s further investigation and association with a peer group with matching subcultural identity. Ewan stated that the twilight heavy-metal ITV programme, Noisy Mothers, introduced him to punk in the early 1990s. Through involvement in skateboarding and the primary investigation of buying records, Nick “gradually” became immersed in the punk subculture (see Borden 2001). The skateboard magazine Thrasher made Nick aware of obscure US hardcore bands during this time: I used to read the American magazine Thrasher, which at the time was a newsprint sort of magazine. I mean the print run was not so great but it used to make its way across to the UK and in that magazine there was not only skateboarding but there was a music column with interviews with hardcore punk bands. The guy who wrote it, Pushead, [aka] Brian Schroeder had a great influence on me and was responsible for getting me into all kinds of different hardcore punk bands.

One particularly common theme of entrance into the punk subculture was tape trading (see Marshall 2003). Tape trading allowed established subculturalists to share tastes and knowledge of punk genres with lesser or equally established peers. Tape trading also allows primary investigative members to evaluate and choose the saliency of taped music at little initial cost. It was peer tape trading that inspired interviewee Stick to engage more with punk. He found initial experiences of punk uninspiring in 1977, stating that “I got off to a false start with the seventy-seven sort of stuff”. Finding the heavy-metal genre of the time much more interesting, initial impressions of punk were that it was an unappealing “violent fashion”. Five years later his engagement with punk began in earnest. This example demonstrates that subcultures are not always immediately subscribed to. Through primary investigation they are returned to once other potential genres are eliminated. Stick eventually listened to punk after trading a tape of a band that affirmed his political ideas of the time. The tape contained Venom’s 1982 album Black Metal and London-based anarcho-punk band Conflict’s It’s Time to See Who’s Who (1983). From these tapes he began to form political opinions: “When I first got the tape I was like yeah, two noisy bands. Then after a bit it was like, shit, one of them is talking crap and one of them is talking politics. I got into the politics.” The assertion of political preferences towards Conflict cemented Stick’s choice (see Glasper 2006, 104–20).



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Speaking of experiences in the 1990s, Ewan echoed similar sentiments to Stick. Becoming aware of metal, he made tapes in 1995 of the deathmetal band Obituary and traded these with an older peer who reciprocated with tapes of Discharge, Napalm Death and American hardcore bands such as Suicidal Tendencies and NOFX. Primary investigation of this tape led to discovery of new punk and hardcore music (for a full account of death metal, see Moynihan, 1998; for hardcore, see Blush 2010). This was a vast improvement on his early ideas of punk established from television clips of the Sex Pistols. He also found that the lyrical content chimed with his existing political beliefs. He explained: “Punk’s definitely got me more into politics and awareness of issues. I always had some kind of feeling that stuff wasn’t right but punk kind of gave me the information.” To portray media coverage of punk subcultures and tape trading as the sole factor in subcultural entrance would ignore the wider context of social peer relations, which is of key importance. Most of my interviewees spoke of peer, sibling and parental relations. From his initial interest in punk, drawn from Thrasher, Nick established peer relationships aimed towards punk inclusion. He was lucky to find another person at his school interested in hardcore (identifiable by the records carried in their school bag): I was in a corridor outside a geography lesson and a guy had a bag full of records. There was the Stupids LP and the Adrenaline OD LP, the Dagnasty LP. I went up to him, as you do in small town—you think you have to reach out cause you’re in the middle of fucking nowhere like. I got talking to him and got loads of tapes.

Through recognition of punk records and a sense of peer isolation, Nick was propelled to make direct contact with a potential peer—from which blossomed a friendship. Once such peer relations are established, mutual primary investigation can occur. Neil reported encountering punk through friend’s tales of accompanying his elder brothers to early 1980s punk gigs. Whilst the brothers participated in the heavy-metal subculture, his friends’ punk activities appealed to his sense of difference. Neil recalled his early experiences of hearing punk records in his bedroom with his friend: “We used to borrow and buy records, get drunk, put them on and throw each other round the room dancing to them. Some of the favourites were like Crucifix, Antisect and the Subhumans.” Here Neil and his friend are rehearsing subcultural activities (Lincoln, in Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2002). Though unable to attend concerts at this point, the reciprocal engagement with punk records and peers proved central to their primary subcultural investigation.

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Primary investigation through peer interaction was also demonstrated by Anth. He encountered punk around 1983, aged thirteen. Like Neil, Anth, heard the first Chron Gen LP, Chronic Generation (1982), in a friend’s bedroom (for an account of street punk, see Glasper 2004, Marshall 2001, 67–85). The impact of this record was bolstered by its cover art: “It was just fucking pink and yellow and it was Day-Glo as fuck and it was punk rock. It was out there.” Anth makes excited claims towards the authenticity of punk rock: identification with the Day-Glo aesthetic of punk rock marks out boundaries of what is, and is not, punk. Having been used on the Sex Pistols LP, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (1977), Day-Glo for Anth was deemed an “authentic” marker of “genuine” punk rock. For Anth, the Day-Glo signifier authenticated bands and signified to peers that he was “into” the “correct” music suitable for further inclusion in his punk peer group. The introduction of music by peers, siblings and friends was a central component of primary investigation. Parents have thus far been portrayed as conventional “gatekeepers” who restrict subcultural membership. In some cases, however, there is parental support for subcultural entrance (see O’Connor 2008 on this issue). Jimmy’s introduction to punk was through his mother: raised by his grandparents, his primary investigation was activated by music his mother played him when visiting. He found this music did not chime with his sense of taste in punk music: I got into sort of alternative stuff like the bigger bands, like Nirvana and bands like the Sex Pistols ’cause my Mum tried to play me good stuff. I said to her I really like it but I want something that’s faster. It sounds right but it needs to be twice as fast.

The reverse of parental restriction towards subcultural involvement is the case here. Jimmy acknowledged the value of the bands mentioned, yet equally demonstrated a need to investigate in order to distinguish his personal taste within the subculture. The examples of punk from his mother were only partially compatible with existing taste. What he cleaved to himself was a desire for music with greater speed. Similarly, Kathy came from a Bradford family of social workers, stating both parents “shaped her ideas on life”. Kathy’s primary investigation during the 1990s was non-specifically described as “kind of indie music and alternative grungy stuff”, which she found lacking. However, Kathy abandoned these genres once she made contact with peers who were members of the punk subculture. Primary investigation, therefore, has a central role in either affirmation or rejection of encountered tastes; it is a trial-and-error process.

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Non-musical yet related forms of subcultural activity, such as skateboarding, were also reported by the interviewees as a means where peer formation and tape trading could occur. Sheep became involved in skateboarding as a next step in his subcultural participation, reinforcing his trendsetter status at school. He connected with two older school skateboarding peers and was introduced to hardcore punk, stating that first contact with hardcore during this period was “life changing” and bolstered though tape trading. He was given a tape by a skating peer containing contemporary American hardcore bands such as the New York straightedge band, Snapcase. Further primary investigation of the genre then took place. Concert attendance also figures prominently in accounts of primary investigation. Sned commented in 1977 that he was too young to attend punk concerts, yet primary subcultural investigation of the subculture within his school peer groups occurred before he could finally attend a concert: The Damned played. I think The Stranglers, X Ray Spex was the first punk gig. The Stranglers gig was mid seventy-seven and the Damned and the Dead Boys played the end of seventy-seven. Some of the kids in our school a year above me went and punk was coming through on a school level. And then my first outing was the Buzzcocks and Penetration in March 1978 when I was just this little geek.

For Sned, primary investigation was practised through mutual peer relations and by vicariously observing the punk activities of his older peers. The account of his “first outing” belies Sned’s sense of this being a primary investigation of the subculture, while referral to himself as “this little geek” denigrates his initial commitment to punk—and peripheral status within punk—in favour of his fully fledged status at the time of interview. Primary subcultural activity is important principally within the world of the subcultural peer group and in the initial practice of rebellion. It is marginal within older and more established subcultural practices of concert attendance and within more core forms of subcultural activities. Within the subculture and its practice, the primary investigator is relegated to the role of a peripheral member; a relative bystander who, by showing persistence and commitment in searching for “authenticity” in punk practice, may overcome and move beyond such marginality. They move towards a flexible position of liminality with respect to subcultural participation and identity. To proceed towards advanced subcultural knowledge of the subculture, peripheral subculturalists enter what I have termed “secondary investigation”.

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Secondary Investigation “Secondary investigation” is the deeper, practical investigation of subcultural activity and the amassing of subcultural knowledge through identification, reciprocation and interaction with more experienced and capable peers. This is undertaken by a deeper exploration of examples encountered in primary investigation. The majority of participants who spoke of their deepening subcultural involvement did so at an age where they had either left school and could attend concerts. Existing peer networks formed through primary investigation were expanded and strengthened during this second stage. They were established through intensive repetition until “authentic” participation was approached, though not fully achieved. From this, a sense of affirmation was felt; shared ways of thinking were embarked upon and social networks were formed. Secondary investigation is key in the formation of subcultural knowledge; it is both heuristic and explorative. The practice of secondary investigation still marks the entrant as existing at either the peripheral or semi-peripheral levels of subcultural involvement. This is not to say that there is no possibility of full or “core” participation. Indeed, secondary investigation confirms the movement from periphery to liminality, as the individual is poised on the cusp of complete subcultural participation and practice. In secondary investigation, the gradual accumulation of subcultural knowledge takes place. Jimmy provides a clear example of how, in the absence of more experienced peers, secondary investigation takes place: We weren’t told that the Dead Kennedys were a classic band. We were like: where do we start? Oh right well I went to see this band and this band supported and they are playing again and we should check ’em out and do it from scratch ourselves. Every time we found a band that was amazing we were like, what label are they on? Follow that up, check out the other bands on that label.

From this practice, the vernacular skills used to participate in punk are deployed to become knowledgeable of its subgenres produced through repetitive engagement and cultivated through a trial-and-error process. In Jimmy’s case, finding out what the “classic bands were” was explorative and achieved through the subjective peer process of ascertaining what is good and bad music within the subculture. This level of investigation involves refining one’s tastes to a distinct genre of punk. Once selected, exploration of the specifics of that given genre can occur. This practice was carried out by Jim in his search for an appropriate peer group who listened to American hardcore during the mid-1980s

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(Blush 2001, Anderson and Jenkins 2001). He found himself associating with “the metal kids” for company, although the dominance of the metal genre within his peer group and the obscurity of hardcore punk left him with an “outsider” status amongst his peers and his isolation intact (see Arnett 1996; Walser 1993; Weinstein 1991, 2000). This led Jim to continue secondary investigation, resulting in the subsequent discovery of, and his eventual identification with, the subgenre of straightedge. He did not appreciate the drinking and hedonism of his peers, and found that the adoption of straightedge allowed him to “resist peer pressure to drink” (see for an account of straightedge, Lahickey 1997; Anderson and Jenkins 2001; Wood 2006; Haenfler 2008; Kuhn 2010). His secondary investigation resulted in the formation of a peer group with straightedge beliefs. These experiences deepened his commitment to the subculture providing a sense of “brotherhood”: It was a nice little clique and there were not that many straightedge kids about so you had a feeling of brotherhood. I mean if you saw some kids into the straightedge you understood each other and had a link.

Jim demonstrates the issues that subcultural investigation can present. Through trial and error, secondary investigation continued until an “authentic” and personally suitable punk subcultural grouping was identified. Affiliation with a group of outsiders, initially to the existing punk scene of the late 1980s and to punk activities couched in hedonism, provided a sense of unity and allowed Jim to show affinity with a group marginalized within the punk subculture. This deepened both his sense of affiliation and his particular commitment to the punk subculture. Thus far, within secondary investigation, peer pressure has remained unexamined. In the previous section on primary investigation, Sheep described himself an “authentic” trend-setter. In secondary investigation this changed dramatically. Once immersed in the hardcore punk subculture, Sheep found his peer group through secondary subcultural investigation into the niche genre of straightedge. However, where Jim clearly articulated the conscious decision to resist peer pressure and become straightedge, for Sheep the opposite was true: his role was reversed in that he was no longer a trendsetter but a follower! He became the person he chastised for following his rebellious examples at school! Sheep’s secondary investigation of straightedge derived from peer pressure to conform to a set of beliefs, even though he had little knowledge of what these meant. Of all the interviewees, Sheep was clearest in relation to the peer pressure felt during his early years to participate in the hardcore scene. Issues of authenticity become striking here as he makes a distinction be-

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tween being an “inauthentic” participant of straightedge and attempting to be an “authentic” participant. Becoming straightedge at sixteen, Sheep discusses how this decision was a result of peer pressure and fear of being identified as “inauthentic” by a more experienced straightedge peer: My decision to be straightedge harks back to a conscientious fashion decision back in the day. I remember going to see a band and they were all x’ing up and stuff and I x’ed up to be part of the crew. And they are “oh, so you’re straight edge then?” And I’m like yeah okay, I’m straightedge and then I found out what it meant and I was like: okay I’m gonna be straightedge for a year just to prove I’m not addicted. I was like doing it purely for fashion, to be part of the crowd, to belong. Six years later I still don’t feel the need to drink or whatever.

The clear suggestion here is that the process of subcultural membership is learnt—“then I kind of like found out what it [straightedge] meant”. Taste is not governed solely by the individual’s preference at the point of secondary investigation. For Sheep, the admission that he did not fully understand the implications of what was involved with straightedge and his admission of succumbing to peer pressure and the need to “fit in” meant that he merely assumed this role until he could participate long enough to investigate straightedge practice more fully. The question by his peers, “oh, so you’re straightedge then?”, also reveals either that there is some affinity being expressed between peers or, at the same time, that there is some “doubt” on the part of the questioner. The affirmative response from Sheep reveals his fear of being seen as “inauthentic” and this leads to further, secondary subcultural investigation. This is where the peer pressures for “authenticity” are revealed. Sheep’s example demonstrates that the central point of secondary investigation of the subculture is governed by both peer pressure and “bluffing” around questions of identity and taste. As Jimmy stated above, “no one told us the Dead Kennedys were a classic band.” Similarly, no one told Jim or Sheep what straightedge was; they had to find out through secondary investigation. Once the subculture is investigated and explored heuristically, detailing how the shared subcultural values, rules and norms operate, a deeper form of authentic participation and commitment can occur. Overall, the subcultural peer group is sought out and established through secondary investigation. Peer pressure is either refuted or withheld as a practice of gaining entrance credentials. What runs alongside this entrance practice is a deepening of commitment through the meaningful reiteration and intensification of subcultural activities. The question arises:

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what shape and form does this deepening of commitment take in secondary subcultural investigation? One salient demonstration of subcultural commitment was vegetarianism. A striking similarity between my interviewees was that all of them were, or had at some time been, either vegetarian or vegan. Sned, Neil, Protag, Anth, Ewan, Stick and Nick were explicit in stating the main influence for their change in diet was the discovery of anarcho-punk in their teenage years, with its heavy emphasis on animal-rights politics (see Gordon 1995, 2012; Glasper 2006, Berger 2006). Neil became involved in the Hunt Saboteurs alongside Cathy and Rita. For Anth, “if it wasn’t anarcho it wasn’t good”. Anth became a vegetarian and later, through secondary investigation, became active with other punks in forming a Hunt Saboteurs cell. Nick was explicit about how his involvement was both a combination of the need to impress his girlfriend at the time, and a product of his investigation of anarcho-punk: She was a vegetarian and we went to Birmingham to buy records and stuff. I bought a Ripcord record, Defiance of Power, and there’s an antiMcDonald’s song on it. There we were stood outside McDonald’s and I’m chomping on a burger and she’s vegetarian. I suppose it’s the sort of thing where you want to impress your girlfriend; you want to do the right thing. So then like, I was going to be a vegetarian. I ended up doing it and sticking with it.

Nick shows how his level of commitment was the result of a combination of peer pressure and the political statements of the genres of punk he was investigating. For my interviewees, such levels of commitment were equally extended to other activities within their chosen punk subculture. Sned wrote a fanzine and copied tapes for friends before joining his first band in 1984. Danbert Nobacon took inspiration from Crass, who demonstrated the ease by which goals could be achieved in punk rock though DIY and took early steps towards forming Chumbawamba. Pete became involved in the promotion of gigs for the 1in12 club in Bradford. All the interviewees spoke of regular attendance at punk concerts during the later stages of their subcultural entrance. In contrast to primary investigation, the short list of secondary investigative activities detailed here demonstrates their deepening of levels of commitment to the punk subculture. “Authenticity” was an implicit theme in the interviewees’ talk of commitment to a given subgenre of punk. The majority of the interviewees chose anarcho-punk as an “authentic”, “ethical” version of punk. To be committed to a specific genre of punk and form opinions of what is and is not punk was both an index of a commitment to the subculture and a badge

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of authenticity and separation. Sned demonstrated that some of his punk subcultural peers “just didn’t get it”. For Sned, their interpretation of punk was “inauthentic”. Here he voices opinions on the rise of 1980s street punk: It occurred everywhere, it was stupid, especially the press, Garry Bushell and Sounds and Punk Lives with the fucking “punk prime-minister” or whatever. I mean there are probably equivalents of that now in some sort of cheesy pop paper. You know it was laughable. We used to laugh our asses off at the Exploited. I should show you my copy of Punk’s Not Dead where it has these crazy drawings taking the piss out of these fucking goons. So yeah, I wasn’t really down with unity ’cause there was like punks who got it and fucking punks who didn’t.

This quote reveals that in secondary subcultural investigation, alongside a deepening commitment to a subculture, an opinion is formed regarding what is deemed to be “authentic” punk rock. For the interviewees of this study, secondary investigation involved an affinity towards what was considered an “authentic” version of punk rock and the active demonstration of a commitment to it. As secondary investigation progresses, so too do claims to “authenticity”, which become sediment in discourses of “punk authenticity”. It follows, therefore, that as punk culture is entered, dilemmas around “authenticity” will arise. As knowledge and experience of punk subculture progresses, so too do sensibilities that subsequently police the boundaries of punk rock. This model serves the principal explanatory purpose of explaining how, and in what ways, subcultural senses of authenticity are arrived at and constructed through the experiences of entrance to punk culture.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated entrance practices to punk subculture and counters previous CCCS and post-subcultural research accounts. Overall, I have characterized punk subcultural entrance as a gradual, deepening, investigative journey for the young subculturalist. The focus of this chapter has been on semi-peripheral and peripheral subcultural participants as opposed to core, because core practices occur once a subculturalist becomes fully immersed and familiar with punk culture. All of my interviewees proceeded to core status later in their lives going on to run record labels, book concerts, tours, play and drive bands, run record shops, distribute records or run clubs such as the 1in12 Club (see Gordon 2012, for a fuller account of the pitfalls of core subcultural membership). Only by building on the experiences and peer networks tentatively described above

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could they have proceeded to make these contributions to the punk subculture. Entrance into the punk subculture is also a cultural activity that involves the formation of peer identification, parental support or hostility, interaction and reciprocal network support that allows the participant to strive towards full, “authentic” participation in the punk subculture. All the interviewees described the learning process involved before some form of “authentic” participation could be recognized by their peers. As I noted in my introduction, the advent of digital culture brought with it an ease for subcultural investigation. Today there is much more valuable historical and current information on subcultures available instantaneously through digital means. Nevertheless, the essential excitement and effort I have described here still applies, though the depth and scope of the available subcultural knowledge has fundamentally increased with a bewildering array of information easily at hand. This change does not, however, mean that peer pressure, parental restriction and choosing the right information in order to present oneself as “authentic” no longer applies. That said, there is much work to be done to examine contemporary subcultural entrance practices that can build on the research outlined above.

Note 1. Some interviewee names used below are genuine and used with permission, others are pseudonyms.

References Andersen, Mark and Mark Jenkins. 2001. Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital. New York: Soft Skull Press. Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. 1996. Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation. Boulder: Westview Press. Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Bennett, Andy and Keith Kahn-Harris, eds. 2004. After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bennett, Andy. 2006. “Punk’s not Dead: The Continuing Significance of Punk Rock for an Older Generation of Fans”. Sociology April 2006, 40(2): 219–35. Berger, George. 2006. The Story of Crass. London: Omnibus Press.

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Blush, Steven. 2001. American Hardcore: A Tribal History. New York: Feral House. Borden, Iain. 2001. Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body. Oxford: Berg. Clarke, Gary. 1990 (1981). “Defending Ski-Jumpers: A Critique of Theories of Youth Subcultures”, in On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 68–80. London: Routledge. Cohen, Albert. 1955. Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Cohen, Stanley. 1980. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Oxford: Martin Robertson & Co. —. 1991. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon. Epstein, Jonathon S., ed. 1998. Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World. Oxford: Blackwell. Fonarow, Wendy. 2006. Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Fox, Kathryn J. 1987. “Real Punks and Pretenders: The Social Organisation of a Counterculture”. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 16(3): 344–70. Glaser, Barney and Anselm Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago: Aldine Press. Glasper, Ian. 2004. Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980–1984. London: Cherry Red Books. —. 2006. The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980– 1984. London: Cherry Red Books. Gordon, Alastair. 1995. Throwing the Punk Rock Baby Out With the Dirty Bathwater: Crass and Punk Rock, A Critical Appraisal. Nottingham: Do One Press. —. 2005. The Authentic Punk: An Ethnography of DiY Music Ethics. (Unpublished PhD thesis, Loughborough University). —. 2012. “Building Studios Whilst Rome Burns”, in Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower, edited by Zack Furness. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions. Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson. 1976. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Unwin Hyman. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge.

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Haenfler, Ross. 2007. Straight Edge: Clean Living Youth, Hardcore Punk and Social Change. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hodkinson, Paul. 2002. Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture. Oxford: Berg. Huq, Rupa. 2006. Beyond Subculture: Pop Youth and Identity in a Postcolonial World. London: Routledge. Kuhn, Gabriel, ed. 2010. Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and Radical Politics. Oakland: PM Press. Lahickey, Beth. 1997. All Ages: Reflections on Straight Edge. California: Revelation Books. Leblanc, Lauraine. 1999. Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Lewin, Philip and J. Patrick Williams, 2009. “The Ideology and Practice of Authenticity in Punk Subculture.” In Authenticity in Culture, Self and Society, edited by Philip Vanini and J. Patrick Williams , 65–86. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lincoln, Sian. 2004. “Teenage Girls’ ‘Bedroom Culture’ Codes versus Zones”, in After Subculture Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, edited by Andy Bennett and Keith Kahn-Harris, 94–106. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Marshall, Lee. 2003. “For and Against the Record Industry: An Introduction to Bootleg Collectors and Tape Traders”. Popular Music 21(1): 57–72. McRobbie, Angela. 1991. Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen. London: Macmillan. Milioto Matsue, Jennifer. 2009. Making Music in Japan’s Underground: The Tokyo Hardcore Scene. London: Routledge. McKay, George, ed. 1988. DiY Culture: Part & Protest in Nineties Britain. London: Verso. Moynihan, Michael and Didrik Søderlind. 1998. Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground. Los Angeles: Feral House. Muggleton, David. 2000. Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford: Berg. Muggleton, David and Rupert Weinzierl, eds. 2003. The Post Subcultures Reader. Oxford: Berg. O’Connor, Alan. 2002a. Who’s Emma: Autonomous Zone and Social Anarchism. Toronto: Confused Editions.

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O’Connor, Alan. 2002b. “Local Scenes and Dangerous Crossroads: Punk and Theories of Cultural Hybridity”. Popular Music, 21(2): 225–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2003a. “Anarcho-Punk: Local Scenes and International Networks”, Journal of Anarchist Studies, 11(2): 111–21. —. 2008. Punk Record Labels and the Struggle for Autonomy: The Emergence of DiY. Maryland: Lexington Books. Pearson, Geoffrey. 1983. Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears. London: Macmillan. Ryan Force, William. 2009. “Consumption, Styles and the Fluid Complexity of Punk Authenticity”. Symbolic Interaction, 32(4): 289–309. Strauss, Anselm and Corbin, Juliet. 1990. Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory, Procedures and Techniques. London: Sage Publications. Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. London: Polity. Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover: University Press of New England. Weinstein, Deena. 1991. Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Lexington Books. —. 2000. Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture. Boulder, Colorado: Da Capo Press. Widdicombe, S. and R. Wooffitt. 1990. “Being Versus ‘Doing’ Punk: On Achieving Authenticity as a Member”, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 9(4): 257–77. Widdicombe, Sue. Wooffitt, Robin. 1995. The Language of Youth Subcultures: Social Identity in Action. London: Harvester, Wheatsheaf. Wood, Robert T. 2006. Straight Edge: Complexity and Contradictions of a Subculture. New York: Syracuse University Press.

9. STARING AT THE RUDEBOYS: THE REPRESENTATION OF YOUTH SUBCULTURES IN GAUTAM MALKANI’S LONDONSTANI AND JOHN KING’S SKINHEADS NICK BENTLEY

Whilst there has been much work done on the way in which subcultures have been represented in the media, through semiotic display, and in other cultural forms such as musical expression, fashion, artwork and fanzines, there has been very little work done on the way in which subcultures have been articulated in narrative fiction. This is somewhat surprising given the fact that the subcultural novel has been an attendant form of expression mapping the rise of classic subcultures in the latter half of the twentieth century. From the 1950s, for example, we might identify Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar, which to varying degrees offer fictional examinations of identifiable youth subcultures such as the Teddy boys, jazz fans and the emergent mod scene. Richard Allen’s series of pulp novels in the 1970s looked at skinhead, suedehead and punk culture (1970; 1971; 1972), whilst several novels associated with more serious literary fiction such as Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia, and Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club have all included characters who are immersed in varying kinds of youth subcultures. Many other writers have addressed subcultural identity through fiction over the last sixty years or so such as Martin Amis (1973), Iain Banks (1987), Nicholas Blincoe (1995), Nik Cohn (1967), Toby Litt (1997), Bill Naughton (1966), Zadie Smith (2000; 2005), Alan Warner (1995), and Irvine Welsh (1993; 2012).1 However, the analysis of subcultural fiction seems to have fallen between academic disciplines. Cultural-studies and sociological approaches have, perhaps naturally, tended to focus on media representation, semiotic display, ethnography and the related interpretation of the cultural and ideological meaning of

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subcultures.2 Literary studies, on the other hand, has not really identified subcultural literature as a distinct form of literary analysis, although there has been much work done on other forms of popular genre fiction such as the detective novel, romance and the gothic novel (Ashley 1989; Bennett 1990; McCracken 1998; Phillips 2006; Radway 1984; Spooner 2006). What is also noticeable, however, when researching this body of fiction is the increase of novels that have incorporated elements of subcultures over the last fifteen years or so. This period, of course, represents the relative decline in “classic” subcultural analysis as produced by the Birmingham and Chicago schools; and one of the arguments I want to put forward in this chapter is that fiction has perhaps filled a gap left by this relative drawing back (or critical reassessment) of subcultural studies as it moved into the twenty-first century. This chapter identifies a rise in subcultural fiction in Britain in the 2000s, citing a range of novels that explore the social and political importance of contemporary and historical youth subcultures in British society by writers such as Monica Ali (2003), Niall Griffiths (2000), Stewart Home (2005), John King (2000; 2008), Courttia Newland (1999), Gautam Malkani (2006), Zadie Smith (2000; 2005), and Alex Wheatle (1999; 2001; 2008). From this list, I will discuss two novels in detail: Gautam Malkani’s 2006 work Londonstani, and John King’s Skinheads, published two years later. Before looking at these examples, however, it is important to note that there are (at least) two types of youth subcultural fiction during the decade, the first of which focuses on past subcultures drawn from a series of periods from the 1950s onwards. This kind of fiction represents a form of nostalgia for the “lost” subculture and for the social and cultural contexts from which it emerged. This is not, however, always a rose-tinted gaze at a lost past. Most of the novels produce what I would call a critical nostalgia, a mode that foregrounds political and ideological problems in British society and in the subculture itself, while simultaneously identifying positive aspects of subcultural belonging and expression. This subcategory would include Alex Wheatle’s Brixton Rock (1999), and East of Acre Lane (2001); Stewart Home’s Tainted Love (2005); and John King’s Skinheads, amongst others. The second type of novel is located in the contemporary moment and addresses specific state-of-the-nation concerns articulated through a plot line set in a subcultural environment. Examples of this kind of novel include Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003); Courttia Newland’s Society Within (1999), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and On Beauty (2005). These texts address a range of contemporary social and cultural concerns from the perennial identification of youth culture with criminality, antisocial behaviour and promiscuity, to

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more serious concerns around the politicization of youth in terms of racist politics and terrorist activity. Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani can be placed in this category, and it must also be stressed that King’s Skinheads also addresses the contemporary moment in much of its action as well as containing significant sections referencing the memories of characters back to earlier periods. It is also useful to consider the particularities associated with the genre and form of narrative fiction generally with respect to the way in which youth subcultures are represented. I want to argue, following Derek Attridge’s concept of the “singularity of literature”, that fictional representations of youth subcultures offer a specific engagement within the field of subcultural studies that differs in substance from those approaches that take either an ethnographic or cultural-studies approach. Attridge makes the case for literature that it: “consistently exceeds the limits of rational accounting” and this has relevance to the way in which subcultures are represented in fiction (2004, 3). The literary expression of subcultural belonging acts as a textual hinge between real-life experiences and cultural practices and the constitution of subcultures as forms of imagined communities. One of the ways to approach this formal and generic distinction is to consider the relationship of the fictional texts towards the reader.3 Narratology identifies what it calls the “implied reader”, a projected image of the reader produced within the text itself, as opposed to a real reader outside it (Chatman 1978; Genette 1980; Rimmon-Kenan 2002). In the case of subcultural fiction a number of possibilities can be envisaged in this context. Firstly, the implied reader might be a member of the subculture that is represented in the novel. For this kind of reader, judgements of association and authenticity might be paramount, as well as the function of the text to help to consolidate or even legitimize in a literary form the sense of belonging produced by other forms of subcultural practice.4 Secondly, the implied reader might be someone outside of the subculture, whether that is someone who might be associated with what the Birmingham School would call the parent culture, or indeed someone not of the parent culture but affiliated to another (youth) subculture not described in the book. The function of the novel in this scenario might be akin to a kind of anthropological survey and explanation of an exotic cultural identity and set of practices. Much subcultural fiction operates in this way, and indeed MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, arguably the first novel that addresses subcultures, has as part of its intention, this kind of survey.5 It must be stressed, however, that it is too simplistic to divide novels neatly into the categories referred to above,

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and in practice most subcultural novels have aspects that relate to each of the two intended readerships. The way in which the narrative is delivered is also important in examining the representation of the subculture. Many novels elect to convey the events in the first person, usually from a member of (or someone closely associated with) the subculture, producing a certain level of authenticity and insider knowledge. This is the form, for example used in Londonstani, although, as we shall see the issue of authenticity is particularly complicated in this novel. The literary critic Andrew Gibson has argued that the use of a “narrator-character” can be useful in closing down the distance between the subject and object of narrative discourse which is especially useful in the articulation of subject positions in fiction: “There is a radical distinctness [...] to the mode of narration that Genette called extradiegetic-homodiegetic [...] The narrator is also an experiencer. He or she is engaged, involved in the world narrated. Thus narration as reflection appears to supervene upon pre-reflective experience. The ethics of narrator-character or focalized narration thus entails a play of levels and dimensions” (Gibson 1999, 27; Genette 1983). On the other hand, thirdperson narrative can produce the sense of an external perspective on the subcultural characters producing what appears to be an objective critical exploration. However, this does not necessarily mean that a level of empathy cannot be produced using the third person; Skinheads, for example, uses a third-person narrative voice, but one that is clearly attuned to the outlook and cultural codes of the characters it describes. In both cases the narrative voice can stand for an individual, but also for a collective articulation of the subculture. It is useful to consider Deleuze and Guattari’s work in this context in terms of their discussion of the effect of deterritorialization in the use of specific narrative voices, styles and registers in literature that address the articulation of marginalized identities. In their discussion of Franz Kafka’s work they identify a function of narrative to produce what they call a “collective enunciation” in certain kinds of what they call “minor literature” that radically unsettles dominant ideologies: The third characteristic of a minor literature is that everything takes on a collective value [...] what each other says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political [...] literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation. It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside of his fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible

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community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility (Deleuze 1986, 17).

This “collective enunciation” has particular relevance to subcultural fiction as it emphasizes the way in which formal literary and narrative devices can be deployed in the representation of a radical cultural alterity. This is, in part, the function of the narrative styles in both Londonstani and Skinheads.6 Another consideration to bear in mind when looking at subcultural fiction is the way in which it often intersects with other literary genres. Two are of particular relevance: the Bildungsroman, and the state-of-thenation novel. The Bildungsroman, or “novel of development”, is a form that is often used in subcultural fiction, as many of the novels dramatize the move from childhood or adolescence into the early stages of adulthood, or detail the establishment of a central character who has in some way been marginalized from mainstream society. The classic nineteenth-century model often includes an orphaned child who after several adventures finds himself reintegrated into a stable societal place or relationship (for example, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Jane Eyre). The state-of-the-nation, or condition-of-England novel, was established in the nineteenth century by writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley and addresses social, political and cultural themes through a fictional scenario.7 Subcultural fiction often includes an element of this kind of social critique alongside its articulation of marginalized positions and cultural politics.8 As suggested earlier, the rise in the British subcultural novel from the 1990s onwards roughly corresponds with a decline in traditional sociological and cultural-studies analyses of subcultures. The period from the late 1990s to the present has seen a shift in the way subcultures have been understood and studied, and a range of critical reinterpretations of the methods and approaches established by the Birmingham and Chicago schools. The term post-subcultures has been developed as a way of distinguishing more recent critical interventions from those earlier approaches, whilst at the same time retaining the need to identify and examine discrete (youth) groupings in contemporary society. Postsubcultural analysis tends to emphasize the self-reflexive and self-aware nature of subcultural identity. This self-awareness is often identified in terms of the rejection of claims of authenticity and an emphasis on the textuality and performative nature of subcultures. This represents a move away from the traditional notion of subcultures as identifiable groups that exist in the real world and that are simply “recorded” or “represented” by

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sociologists, ethnographers, writers or film-makers. This shift has also emphasized a more critical approach to the constitution and ideologies of post-subcultural identity. As Weinzierl and Muggleton write in the introduction to an important 2002 collection of essays in this context The Postsubcultures Reader: “the era seems long gone of working-class youth subcultures ‘heroically’ resisting subordination through ‘semiotic guerrilla warfare’. Both youth cultural activities and the research efforts in this field seem nowadays to reflect a more pragmatic approach compared to the romanticism of the CCCS, whose authors saw a radical potential in largely symbolic challenges” (Weinzierl 2002, 4). These theoretical perspectives are something to bear in mind when looking at both Malkani’s Londonstani, and King’s Skinheads.

Gautam Malkani, Londonstani Malkani’s Londonstani details the exploits of a group of middle-class, west London teenagers from a range of ethnicities who attach themselves to a complex mixture of already existing subcultural identities drawn primarily from black American, British-Asian and south-east Asian contexts. The novel is narrated in the argot of the subculture and delivered through the first-person narration of Jas, who the reader assumes is of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi background, but who turns out, in an awkward twist of identity at the end of the novel, to be from a mainstream, white, middle-class, British background. This ending emphasizes the fact that the constructedness and artificiality of subcultural identity is central to the novel’s understanding of youth-group affiliation. Although the ethnic background of the narrator is concealed behind the use of the street argot, his narrative is nevertheless aware of the contradictions of the identity he is involved in performing and of the media’s role in this process. This can be seen in particular in this early passage: So now it was Ravi’s turn to make me jealous with his perfectly timed and perfectly authentic rudeboy front. I still use the word rudeboy cos it’s been around for longer. People’re always tryin to stick a label on our scene. That’s the problem with havin a fuckin scene. First we was rudeboys, then we be Indian niggas, then rajamuffins, then raggastanis, Britasians, fuckin Indobrits. These days we try an use our own word for homeboy an so we just call ourselves desis but I still remember when we were happy with the word rudeboy. Anyway whatever the fuck we are, Ravi an the others are better at it than I am. I swear I’ve watched as much MTV Base and Juggy D videos as they have, but I still can’t attain the right level a rudeboy authenticity. If I could, I wouldn’t be using poncey words like attain an authenticity, innit. I’d be sayin I couldn’t keep it real or someshit. An if I

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said it that way, then there’d be no need for me to say it in the first place so I wouldn’t say it anyway. After all, it’s all bout what you say and how you say it. Your linguistic prowess an debating dexterity (though whatever you do don’t say it that way) (Malkani 2006, 5–6).

The emphasis here is on the problems of appearing to be authentic. Authenticity in this sense is something to be learned, indeed to be performed and practised (in both senses of the word). Paradoxically, authenticity is perceived not as something that comes naturally out of social heritage, location or background, but something that is constructed and artificial, and it is MTV Base and Juggy D videos where the nuances of this subculture are learned. Much of the comic drive of Jas’s narrative comes out of this paradox—this need for him to achieve sufficient authenticity to be respected within this group. The shift towards the performative can also be identified in the way in which Jas deals with the relationship between his lived experience and attainment of an ideal identity, and emphasizes how subcultures occupy that space between the real and the imaginary. Adapting Judith Butler’s work on gender and sexuality here, it can be seen that performativity in Malkani’s novel emphasizes the way in which an individual’s consumption of, and affiliation to, subcultural identity is fluid and dependent on context; rejecting the idea that individuals are, or ever were permanently attached to a discrete subcultural identity (Butler 1990). The work that needs to be done to attain the right level of authenticity can be seen in a passage which describes his involvement on the margins of an attack on a white kid who has allegedly hurled racist abuse at the group: Teachers or non teachers, fuck it. I had to redeem myself after my gimpy remark bout spellin Paki with a capital P. After all Ravi had spotted the white kid in the first place an Amit’s helped Hardjit pin him against the brick wall. But me, I hadn’t added anything to either the physical or verbal abuse a the gora. To make up for my useless shitness I decided to offer the following carefully crafted comment: Yeah, bredren, knock his fuckin teeth out. Bruck his fuckin face. Kill his fuckin … well, his fuckin, you know, him. Kill him. This was probly a bit over the top but I think I’d got the tone just right an nobody laughed at me. At least I managed to stop short a sayin, Kill the pig, like the kids do in that film Lord a the Flies. It’s also a book too, but I’m trying to stop knowin shit like that (Malkani 2006, 9).

The last point Jas makes here is interesting in terms of cultural knowledge or what we might think of, following Sarah Thornton’s adaptation of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories, as subcultural capital. As Thornton argues:

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9. Youth Subcultures in Malkani’s Londonstani and King’s Skinheads Subcultural capital confers status on its owner in the eyes of the relevant beholder […] Subcultural capital can be objectified or embodied. Just as books and paintings display cultural capital in the family home, so subcultural capital is objectified in the form of fashionable haircuts and well-assembled record collections […] subcultural capital is embodied in the form of being “in the know”, using (but not over-using) current slang […] both cultural and subcultural capital put a premium on the “second nature” of their knowledges (Thornton 2005, 11–12).

For Jas, knowing about Lord of the Flies has become not only worthless, but embarrassing in terms of the cultural grouping in which he finds himself. He is therefore keen to tailor his cultural knowledge in terms that will be recognized within his new grouping. It is, then, in the context of subcultural capital that the novel builds up a framework of knowledge and ownership of specific cultural signifiers that marks out authentic affiliation within the group. In terms of music the subculture celebrates black American, British Asian and south-east Asian music, and in particular gangsta rap, Bhangra-pop and Bhangra-hip hop crossovers. Several artists are named in the novel including DMX, Usher, the Panjabi Hit Squad, Panjabi MC and RDP (Rhythm, Dhol and Bass). Alongside the music references other fashion and technology products are crucial to the desi subculture’s recognition of its own value system, in particular ownership and display of a range of consumer products: German cars, such as “Beemers” (BMWs), “Mercs” (Mercedes), and Audis; European fashion and perfumes such as Dolce and Gabbana, Hugo Boss, and Armani; Japanese, Korean and Scandinavian mobile phones (always referred to as “fones” in the novel) such as Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and Nokia. Knowledge and ownership of these cultural products are all marks of value within the desi subculture as it is presented in the novel, and two things are apparent here. Firstly, the novel shows the globalized nature of cultural products that are integral to this subculture, often presented ironically by Malkani as out of place in the physical location of the teenagers in the west London suburbs of Hounslow and Staines. Secondly, the knowledge and naming of the brands represents kudos within the subcultural identity. In this context, the amount of what we might call product placement is a noticeable feature of the novel and emphasizes the way in which the subculture negotiates the dominant frameworks around the commodification of contemporary culture. In one sense, then, we have an inversion of the idea of cultural capital, which marks out the cultural territory of the group vis-à-vis the dominant, prevailing or mainstream culture. But the subculture still adheres to the hierarchical structure of the cultural-capital model; the content may be

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different but the pattern remains. In this sense the subcultural capital hierarchy for the desis does not reject the capitalist paradigm of a globalized market economy, but recalibrates it in terms of specific objects and cultural signifiers. We are a long way here from the romanticized idea of an oppositional youth subculture as identified in much of the CCCS work of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, for example, Dick Hebdige’s reading of the radical potential of punk in the late 1970s (Hebdige 1979). This suturing between consumption and engagement in the production of consumer products can also be seen in the way music is consumed in the novel. Take the following two examples: “When you’re in the back seat a some pimped-up Beemer it’s basically your job to be cool. To just chill, listen to the tunes and stare out the window like some big dumb dog with a big slobbery tongue. DMX pumpin so loud out the sound system you can hardly hear what the other guys’re saying up front” (Malkani 2006, 16). And later: “The tabla drums from ‘Hasdi Hasdi’ by the Panjabi Hit Squad fill the Beemer and start bouncing out the windows onto the road an all the concrete car parks that lie along the back a High Street” (Malkani 2006, 88). In these descriptions, the individual members of the subculture essentially become part of the performance of the music. Their broadcasting of it to the non-subcultural world—“High Street”—(what classic subcultural studies would call the parent or dominant culture) represents a kind of vicarious ownership of the music and by extension the ideologies the music promotes. In this context, it might appear that the gangsta rap of DMX is out of place with respect to second-generation, south-east Asian youth in West London, but in terms of the performative and commodity-focused nature of the desi subculture it makes perfect sense to adopt this form of Black American culture as a vehicle for the expression of its own concerns and outlook. However, the novel becomes increasingly critical of the way in which some of the ideologies embedded in popular music culture (gangsta rap in particular) are misplaced in the contemporary British context in which Jas and his friends are located. It is plain that the sexist, homophobic and aggressive outlook promoted in the lyrics of DMX (for example) are in part reproduced in the desi subculture as it is presented in the text. Jas, however, begins to question the ideologies embedded in this cultural interchange, especially with respect to misogynistic attitudes.9 As the novel moves forward Jas begins to reassess the very identity he has striven to construct for himself in the earlier sections, and in many ways this processes adheres to aspects of the Bildungsroman form. This development is addressed with respect to the mode of voice Jas uses as his

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coming-of-age narrative is focused through the relationship between articulation and identity: Every time when it’s important to use this gob a mine I hear my voice, which never normly works proply an so I panic. It’s as if there’s some other voice a mine givin it, Don’t say that, it’ll make u look like a gimp. An so I’ll go, Yeh, maybe so, but … Then I’ll realise that the other person, the one I’m s’posed to be talking to, can hear me. So I’ll quickly shut my gob, only to hear the other voice go, You fucin sap. Now you look like you can’t even talk. Which you can’t, you stammerin piece a wasted shit. For fuck’s sake just speak up. Fuck off, leave me alone. I’ve just got gunge an shit down my throat. Speak up, boy. Obviously this voice must know that actually it can’t speak up, that it can’t talk cos it’s me innit, it’s my voice. But it keeps tryin anyway. An then another voice, I reckon that make three fuckin voices, will go, Boy? In’t no fuckin boy. In’t no girl either but in’t no fuckin boy (Malkani 2006, 30).

This passage reveals the way in which the novel balances individual identity, affiliation to the subculture, and a notion of the mainstream against which the subculture sets itself. The identity crisis that this mix of affiliation places on Jas results in the internal divisions he registers through the dialogue he often has with his inner self.10 It is tempting to discuss this aspect of Londonstani with respect to a Freudian psychoanalytic model: the first voice in the passage above representative of the id that wants to articulate itself immediately and spontaneously, but which is regulated by the second voice, the ego, that is aware of the way it will sound in a social sphere. The third voice then can be read as the superego (although one adapted to the argot of the subculture) that recognizes that Jas is no longer a boy, but is moving into adulthood and therefore has to adapt to normative modes of expression (which are conventionally gendered in the passage). There is mileage in this kind of analysis, but it would have been interesting if these three voices had different registers. In addition, Londonstani adheres to the convention of much subcultural fiction told in the first person of having another member of the subculture who appears to be more in control and who is idolized by the main narrator; a surrogate father figure that is eventually killed off (metaphorically) before the main character can achieve his/her own place in society. In this text, it is the character Hardjit who supplies this Oedipal framework. It is Jas’s eventual distancing from his subcultural roots that allows him to be admitted into the “adult” world, and the novel ends with him adopting a more comfortable understanding of his maturing personal

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identity. In this way, Londonstani represents aspects of the typical Bildungsroman novel with subcultural affiliation presented as part of the process of working through adolescence, an identity that is thrown off in order to allow the individual to establish him/herself in the dominant or parent culture.

John King, Skinheads John King’s 2008 novel Skinheads provides an interesting contrast to Londonstani, especially in the shared west London location of the two novels.11 King’s novel takes three characters associated with different historical moments and versions of the skinhead subculture and articulates their individual relationship to the broader social subgroup. The novel is narrated in the third person, but is focalized through each of the three characters in different chapters, moving between Terry English, an “original” skinhead influenced by the Jamaican rudeboy and ska culture that was exported to Britain in the late sixties; Ray, his younger cousin who was part of the skinhead revival in the late seventies and who represents a much more violent strand and is associated with potentially racist elements of the subculture; and Lol, Terry’s son, the only character in this novel who represents the more typical subcultural teenager. The novel, therefore, mixes a critical nostalgia with a commentary on contemporary British society. In doing this it is specifically interested in articulating white working-class identity, an ethnicity that several cultural commentators have argued has been neglected in recent years (Collins, 2004; Jones, 2010). It also attempts to reclaim the stereotypical media image of the skinhead as a racist thug established in part in Richard Allen’s series of skinhead novels of the 1970s.12 The novel has many of the characteristics of the typical subcultural novel, especially in the identification of specific cultural signifiers that mark out affiliation with this particular subcultural group, and there is detailed attention paid to specific types of fashion, music, cultural locations and practices. This can be seen in an early description of Terry as he gets ready to leave his house: Pulling his Crombie on Terry stopped in front of the mirror in the hall and smiled. He dressed smart and moved with the times, always wore a neatly ironed Ben Sherman shirt and Levi jeans, his hair shaved in a number two crop, the main difference from his youth the air-ware soles of the Timberlands he sometimes wore to work. Even those matched the DM model. They said everything was different these days, but nothing had really changed. The skinhead style had gone mainstream a few years ago, even if

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9. Youth Subcultures in Malkani’s Londonstani and King’s Skinheads the kids traded under different names. His cherry-red Doctor Martens were upstairs, polished and ready for action, and to this day he never went to football in anything else. DMs and a black Harrington. The combination had never been bettered. He saved his brogues and tonic suit for special occasions, proper skinhead nights. And he was a skinhead all right. One of the originals (King 2008, 7).

What is unusual in the articulation of subcultural identity in this novel is that it has extended beyond the teenage moment. Terry is approaching fifty, and yet the impact that his affiliation to the skinhead culture is seen to have continued into middle age. Musical references, in particular, are used profusely in the novel to indicate emotional states of mind of the characters, political outlooks and an alternative socio-cultural history of working-class Britain in the period form the late 1960s to the present. Several bands and musical styles are referred to and become part of the fabric of the text: He left the house and climbed into his Merc, slipped a CD in, eased off the drive to the sound of “Gun You Down” by the Ethiopians […] parking under the Estuary Cars sign, waiting for “Harry May” by The Business to finish, pumping himself up for the day. It was the only Oi song he listened to, passed on by his nutty nephew, an aggro-merchant gem in the Slade tradition. He grinned. “Gun You Down” meets “Harry May”. Two versions of the skinhead world (King 2008, 7–8).

Much of the novel is concerned with this contestation of the skinhead label between the two groups—which reveal some of the contradictions in the media representations of this group and with white, working-class culture generally: “For Terry English being a skinhead is all about the boss sounds coming out of Jamaica—the pumped-up beat and stripped down vocals of reggae music” (King 2008, 53). Terry’s resistance to dominant culture represents what Laclau and Mouffe call a chain of equivalence between marginalized identities and politics (1985). The multicultural and the subcultural are in cahoots in Terry’s ideological framework, represented early in the novel in its description of Terry’s variety of breakfast possibilities: “He was a man pulled in many different directions, the thought of that rogan josh fighting with donner and chips. He was spoiled for choice. Glad he lived in a democracy”; although significantly he plumps for the “Full English” (King 2008, 12). Terry’s love of early ska and rudeboy music reflects his own assertion that he’s not political, which is revealed by his acceptance of the diversity of multicultural Britain. This contrasts with his cousin Ray, and in many ways the debates around multiculturalism in the novel are expressed imp-

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licitly in the varieties of skinhead culture to which each of these characters hold allegiance: Terry didn’t have a bad bone in his body, but was no mug. Teased his nephew when he turned skinhead, saying he was more of a punk listening to those Oi bands, decked out in green flight-jacket and black DMs, his head shaved down to the skull. It was a new version of the skinhead look, while the music was a million miles away from the reggae of the original skins […] Ray eventually fought back saying if he was a punk then Terry was a mod. They were both claiming the skinhead soundtrack (King 2008, 22).

Contestation over the politics and ideologies of the skinhead heritage is clearly apparent, but the nuances within the subculture reveal distinct political and ideological outlooks. Of the two, Ray is presented as the more openly political, railing against what he sees as the chattering classes, and their abandonment, in his eyes, of traditional national values. In fact, Ray’s politics elude a conventional understanding of left and right: he is described at one point as believing in “the welfare state and core socialist values” (King 2008, 96), yet at the same time he is angered by “how the England-haters further up the ladder had slagged off the army for caning the fascists and liberating the Falklands. It was the same with Afghanistan and Iraq” (King 2008, 123). King’s approach here is to record the ambivalent and sometimes contradictory political approaches taken by some members of the skinhead subculture. However, his tone is very different to Malkani’s, as his combination of straight third-person narration and free-indirect-discourse tends to take seriously the viewpoints of the characters. The ironic distance is far less than in Londonstani. Part of the text is interested in reclaiming the accusations made against skinhead culture of racism, and in particular the Oi! subculture of the early 80s. One chapter in the novel, “Running Riot in ’81” details, through flashback, Ray’s involvement in the so called “race riot” surrounding an Oi! gig in Southall on 14 July 1981, where a number of skinheads and members of the Southall Asian community were involved in clashes on the street and around the Hambrough Tavern where the gig was taking place (4-Skins and the Business). The novel claims that the skinheads were attacked on their way to the gig thus provoking the violence. This is clearly an attempt by King to redress the version of events presented in the tabloid press at the time, especially the Daily Mail. However, the racist language in the text (albeit through Ray’s free indirect discourse) undermines the validity of the “innocence” of the skinheads on that particular occasion. The third main character in the novel is Lol, Terry’s son and Ray’s nephew. Laurel, named by his father, after Laurel Aitkin, the Jamaican ska

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artist who was highly influential for the first wave of British skinheads in 1960s. The shortening of his name to Lol represents something of a claim for an individual identity outside of the skinhead subculture into which he’s born: “being born into a skinhead family you didn’t have much choice about how you grew up—the music you liked—he had been raised on his mum and dad’s ska records—Ray’s Oi!—and Lol was the place where it all collided”. Lol provides a coming-of-age narrative in the book, mapping out his adulthood with respect to the various legacies handed down to him by the male role models he has, most notably Terry and Ray, and in a sense is closest to the more typical British subcultural novel (for example, Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, Richard Allen’s skinhead novels, and Alex Wheatle’s Brixton Rock). It is in the intersection of these generations of subcultural identity that the novel attempts to offer a reading of contemporary, white working-class society, offering a range of ideological positions that extends the influence of subcultural meaning beyond the typical teenage years, This novel, then, attempts to offer an articulation of the varieties of white, working-class identity and street politics through its focus on subcultural affiliation and contestation. Terry’s acceptance of the broad multicultural heritage that underpins his main cultural affiliation comes into contrast with the more aggressive and monocultural Ray. But for all that, this is a novel which shows that family comes first, and the novel can in part be accused of being apologetic towards some of the racist ideologies it describes. In this sense, Skinheads offers an interesting contrast to Malkani’s Londonstani. Taken together the two works, both being set in almost the same contemporary west London location show something of the atomization of contemporary British culture and the presence of discrete urban “tribes” as identified by the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli in contemporary capitalist societies. According to Maffesoli, the urban working class should no longer be thought of in terms of the masses or the proletariat, but as a series of smaller group affiliations with shared outlooks and more localized forms of collective identity (Maffesoli 1996). In their identification of subcultural groupings both novels reveal this tendency in twentyfirst-century British society. Both novels also, in this sense, succeed in dramatizing contemporary political debates around youth, class, ethnicity (and to a lesser extent gender), and reveal some of the ambivalences and debates within wider culture. However, they represent a difference in tone and attitude towards the subculture they are attempting to represent. Whereas Malkani offers a sometimes comic, sometimes serious critical examination of subcultural behaviour and outlook, King’s approach is more akin to some of the older CCCS approaches that tried to offer an

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authentic representation of marginalized groups, and in King’s case a group that he feels has been under-represented both in contemporary fiction and contemporary cultural debate.

Notes 1. There are many others and too many to list here. 2. The British New Left and the Birmingham School pioneered this range of approaches in a British context from the late 1950s onwards, taken up by post-subcultural studies in the 1990s (Bentley 2005). 3. Reader-response criticism is a large area in literary studies, and I am assuming a reasonable knowledge of this field because of lack of space in this essay. Those for whom this area of criticism is relatively new, I would recommend Tompkins 1980. 4. In terms of legitimization, this presumes that literary fiction to a certain extent carries a different kind of kudos and cultural value to other cultural forms that have been deemed to be more “popular”. I do not subscribe to the politics of this kind of distinction, nevertheless it is certainly still prevalent, and could therefore act upon the sense of the reader. 5. As well as being a novelist, MacInnes was also a journalist who was associated with New Left publications in the late 1950s and early 1960s. See Bentley 2007, 231–62. 6. It should also be noted that several novels that engage with subcultures are not attempting to celebrate the potentially radical cultural politics, but rather use the subculture as indicative of some kind of cultural decline, e.g. in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Martin Amis’s Dead Babies, and although not a novel, Richard Hoggart’s reading of the “Juke-Box Boys” in The Uses of Literacy (1958, 246–50). 7. The form was initiated by the phrase “condition of England” used by Thomas Carlisle in his pamphlet “The Condition of England Question” of 1839 in response to the Chartist disturbances of the latter half of the 1830s. 8. Again, there are numerous examples, but Martin Amis’s Dead Babies, and Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club are good representatives of this kind of approach. 9. The novel cites DMX’s “Ruff Ryder’s Anthem” at one point which exemplifies the celebration of gun-toting, violence and misogyny in much gansta rap. 10. Split personality is again a feature of much subcultural fiction and film. It plays a significant role, for example, in MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, and Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, as it also does in the classic 1970s subcultural film Quadrophenia (and the Who’s concept

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album from which the film was adapted). This dual personality and identity crisis is often used to represent metaphorically the differing forces and ideologies acting on the adolescent as s/he negotiates a place in adult society. 11. Skinheads is located mainly in Slough, Uxbridge and surrounding areas, with some passages moving the characters to central London. 12. Richard Allen was the pseudonym of the Canadian journalist James Moffatt who produced eighteen subcultural pulp novels in the 1970s and early 1980s.

References Ali, Monica. [2003] 2004. Brick Lane. London: Black Swan. Allen, Richard. 1970. Skinhead. London: New English Library. —. 1971. Suedehead. London: New English Library. —. 1972. Skinhead Escapes. London: New English Library. Amis, Martin. 1975. Dead Babies. London: Jonathan Cape. Ashley, Bob. 1989. The Study of Popular Fiction: A Source Book. London: Pinter. Attridge, Derek. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Banks, Iain. 1987. Espedair Street. London: Macmillan. Bennett, Tony. 1990. Popular Fiction. London: Routledge. Bentley, Nick. 2005. “The Young Ones: A Reassessment of the British New Left’s Representation of 1950s Youth Subcultures.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 8(1), 65–83. —. 2007. Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s. Oxford: Peter Lang. Blincoe, Nicholas. 1995. Acid Casuals. London: Serpent’s Tale. Burgess, Anthony. 1962. A Clockwork Orange. London: William Heinemann. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity London: Routledge. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Coe, Jonathan. 2001. The Rotter’s Club. London: Viking. Cohn, Nik. 1967. I’m Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo. London: Secker & Warburg. Collins, Michael. 2004. The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class. London: Granta.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guatarri. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan, 16–27. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Home, Stewart. 2005. Tainted Love. London: Virgin. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gibson, Andrew. 1999. Postmodernism, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. London: Routledge. Griffiths, Niall. 2000. Grits. London: Jonathan Cape. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen & Co. Hoggart, Richard. [1957] 1958. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of WorkingClass Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jones, Owen. 2011. Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. London: Verso. King, John. 2000. Human Punk. London: Jonathan Cape. —. 2008. Skinheads. London: Jonathan Cape. Kureishi, Hanif. 1990. Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Litt, Toby. 1997. Beatniks: An English Road Movie. London: Secker & Warburg. MacInnes, Colin. 1959. Absolute Beginners. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Maffesoli, Michel. 1996. The Time of the Tribes: the Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. Translated by Don Smith. London: Sage. Malkani, Gautam. 2006. Londonstani. London: Fourth Estate. McCracken, Scott. 1998; Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction Manchester: Manchester University Press. Naughton, Bill. 1966. Alfie. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Newland, Courttia. 1999. Society Within. London: Abacus. Philips, Deborah. 2006. Women’s Fiction: Writing Romance. London: Continuum. Radway, Janice. 1984. Reading the Romance Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge. Sillitoe, Alan. 1958. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: W. H. Allen.

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Shields, Rob. 1996. “Foreword: Masses or Tribes”. In Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: the Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, ix–xii. Translated by Don Smith. London: Sage. Smith, Zadie. 2000. White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton. —. 2005. On Beauty. London: Hamish Hamilton. Spooner, Catherine. 2006. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion. Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tompkins, Jane P. (ed.) 1980. Reader-response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Warner, Alan. 1995. Morvern Callar. London: Vintage. Waterhouse, Keith. 1959. Billy Liar. London: Michael Joseph. Weinzierl, Rupert and David Muggleton. 2002. “What is “Post-subcultural Studies” Anyway?” In The Postsubcultures Reader, edited by David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl, 3–23. (Oxford: Berg). Welsh, Irvine. 1993. Trainspotting. London: Secker & Warburg. —. 2012. Skagboys. London: Jonathan Cape. Wheatle, Alex. 1999. Brixton Rock. London: BlackAmber Books. —. 2001. East of Acre Lane. London: Fourth Estate. —. 2008. The Dirty South. London: Serpent’s Tail.

III. SUBCULTURES, GLOBAL FLOWS AND LOCAL CONTEXTS

10. THE STAX/VOLT REVUE AND SOUL MUSIC FANDOM IN 1960S BRITAIN JOE STREET

The Stax/Volt Revue remains a central event in the history of the Stax record label, and is a key moment in the transatlantic appreciation of soul music. It was the first time that many of its participants visited the United Kingdom and it offered British soul fans their first opportunity to see the musicians who played on the label’s recent hits. The Revue was not the first soul package tour to reach the UK but it was at that point the most successful and significant. It played to sold-out audiences in many of Britain’s major cities during March and April 1967, and also visited a small number of European cities including Paris, Oslo and Stockholm. It cemented the appeal of Stax artists like Otis Redding and Sam and Dave in the UK, confirming them as transatlantic soul icons. It was also a major turning point for Stax, marking the beginning of a new era of fame and fortune that presaged the later financial collapse of the label and the commercial decline of its artists. Yet the Revue has not received much scholarly attention. Rob Bowman (1997, 108–9; 115–22) devotes a short section of his forensic history of Stax to the Revue, and Peter Guralnick (1986, 309–10; 312–15) touches on it in his classic study of southern soul. Beyond this there has been no serious study of the Revue, in part because it was ignored by the national and local press, with coverage limited to the British music magazines of the time. This sorely underestimates its significance, for it proved to be a transformative experience both for the musicians and many audience members. Significantly, the response of young British soul fans to the Revue indicates that it was amongst the most important musical events of the decade. It consequently offers a useful starting point from which to probe the ways in which British soul fans thought about both the music and themselves. Each night’s show was opened by a short instrumental set from Booker T. and the MGs that ended with their signature “Green Onions”. The band would then be joined by the Stax horn section for a few further instrumentals before a sequence of singers took to the stage. Arthur Conley, one of Otis Redding’s protégés, kicked off with his “Sweet Soul Music” before

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making way for a set by Eddie Floyd, which always included his most famous hit, “Knock on Wood”. Floyd was followed either by Carla Thomas, or when Thomas was unavailable due to prior commitments, the white South African singer Sharon Tandy. The nights peaked with short sets from Stax’s most legendary acts. Sweating profusely, Sam and Dave would run through a selection of their greatest songs, often culminating with a breathtaking extended version of “Hold on I’m Coming”, which invariably raised the roof. Otis Redding brought the Revue to a euphoric finale with a twenty-minute set of up-tempo numbers that concluded with a celebratory mass singalong from all the participants (see Bowman 1997, 116, 118–21; Guralnick 1986, 312, Kaye 2011; Saxe 2011).1 The Revue had a profound impact on the musicians. MGs organist Booker T. Jones observed that, prior to the Revue, the musicians “were living in a kind of cocoon. We were just going to the studio every day and making music. Not even reading the trade magazines. Not knowing how the rest of the world saw Stax” (Bowman 1997, 115; Guralnick 1986, 309).2 The Revue revealed to the musicians that they were the object of frenzied attention. Impressionable female audience members tossed their underwear at Otis Redding; support acts were booed and pelted with mustard pots in order to bring the Stax artists onstage more quickly; Redding was allegedly dragged into the audience by hysterical teenagers, and fans remained at the venues long after the shows in order to meet and talk to their heroes (Bowman 1997, 12; Kaye 2011; Street 2010).3 For the radio DJ and Revue compère, Emperor Rosko, “the buzz of that tour … was so magical ... the audiences were just unbelievable” (Rosko 2011). Some months after the Revue concluded and the musicians returned to the United States, Otis Redding told Hit Parader (Anonymous 1967a) that he “loved England from head to toe”.4 Steve Cropper, MGs guitarist and one of the label’s principal songwriters, recalled the tour as “just a mindblower ... [T]here were hordes of people ... autograph hounds. ... I didn’t know what that stuff was all about. That was something that happened to Elvis or Ricky Nelson” (Guralnick 1986, 314). Although he lamented the poor quality of English cigarettes and the lack of sauces and spices to accompany the relatively bland British food, Booker T. Jones considered the UK experience “a gas” (Jones 1976, 6). Tour manager Phil Walden claimed that “[e]very night was more exciting than the previous one. There was never a climax. The thing just kept getting better. You would never know how it could be better than it already was” (Bowman 1997, 118). For Redding and the MGs, it was but one step from the Revue to their legendary appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, where Redding’s music crossed over to a white American audience.

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As the response to Redding in particular suggests, the Stax/Volt Revue exerted a lasting impact on soul-music fans in the UK (see Anonymous 1967b, 5; Bowman 1997, 115; 122; Guralnick 1986, 309; 322).5 Many audience members later recalled it as simply the greatest show they had ever seen (see Bowman 1997, 115; 118; 120; Finbow 2011; Green 2011a; Richardson 2010, 34; Saxe 2011; Street 2011). Beyond this, the Revue might be approached as a prism through which to examine the ways in which British soul fans related to the music. The application of cultural theory can be a fruitful method for interrogating the ways in which these people conceptualized their fandom and interpreted the music of black America. More importantly for this study, it offers numerous approaches through which to develop insight into the significance of the Revue, both for its audience and for historians wishing to investigate the transatlantic connotations of soul music within the context of racial politics in the 1960s and the development of what might be termed a soul-music subculture in the UK. This is because music, as Andy Bennett (2000) has noted, can be a crucial site for the formation of pride in identity and location. While Bennett’s work focuses most explicitly on how music is used to establish, define, and redefine racial, ethnic, and social identities at a local level, his approach might also be used to interrogate the extent to which music helps to generate and maintain broader networks of identification—for example, the ways in which white British soul fans might have used soul music as a gateway into deeper identification with black people. As Bennett (2000, 195) argues, “in a very real sense, music not only informs the construction of the self, but also the social world in which the self operates.” This social world, for soul fans, included the shared experience of and support for African-American soul music. In similar fashion, John Storey (2003a, 91) has pointed out that “our identities are not the expression of our ‘nature’, they are a performance in culture” defined in part by the choices we make as consumers, including our musical choices. Such choices, especially for young people, are vital means through which a public identity separate from other groups in society can be created and maintained. The fact that Stax’s music was in some way different to the more commercial soul records that became popular in the mid-1960s attracted Melv Kaye and Phil Saxe, amongst others. Kaye was a working-class teenager from the South Yorkshire town of Conisbrough; Saxe a grammar-schoolboy from the Jewish community in Stretford, Greater Manchester. For Saxe (2011) in particular, his love for soul music was in part an expression of his nonconformity: “I always felt different”, he later stated (see also Kaye 2011). This notion of difference is crucial for an understanding of why many British teenagers

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became so fascinated by soul music. The concept manifests itself in two distinct but not unrelated ways. Firstly, it relates most directly to the music itself: that soul music was, and remains, different from other forms of popular music. On the surface this might appear a banal and obvious observation, yet beneath it lie more complex ideas related to the ways in which consumers attach certain ideological constructs to music. Secondly, the concept of difference was applied by soul fans to themselves, in that they constructed their own identity in part through the music that they championed. That soul fans were relatively low in numbers emphasized their difference from mainstream pop fans and afforded them a sense that they were part of a subculture.

“The Memphis Train”: The Meaning of Stax That soul music had a particular sound is common knowledge. Although there were huge differences within soul—Chicago soul was quite distinct from the arguably more commercial Detroit sound dominated by Motown, which was itself very different from the gritty Stax sound that emanated from Memphis, for example—it was relatively easy during the 1960s to identify a soul record. Its integration of the African-American musical forms of gospel and blues, uniting the sacred of the former with the profane of the latter, and its focus on the emotional expression of the singer’s voice rendered it unique in the 1960s (see Bowman 1997; Finbow 2011; Guralnick 1986; Hershey 1984; xiii–xv; Pruter 1991; Smith 1999; Ward 1988).6 As the music historian Ronald Radano (2003, 14) has indicated, “More than any other expressive phenomenon, the ‘vocal’ sound of black music has represented the crucial place from which African-Americans have told their stories” in popular culture. This was a music that was very closely associated with African-American singers (regardless of the racial identity of the backing groups), emphasizing its racial difference from most 1960s pop music. To British ears, this difference rendered the music unusual; that it was far from a dominant sound in the pop charts also emphasized its difference: during the month of the Stax/Volt Revue, for example, only five of the top forty singles were soul records: the Supremes, “Love is Here and Now You’re Gone”, the Four Tops, “Bernadette”, Eddie Floyd, “Knock on Wood”, Martha and the Vandellas, “Jimmy Mack”; and Jimmy Ruffin “Gonna Give Her All the Love I’ve Got”. Of these, Floyd’s was an Atlantic release from the Stax label; the others were on Tamla-Motown. Thus it might be suggested that Stax was the preserve of the cognoscenti—those who were in the

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know about “real” soul music rather than the poppier sound of Motown (see Saxe 2011).7 This notion that there was such a thing as “real” soul music is part of the reason why Tony Rounce was directed to the records of Don Covay by the owner of a local record shop, Martin Hubbard. Born in east London, Rounce moved to Stanford-le-Hope in Essex as a young boy. Hubbard’s shop, the Melody Inn, was to become the “focal point” of Rounce’s teenage years and Hubbard did more than any other individual to shape Rounce’s taste in music, to the extent that Rounce still considers him a mentor. When Rounce was searching for the latest Rolling Stones single during the early 1960s, Hubbard stopped him and told him to listen instead to Covay who, according to Hubbard, was the singer whom Mick Jagger was copying now that he had stopped imitating Chuck Berry. It was obviously better for Rounce (2011) to listen to the real thing than to “that pop stuff” (see also Guralnick, 9). This element of authenticity has echoes of other subcultures of the 1950s and 1960s. George Melly (quoted in Schwartz 2007, 39) said that the idea of actually hearing a real AfricanAmerican perform blues songs at this time was “almost unbearably exciting”. This was echoed by Bob Cummings (2011a), a teenage apprentice compositor in Manchester who regularly visited the Twisted Wheel nightclub. Cummings remembered that it was “incredibly exotic” to be hearing real bluesmen such as John Lee Hooker at the Twisted Wheel. The historian Gillian Mitchell (2006, 608–9) notes that folk-music fans of the time were partly attracted to folk because they believed that it represented a more authentic music than that which was in the mainstream culture. Similarly, searching out music from different cultures to their own (white, often middle-class) culture was a central aspect of the appeal of the soul music subculture. Like Cummings, Dave Phillips (2011), an apprentice engineer from Manchester, noted that African-American blues singers were treated like royalty at the local blues club, although Phillips also pointed out that the white British beat group Spencer Davis Group, which performed numerous blues covers, was also popular, indicating that the authenticity issue was not simply linked to racial and national identity but that what Roland Barthes (1977, 179–89) terms the “grain of the voice” was an expression of an individual singer’s soulfulness.8 Barthes’s notion suggests that great singers are able to transport the individual listener to a realm beyond objective reality. Listening to certain singers, Barthes (1977, 181–2) suggests, leads the listener to consider the music beyond what is being sung (both in the verbal and musical sense): “this voice bears along directly the symbolic, over the intelligible, the expressive.” It might be suggested that this “grain of the voice” could be

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extended to the sound of the whole band, and that this performance could transport the listener to a realm occupied by the performers. Manthia Diawara (2002) argues that the young people of Bamako in Mali were “mak[ing] connections beyond national frontiers with the black diaspora” in their active response to the songs of James Brown and other AfricanAmerican musicians during the 1960s. Diawara’s notion that music can be used to “collapse” barriers between two cultures and symbolically link the socio-political environments of the audience and performer might be utilized to suggest that the presence and performance of African-American musicians outside the United States spread the aesthetics of southern soul, including its implicit and explicit opposition to racial segregation (Diawara 2002). Consequently, in a metaphysical sense, Stax listeners were symbolically transported to an integrated Memphis by the music—or perhaps the culture of the Stax studio was transported to the UK.9 While, with the exception of Sharon Tandy, all the singers on the Revue were African-American, Booker T. and the MGs were evenly split between white and black. Jones and drummer Al Jackson Jr. were AfricanAmerican Memphians; Dunn a white Memphian; Cropper a white Missourian. The Mar-Keys horn section was similarly integrated: Andrew Love, Joe Arnold and Wayne Jackson were all Memphis natives; Love was black, while Arnold and Jackson were white. The very name Booker T. and the MGs also spoke of the band’s integrated nature. That the band was named for its African-American organist was an unequivocal rejection of traditional racial hierarchies. Similarly, that African-American singers were leading white musicians onstage at the Revue constituted a further rejection of white supremacy and black deference. Even though at a personal level they may have rejected these political connotations, with nominal black “leaders”, the MGs constituted a profound rejection of segregation and a vision of an integrated future. In this sense, the MGs encapsulate both Ronald Radano’s claim that black music “has come to signify both the integrationist completion of a nation as well as a racial threat to the integrity of whiteness” and his quest to disabuse listeners of the belief that the colour line in popular music may be reified (Radano 2003, 42; 257). Stax’s symbolic opposition to segregation and racial oppression ran deeper than the tour: the Stax studio on McLemore Avenue in south Memphis was thoroughly integrated, and acted as a potent symbol for integration. Notably, the studio was not attacked during the unrest that followed the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. less than three miles away on 4 April 1968. That Stax was a white-owned business in a predominantly African-American area would have normally have rendered

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it a target for vandalism but its cultural capital surely played a factor in its survival, illustrating that its integrated identity and support for the local African-American community was central to its position in the city (Branch 2006, 697–706; 730–8). Taking this political subtext further, Otis Redding’s manager Phil Walden (quoted in Godin 1995, 324) asserted that Redding had “done more to improve the racial situation in the South than a hundred sit-ins”. This comment might have a hyperbolic tone to it, but there remains more than a kernel of truth in Walden’s suggestion that Redding’s music made a significant contribution to racial tolerance, as the singer’s fronting of an integrated group suggested. As the Stax musicians were preparing their visit to the UK during February 1967, for example, Aretha Franklin was recording a version that was to transform Redding’s song “Respect” into one of the most profound calls for racial equality of the 1960s.10 “Respect” was joined by a cover of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” on Redding’s 1965 album, Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul. Cooke’s anthem, according to his biographer Peter Guralnick (2005), was written after Cooke heard Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” in mid-1963, following the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at which Dr King gave his celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech. Within the context of the 1960s civil-rights movement, it was not difficult to comprehend the change that Cooke (and hence Redding and hence Stax) sought (see Guralnick 1986, 46; Guralnick 2005; and Marcus 2005, 3942.11 Thus the Revue was heavily weighted with political and racial significance, and its audiences were (either unconsciously or consciously) playing a role in supporting this quest for change.

“You Don’t Know Like I Know”: Stax and Identity Given that soul music is often interpreted as an expression of AfricanAmerican identity, we might also consider the extent to which music helped to generate and maintain broader networks of identification. A similar—and arguably as powerful—connotation of difference relates to the self-image of the white fans themselves, in part defined by this search for different music. As Dick Hebdige (1979, 88) has noted, young people use their musical choices as a means through which to “negotiate a meaningful intermediate space somewhere between the parent culture and the dominant ideology: a space where an alternative identity could be discovered and expressed.” For John Storey (2003a, 89–90), consuming music is central to staging and performing “the drama of self-formation”. Moreover, as Storey (2003b, 119) notes, “[t]he consumption of music is one of the means through which a subculture forges its identity and

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culturally reproduces itself by marking its distinction and difference from other members of society”. Indeed, that the mainstream press completely ignored the Revue reinforces the suggestion that soul music was the preserve of a subculture. For many fans, soul music—and Stax especially—was a badge of identity that reinforced generational separation and also elevated them from the common herd of teenagers. Many fans were keenly aware of the link between the records you owned and your standing among your peers, considering themselves, and in their eyes, being considered hipper than those with more mainstream or lessextensive record collections. Consequently, openly carrying a particular LP under your arm played a key role in identity formation for these teenagers. For Phil Saxe, for example, people would carry a particular LP as a way of demonstrating how “special you were”. Stax records were important for Saxe (2011) in separating himself from the “sheep who liked the Supremes”.12 Saxe dismissed much Motown music as pop fodder; Stax records were, by contrast, different and more special, perhaps even reserved for those with a finer musical palate. Similarly, Tony Rounce (2011) considered it “pretty cool” to be a schoolboy who owned records by Garnet Mimms or Solomon Burke rather than the Hollies or the Searchers, and Melv Kaye (2011) considered Stax fans of the 1960s “better than your normal kid who bought music in the charts”. This sense of being different, and in many ways superior, was reinforced by the fact that soul fans had to dedicate themselves to the task of finding records. The distribution of soul records was relatively poor in the mid-1960s, and fans had to keep in touch with the release schedules. Very few high-street shops carried these records, meaning that fans had to locate specialist shops and often order records in advance of their release in order to guarantee a copy. Consequently, obtaining soul records frequently became a hunt involving more than simply a trip to the local shops; this was a quest that only the dedicated few were prepared to embark upon (Finbow 2011; Richardson 2010, xiv–xv; Saxe 2011; Storey 1993a, 98–91; 1993b, 110–19). The methods they needed to use also emphasized both their difference and their dedication. Radio Luxembourg was crucial in offering publicity for soul records. Among others, the future Hammer Horror actor Mike Ravens had a soul show on the station which played the most recent soul numbers and gave information about upcoming releases. Unfortunately, the notoriously unreliable Radio Luxembourg signal, which drifted in and out almost at random, necessitated great patience on the listener’s behalf. Tales abound of young listeners hiding under the bedclothes with transistor radios, frantically twiddling their knobs in order not to miss a good record—or as important,

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the announcement of the record’s identity (see Lovegrove 2011; Millard 2012, 89; Raven 1997; Radio Rewind 2011; Richards 2010, 64; Rounce 2011; Saxe 2011). On a more consistent note, Record Mirror was another key information source. One of the four weekly magazines which catered for a teenage market of record buyers and pop fans, Record Mirror was founded in 1953 as a competitor to New Musical Express and Melody Maker (the fourth, Disc, first appeared in 1958). In 1967 the total weekly circulation for these publications was a little under 520,000, with NME accounting for half, Melody Maker and Disc selling an average of 93,000 each and Record Mirror 66,000 (see Frith 1978, 138–46; Lindbert et al. 2005, 17–18; Savage 2009). Record Mirror had a very distinct identity from its competitors. It carried the American singles chart, offering its readers insight into the major market for pop music and advance warning of American records that would eventually cross the Atlantic. Of the weeklies it offered the best coverage of African-American artists and gave particular attention to Motown and Stax. More important, Tony Hall’s “My Scene” column frequently offered commentary on R&B or soul records and Norman Jopling wrote regularly on soul.13 Jopling had been a keen promoter of the British rhythm ’n’ blues boom but had shifted his interests by the mid-1960s. He wrote a regular soul-music review section and penned many of the profiles of soul artists in Record Mirror. Thanks in part to his efforts, Record Mirror offered more coverage of, and a more authoritative critical stance towards, soul music. Perhaps more significantly, Jopling retained an independence of thought that set him apart from many of his peers. While his record reviews—like those of his peers—concerned themselves with the chart potential of the disc in question, Jopling was unafraid to compare or contrast albums and singles with previous releases by the same artist. More importantly, while he was a committed fan of the music, he was unafraid to speak out when it did not live up to his expectations. His opinion of the Revue at the Finsbury Astoria, for example, singled out Redding’s performance for criticism on the grounds that it was “corny” and based on too many cover versions and fast songs at the expense of the (more soulful) ballads (Jopling 1967, 7).14 Such was the response to his subdued review that Record Mirror devoted a whole page to letters on the “Stax Controversy” and compelled Jopling to provide an extraordinary defence of his opinion. He reiterated that he “quite enjoyed” the show but remained unrepentant that he reserved the right to criticize Redding, a stance which was one of the first public and unequivocal assertions of independence among music journalists of the 1960s (Anonymous 1967d). Jopling’s understanding of the role of the

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critic was vitally important to the development of an independent critical voice among British music journalists (see Richardson 2010, xv–xvi).15 Although it did not necessarily aid his popularity among his readership, his forthrightness helped to establish Record Mirror’s identity as the weekly to consult for soul music news and reviews. In addition to its ability to create informal communities of like-minded fans, music also acts as a forum for, to quote George Lipsitz (1994, 126), “negotiation and contestation between [such] groups”. While Lipsitz primarily discusses the role of music in immigrant communities, his theory might be applied to the subcultural groups of mods, soul fans and other teenagers who attended the Revue’s shows or who bought the records of African-American soul artists. Support for the music could be interpreted as an expression of a white individual’s empathy for people of colour, and a means through which cross-cultural and interracial interaction could be facilitated. In this sense, soul music could also be a gateway into deeper identification with black people and one of the influences that promoted racial integration in the late 1960s (Bennett 2000, 2–5 passim). These theories are implied by the fictional character Jimmy Rabbitte in Roddy Doyle’s tale of a white soul band from Dublin, The Commitments: “The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads. An’ Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland …. An’ the northside Dubliners are the niggers o’ Dublin—say it loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud” (Doyle 2008, 9).16 This claiming of a famous Black Power slogan (first coined by James Brown), and the attendant reinvention of ethnicity was facilitated through the Commitments appropriating for themselves the soul music of the American South. (As Rabitte pointed out, “[y]our music should be abou’ where you’re from an’ the sort o’ people yeh come from” (Doyle 2008, 9).) In this we might interpret attendance at a Stax show constituting an expression of political, racial, and musical solidarity. This political subtext occasionally appeared in the pages of Record Mirror. In 1965, the singer Chuck Jackson proclaimed that “R-and-B is a phase, a branch from the tree and the tree is basically Negro, you know, Negro history. ... White artists don’t have the soul for it. It’s the background, man, it’s hard livin’ and the rhythm of tote that barge, lift that bale” (quoted in Green 1965, 3). Regular correspondent and founder of the Tamla-Motown Appreciation Society Dave Godin (1966, 2) offered a sensible and wide-ranging observation in response to readers expressing similar opinions to Jackson in November 1966: It is way off beam to say that fans of R and B and “Soul” say it is the colour of a star’s skin that brings the elusive “soul” quality ... the depth of emotion and feeling doesn’t particularly hinge on the singer’s past

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suffering, but on his dramatic ability and acting power. We do maintain, however, that because American Negroes can only enter the musical field, and are denied opportunities to enter other fields, this pent-up talent will dominate the one area where they are allowed artistic expression … A Glasgow orphan doesn’t find doors closed in his face just because he is an orphan but this is just what does happen to the American Negro, day in and day out. The same orphan singing with an assumed American Negro accent would still be as much of a phoney as any British singer with a less unhappy background singing as if he’d just come out of the cotton fields— and the whole cult of “one accent for the interview and another for the record” won’t survive the flimsiest examination.17

Echoing debates that enveloped the American jazz periodical Down Beat in 1963, Tony Hall (1967, 10) decried “Crow-Jim” (reverse racism) in 1967, arguing that most listeners had phases in which they “won’t acknowledge the existence of any music other than by coloured artistes” but averred that most people were able to overcome this aural form of segregation.18 (Dave Phillips (2011) and Melv Kaye (2011) both confessed to this form of positive discrimination. Kaye’s predilection for exclusively playing records by black artists led one of his friends to mock him as a reverse racist, whereas Phillips (2011) commented, “we were into a reverse apartheid: only black singers will do!”.) In response to the urban uprisings that beset Detroit in summer 1967, Record Mirror reader Adam White (1967, 2) lamented that the world would now be remembering Detroit not for Motown but for rioting. These were relatively isolated voices, however. Most Record Mirror readers were interested solely in the music rather than its wider political connotations, largely because they were teenagers whose political sensibilities had not yet matured or simply because they did not believe there to be a link between music that they considered so beautiful and politics that they considered so mundane (see for example Cummings 2011a).

“Melting Pot”: Integration and Cultural Intermezzos This discussion opens up both problems and possibilities for understanding of the significance of the Revue for British youth. The fans who participated in this study indicated three layers that defined their love for soul. The music, obviously, was paramount; the race of the musicians secondary; and the politics of the time was relatively distant in their minds. They are at liberty to state that the race of the Stax singers did not matter to them personally, but the fact remains that within the context of the United Kingdom in the mid-1960s, race undoubtedly mattered (Fidler 2011; Nickols 2011l; Richardson and Finbow 2011; Rounce 2011). The country was engaged in an impassioned debate over race and nation. Two

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years earlier, Malcolm X visited the country and became embroiled in a housing controversy in the West Midlands which revealed high levels of resentment in the local working-class white community over the issue of immigration and housing. In the week of the Revue’s arrival in Leicester, the Leicester Mercury offered a racist editorial cartoon that commented on immigration, race and the state. Some residents were annoyed that council houses were being offered to recent immigrants. The cartoon featured a heavily caricatured African tribesman playing bongos while sporting a loincloth, bone earrings and with bones tied in his hair. His comment to his similarly clad “wife” revealed that the bongo-playing represented him “applying for a British council house” (reprinted in Hiro 1991, 44). This type of response to immigration formed part of the controversy that still surrounded the 1965 White Paper on immigration and the 1965 Race Relations Act. The Act made racial discrimination an offence in public places but by the time of the Revue had not led to one conviction. It was overshadowed by its quid pro quo, the White Paper, proposed tougher immigration restrictions and proposed placing the police force at the centre of the process for registering immigrants. The formation of the British National Front in February 1967 illustrated that the extreme right was mobilizing itself against people of colour, and the startling popularity of the television program, Till Death Us Do Part, whose main character was the white racist Alf Garnett, suggested that many Britons were unhappy at the presence of the country’s non-white population. Many West Indian migrants, for example, found themselves excluded from white social circles. Such exclusion forced them into an informal process of segregation, leading many to conclude that British society was, quite simply, unwelcoming and prejudiced (see Foot 1969, 90; Heineman 1972, Hinds 2001; Hiro 1991, 60; 16–20; Sandbrook 2006, 661–3; Street 2008, 932–50; Taylor 1982, 17–18). This integration debate formed a crucial backdrop to the Stax/Volt Revue. While a subculture is forging its identity and differentiating itself from the mainstream by its consumption, it is also having this identityformation process enacted upon itself (Storey 2003b; Hall and Whannel 1990). Consequently, while many soul fans might not have attached explicit political importance to their fandom, their support of AfricanAmerican musicians (both financial, personal and by implication moral) was in essence making a political point, even if these same fans did not wish to acknowledge it as such. Observers of the interracial crowds would doubtless have formed conclusions about the audiences’ attitudes towards integration. Certain cases suggest that these observers were far from wrong in doing so. It seems that most—if not all—white members of the

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audiences were relatively open towards their black counterparts. For Barbara Mynott, then a sixteen-year-old mod from Smethwick, a small town less than five miles from Birmingham city centre which had been the focus of the housing controversy which so appalled Malcolm X, the Revue was the first time that she came into close contact with Birmingham’s predominantly Caribbean black population. The Revue thus constituted a site in which integration could occur without tension (Street 2010). More passionately, Melv Kaye (2011) insisted that the halls in which the Revue played were spaces in which racism was not only unapparent but was also not tolerated. Other members might not have been quite as sensitive to the political and social possibilities of the audience gatherings but a crucial fact remains: many white audience members would have resisted any suggestion that the race of the performers and fellow audience members mattered. They were there simply for the music. Such protestations underemphasize the extent to which believing that race was unimportant was in fact a significant statement within the context of the 1960s (Fidler 2011; Finbow and Richardson 2011; Nickols 2011). While the audience was in no way filled with crusaders for black rights, they were by their very presence crossing or perhaps more accurately, blurring a racial line. Thus their mere attendance was a political statement, however muted the conscious meaning of this statement might be. These individuals were, after all, present in a social world in part constructed by Stax soul, the African-American civil-rights movement and the immigration debate in the UK (Bennett 2000, 195; Hebdige 1979; Rosko 2011). For many fans, soul operated largely as a signifier of status, elevating them from their peers. It conferred upon them an “otherness” that was not enacted in racial terms but which existed largely within the structures of British youth culture. Yet this “otherness” was enacted in a multiracial space in which racism was not apparent. It represented a space in which black and white Britons could share a profound, possibly even transcendent experience that was defined in part by the integrated American musicians onstage. Consequently, the physical and metaphysical space in which the Revue took place became, to cite Les Back, a “cultural intermezzo” where “different cultural sensibilities merge and new identifications are formed” (Back quoted in Bennett 2000, 115). Although there was no great response to the Revue in the pages of local or national newspapers, the shows remain as evidence that some young Britons were in the process of breaking down racial divides. Moreover, numerous white soul fans were encouraged to cross physical racial lines by the music. Obviously, in attending shows as part of a racially mixed crowd they were contributing to racial integration in the

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UK. But a number of fans extended this integration into other aspects of their lives. Some began investigating the social roots of the music that they enjoyed. The manifestation of this interest took different forms. Encouraged by their interest in soul music, Melv Kaye (2011) and Barbara Mynott (Street 2010) began to read about the situation in black America. After learning of segregation on public transport in the American South, Kaye decided that as a gesture of solidarity he would always sit at the back of a bus. Some soul fans like Kaye also espied particular parallels between the struggles that characterized their working-class backgrounds and those that faced black Americans. Working-class Britons, according to Kaye, could understand and empathize with the “anger, helplessness and desperation” of many African-Americans. His upbringing and background in the mining communities of Yorkshire revealed to him the limited life options and horizons of young men like him. The exclusion felt by working-class boys such as Kaye was certainly reminiscent of that experienced by black Americans, even if it did not approach the levels of American racial oppression. On a symbolic level, then, Kaye’s comments, like those of Cummings, Phillips and Rounce, echo those of many British blues fans of the 1950s and 1960s who claimed their own backgrounds—often characterized by working-class toil and struggle—gave them a sense of identification with the African-American singers whose music they loved so much (see Wynn 2007, 15).19 Other soul fans developed an understanding of the political economy that lay behind African-American recorded music, and began to argue that buying records by soul musicians would help ensure that some money found its way to the artists. Thus they were, in a small way, contributing towards the financial uplift of black America (Kaye 2011; Rounce 2011). Yet more sought to increase the level of integration in their own lives, which prompted them to head into nominally “black” areas of the cities in which they lived. The results of these impromptu integration efforts were mixed. Brian Lovegrove (2011), a mod and soul fan from Reading who frequently visited London nightclubs in the 1960s, recalls an “undercurrent of violence” between whites and blacks at the Flamingo Club on Wardour Street in Soho.20 The Flamingo was a favourite club of London’s young West Indians and African-American GIs; the appearance of a number of mods reportedly provoked tension and occasional violence. Lovegrove noted that there was far less racial tension in the mod clubs in Reading. In Manchester Phil Saxe became the focus of racial abuse for his public identification with black people. After buying his ticket for the Revue he urged his fellow schoolboys to come along. One particular response remained in his mind over forty years later: “why would you go to see a

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bunch of niggers for?” (Saxe 2011). For Saxe, part of the mod life was being a fan of black music. It therefore followed that a real mod would be somebody who rejected racial discrimination. Echoing this belief, Melv Kaye (2011) could not quite believe that he needed to write ahead of his visit to a Scarborough bed-and-breakfast to check with the landlady that it was acceptable for his West Indian friend Stafford Harris to visit as well. Perceiving black culture to be cooler than white culture as a consequence of his musical choices, Bob Cummings made deliberate attempts to cross Manchester’s colour line with his friends. The results ranged from bemusement to outright rejection (Cummings 2011b). Through establishing friendship networks with Jamaican immigrants at the Blue Note club, Dave Phillips (2011) learned about black political figures such as Marcus Garvey, although his forays into Moss Side’s black area also led to at least one less intellectual discussion which ended with him handing over a tenbob note in return for his safe passage home.21 This suggests that a certain level of social and political integration was wrought by soul music in 1960s Britain, although the reciprocality of this relationship remains moot.

“Wrap it Up”: Conclusions The preceding discussion indicates that the Stax/Volt Revue offers a useful starting point for a broader discussion of soul music in the UK during the 1960s. The relatively small and self-selecting group of soul fans who participated in this study all broadly supported the concept of racial equality, although such support was not confined to the select few. As Bob Cummings (2011b) noted, many mods and soul fans applauded the African-American civil-rights movement when they saw it on television or read of it in the newspapers. They knew which side they were on, even if they did not have to make a physical commitment to the struggle. They were, however, also at liberty to switch off the television, put down the newspaper and focus on their own daily life. As another soul fan commented, “the civil rights movement seemed far away from me and my concerns in London at that time” (Green 2011b). Thus they could detach themselves from the political implications of soul music—the AfricanAmerican struggle was, after all, many thousands of miles away. Perhaps more pertinently, many soul fans were in their mid-teens when they attended the Revue’s shows. Even disregarding the undoubted quality of the shows it would not be unexpected for fourteen- or fifteen-year-old audience members to state that the Revue was an almost transcendent event, for the mid-teens are formative years in setting an individual’s identity. The respondents for this study were contacted primarily through

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word-of-mouth and various soul websites, meaning that older members of the audience were more difficult to approach and those for whom the Revue was not a significant event remained silent. Moreover, most of those commented are still active in the soul subculture, either through Internetbased messageboards or through their personal and/or professional lives: Melv Kaye has been a soul DJ for many years, and named his son for Steve Cropper and Otis Redding, and daughter for Carla Thomas; Dave Phillips and Bob Cummings run a vibrant soul website; Phil Saxe was a DJ at the legendary Twisted Wheel nightclub and later joined the music industry, working for the Manchester-based independent record label Factory Records. Consequently it is to be expected that their memories of the shows would be especially significant, since they helped to shape a lifetime’s love of soul music. Hindsight also plays a role. The Stax/Volt Revue has attained almost legendary status in the British soul community, and it is entirely possible that memories have become shrouded in one or more layer of myth-making and hyperbole. The 2007 DVD of the Revue’s appearance in Oslo provides a useful counterpoint and potential corrective to this myth-making.22 Yet it largely confirms the fans’ conclusions about the Revue’s quality. The performances are polished yet also gritty, soulful and funky, and while Otis Redding’s set is a little frenetic, Sam and Dave are so transcendent that even the staid Norwegian crowd are brought to their feet. The film suggests that the legendary status of the Revue is fully deserved. Importantly for this study, many fans did not feel obliged to translate their fandom into explicit support for any political movement among black people. Indeed, Phil Saxe (2011) unambiguously commented that his fifteen-year-old self was not politically mature enough to make connections between, for example, Otis Redding and Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. Similarly, although Tony Rounce (2011) came from a highly political family, at fourteen years old he was not able to consider the political and racial significance of the Revue more deeply than to notice how many black faces were in the audience—an unusual sight for a young boy who lived in Stanford-le-Hope in Essex. On the other hand, the fact that most of the fans were so blithely unconcerned about the racial identity of the bands they were watching is surely significant, revealing the relative lack of concern about racism among certain numbers of young Britons in the 1960s (see Fidler 2011; Finbow 2011; Nickols 2011). Through this we might begin to approach the ways that British people interpreted—or were moved by—the sounds of black America and perhaps even the AfricanAmerican civil-rights movement: guided in part by their love for music, many soul fans did not see race as a problematic issue. These crowds were

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not necessarily filled with campaigners for the civil-rights movement, but their openness suggests that young white and black Britons were prepared to share space with each other. In stark contrast to the notorious “if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour” graffiti that accompanied Peter Griffiths’s 1964 election campaign in Smethwick, white Britons in the Stax audience were suggesting that they were prepared for, or at least unconcerned about integration (Street 2008, 936–7). Whether their lack of concern about integration changed as a result of their musical tastes or whether their lack of racial prejudice informed their musical choices may well remain a chicken-and-egg conundrum. Yet, within its historical context, the issue of race and integration is highly important. Furthermore, the identities and group sympathies of soul fans are related to their musical tastes. The issue of political allegiances relates to merely one aspect of soul fans’ multifaceted identities. To assert that the Stax/Volt Revue facilitated the creation of an invented or imagined community of people fighting for racial equality might overburden the evidence with a preconception of the relationship between music and politics, but the fact remains that a community was in existence in the halls in which the Revue played (see for example Lewis cited in Bennett 2000, 50). Those present shared a love of soul music and were brought together by its transcendent power to move their spirit. Attendance at the shows was also a direct statement of identity—those attending the shows were dedicated soul fans; they knew that Stax was the connoisseur’s choice that separated them from the common herd. Like the mods, who were consistently separating themselves from mainstream trends in order to identify themselves as mods both to fellow mods and outsiders, Stax fans would carry around their records both to identify themselves to other Stax fans and to separate themselves from the common teenager who tucked a Herman’s Hermits record under their arm. This imposition of a hierarchical relationship between teenage tribes itself points towards the rise of one of the most celebrated subcultures of the postwar era—northern soul. It was but a few small steps from Sam and Dave to Duke and Leonard.23

Notes 1. Recordings of the tour are available on three CDs: The Stax/Volt Revue: Volume One—Live in London (Atlantic LP, 1967 or CD, 1991); The Stax/Volt Revue: Volume Two—Live in Paris (Atlantic LP, 1967 or CD, 1991); The Stax/Volt Revue: Volume Three: Live in Europe—Hit the Road Stax (Atlantic LP, 1967 or CD, 1992). The Oslo show was filmed by

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Norwegian television and is currently available on the Stax-Volt Revue DVD (Universal, 2007). 2. See also Donald “Duck” Dunn quoted in Guralnick 1986, 314. 3. Bowman (1997) does not identify the location of the show at which Redding was apparently pulled into the audience, claiming only that it occurred in Scotland. Records suggest that this was the 30 March show in Glasgow, the only Scottish show of the tour. No press reports are available to corroborate Bowman’s unreferenced remark. 4. In this article Redding makes the frequent mistake among Americans of using “England” as a synecdoche for the United Kingdom. 5. Notably, Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood” reached its peak chart position after the Stax tour, six months after its original release. 6. It should be noted that the difference in sound is as much to do with the producers and writers of the music as geography. 7. See also charts at UK Top 40 database (http://www.everyhit.com/ retros/index.php), consulted 5 May 2011. Note that this database is slightly flawed in that it separates the charts into three-per-month (early-, mid-, and late-), although as an aggregate of the rival charts of the time it is a useful resource. 8. For the folk revival and notions of authenticity as experienced and debated in the United States, see Cantwell 1996; and Cohen 2002. 9. See e.g. Storey (2003b, 123–6) for the application of Barthes to twentiethcentury popular music. For the disputed concept of “southernness” in the music of Stax, see Guralnick 1986, 6–11. 10. Franklin’s cover of “Respect” was recorded on 14 February 1967. Liner notes, Aretha Franklin, I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You (Los Angeles: Atlantic CD reissue, 1995; originally Atlantic LP, 1967). 11. Marcus (2005, 39–42) asserts that Cooke’s is (infinitely) superior in comparison with “Blowing in the Wind”. 12. This was also the case for Manchester’s mods. See also Hall and Whannel 1990 (1964), 22–34; Hebdige 1979, 88. 13. Illustrating the close relationship between record labels and the music press, Hall was also the Head of Promotions for Decca Records, leaving the post in July 1967 to set up his own label (Anonymous c. 1967, 31). 14. Finbow (2011) echoes Jopling’s criticism: “h]is performance at the Granby Halls was certainly high on energy and the man dominated the stage, but I could have done without all the relentless ‘gotta gotta’s’ and yearned for something a little more subtle. From their reaction it was obvious that the crowd thought otherwise.”

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15. See also Norman Jopling profile at Rock’s Backpages (http://www. rocksbackpages.com/writer.html?WriterID=jopling), accessed 6 April 2011; see also Finbow 2011; Rounce 2011. 16. The cinematic version, The Commitments (dir. Alan Parker, 1991), sanitized the language so that Rabitte talked of the “blacks” of Europe, Ireland and Dublin. 17. Godin was also briefly Motown’s British representative and is credited with coining the term “northern soul”. He was a vital cog in the soul community and amongst the most vocal in articulating the close relationship between soul and politics. See Godin 1995 (1968), 324–7; Hewitt 2003, 20–1; Johnson 2004, 34. 18. For the original debates, see Anonymous, 1962a; 1962b; Welding 1962, 30. A roundtable was prompted by a patronizing review by Ira Gitler of an Abbey Lincoln album in which he accused the singer of being a “professional Negro [who was] misguided and naïve”. This followed a denunciation of Roach’s 1961 album, Percussion Bitter Sweet, which pursued the protest theme of his furious 1960 album, We Insist!—Freedom Now Suite. A tense debate involving Gitler, Lincoln, her husband Max Roach, Don Ellis, Lalo Schifrin, Nat Hentoff, Bill Coss and Don DeMicheal followed, in which Gitler’s review was rebutted by Lincoln and Roach before the debate moved on to a blander discussion of the wrongs of racial prejudice. 19. These individuals included Animals vocalist Eric Burdon and Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman. 20. See also “Organized Rage”, “A Blast From the Past: Rhythm, Blues and Anti Racism, Live at the Flamingo”, 8 April 2011. Accessed 23 May 2012. (http://www.organizedrage.com/2007/04/rhythm-blues-andanti-racism-live-at.html). 21. See also Dave 2009, 74–5 (Philips’s autobiographical novel of the Manchester mod scene). 22. See Reelin’ In The Years Productions website for details (http://www. reelinintheyears.com/dvd-individual-new.php?id=39). Accessed 25 May 2012. 23. Duke and Leonard were a soul duo whose rare single “Just Do The Best You Can” (Stomp Town 45) is prized in the northern-soul scene.



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References Anonymous. 1962a. “Racial Prejudice in Jazz, Part I”, Down Beat 29, 6, March 15: 20-26. Anonymous. 1962b. “Racial Prejudice in Jazz, Part II”, Down Beat 29, 7, March 29: 22-25. Anonymous. 1967a, “Otis Redding Interview”. Hit Parader, August. Accessed May 11, 2011. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html? ArticleID=4973. Anonymous. 1967b. “Rhythm and Blues Chart Survey, 1966–7”, Record Mirror July 22: 5. Anonymous. 1967c. “UK Record Firms Reshuffling Room at the Top”, Billboard, July 8: 31. Anonymous. 1967d. “The Stax Controversy”, Record Mirror, April 15. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Grain of the Voice”. In Image-Music-Text, edited and translated by Stephen Heath, 179-189. London: Fontana. Bennett, Andy. 2000. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. London: Macmillan. Bowman, Rob. 1997. Soulsville: The Story of Stax Records. London: Books with Attitude. Branch, Taylor. 2006. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968. New York: Simon and Schuster. Cantwell, Robert. 1996. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cohen, Ronald D. 2002. Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Cummings, Bob. 2011. E-mail to Author, February 24. Dave. 2009. The Manchester Wheelers: A Northern Quadrophenia. Soul Publications. Diawara, Manthia. 2002. “The 1960s in Bamako”, Politics and Culture, 1. Accessed May 25, 2011. http://www.politicsandculture.org/2010/08/ 10/the-1960s-in-bamako-manthia-diawara-2/#print. Doyle, Roddy. 2008. The Commitments. London: Vintage. Originally published in 1989. Fidler, Brian. 2011. E-mail to Author, February 9. Finbow, Mike and Clive Richardson. 2011. Message to Author on The Southern Soul List, February 8. Finbow, Mike. 2011. “Thoughts on Sixties Soul”, pers. communication to author, February 11. Foot, Paul. 1969. The Rise of Enoch Powell. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Frith, Simon. 1978. The Sociology of Rock. London: Constable. Godin, Dave. 1966. “Letter”, Record Mirror, November 26: 2 —. 1995. “R&B and the Long Hot Summer”. In The Faber Book of Pop, edited by Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage, 324. London: Faber and Faber. Originally published in Soul Music Magazine, (March, 1968). Green, Geoff. 2011a. E-mail to Author, February 17. —. 2011b. SoulSource web conversation, February 17. Green, Richard. 1965. “’White Artistes Don’t Have the Soul for Blues’ says Chuck Jackson”, Record Mirror, April 3: 3. Guralnick, Peter. 1986. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. London: Penguin. —. 2005. Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. London: Little Brown. Hall, Stuart and Whannel, Paddy. 1990. “The Young Audience”. In On Record: Rock, Pop & the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 22–34. Originally published in 1964. Hall, Tony. 1967. “My Scene”, Record Mirror, February 11: 10. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Heineman, Jr., Benjamin W. 1972. The Politics of the Powerless: A study of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination. London: Oxford University Press. Hershey, Gerri. 1984. Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music. London: Macmillan. Hewitt, Paolo. 2003. “The Soul Pioneer”, Manifesto, June: 20-21. Accessed August 13, 2013. http://www.soulwalking.co.uk%A5Dave 520Godins%20File/Dave-Page-1.jpg; http://www.soulwalking.co.uk% A5Dave520Godins%20File/Dave-Page-2.jpg Hinds, Donald. 2001. Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Press. Hiro, Dilip. 1991. Black British, White British: A History of Race Relations in Britain. London: Harper Collins. Johnson, Phil. 2004. “Dave Godin”, The Independent, October 20: 34. Jones, Peter. 1976. “Sometimes, fame comes to a label as well as a star— like Tamla Motown. Now here’s Stax Volt from America with hot soul discs, & a crop of chart-riding R&B artists”, Record Mirror March 25: 6. Jopling, Norman. 1967. “Stax Show Review”, Record Mirror, March 25. Kaye, Melv. 2011. Interview with Author, February 3.

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Lindbert, Ulf, Gestur Gudmundsson, Morten Michelsen and Hans Weisethauent. 2005. Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers and Cool-Headed Cruisers. New York: Peter Lang. Lipsitz, George. 1994. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place. London: Verso. Lovegrove, Brian. 2011. Interview with Author, March 29. Marcus, Greil. 2005. Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. London: Faber and Faber. Millard, André. 2012. Beatlemania: Technology, Business and Teen Culture in Cold War America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mitchell, Gillian A. M. 2006. “Visions of Diversity: Cultural Pluralism and the Nation in the Folk Music Revival Movement of the United States and Canada, 1958–1965”, Journal of American Studies 40: 608–9. Nickols, Peter. 2011. E-mail to Author, February 8. Phillips, Dave. 2011. E-mail to Author, February 24. Pruter, Robert. 1991. Chicago Soul. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Radano, Ronald. 2003. Lying Up A Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Radio Rewind. 2011. “Mike Raven. Accessed May 9, 2011. http://www. radiorewind.co.uk/radio1/mike_raven_page.htm. Raven, Mike. 1997. “Obituary: Churton Fairman”, The Independent, April 29. Accessed May 9, 2011. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people /obituary-churton-fairman-1270037.html. Richards, Keith. 2010. Life. London: Orion. Richardson, Clive. 2010. Really Sayin’ Something: Memoirs of a Soul Survivor. Lydd, Kent: Bank House Books. Rosko, Emperor (Mike Pasternak). 2011. Reply to Author’s Questionnaire, February 14. Rounce, Tony. 2011. E-mail to Author, February 2. Sandbrook, Dominic. 2006. White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties. London: Little Brown. Savage, Jon. 2009. “The Magazine Explosion”, The Observer, September 6. Accessed May 25 , 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/ sep/06/sixties-60s-pop-magazines-beatles. Saxe, Phil. 2011. Interview with Author, February 11. Schwartz, Roberta Freund. 2007. How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues Style in the United Kingdom. Aldershot: Ashgate. Smith, Suzanne E. 1999. Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Storey, John. 2003a. Inventing Popular Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2003b. Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Street (née Mynott), Barbara. 2011. Interview with Author, December 24. Street, Joe. 2008. “Malcolm X, Smethwick and the Influence of the African American Freedom Struggle on British Race Relations in the 1960s”, Journal of Black Studies 38, 6: 932–50. Taylor, Stan. 1982. The National Front in English Politics. London: Macmillan. Ward, Brian. 1998. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations. London: UCL Press. Welding, Pete. 1962. “Review of Max Roach Percussion Bitter Sweet”, Down Beat 29, 1, January 4: 30. White, Adam. 1967. “Letter”, Record Mirror, August 12: 2. Wynn, Neil A. 2007. “‘Why I Sing the Blues’: African American Culture in the Transatlantic World’ in Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe, edited by Neil Wynn, 3–22. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

11. 1968 UNDERGROUND: WEST GERMAN RADICALS BETWEEN SUBCULTURE AND REVOLUTION TIMOTHY SCOTT BROWN

From the perspective of subcultural studies, one of the most notable features of the global rebellion of “1968” was that it marked the birth of youth subcultures standing at the intersection of popular culture and radical politics. Subcultures had of course existed long before the 1960s, and were objects of scholarly study as early as the 1940s (Gelder and Thornton, 1997). Yet the particular innovation of the 1960s was the transformation of the postwar form of youth subculture based on pop-cultural consumption and a new “youth” identity into an explicitly political phenomenon in which the act of youth rebellion around style, fashion, and music was seen as part of a broader anti-authoritarian project. In West Germany, one of the most explosive and multifaceted “small” 1968s of which the global, “large 1968” was composed, this phenomenon was particularly pronounced (Brown 2009). Not only did subculture become political, it became analytically aware of itself as subculture. Indeed, from the end of the 1960s and stretching into the 1970s, concepts and terms like “subculture”, “counterculture” and “underground” were theorized by the left in general, and in many cases, by the very people involved in them; and members of subcultures adopted an explicitly political role for themselves based on the defence of subculture against both state repression and capitalist commodification. In the West German 1968, and to an extent also in other national 1968s (the Netherlands, Great Britain, the United States, and other locations that future scholarship will reveal)—subcultural members were no mere objects of scholarship, but became subjects of their own social and political awakening (Pas 2011; Brown 2013). This model of subculture stands in stark contrast to that associated with the classics of subcultural studies. The earliest sociological studies dealt with groups like jazz musicians and taxi dancers that were deemed “subcultures” by the persons studying them, and who would not necessarily have seen themselves as members of subcultures as such. The

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Teddy boys, mods, skinheads and punks who were studied by the Birmingham School a few decades later may have been more likely to identify themselves as members of subcultures, if only because of the importance of style, shared tastes in fashion, music, and so on. Yet, these subcultures typically did not think of themselves in political terms, and indeed, with certain exceptions, rejected explicit politics (Brown 2004); it was up to scholars to ascribe to them political significance, finding subversive potential in the symbolic disruptions caused by subcultural style, seeing subcultural style as a challenge to hegemony, or as a phenomenon that magically helped to resolve the contradictions of capitalism (Hebdige 1979). Yet here, the political significance of subcultures was a passive one—their challenge to ruling elites was, as far as politics was concerned, largely inadvertent. Subsequent scholarship in cultural and media studies has placed more emphasis on the active component in subculture—that is, on the cultural and/or political agency of subcultural members—with respect especially to insurgent subcultures/music genres like hip hop; but as this essay will demonstrate, an active model of subculture was already extant in the 1960s, emerging out of the realm of subculture itself, predating the most influential Anglophone approaches to the topic. The emerging historiography on the student movement and counterculture of the 1960s has in common with the more recent scholarship on subcultures, popular music and cultural exchange an emphasis on the active component in subculture; that is, on the way that individuals used globally available cultural products to construct subcultural identities with an explicitly political valence. This essay will explore a previously overlooked facet of the active element in subculture: how the concept of “subculture” was elevated by subcultural protagonists into an element of cultural practice in its own right, and how the elements of subcultural praxis—style, DIY (“Do it Yourself”) cultural production, the appropriation and reconfiguration of elements of transnational popular culture—became central to the political practice of the activists of the 1960s. **** “1968” in West Germany was an anti-authoritarian revolt stretching from the early 1960s to well into the 1970s. Driven by the student movement and its chief organization, the SDS (Socialist German Student’s League), it also extended out into the arts and the counterculture. If the chief events and personalities of the revolt have received significant scholarly attention (Brown 2013; Klimke 2010; Klimke and Scharloth 2008; Horn 2006; Suri

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2003), non-student actors and initiatives falling outside the realm of street protest have received considerably less. This relative lacuna is unfortunate since, in addition to explicitly political aims like university reform and an end to the West German government’s support for the American war in Vietnam—efforts too often made coterminous in the scholarly imagination with the actions of a small group of male, middle-class student theoreticians—the revolt sought to contest authority at the level of daily life, a site where young bohemians, artists, workers, women and other marginalized groups came into their own. The “revolution of everyday life” was heavily influenced by theory and practices drawn from the avantgarde artistic doctrines like French Situationism and the Dutch “Provo” movement, both of which emphasized pranks and provocations as a means of disrupting business as usual and thereby creating a shift in consciousness that was at once both personal and political. At the same time, it was expressed in a myriad of independent initiatives from below, ranging from the founding of underground newspapers, publishing houses, and distribution networks to the formation of independent political groups and social initiatives like kindergartens. In all these initiatives, the distinction between culture and politics, between art and daily life, was erased, and subculture—as a key site where artistic and cultural-productive practices became mixed up both with a politics at once public and personal— assumed a central importance. The convergence between subculture and the revolt of “1968” in West Germany developed slowly at first, the “revolutionary potential” of bohemia and bohemians being an object of either intense dispute or cautious interest among the young intelligentsia and left-leaning academics. Early assessments, such as the sympathetic 1967 study by Margret Kosel, sought to come to grips in particular with the figure of the “Gammler”, an allpurpose German word for shaggy young non-conformists, be it rock fans in the mid-1960s, or later, hippies (Kosel 1967). There had been an earlier German subcultural type—the so-called Halbstarke—who was basically an early version of “rocker” who patterned his or herself after Marlon Brando in The Wild One, but this had been a phenomenon of the 1950s, predating the intensive politicization of the following decade and bearing none of the marks of a politically conscious subculture that would later develop. Indeed, the Gammler appeared on the scene as a more-or-less direct response to the invasion of English “beat music”—Beatles, Kinks, Rolling Stones, Who—sounds and images flooding into West Germany via American armed forces radio programming, television programmes like Beat Club, concert appearances, and cross-Channel tourism and other personal exchanges (Siegfried 2006).

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The revolutionary potential of music—that is, its potential to synergize youth unrest that could become politicized either “from above”, by the authorities, or “from below” by the participants themselves (Siegfried 1995)—became visible several years before the public emergence of the Gammler. During the Munich “Schwabing riots” of June 1962, the attempt of police to break up a group of young people listening to street musicians led to several nights of rioting. Official commands, grudgingly obeyed at first, began to be met with resistance. Late the next night, when police tried to disperse a crowd of listeners gathered around three guitarists on the Leopoldstrasse, they were met with a hail of rocks and bottles. Crowds of young people physically interfered with police trying to make arrests, damaged police vehicles, and attempted to stop and overturn passing cars. Crowds taunted police with cries of “Gestapo!” Over the weekend and into the next week, hundreds of police fought running battles with crowds of demonstrators 4–6,000 strong. The riots left a deep impression in their aftermath. Newspaper accounts expressed outrage against the rioters, who in one particularly imaginative account were presented as a “halforganized mob out of the Munich underworld” which had succeeded in causing a disturbance “comparable only to the gangster battles of Chicago in the twenties” (Anonymous, 1962). Three years later, a concert by the Rolling Stones in West Berlin’s Waldbühne (“forest stage”) signalled in an even more striking fashion the potential of music to effect a breach between youth and authority. A group of young people, many of them “rockers” from Berlin’s working-class Märkisches Viertel, had earlier in the day burst through police lines to enter the concert grounds without tickets (Reinders and Fritsch 1995, 14– 15). After the Stones’ performance of “Satisfaction”, the short concert came abruptly to an end. A pitched battle developed between the police and concert-goers, the former making liberal use of truncheons and water cannons, the latter tearing apart the stadium stands and pelting police with the debris. The battle continued on the city train. In the wake of the hourslong mêlée, seventeen city train cars were destroyed, four so badly that they had to be taken permanently out of service (Kraushaar 2007). Many of the participants in these riots went on a few short years later to form the hard core of a radical West Berlin subcultural group—the “Hash Rebels” aka “the Blues”—which would make explicitly political what had only been inadvertently so in the Stones riot. Yet, when the figure of the “Gammler” entered the public consciousness the year after the riot, it was not as a street-fighting militant, but as a public nuisance who challenged authority by his (less frequently, her) mere presence and appearance. The Gammler, an acknowledged presence in West Germany’s

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major cities by 1966, quickly became subject of a fierce public backlash. In the divided city of Berlin, a Cold War flashpoint where ideological and social tensions were particularly acute, the Gammler was hated, for both similar and different reasons, by both authorities and average citizens, on both sides of the wall. In the East, “longhairs” were often hunted by the police and given forced haircuts (Brown 2009, 86). In the western part of the divided city, the reception was more restrained, although not appreciably warmer. The chief hangout for Gammler in West Berlin was the plaza outside the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Built in the 1890s, the church had been heavily damaged in a bombing raid in 1943, and left in its partially ruined state after the war as a warning to future generations. Alex Gross, a visiting correspondent for the London-based International Times, profiled the scene around the Gedächtniskirche in a late 1966 essay entitled “Beatniks of Berlin”. Gross’s essay featured an interview with the pastor of the church, Gunter Pohl. Pohl was sympathetic to the young people milling around his church, but had been unable to avoid becoming involved in the problems created by open marijuana use, “public displays of affection”, and street hassles between Gammler and passerby. Gross writes: “The Gammlers [sic] were not really arrested. They were merely taken down to the station for an ‘inspection.’ On what grounds, I asked. Disturbing the peace. And what constituted disturbing the peace? Any act which interrupted the normal rhythm of life” (Gross 1966, 8). This temporal disruption was simultaneously spatial, not only because the Gammler’s challenge to reigning mores unfolded in the spaces of the city—thereby challenging dominant “place roles” (Dienel and Schophaus 2005)—but more broadly because the mobility of the Gammler represented a rebuff to dominant mores of responsible behaviour. “Gammeln” was literally to “bum around”, not only around the city—or from city to city—but to exotic eastern locales where drugs were plentiful and living cheap. Even more fundamental in the genesis of the moral panic surrounding the Gammler was the visual challenge represented by the Gammler’s unkempt appearance. The political uses to which public distaste for Gammler could be put quickly became apparent to the authorities. “Gammler” rather quickly became a catch-all term for youthful non-conformists of whatever stripe, from runaways to hippies to students with a little bit of hair over the ears. Indeed, “Gammler” became the term of abuse par excellence for the right-wing press when referring to students. Student leaders like Rudi Dutschke were transformed “Polit-Gammler” (“political Gammler”) or “academic Gammler”. The ideal-typical figure of the student—still in reality at this time (mid-1960s) relatively clean-cut—

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was portrayed in the cartoons printed in the Bild Zeitung as a cross between a crazed beatnik and a Hell’s Angel. **** Opinion was divided about whether Gammler represented a political phenomenon. For the novelist Reinhard Lettau, writing in the pages of the left-wing literary journal Kursbuch, the portrayal of Gammler in the Springer press was symptomatic of a broader demonization of the “Other” that was intimately bound up with the repressive power of the state (Lettau 1966). The German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse, whose emphasis on the revolutionary importance of “marginal groups” was a major influence on the New Left, remarked during a lecture appearance in West Berlin in 1967: I am supposed to have asserted that what we in America call hippies and you call Gammler, beatniks, are the new revolutionary class. Far be it from me to assert such a thing. What I was trying to show was that in fact today there are tendencies in society—anarchically unorganized, spontaneous tendencies—that herald a total break with the dominant needs of repressive society. The groups you have mentioned are characteristic of a state of disintegration within the system, which as a mere phenomenon has no revolutionary force whatsoever but which perhaps at some time will be able to play its role in connection with other, much stronger objective forces (Marcuse 1970).

The German student leader Rudi Dutschke, who was highly influenced by Marcuse, similarly recognized in the figure of the Gammler a certain subversive potential, even if as a student-intellectual, he remained noncommittal about the political value of dropping out of society altogether. “We were also very interested in the Gammler-Beatniks along the Seine”, he wrote to a friend in October 1966 after a trip to Paris: Every day there on the Boulevard Saint Michel we could see some 40–50 types, standing, sitting, lying, sleeping, romancing, singing, playing the guitar etc., and we also talked to a few. For the most part they were school kids between 17 and 21 who, discontented with the pressure of home, school, and the factory, demonstrated their anti-authoritarian mindset at the level of everyday life [ihre Anti-Autoritäts-Haltung lebendig demonstrieren]. Not infrequently there were also left-wing students among them, for whom concepts like the proletariat, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the class had become stale [brüchig geworden sind], and who felt they saw, in the emergence of Gammlertum, evidence of the historically

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changed situation of the revolutionary forces in “late-capitalist” society (Dutschke 1966).

Others were not so sure. The Iranian exile writer Bahman Nirumand, a significant force in the West German New Left, lumped “Gammler” along with the other countercultural types—from lovers of jazz to aficionados of Zen Buddhism—whose dangerous embrace of personal fulfilment over political militancy threatened to derail attempts at systemic change (Nirumand 1967). Such critiques like this would pick up force from 1968 on, as the gulf widened between the “hedonistic left” and the “militant left” (Mausbach 2006). The question of whether lifestyle was a site of politics or simply a distraction from politics was debated across the left spectrum, by activists, and by cultural promoters and hip capitalists, and in the underground press. The latter was one of the primary sites in which the underground scene theorized itself, working through partially contradictory and overlapping concepts like “underground”, “subculture”, and “counter-culture”. The debate about subculture/underground was launched in Song, one of the earliest German underground magazines. Founded in 1966, and edited by Reinhard Hippen, Rolf Gekeler, and Tom Schroeder, Song began as a folk-oriented magazine associated with the annual Burg-Waldeck-Festivals. Its assessment of subculture was intimately bound up with an assessment of the value and worth of popular culture, an analysis which was tied in turn to reflections on the merits of specific musical genres. More generally, however, Song played an early and continuing role in distinguishing between the negative content associated with subculture— ascribed to an undifferentiated hippie-like hedonism, linked with the consumption of markers of identity already recuperated by capitalism— and its positive content, which was associated with a critical stance involving both aesthetic and political parameters. This critical stance was reflected in a series of name changes intended to better capture the magazine’s evolving mission. The change of the magazine’s subtitle in 1969 from “German Underground Journal” to “Journal for Progressive Subculture” was meant to reflect a more discerning approach to the question of subculture (Hinton and Bullivant 1974). A leading voice in the attempt to theorize subculture was the Austrian actor, singer, songwriter and author Rolf Schwendter. In an essay published in Song in 1968, Schwendter wrote: The hippies and Beatniks, the Gammler and the Provos, the students (virtually throughout the world) and the school children, the peace marchers, protest singers and intellectuals of the underground newspapers, also the negroes and the Puerto Ricans: a whole multitude is increasingly,

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Citing approvingly Rudi Dutschke’s use of the terms “subculture” and “oppositional milieu” (“Gegenmilieu”) during a 1967 television interview, Schwendter offered subcultures as a living example of Herbert Marcuse’s “great refusal”. Refuting those who dismissed youth nonconformism as a distraction from urgent political tasks, Schwendter insisted on its value. He quoted at length a (rather entertaining) passage of Theodor Adorno’s: The apartment of … a young bohemian corresponds to his spiritual household. On the wall, the illusory [but] true-to-the-original color print of the famous Van Gogh …, on the bookshelf, a distillation of socialism and psychoanalysis, a little sexual lore for the uninhibited with inhibitions. Also the Random House edition of Proust … classiness at cut-rate prices …; a couple of loud jazz records, with which one can feel simultaneously collective, adventurous, and comfortable. Every opinion is automatically agreed upon by friends, they know all the arguments ahead of time …. The outsiderness of the initiated is illusion and mere idleness.

In response to this passage—astonishingly elitist even by Adorno standards—Schwendter wrote: “Here as well the historical situation has overtaken the analysis ...; next to Proust stands Barbarella, next to Jazz the Rolling Stones. Agreed-upon opinions, even about critical theory, … have become rare” (Schwendter 1968). Schwendter’s 1971 book Theory of Subculture expanded on these ideas, arguing that in order to be valid subcultures must hold an “emancipatory” content. In contrast to “retrogressive” subcultures— among which Schwendter both included nineteenth-century “bohemia”, and twentieth-century pop—“progressive” subcultures held within themselves the positive potential to contribute to the remaking of society along new lines. A corollary was that subculture must, in order to avoid being recuperated into the dominant culture, involve political action. Here, Schwendter came close to articulating a model of counterculture which echoed that proposed by the editors of Song; the latter argued that “a subculture is only a counterculture, firstly, when it strives for a fundamental change of society, aimed at its humanization and emancipation, and secondly, when it cannot be easily integrated or made to conform”. The underground press was important, Schwendter had argued in the Song essay, precisely because it was difficult for capitalism to assimilate. Another key figure in asserting the worth of subculture was Rolf Ulrich Kaiser. Kaiser was organizer of the Essener Songtage (Essen Song

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Days), which was the European answer to the Monterey Pop Festival. It took place in September 1968 in the Ruhr Valley city of Essen. There, dozens of musical acts from all over the world performed over a five-day period to an audience estimated at upwards of 40,000. With light shows, experimental films, open-mic sessions and a psychedelic happening, the festival put on display for a European audience all the exciting new wares of the 60s cultural revolution. Top American acts like the Mothers of Invention, and the Fugs, shared billing with well-known figures of German political song like Franz Joseph Degenhardt and Dieter Süverkrüp; English performers like Julie Driscoll and Pink Floyd; with jazz musicians like Gunter Hampel and Peter Brötzmann. Most strikingly of all, the festival showcased the new crop of German experimental rock bands—Amon Düül, Cab, Tangerine Dream, and others—marking the breakout of German performers onto the world stage. Kaiser and his co-organizers felt that it was important to theorize their event, to insist that it had a positive social worth, and was something more than just a concert series. The assertion of worth—regarding not just popular music but also the broader culture of lifestyle and artistic experimentation with which it was connected—was expressed by the organizers of the Songtage through the idea of the “underground”, a term that was already gaining a new currency in the 1960s as it was applied to aspects of the cultural explosion (e.g. “underground film”). The Essen Song Days marked one of the first times that the idea of “the underground” was systematically propagated as an antidote to the artistic and spiritual deficiencies of the “mainstream”. “One person shivers or makes the sign of the cross”, read the festival’s press release, another smells subversive intentions, many think of the metro, a few on the revolution, most don’t even know where to begin with the idea: underground. What that it, underground or Untergrund, will be shown by the Internationalen Essener Song Tage …”. The Song Tage will be “a mammoth underground party, a celebration of what astute thinkers from McLuhan to Scheuch have designated subculture” (Internationale Essener Song Tage (IEST 68) veranstaltet, 1968).

The use of terms like “subculture” and “underground”—and the citing of scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Fritz Scheuch—was an attempt to legitimate the festival and the youth revolution it claimed to represent, a focus also evident in the organizers’ trumpeting of the “brains trust” of experts involved in choosing acts for the festival and the inclusion of panels and seminars during the festival to discuss the social significance of popular music. “[The] choice of artists”, argued the organizers, “shows that this festival does not shut out [popular music], but … makes a definite

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[distinction] between tearjerkers and hit-songs” (Information Nr 1, Sammlung Uwe Husslein, Cologne). The assertion of popular music’s artistic merit complemented the attempt to establish its political credentials. The two were intimately linked, indeed, for the claim to rock music’s artistic significance (and the attempt to connect rock music with a lineage embracing folk, jazz, and political song) were part of a larger attempt to establish and legitimize a sphere of cultural activity autonomous from traditional spheres and producers of culture. This autonomous sphere of culture—the “underground”—was not a sphere of “conspiracy and criminality”, but rather, argued the organizers, a sphere in which it was possible “to produce … without worrying about the commercial potential, that which is fun, which corresponds to one’s own convictions, which the established producers can’t and don’t want to do, and which is therefore not available in the [mainstream] market” (Internationale Essener Song Tage (IEST 68) veranstaltet, 1968). The idea of the underground was linked, in short, with the right to produce an alternative culture from below, a right linked with the assertion of artistic and social worth; the goal was “to advance and expand [through] ownership of the means of production, that which is created with the intention, not to entertain, but to enlighten, to agitate, to provoke, to develop awareness” (Internationale Essener Song Tage (IEST 68) veranstaltet, 1968). Many of the performers at the festival were, accordingly, chosen both for artistic and political merit. The political aspects of performers like the Mothers of Invention and the Fugs, the German agitrock group Floh de Cologne and the political singer-songwriters like Wolf Biermann, were emphasized in the festival’s press releases. One entire segment of the festival—“Seht Euch diese Typen an!”—was dedicated to protest singers. The title, which mocked a leading West German politician’s well-known cry of exasperation over the shaggy appearance of left-wing protesters, was clearly aimed at solidifying the link between underground culture and New Left politics.1 This festival and the ones that followed it were very successful; but they also received criticism from within the left for being yet another attempt by capitalism—in this case “hip capitalism”—to recuperate challenges from below. This criticism emerged especially from the radical underground that began to form in West Berlin after the high-water mark of the student movement. In the same year as the festival, 1968, this movement reached its apogee. Student leader Rudi Dutschke survived an assassination attempt by a deranged right winger, but head wounds left him more or less permanently off the scene. Street battles with police—the

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most famous of which saw working-class rockers join students at the barricades—proved a dead end in strategic terms. Disagreement about goals and tactics, papered over during the period of revolutionary excitement culminating in the spring and summer of 1968, became increasingly prominent. The “movement” centred on SDS and its alliance with other critics of authority (left-leaning intellectuals, trade-union and church groups worried over signs of authoritarian resurgence in West Germany) began to split apart. Dogmatic communist groups—the socalled “K-Gruppen”—attempted to resurrect the basic of MarxismLeninism as an antidote to a perceived surfeit of “anti-authoritarianism” on the left, while their opponents, the so-called “spontis” (as in “spontaneous”), emphasized the importance of anti-dogmatism and the attempt to recover lost traditions of anarchism. **** In the wake of this splintering, the “underground” (in the several meanings of the term) began to come into its own. Some members of the commune movement and associated freaks and dropouts retreated into a private sphere of personal fulfilment and New Age spirituality, while (sub)cultural producers—underground authors and publishers, film and book collectives, anti-authoritarian clinics and drug-treatment groups—attempted to build an alternative society within the existing one. Still others attempted to combine personal fulfilment with political militancy—up to and including terrorism—with the West Berlin “blues” scene being the most notorious example. The critical stance of this “anti-dogmatic” left focused heavily on the critique of capitalism’s attempts to “recuperate” the look, feel, and ideas of the underground, and thereby destroy its revolutionary potential. Underground journals such as Fizz and Agit 883, for example, fiercely defended “revolutionary” rock music against the danger represented by capitalist recuperation. The former dismissed the American group Grand Funk Railroad as “the prototype of a capitalist pop group” (Fizz No. 1, reprinted 1989) while the latter praised performers like Jimi Hendrix, the American radical rock band MC-5, and the Berlin group Ton Steine Scherben as praiseworthy examples of radical art (Anonymous 1970, 883, 1971). Ton Steine Scherben itself became a sort of musical avant-garde of the radical scene, playing to support building seizures and all sorts of political demonstrations. Songs like “Macht Kaputt was Euch Kaputt Macht” (“Destroy what destroys you”) and “Keine Macht für Niemand” (“No Power for Anyone”) became anarchist anthems both drawing on and ins-

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piring the radicalism of the underground scene (Brown 2009). Producing its own debut single and founding its own record label, the band also weighed in on debates about the proper role of revolutionary art. In one famous incident, the group’s manager abused fellow television panellist Rolf Ulrich Kaiser for bolstering capitalism, smashing the studio table with an axe before stuffing the station’s microphones into his coat pockets for use by “young comrades” in prison. The Hash Rebels were particularly militant practitioners of this sort of subcultural police work, one of their most famous actions being an attack on the West Berlin premiere of the musical Hair as a protest against the co-optation of the counterculture. “We are well aware”, read a flyer distributed in connection with the action, “that ‘Hair’ only appears in the guise of the subculture in order to gratify capitalist demands” (Anonymous 2004, 24). Founded in the summer of 1969 in West Berlin, the “Central Committee of the Wandering Hash Rebels”—the name a sarcastic jibe at overserious student communists—sought to turn lifestyle into a form of political praxis. Pot-smoking, Molotov cocktail-yielding anarchists, the Hash Rebels declared open warfare on all such attempts by the twin forces of state and capital to destroy the “true” subculture, whether by cooptation or open repression. In contrast to the K-Gruppen, who largely rejected “freak” appearance in favour of an idealized vision of working-class sobriety, rejecting popular culture as a site of serious politics, the Hash Rebels revelled in both. Self-consciously working class, violence-prone, and unafraid of the police, they represented the countercultural impulse at its most militant. The group’s founding event was a “smoke-in” held in Berlin’s Tiergarten in July 1969, where 400 freaks defiantly smoked dope in the open. In subsequent events, militants fought battles with police to protect subcultural hangouts like the “Zodiac” and “Mr Go”. In the former case a police car was overturned in protest against the police taking photographs of traffic into and out of the club. In the latter case, militants fought police with Molotov cocktails (Anonymous 2004, 26–7). Wherever they might come down in the extreme left-wing spectrum, even some sympathizers were sceptical of the Hash Rebels’ emphasis on the revolutionary imperative represented by drugs and the drug trade. Peter Paul Zahl, the editor of Agit 883, the flagship underground newspaper of the West German radical scene (notable, among other things, for publishing the first communiqué of the Red Army Faction) went on record to question the political value of the hash campaign. “Let’s take a look around us”, he wrote; “… We look in the pubs where hash is dealt in grand style—happy year’s-end profit figures. And this does not prove that with hash one is better able to communicate …”. (Zahl 1969, 4). Another

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sceptic argued: It is clear beyond a doubt that where pot is smoked, where flower power is practised, that there Marx’s Kapital and Guevara’s Guerilla—Theory and Method are probably seldom read, and it has likewise been shown that the radicalism of the Hascher and the members of hippie-like subcultures never go beyond a non-committal pacifism containing thoroughly bourgeois elements (Olles 1969, 5). The problem with the Hash Rebels, the piece continued, was one of “general resignation. ‘Nesting in the cracks of power’ and ‘living in the gaps’ means nothing concrete other than integration into a [repressive] society …”. (Olles 1969, 5). Such complaints were met with contempt by the Hash Rebels, who accused Olles of trying to enforce a code by which “a socialist must look like a [bourgeois philistine]”. They continued: “In his eagerness he totally overlooks that the Central Committee does indeed smoke pot, but has never propagated flower power or any other hippie ideology. We also do not nest in the cracks of power and we do not live in gaps. We live in communes, wander about, and fight together against state power in the street.” Debates of this sort were not confined to the relatively small West Berlin underground; on the contrary, they cut across the entire antiauthoritarian revolt in West Germany. The questions raised—about the possibilities of working within the framework of capitalism; about the dangers of recuperation; about the ownership of the cultural means of production; about the merit and content of “cultural” versus strictly “political” means of rebellion; about the value of working to change society from within versus attempting to leave it behind—were some of the central questions of “1968”. These questions were never resolved, nor could they be; but the fact that they were asked, and answered with such fervour, suggests a number of conclusions, relevant both to students of subculture and to scholars of radical politics around 1968. First, they show that popular music and subcultures were, in this historical setting at least, an active category, not just in terms of the play with symbols—although it was that, too—but in terms of political ideas and initiatives. Subculture was not just a site where young people adopted and played with elements of consumer culture to create new identities outside of the mainstream, but was also a site of explicit politics involving the attempt to analyse and problematize the role and content of subculture as it related to the emancipatory claims of the left (an analysis that it goes without saying would have been rejected out of hand, had it even been imagined, by the mods and skinheads of classical subcultural studies), and sometimes, by the fusion of subcultural identity and left-wing political militancy.

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Second, they suggest the extent to which “1968”—as a radical-democratic, anti-authoritarian upsurge—revolved around self-interpretation, selftheorization, and self-invention. More than any other political movement before or since, the movement(s) of 1968 historicized and theorized themselves in real time. In West Germany, the anti-authoritarian gaze fell not only on existing social relations, but on the movement itself, making both political activism and subcultural lifestyle very much conscious phenomena. Third, and finally, they show that popular music and subcultures were, and are, linked to larger processes of social change; they are not ephemeral, but are intimately connected to “big” politics. In West Germany, subculture not only shaped the formation of political doctrines and tactics that transferred out to ever larger sections of the activists population, helping to radicalize the West German student movement; it provided many of the ideas and personnel that helped fuel the development of the left-wing terror groups that shook West German society to its core in the late 1960s and 1970s. From this perspective, “1968 underground” represents one of the most forceful proofs for the relevance of subculture both to cultural analysts and to historians of the modern period.

Note 1. The leading West German politician was Klaus Schütz of the SPD.

References Anonymous. 1962. “Wir haben Angst. Die Schwabinger klagen über den Terror”. 8-Uhr Blatt, June 26. Anonymous. 1970. “Ton Steine Scherben”. 883 No. 73, December 24. Reprinted on DVD in agit 883. Anonymous. 1971. “Scherben machen auch Musik”. 883 No. 83. July 3. Reprinted on DVD in agit 883. Anonymous. 1994. “Ist ‘Hair’ Subkultur?” Reprinted in Gefundene Fragmente, 1967–1980, Band 1, edited Bernd Kramer. Berlin: Karin Kramer. Brown, Timothy S. 2004. “Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and Nazi Rock in England and Germany”. Journal of Social History 38(1): 157–78. —. 2009. “1968 East and West: Divided Germany as a Case Study in Transnational History”. American Historical Review 114(1): 69–96. —. 2009. “Music as a Weapon? Ton Steine Scherben and the Politics of Rock in Cold War Berlin”. German Studies Review 32: 1–22.

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—. 2013. “The Sixties in the City: Avant-gardes and Urban Rebels in New York, London, and West Berlin”. Journal of Social History 46(4), Summer: 817–42. Brown, Timothy. 2013. West Germany and the Global Sixties: The AntiAuthoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978. Cambridge. Christiansen, Samantha and Zachary Scarlett. 2012. The Third World in the Global 1960s. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Dienel, Hans-Liudger and Malte Schophaus. 2005. “Urban Wastelands and the Development of Youth Cultures in Berlin since 1945, with comparative perspectives on Amsterdam and Naples”. In European Cities, Youth And The Public Sphere In The Twentieth Century, edited by Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, 111–33. Aldershot UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Dutschke, Rudi to Révai Gábor. 1966. “Lieber Gábor, liebe—noch unbekannte—Margit!”. Rudi Dutschke, Gábor Révai, Briefwechsel 1966 bis 1971, Eurozine. Fizz. 1. 1989. Reprinted in Fizz Re-Print 1-10. Berlin. Gelder, Ken and Sarah Thornton. 1997. The Subcultures Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Gross, Alex. 1966. “Beatniks of Berlin”. International Times 4. Nov. 28– Dec. 11: 8. Hartmut, Sander. 1994. “Ein Sozialist muss aussehen wie ein Spiesser”. Reprinted in Gefundene Fragmente, 1967-1980, Band 1, edited by Bernd Kramer, 17. Berlin: Karin Kramer. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Methuen. Horn, Gerd-Rainer. 2006. The Spirit of ’68. Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Information Nr 1, Sammlung Uwe Husslein, Cologne. Internationale Essener Song Tage (IEST 68) veranstaltet, 1968. Press Release—German Version, Sammlung Uwe Husslein, Cologne. Klimke, Martin and Joachim Scharloth. 2008. 1968 in Europe. A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977. New York: Palgrave. Klimke, Martin. 2010. The “Other Alliance”: Global Protest and Student Unrest in West Germany and the U.S., 1962–72. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kosel, Margret. 1967. Gammler, Beatniks, Provos. Die schleichende Revolution. Frankfurt am Main: Bärmeier & Nikel. Kraushaar, Wolfgang. 2007. “Berliner Subkultur: Blues, Umherschweifende Haschrebellen, Tupamaros und Bewegung 2. Juni”. In 1968. Handbuch zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, edited by

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Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, 261–75. Stuttgart/Weimar: J. B. Metzler. Lettau, Reinhard. 1966. “Journalismus als Menschenjagd”. Kursbuch 7. Marcuse, Herbert. 1970. “The End of Utopia”. In Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, 62–81. Boston: Beacon. Mausbach, Wilfried. 2006. “‘Burn, ware-house, burn!’ Modernity, Counterculture, and the Vietnam War in West Germany”. In Between Marx and Coca-Cola. Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, edited by Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, 175–202. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Nirumand, Bhaman. 1967. “Die harmlose Intelligenz: Über Gammler, Ostermarschierer, Adorniten und andere Oppositionelle”. Konkret 7, July. Pas, Niek. 2011. “In Pursuit of the Invisible Revolution. Sigma in the Netherlands, 1966–1968”. In Between the Avant-Garde and the Everyday. Subversive Politics in Europe from 1957 to the Present, edited by Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Reinders, Ralf and Ronald Fritsch. 1995. Die Bewegung 2. Juni. Gespräche über Haschrebellen, Lorenzentführung, Knast. Berlin and Amsterdam: ID Verlag. Schwendter, Rolf. 1968. “Zur Theorie der Subkultur”. Song. Deutsche Underground-Zeitschrift, 8. Siegfried, Detlef. 1995. “Unsere Woodstocks: Jugendkultur, Rockmusik und gesellschaftlicher Wandel um 1968”. In Rock! Jugend und Musik in Deutschland, Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 52–61. Berlin: Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig, 1995. —. 2006. Time is on my side. Konsum und Politik in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur der 60er Jahre. Göttingen: Wallstein. Suri, Jeremy. 2003. Power and Protest. Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press. Thomas, Richard Hinton and Keith Bullivant. 1974. Literature in Upheaval. West German writers and the challenge of the 1960s. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Werner Olles. 1969. “Kiff und Revolution”. Agit 883. 28, August 21, 5. Zahl, Peter Paul. 1969. “Haschischkampagne oder Die Ideologie der “Glücklichen Verbraucher”. Agit 883, 24, July 24, 4.

12. “THE LAD IS ALWAYS RIGHT”: STREET YOUTH GROUPS IN RUSSIA AS LOCAL ELITES SVETLANA STEPHENSON

To paraphrase Marx and Engels, the spectre of the gang is now haunting Europe. The gangs, which appear to exist everywhere—from Paris and London to Moscow and Budapest—are presented in public discourse as manifestations of archetypical evil. They breed and multiply; they seduce the innocent; they threaten all that is good in society; and the only possible strategy for fighting them is to eradicate them while trying to save those unfortunate individuals who live their lives in close proximity to the “possessed”, i.e. their neighbours, friends and families. Gang-suppression strategies, gang injunctions, gang ASBOs—a whole arsenal of measures, many imported from the US, is now being deployed in an effort to deal with the threat (Hallsworth 2011). But the “perpetual novelty” of the gang (Pearson 2011) and its construction as some socially isolated and pernicious entity, as a collection of parasites that has emerged out of nowhere to feed on the social body, is misleading. Juvenile street associations have a time-honoured history in western societies and elsewhere in the world. In many areas around the world young people become involved in territorial networks where they battle for honour, control over the local neighbourhood and the status of a core youth group in the area. Although sociology has rarely addressed local systems of control (preferring to discuss centralized, formal social order), there have been some famous studies that explored the place of street youth in the peripheral social structures (Suttles 1968; Whyte 1993). As Gerald Suttles wrote, describing street practices of young people in a working-class area of Chicago, a street-corner group strives to resolve the uncertainties of the local residents about the use of common spaces, streets, parks, etc., and apprehensions about outsiders shared by adults and children. Suttles pointed out that such street-corner groups were not at all novel but arose out of ancient moral traditions, where young boys were expected to spend much time outside their households in close-knit groups.

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Analysing the trajectories of development of gangs in a comparative perspective, Randall Collins suggested that a gang can be seen as a tribal group that fits with Max Weber’s conception of patrimonial social organization. The patrimonial type of organization is based upon familial (or quasi-familial) types of relationships, which are organized around personal loyalty, protection and sometimes shared material opportunities. Large (and armed) patrimonial families were the foundation of the feudal system of relations, and other patrimonial forms (such as tribes) have been widely present across the world. Modern bureaucratic states have attempted (often unsuccessfully) to stamp out patrimonialism. In the case of working-class youth, attempts at control and regulation of youth through mass education have partly led to the resurrection of patrimonialism in the form of gangs, oppositional-youth street organizations. Young people rebel against the discipline of school by forming their own playgroups and delinquent associations on the street (Collins 2011). Previously, Albert Cohen had also linked the emergence of oppositional working-class subcultures and gangs with status frustration, caused by the inability of working-class boys to fully meet the expectations of modern schooling (Cohen 1955). Outside spaces of bureaucratic control, in the street, youth collectives reproduce concerns about honour, loyalty, control and the masculine dominance characteristic of patrimonial forms. In certain historical contexts, when the state becomes weak, we can see a resurgence of patrimonialism, with some of these street organizations getting enough influence to claim economic resources and political power. This chapter analyses the cultural practices of the “lads” (patsany), members of urban territorial youth networks in Moscow.1 Such networks exist in many Russian urban areas, particularly in the periphery of big cities, as well as in small and medium-sized towns (Golovin and Lurie 2008). It shows that while often stigmatized as the social and cultural “Other”, the lads construct themselves as an elite local group, engaged in protection of the home territory. The chapter is organized in the following way. I discuss the lads’ networks and their identities as members of core reputational groups in their territories. I demonstrate that they do not see themselves as marginal or criminal, but on the contrary, perceive themselves as members of honour-based groups, engaged in policing the local territory. I analyse their construction of the “Other”, especially the socalled botanists, non-street young people who are regarded by them as marginal and deviant. I move on to conclude that, in order to understand the complex practices of gangs and street groups, we need to see how their organizational forms reflect local cultural traditions, as well as different

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modes of accommodation between the modern state and patrimonial social forms, rather than seeing them as dangerous outsiders. The evidential basis of the chapter is a set of interviews with twentythree members of the street territorial networks, aged twelve to seventeen, male and female, conducted in Moscow in 2006. Access to interviewees— gang members—was achieved using the snowballing technique, building upon initial contacts with street youth, as well as the local residents, friends, neighbours and former schoolmates of the researchers. Six focus groups with members of territorial groups took place in the school for juvenile delinquents in the south-east region of Moscow.2

The Lads’ Networks The members of street groups in Russia are often seen as belonging to an aggressive and semi-criminal masculine subculture (Kosterina 2006). They are known as gopniks, a derogatory name similar in its connotations to chavs (Hayward and Majid 2006; Nayak 2006; Jones 2011). Their illfitting clothes (often cheap tracksuits), their use of slang borrowing heavily from criminal culture, and their manner of walking the streets in groups or “aggressively” occupying street corners all signify their presumed social and cultural inferiority. Being turned into “folk devils”, some of these young people have started to use the same scripts to emphasize their separation and embrace subcultural styles and symbolism (Cohen 1972). Although many reject the derogatory name of gopnik, preferring to call themselves obychnye, normalnye and mestnye patsany (normal, ordinary, local lads) (Stephenson 2012), others have boldly embraced this denomination. There are now numerous websites where self-identified gopniks place photos of themselves in characteristic working-class attire, upload videos of group fights and drinking sessions, and present stories about their “role models” from the criminal underworld.3 They also give links to their favourite music clips. These are invariably “prison songs”, a traditional Russian genre of romantic, sentimental songs relating the travails and sorrows of criminal “outlaws”. The gopnik subculture is both reviled and celebrated in modern Russian urban culture. In its parochial stubbornness it seems to represent resistance to late modernity, and to an increasingly individualized, diverse and consumer-orientated way of life. The apparent novelty of the gopnik subculture (the first discussions of gopniks date back to the 1980s), should not mask the fact that many of their practices are rooted in traditional patrimonial forms of youth street organization. Street groups, and street cultures, in which children and young people, mainly boys, spend time outside adult control, playing

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together, fighting with their peers from other areas and engaging in (usually) petty crime have been a feature of urban life in many countries around the world (Thrasher 1927; Whyte 1993; Kintrea 2011; Pearson 2011). Russia is no exception. It is important to point out that patrimonial forms of youth life are not just a product of opposition to the modern disciplinary state, as Randall Collins has argued. In Russia at least they can be traced back to rural societies, to the traditions of street-by-street fights and festive combats in which all young males were culturally required to participate (Shchepanskaya 2001; Morozov and Sleptsova 2004). Youth territorial groups reproduce themselves from generation to generation. Boys and young men of school age spend time together in the courtyards of residential blocks of flats and “defend” the local territory from outsiders, often under active encouragement from adults. They engage in highly ritualized arranged combats that date back to rural streetby-street, village-by-village fights (Stephenson 2012). But generally in Moscow organized youth street life is gradually disappearing, especially from the central areas. While older Moscow residents remember the whole of the city being divided into different groups’ territories up to the 1960s, nowadays these groups tend to be concentrated at the outskirts of the city, in residential projects built for working-class people. In the late 1980s and early 1990s many of the Moscow groups started transforming themselves into “violent entrepreneurs” (Volkov 2002), developing racket and protection networks. This was particularly the case in the economically depressed Moscow suburbs and peripheral areas such as Lyubertsy, Orekhovo and Solntsevo. But by the 2000s, with the growing economic prosperity in the Moscow region, these groups started to disintegrate and their members (those who survived the violent gang wars) turned to legitimate or semi-legitimate activities. In 2006, when this research took place, Moscow youth territorial groups were largely engaged in what would seem to be “recreational violence”, attacking passers-by and harassing their peers for money or mobile phones. But the violence was far from purely anarchic and situational. It had its organization and logic associated with the reproduction of the lads’ status as a core reputational group in the territory. They saw themselves as members of an honourable male group, forming the core of street sociability in their neighbourhood and feeling superior to those young people who do not participate in their pursuits. Coming predominantly from working-class backgrounds, they may have lacked the resources to succeed within the formal structures of the society (such as education or employment), but when it came to controlling social interactions in courtyards, parks, streets and other local arenas, it is they who had the upper hand. Their street

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power was sustained not by their individual fighting prowess or hyperviolent displays, which Elijah Anderson describes in his well-known study of black American ghettos, Code of the Street (Anderson 1999), but by their membership of the privileged peer group. Territorial networks in Moscow typically comprise several friendship groups of six to eight members living in the same block of flats or blocks of flats from the same or neighbouring courtyards. The main contingent of the friendship groups are aged from thirteen to seventeen. They can be both boys and girls, although boys make up the core of the groups. Traditionally, for young men this membership ends when young men are conscripted into the army at the age of eighteen. The lads hang out together on the streets in the warm time of year, or in underground cellars and lofts during winter, listen to music, go to football matches or the cinema, make trips to local forests to enjoy a barbeque in the summer or go skiing in winter. Little boys and sometimes girls from the age of seven or eight (“the little ones”) can affiliate themselves to the network, although they are not considered real members. These Moscow networks tend to be composed of ethnic Slavs. This does not mean that young members of ethnic minority groups are not present in these territories. On the contrary, as the housing prices in these peripheral areas of Moscow are relatively low (at least compared to more central areas), they have attracted significant migration, particularly from the Caucasus and central Asia, creating interethnic problems. But, while members of other ethnic communities increasingly live side by side with the lads in their blocks of flats, according to our interviewees, they cannot normally become members of their groups.

Local Reputational Groups Territorial gangs are often viewed through the prism of social exclusion and criminality. But the lads are not socially excluded outsiders. Yes, the groups unite young people from predominantly working- and low-class backgrounds. Still, although peripheral to the booming Moscow economy and largely deprived of access to the prospects of spectacular enrichment which possess many Muscovites’ imaginations, the local communities where these territorial networks took root cannot be called excluded or seriously deprived. In the 1990s, with the economic crisis and collapse of law and order following the end of the Soviet Union, some of these territories lost much of their industrial base and became seriously criminalized. But by the beginning of the 2000s, with economic recovery and increased power of the Russian state, mafia activities had largely sub-

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sided, as had group crimes committed by teenagers (Nurgaliev 2006). As a prosperous city with very low levels of official unemployment throughout the 2000s (under one per cent), Moscow seems to present sufficient opportunities for mainstream educational and labour mobility. Our young interviewees were generally optimistic about their chances of either going to university or getting jobs as skilled manual workers, with a common aspiration for young men of becoming car mechanics or opening their own car service stations. Far from being socially excluded, they are over-included in the local networks (often at the expense of school studies). Not only do they sustain close relationships with other members of their street groups, but they actively socialize with their classmates and young people from other areas. Many have strong identifications with football teams, and participate in football-related violence. However, their predominant identities and concerns are territorial, linked to the “defence” of their local turf. The groups cannot be defined through the prism of crime either, although their members can be involved in criminal activities. Some of our interviewees sustained their street lifestyle through petty crime (mainly through stealing and shoplifting). The nature of crime was primarily social rather than economic—any money “earned” through delinquency was quickly spent on playing gaming machines and on beer, alcohol and marijuana, consumed together with friends. The lads stole cars— sometimes to sell for tiny sums of money to local criminals, but often simply for fun, to do some joyriding and then abandon the vehicles. The key identities of the lads were territorial. They were deeply attached to the neighbourhood, where most of their lives took place, and saw it as their duty to defend it. While criminality was generally episodic and was not displayed by all the groups or their members, everybody was involved in control over their neighbourhood. This included intimidation of non-affiliated youth, and warfare aimed to “protect” their territories and prove their elite status on the streets. Some of the lads extorted money, watches and mobile phones from other young people (non-affiliated local youth and outsiders who “intruded” into the local territory). Others were not involved in any acquisitive crime and only participated in fights. For most of the lads street crime, if it happened at all, was inseparable from the overall goal of reproduction of the group as collective masters of the street. Young men used it to confirm their power in their area, demonstrating the right to dictate the rules of behaviour to other participants of the street space. Street victimization is only partially oriented towards material gains, being an instrument of sustaining the group’s territorial domination (see also Dowdney 2005; Rodgers 2009).

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This social nature of crime was perhaps best expressed by fifteen-yearold Alexei, who, answering my question of how to qualify the fact that his group made passing teenagers give them their mobile phones, and broke open game machines, said: “There were no criminal acts on our part. One can say that this was bad behaviour. We grow up, and with time absorb something from the street. Unlike the kids who walk the streets with their mums. They get given everything. And us … When we have no money, we must think of something”. The fact that “bad behaviour” may constitute a criminal offence does not negate the fact that for the young people this behaviour is firmly linked to their street way of life. It allows them to continue their collective street existence. In their minds, the bad behaviour is supposed to stop when they grow up, become adults, start work and a family and leave the street groups. The Moscow networks are a classic case of Turner’s communitas, a society of equal members linked by unmediated social bonds (Turner 1995). Although some of the territorial networks have informal leaders, they do not have a hierarchical structure of command and subordination or strict discipline. Our interviewees described the culture of sociability and solidarity existing among street youth, and the normative requirement for a young man to be part of a street network (instead of spending his time doing homework and following the prescriptions of family and school). In the interviews and focus groups young people emphasized the following imperatives for a lad’s behaviour: “A normal lad should always have friends in the territory where he lives”, “He has to have a group”, “A lad can’t run away if his friends are in trouble. He has to rush to help his friends if he sees that they’re in trouble. If he pretends that he can’t see anything, he’s not a lad.” “A lad doesn’t lie, doesn’t snitch. He doesn’t assist the police”. Concern about respect towards other members of the territorial network, including the younger lads, was expressed in many interviews: “One shouldn’t humiliate others, be they older or younger” (Andrei, fifteen years). “If you can do something yourself, you don’t ask a little one. Let’s say there is a pack of cigarettes, and he’s sitting over there, and you tell him, ‘Go get me the cigarettes’. That’s wrong. If an older guy sees this, he’ll hit you. You must respect the honour of others and their dignity” (Konstantin, fourteen years).

Policing the Turf The lads’ groups are units of force that try to achieve dominance in the territory. They “police” their piece of turf, courtyard or district, fight with

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their “enemies” and intruders from other areas. The cultural imperative to be in control of the local territory is expressed through an obsessive search for the “Other”. This function can be performed by members of an ethnicminority group, or the so-called neformaly (members of youth subcultures, for example, punks or goths), young people from other territories and, increasingly, young men from exclusive residential developments built on the lads’ “territory”. Sometimes a minimal marker of an “alien” identity is enough to mobilize aggression. For example, as Russian young men often perform their street masculinity by walking and drinking beer from a can or a bottle, this practice can mark them as suitable enemies. If a man walks with a can of beer in his hands in an alien territory, he risks being attacked. “Let’s take E., for example. He’s the leader in the 1st micro-district. He wouldn’t try to get at a twelve-year old. If somebody was walking home from school with a briefcase, he wouldn't touch him. But if a guy from outside the district walked in with a beer in his hand looking all clean, then he’d tell him, ‘Let me stain your clothes a little’. And so it [violence—SS] starts …” (Andrei, aged fourteen).

At the same time, they place a high emphasis on collective rules of “honourable” violent conduct and specifically on verbal rather than physical techniques of intimidation. While their dominant position needs to be constantly confirmed, the lads have to establish some semblance of “fair play”, at least on the level of post-hoc justifications and rationalizations. There has to be some parity of forces for an honourable victory over enemies. For example, it is not considered proper for ten youths to attack one, to fight with women or children, or to start a fight with nonstreet local young men, the so-called botanists. The botanists are young men who do not join their street groups and back down from fights and other collective street activities. This category is similar to the American “punks” or “herbs” (Wilkinson 2003). They are almost never subjected to physical assaults, but can be humiliated, harassed and in some cases forced to pay “protection” money. The discursive constructions of the botanists present them as having subordinate masculinity (Connell 2005). They are boring, unmanly, timid. They are figures of ridicule. They try to escape from the tests of their masculinity, from the dramas of collective existence, in the world of school and family. But that is a world where adults rule, and that is why the botanists are not their own men. In the discourse about the botanists, much like the lads in a classic study of working-class youth subculture by Paul Willis (1977), the Russian lads deny manhood to these cultural cousins of Willis’s “ear’oles”, weak young men who comply with the adults’ requirements. In the lads’ narratives, a botanist is an a priori

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inferior human being. His subordinate status and a lack of willingness to fight for his reputation, for male honour, make him unable to participate in the lads’ brotherhood. In the lads’ descriptions, the image of the botanist is strikingly archaic and caricatured. The markers of belonging to this despised caste become, for example, round glasses, a homemade jumper, a briefcase instead of a school bag—generally, things that modern schoolchildren rarely display. Here are some fragments from focus groups with fourteen- to sixteenyear-old boys and girls, members of street groups, where the participants were asked to define botanists: —They’re not like normal people, not like the rest of us. They’re disliked because they’re a minority; —You can’t talk to a botanist about anything. He can only talk about his studies; —These are people who do their homework and study well. They don’t go out, they stay at home all the time at the computer, doing homework; —They say, “My mum doesn’t let me go out. My mum told me to be home at nine o’clock. My mum told me not to smoke”; —They all wear round glasses; —They have briefcases, you know, like kids from primary school; they put on straight trousers and a homemade jumper and walk with a book in their hands.

Distancing themselves from the world of their street peers, not knowing the right people who might be useful if they come into danger, beyond the doors of their homes the botanists find themselves in an alien environment. They do not understand how to behave in this complex and treacherous space, or which resources to mobilize in case of a sudden attack. They do not know how to respond to a provocation, and they are not ready to give an immediate rebuke or name allies and friends. Botanists can easily be deprived of their watches, money or mobile phones, and they do not know whom to ask for help. By turning to their parents or to the police, they distance themselves even further from the world where their peers exercise their own justice. The botanists’ inferiority is supposedly manifested in their presentation of the body. A botanist behaves like a dominated subject. He is humble, unconfident, unable to talk back. He shows fear; he submits to demands. His reactions to provocation are slow. Instead of responding quickly and clearly, he betrays his insecurity. He is afraid of confrontation and he does not look you in the eye. It soon becomes apparent that you can take anything you want from him. Here is what fifteen-year-old Mikhail said:

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12. Street Youth Groups in Russia Interviewer: “What does one have to do in order not to be a botanist?” Mikhail: “In order not to be a botanist, you have to lead a normal way of life. Not be a loser. Someone spits at him, and he has no idea what to do. He ought to do something, to spit or hit back. Not to be afraid.”

And a fragment from a focus group with fourteen- to sixteen-year-old boys: Interviewer: How can you tell if a person is a botanist? —He has no confidence. —You come to him and ask: “Do you have the time?” And you have a watch on your arm, or a mobile phone. And he says that he doesn’t know and keeps going. Interviewer: Instead of saying, “Look at your own watch”? —Yes. Some guys answer like this. But a botanist ... you can see him immediately. You ask him something, and he says like a little kid, ‘What? Where?’ He should respond straight away, he should not be slow. Then you’d understand that you won’t get anything from him just like that. If a guy starts mumbling, you understand that you can do what you like”.

Unlike the botanists, the lads see themselves as competent performers of masculinity. The object of specific pride is an ability to achieve domination not through the use of physical violence but through conversational devices. This is how the lads, participants of a focus group with sixteenand seventeen-year-old boys, described their use of conversational devices in encounters with potential victims: —I start talking to him, and I can see from his reaction that he is nervous. And I say, “Come on; give me your mobile phone. I'll get it back to you in an hour. He doesn’t know what to do, and I draw a line—that’s it. I need it now.” And he gives me his mobile phone. I take it and walk away with it. —I tell him, give me the money; I’ll give it back to you tomorrow. He gives me the money, and tomorrow I’ll tell him to get lost. He’ll become a “sufferer” [a passive victim, liable for further extortion] forever.

The sovereign role of the lad on the streets is encapsulated in the dictum, “The lad is always right”. Nothing better, it seems, captures the sense of entitlement, of innate superiority, that the lads possess. This axiom implies that the lad’s authority cannot be challenged. If it is, he has to fight in order to protect his honour. But, while requirements of honour presuppose aggressive displays of domination, in the process of socialization in established street cultures the lads acquire the ability to avoid extreme confrontations and use cultural knowledge—rules of self-presentation, including manners, talk etc.—in order to prevail without using excessive and unnecessary force. This

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ability confirms their status as local elite, who can use “social techniques for creating violence” rather than engaging every time in direct physical challenges (Collins 2008, 332).

Street Groups and the Wider Society In Russia, patrimonial structures coexist with, and penetrate, the bureaucratic state, and the lads’ groups are no exception. They are not entirely oppositional to the formal order. The lads can be seen as a part of the local patchwork of informal and formal control. There are other power structures in the territory, and the lads’ groups are far from purely oppositional forms to modern authority. The lads try to establish “good” (often meaning corrupt) relationships with representatives of the local police force. Far from challenging police authority or openly “disrespecting” the representatives of law and order, some lads proudly reported their “friendship” with junior policemen and boasted of the fact that, if they are arrested and taken into a police station, their mates or older members of neighbourhood networks will be able to arrange their release. For all the poetry of violent endeavour, the cult of masculinity, risk and spontaneity, the lads orientate themselves very well among the different vectors of violence transecting the urban environment, and they try to move carefully between them in order not to get into trouble. However much they may want to have a joy ride in an expensive foreign car, they would rather steal a cheap Lada than risk crossing a rich car owner, who may have “real power behind him”. They also avoid making trouble in the city centre. As participants of focus groups reported, “There are many racketeers in the centre. There is big money there. That is why it’s tougher there”; “You never know who you may come up against there”. They only travel to the centre of Moscow to have fun, go to a cinema or a bar or play in gaming arcades. Thus, violence is territorially bound, with the lads attempting to control their piece of turf without challenging other power regimes. As I have already mentioned, at a time of crisis of state power in Russia, from the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s, street gangs in many areas moved into extortion and protection rackets. Several Moscow gangs expanded to form large patrimonial structures that organized themselves into militarized units and made local businessmen, street traders, street drug traders and sex workers pay “protection” money. The same processes were taking place all over Russia (Volkov 2002; Stephenson 2011). The top echelons of these gangs penetrated into the state structures, invested their money into large businesses and eventually turned into legal

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entrepreneurs. But the core of the members, people who grew up in street peer groups and later formed the “little families”, “teams” and other primary social units of the organized crime structures, retained their ethos. Just like members of Italian “cosca”, the basic social unit of the mafia, they were not corporate units, but patrimonial organizations linked by trust, loyalty, solidarity and control (Paoli 2003). These pre-modern qualities were in fact the foundations of their economic success; they allowed them to launch themselves into the brave, new world of capitalist accumulation. As Mike Davis has argued, contemporary gang studies often avoid looking at the complex realities of street organizations and fail to explore their histories. He pointed out that while gangs indeed share a “generic logic—the informal ownership of the street through a local monopoly of force”, specific configurations of these informal spatial monopolies remain occluded by the tendency of mainstream criminology towards overgeneralization and pathological representation of adolescent street cultures (Davis 2008, xii). With some notable exceptions (Hagedorn and Macon 1988; Kontos, Brotherton et al. 2003; Rodgers 2009), current gang literature lacks a systematic examination on the gangs as solidaristic social organizations, whose existence is not limited to the instrumental pursuit of criminal ends and/or destructive violence. The literature on street violence tends to view violence as an individual resource, used by sections of disadvantaged youth living in low-income areas to compensate for the lack of mainstream opportunities and achieve street reputation, status, or access to limited goods. Low-class young men are seen to mobilize violence in a project of individual identity construction, to displays of dominant masculinity and campaigns for respect. Violent street actors are also commonly seen as profoundly individualistic, fatalistic and displaying distrust of anyone else on the streets (Messerschmidt 1993; Barker 2005; Mullins 2006). Even for Elijah Anderson, who explicitly posited the existence of the “code of the street” in US ghetto areas, the main focus of such a code is seen too as affirmation of individual reputation and respect rather than any collective projects. Individuals must observe the code in order to avoid being victimized and get access to scarce goods. As Anderson argued, in the predatory culture of the streets, those who subscribe to its “code” “tend to approach all persons and situations as part of life’s obstacles, as things to subdue or to ‘get over’. To get over, individuals develop an effective ‘hustle’ or ‘game plan’, setting themselves up in a position to prevail by being ‘slick’ and outsmarting others” (Anderson 1999, 37). Ultimately,

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through cunning and ruthless behaviour, ghetto youth ensure their individual survival. The case studies of Moscow street organizations have demonstrated that young people pursue projects of collective reproduction. The lads form patrimonial structures, participate in street brotherhoods and learn mastery of violence in the group context. In certain historical situations, when, as occurred in Russia in the 1990s, the state loses its capacity to create effective systems of law and order, and ordinary citizens experience life as a profound social crisis (Shevchenko 2009), the street gang may become one of the few institutions united by immediate bonds of solidarity and trust. As Hesse explained when writing about the Sicilian mafia, “Because of the weakness of the coercive machinery of the state there is an absence of a legal order and of the sanctions which lend dependability and durability to relationships in heteronomous groups. But this lack has no bearing on the possibility or stability of relationships in autonomous groups whose norms are not sanctioned by public law … The bonds within these primary groups or informal groupings are felt clearly and as an obligation.” (Hesse 1992, 37.) The ability of street organizations to sustain close personal bonds and collective identities, coupled with their capacity to manage violence, allows these groups to become agents of economic, social and political power within their neighbourhoods, and participate in power-sharing with state institutions. This requires reconfiguration of the gangs’ practices and a much stronger self-organization. Non-instrumental street violence, directed at categorically defined enemies, such as ethnic minorities, members of youth subcultural groups or people of different economic status (which is a feature of Moscow territorial networks) loses its currency for entrepreneurial gangs. They have their sights fixed on placing their groups at the heart of the larger political economy and systems of social regulation. This requires state penetration—something that entrepreneurial gangs achieved quite well (Stephenson 2011). The Moscow lads’ groups are patrimonial territorial groups that construct themselves as masters of the local space. This leads to quite specific cultural practices, which are different from those of the delinquent peer groups seeking situational domination by any means available described by Anderson (1990; 1999), or from the organized gangs using violence for the purposes of sustaining their control over the local street economies (Stephenson 2011). The “gang” should not be used as a falsely monolithic construction of an alien social body. Its organizational forms reflect local cultural traditions, as well as different modes of accommodation

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between the modern state and the social forms that historically preceded it but have never gone away.

Notes 1. The project was supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. I am grateful to Rustem Maksudov for his contribution to the project. 2. The school is an “educational institution of a closed type”. It belongs to the Moscow City Department of Education. Its students are referred to it by courts for minor offences (mainly hooliganism and theft), as an alternative to criminal punishment. 3. See e.g. bidla.net, yagopnik.com.

References Anderson, Elijah. 1990. Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. —. 1999. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York and London: Norton. Barker, Gary T. 2005. Dying to be Men: Youth, Masculinity and Social Exclusion. London: Routledge. Cohen, Albert K. 1955. Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press. Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Collins, Randall. 2008. Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. Princeton, N.J. and Woodstock: Princeton University Press. —. 2011. “Patrimonial Alliances and Failures of State Penetration”. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 636, 1: 16–31. Connell, Robert. 2005. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity. Davis, Mike. 2008. “Foreword. Reading John Hagedorn”. In A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture, edited by John Hagedorn, xi–xvii . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dowdney, Luke. T. 2005. Neither War Nor Peace: International Comparisons of Children and Youth in Organised Armed Violence. Rio de Janeiro: Viva Rio/ISER/IANSA 7Letras. Golovin, V. V. and M. L. Lurie. 2008. “Ideologicheskie i territorialnye soobshchestva molodyozhi: megapolis, provintsialnyi gorod, selo”. Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 1: 56–70.

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Hagedorn, John and Perry Macon. 1988. People and Folks: Gangs, Crime, and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City. Chicago, Lake View Press. Hallsworth, Simon. 2011. “Gangland Britain? Realities, Fantasies and Industry”. In Youth in Crisis? “Gangs”, Territoriality and Violence, edited by Barry Goldson, 183–97. London and New York: Routledge. Hayward, Keith J. and Yar Majid. 2006. “The ‘Chav’ Phenomenon: Consumption, Media and the Construction of a New Underclass”. Crime, Media, Culture, 2(1): 9–28. Hesse, Barnor. 1992. Beneath the Surface: Racial Harassment. Aldershot, Avebury. Jones, Owen. 2011. Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. London, Verso. Kintrea, Keith, Jon Bannister and Jon Pickering. 2011. “‘It’s Just an Area—Everybody Represents It’: Exploring Young People’s Territorial Behaviour in British Cities”. In Youth in Crisis? “Gangs”, Territoriality and Violence, edited by Barry Goldson, 55–71. London and New York, Routledge. Kontos, Louis, David C. Brotherton and Luis Barrios. 2003. Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. Kosterina, Irina Vladimirovna. 2006. “Skinkhedy i gopniki: raznye liki agressivnoi maskulinnosti.” In Konstruirovanie maskulinnosti na Zapade i v Rossii, edited by I. A. Shkolnikov and A. V. Shnyrova, 21– 37. Ivanovo: Ivanovskii tsentr gendernykh issledovanii. Messerschmidt, James. W. 1993. Masculinities and Crime: Critique and Reconceptualization of Theory. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Morozov, I. A. and I. S. Sleptsova. 2004. Krug igry: prazdnik i igra v zhisni severorusskogo krest’ianina (XIX–XX vv.). Moscow: INDRIK. Mullins, Christopher W. 2006. Holding your Square: Masculinities, Streetlife, and Violence. Cullompton: Willan. Nayak, Anoop. 2006. “Displaced Masculinities: Chavs, Youth and Class in the Post-industrial City”. Sociology 40(5): 813–31. Nurgaliev, Rashid. 2006. “Speech in the State Duma”. Accessed 13 August 2013. www.mvd.ru/news/8185. Paoli, Letizia. 2003. Mafia Brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pearson, Geoffrey. 2011. “Perpetual Novelty: Youth, Modernity and Historical Amnesia”. In Youth in Crisis? “Gangs”, Territoriality and Violence, edited by Barry Goldson, 20–37. London and New York: Routledge.

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Rodgers, Dennis. 2009. “Living in the Shadow of Death: Gangs, Violence and Social Order in Urban Nicaragua, 1996–2002”. In Youth Violence in Latin America, edited by Dennis Rodgers and Gareth A. Jones, 25– 44. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shchepanskaya, T. B. 2001. “Zony nasiliya (po materialam russkoi sel’skoi i sovremennykh subkulturnykh traditsii)”. Antropologiya nasiliya, edited by V. V. Bocharov and V. A. Tishkov, 115–77. Sankt-Peterburg: Nauka. Shevchenko, Olga. 2009. Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. Stephenson, Svetlana. 2011. “The Kazan Leviathan: Russian Street Gangs as Agents of Social Order”. The Sociological Review 59(2): 324–47. —. 2012. “The Violent Practices of Youth Territorial Groups in Moscow”. Europe-Asia Studies 64(1): 69–90. Suttles, Gerald D. 1968. The Social Order of the Slum. Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Thrasher, Frederic Milton. 1927. The Gang. A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University Press. Turner, Victor Witter. 1995. The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Volkov, Vadim. 2002. Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Whyte, William Foote. 1993. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Wilkinson, Deanna. L. 2003. Guns, Violence, and Identity Among African American and Latino Youth. New York: LFB Scholarly Pub. Willis, Paul. E. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Aldershot, Ashgate.

13. AN EXPLORATION OF DEVIANCE, POWER AND RESISTANCE WITHIN CONTEMPORARY CUBA: THE CASE OF CUBAN UNDERGROUND RAP ELENI DIMOU

Introduction This chapter aims to revisit and reconceptualize the way we think about subcultures and their continued importance. It will revive the tradition of the Birmingham School (CCCS) in its interpretation of subcultures, and it will address the theoretical challenges posed by post-subcultural theorists, using contemporary socialist Cuba to illustrate the argument. I want to demonstrate, through ethnographic material and discourse analysis of rap lyrics, that a reconciliation of the CCCS with post-subcultural theory is not only possible, but a strategy to be followed when investigating subcultures in contemporary society. I adopt Hall and Jefferson’s “double sidedness” perspective, which entails “acknowledging the new without losing what may still be serviceable in the old” (2006, xii). Thus, a bridging of the two perspectives (both the micro and macro analysis and the interactions between the two) is required, in order to come to a better understanding of young people’s cultural formations, everyday practices and their relation to power and resistance. The chapter begins with a brief description of Cuban underground rap and its relationship to state institutions in order to demonstrate the complexity of power within the Cuban context. This is important because, as Greener and Hollands (2006, 415) argue, much of the theorizing of the subcultural and post-subcultural debate is “in fact, UK based, if not western in its orientation”. By exploring these theoretical approaches through the perspective of “border thinking” (Mignolo 2000, 84) I aim to investigate whether a CCCS approach or a post-subcultural one, can or cannot be applied in the Cuban context. Hence I will explore the connection

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between Cuban rap and the Cuban ideology (namely cubanía) and the structural changes that occurred in the island since the 1990s. Additionally rap’s relationship to the state’s apparatus will be critically analysed, as well as the importance of affects, feelings and personal struggles of the rappers in their everyday lives. By examining the nature of subcultures, power and resistance in Cuba, this chapter will attempt to bridge subcultural and post-subcultural theory.

Cuban Underground Rap and Border Thinking Cuban underground rap emerged in the early 1990s in Alamar, a suburb on the outskirts of Havana, where young Afro-Cubans used to listen to Miami radio stations that often broadcast US rap songs (Fernandes 2006). Due to the intervention and negotiations of several Cuban and political exiles from the US that had influence on Cuba’s state institutions, there was an attempt to “legitimize” this socially critical music of foreign origin. Furthermore in the late 1990s Fidel Castro took an explicit interest in the role that Cuban rap could play in disseminating revolutionary consciousness all around the world (Baker 2011). These factors combined to result in institutional support for rap from the Ministry of Culture and the cultural organization, the Brothers Saiz Association (BSA). Moreover, they led to the establishment of the annual hip-hop festival in Alamar from 1995 up to 2004, the creation of the Cuban Rap Agency (CRA) in 2002 and the blossoming of the rap scene until 2004 (Baker 2011). Although this gives the impression of a harmonious relationship between state institutions and rap, the reality was rather different. As one of the oldest rappers reported to me in interview: At the beginning I saw people that were singing being handcuffed on the scene and dragged down by the police […] things that they do not do now of course. Cuba has changed a lot. [...] People think that hip-hop is difficult to realize now [...] before performing hip-hop was much more difficult! Only to say, in the 1990s, that Cuba has problems and nothing more, directly meant that you should look for rescue afterwards (interviewed by Dimou, August 2010).

Why is it then that rappers, despite having the official support even of Castro himself, are still suppressed, marginalized, censored and nonrepresented in the media? This complex manifestation of power will be discussed in more detail later. I should stress at this point that, by examining the overt and complex nature of Cuba’s state power, Cuba emerges as fertile territory for

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exploring the link between subcultural theory and post-subcultural theory. In doing this, I use Mignolo’s (2000, 84) perspective on “border thinking”. Border thinking entails thinking from and within the intellectual power of Cuba, rather than imposing a top-down western perspective. Specifically, border thinking occurs through a process of a “double critique” (Mignolo 2000, 84). This is manifested by adopting the internal critiques of modernity (postmodern perspectives), followed by a critique from the Cuban perspective (colonial difference) (see Mignolo 2000). By applying this “double critique” I aim to explore whether or not modern and postmodern conceptualizations of subcultures, power and resistance could be applied in the case of Cuba. Hence in the following section I provide a brief investigation of the CCCS’s perspective and post-subculture theory on issues of power, resistance and subcultures, in order to later explore their relevance within the Cuban context.

Power, Resistance, Subcultures: CCCS and Post-Subculture Theory Issues of power and resistance were highly embedded in the interpretation of subcultures offered by the CCCS (Clarke et al. 1976). Specifically, subcultures were interpreted as sites of conscious (in countercultures) or unconscious resistance; as “magical” and temporary responses to the hegemonic culture, within a specific historical conjuncture. As Hall and Jefferson (2006) argue, the main aim of the Birmingham School was to empirically “ground” subcultures in relation to the historical, sociocultural, economic and political context. Thus, the CCCS project aspired to make connections “between lived experience and structural realities” (Hall and Jefferson 2006, xiv). From this perspective subcultures are linked to the way that significant historical changes are experienced by ordinary people. Moreover, subcultures have an ideological dimension in the way they negotiate their collective experience with the hegemonic culture (Clarke et al. 1976). Thus, class, structures, hegemony, ideology and politics were highly significant in the CCCS’s analysis of subcultures. Resistance was interpreted in two main ways. Resistance through appropriation (bricolage) was seen as a form of collective defiance, which was manifested indirectly and “symbolically” through subcultural style and rituals (Hebdige 1979; Raby 2005). Subcultures were regarded as a site of winning spaces that had the potential to transform, provoke, create, negotiate or win relative autonomy and self-fulfilment (Clarke et al 1976). Furthermore resistance through deviance (see Willis 1977) was seen to momentarily oppose power, even as subcultural creativity aided the repro-

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duction of hegemonic power relations (Raby 2005). From the CCCS’s perspective, resistance was seen as largely unconscious and symbolic, placed within the cultural realm and serving as a form of micro-political resistance (Marchant 2003). It could be argued that resistance in contemporary post-subcultural theory is also placed at the micro level of politics in everyday life (Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003). However, due to the explicit aim to move away from the CCCS’s Marxist paradigm, subcultural resistance is not linked to macro-structural and cultural changes (Blackman 2005). For post-subculturalists, subcultures are not a site of ideological struggle with the hegemonic culture (Redhead 1990). Under this perspective, it has been argued that the notion of hegemony—as power—is no longer adequate in explaining the complex interplays of power and resistance within late modern contemporary societies (Thoburn 2007). Rather, drawing on Spinoza’s notion of potentia (Maffesoli’s (1996) puissance), Beasley-Murray (2003), Lash (2007) and Thoburn (2007) have argued that we have entered into a post-hegemonic period, where ideology is no longer important. They argue that we should focus on the micro-politics of power and resistance; on feelings and affects, which are experienced and realized in everyday life. Furthermore, within the postmodern perspective, subcultures are no longer centred on class, gender and ethnicity. Rather they are articulated around self-authentication and individual choice (Muggleton 2000). Subsequently, temporality, media saturation, commerciality, consumerism, the intersection of the global and the local, individualism, heterogeneity, hedonism, apolitical sentiments and fluidity are argued to be the prevailing characteristics of postmodern “subcultures” (Redhead 1990; Bennett 1999; Muggleton 2000). As a result resistance is seen as the “‘new’ politics of pleasure: a pleasure for its own sake” (Redhead 1993, 21) where young people “implode with the pure joy of individualistic consumerism” (Blackman 2005, 10). Thus, post-subcultural resistance subverts power relations momentarily, through the very diversity of individual choice in patterns of consumption (Bennett 1999). It could be argued that despite the tensions between the two approaches (see Blackman 2005; Shildrick and MacDonald 2006; Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003), they are not necessarily in opposition. The Birmingham School was mainly interested in the importance of subcultures at a macrostructural level, whereas post-subculture theory is more preoccupied with the micro, everyday realities and the feelings of subculturalists. Moreover Hall and Jefferson (2006) in their latest auto-critique assert that postsubcultural theory has advanced some of the principles of the CCCS in

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new ways. Thus by looking at the case of Cuba underground rap I will attempt a bridging of the two perspectives (both the micro and the macro) through a “double sidedness” (Hall and Jefferson 2006: xii) approach. Following the steps of the CCCS I will explore the relationship of Cuban underground rap to Cuba’s hegemonic ideology and structural changes that have occurred in the island. Only then can we see whether Cuban rappers are apolitical, revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries/counterhegemonic. By examining power and resistance in Cuban underground rap it will be illustrated that post-subcultural elements such as individual choice, local and global interaction and affects are also of high significance in the interpretation of the specific subculture.

Cubanía and the Special Period In contrast to what many might think, Cuba’s dominant ideology is not Marxist-Leninist but rather, what is called cubanía (which translates to a belief in Cubanness); the “particular Cuban manifestation of a radical and then revolutionary, nationalism” (Kapcia 2008, 89). Arguably cubanía is centred on Jose Marti’s1 vision of Cuba Libre (free Cuba) (Kapcia 2000). Specifically the 1959 revolution has been depicted as predominantly “Martiano”, advocating independence, sovereignty, liberty, social welfare, social justice, social and racial equality, struggle, activism, emancipation through education and culture, dignity, social duty, selflessness, loyalty, collectivism and solidarity (Kapcia 2000). As we shall see, the rappers draw explicitly on the values of cubanía. This is no coincidence. As the Birmingham School pointed out, subcultures are to be understood within a specific historical conjuncture and the rise of rap is connected to important structural changes in the island since the 1990s. The rapid economic changes that occurred in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union affected all aspects of social life (Pérez-Sarduy and Stubbs 2000). Severe austerity followed, leading Castro to declare that Cuba was entering into a “special period in times of peace” (Brenner et al. 2008, 1). The Special Period was characterized by job insecurity, scarcity and rationing of food, lack of medicine and basic domestic supplies, power cuts, problems with the transportation system, the rise of racism and the marginalization of urban Afro-Cubans among others (Pérez-Sarduy and Stubbs 2000; De la Fuente 2001). One of the most crucial government economic reforms was the introduction of a double currency (Cuban pesos and convertible pesos-CUC)2 (Eckstein 2008). This had severe implications for Cuban social equality and gave rise to class divisions (Jimenez 2008). As de la Fuente (2001) argues, since this economic

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reform, Cuba tends to be divided between those who have access to CUC and those who have not. The economic reforms and the austerity conditions led to the proliferation of what has been called “double morality” (Wirtz 2004, 414). Mainly, this term is used to describe “the problematics of taking contradictory public and private stances, namely espousing revolutionary values while discreetly subverting those values in the name of economic survival” (Wirtz 2004, 414). The spread of double morality means that the majority of Cuban citizens have to live outside the boundaries of the law (Henken 2008). This fact is reflected in everyday Cuban terms like “inventar” (to make ends meet). Some scholars (Fernandez 2000; Moore 2006) have argued that (despite the official commitment of the state to defend socialism to “death”) Cuba is slowly embracing a capitalist or socio-capitalist economic system. Specifically the Cuban state has implemented the double currency in order to adjust to the hard currency-based global economy (Eckstein 2008). Furthermore, in an attempt to seek foreign investments, it has opened up its doors to tourism and joint ventures with foreign tourist companies. As a result, tourism since the 1990s has been one of the principal resources of hard currency for the Cuban economy (Sharpley and Knight 2009). The promotion of tourism has arguably rendered average Cubans as “second-class citizens”: tourists can enjoy all the beauties of Cuba whereas the majority of Cubans, due to their economic condition and state restrictions, cannot (Jimenez 2008). Another consequence of these reforms has been the re-emergence of jineterismo (mainly prostitution) as well as sex tourism (Sharpley and Knight 2009). Last but not least, increased levels of corruption and the spread of consumer values and materialism were also effects of this socio-economic crisis (Fernandez 2000; Kapcia 2008). In other words, it could be argued that life in Cuba has changed more within the last two decades than in the previous thirty years of the post-revolutionary experience (Kirk and Padura Fuentes 2001).

Cubanía and Cuban Underground Rap Fernandez (2000) has argued that young Cubans have become very disillusioned with the state and with its inability to fulfil its promises. This disillusionment is expressed within Cuban rap. Specifically, the rappers criticize the government for being unable to fulfil the dream of a truly free Cuba, as well as for failing to keep its promises of equality, the eradication of discrimination and a good quality of life for all its citizens.

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A representative example of Cuban underground rap is the song “Long Live Free Cuba” (Viva Cuba Libre) which states that the dream of Free Cuba has not yet been fulfilled. The rapper (El B) puts himself in the role of Antonio Maceo, one of the generals in the struggles for independence against Spain, who was willing to die for the liberation of his country and its people. El B raises the issue of the continued economic dependence of Cuba, first to the USSR and now to Venezuela and China, arguing that Cuba is still not independent. He challenges the government to tell him what communism is when, while there is free healthcare for everyone, deteriorating conditions mean many Cubans are not treated properly. He does not disavow the slogans used by the government, but rather advocates that they be enforced. By using the metaphor of Pinocchio silencing his consciousness (that is, the cricket), he makes obvious the disillusionment and frustration stemming from the gap between the government’s official discourse and everyday reality in Cuba. He stresses the corrosive effects of the double currency for social equality and the inability of the state to provide a good quality of life for its citizens. He challenges the government not only to ask itself: “how do people that do not work, live?” (by implication referring to the black market) but also “how people that do work, live”? Demonstrating in that way that it is impossible to live with the state salary that is in Cuban pesos while almost everywhere in Havana Cubans need to pay in CUC. El B illustrates the interconnections of emotions and affect (the cultivation of fear by the government, love for liberty and hatred for the one that denies it to the people), with politics and ideology. As Fernandez (2000) has argued ideological politics and affective politics are inextricably linked. Feelings and affects are equally important to how ideologies and politics are shaped; and conversely, feelings and affects are influenced by politics and ideologies (Fernandez 2000). Therefore ideology and affects, structural issues and everyday struggles, are equally important to our interpretation of subcultures in the Cuban context. Moreover the rapper ends the song by repeating the words of Castro himself “revolution is to change anything that needs to be changed”. This technique of appropriation of Fidel’s slogans is frequently used by El B and other rappers (Baker 2011). In that way they demonstrate explicitly their patriotism, and at the same time by using Fidel’s own words they place themselves “inside the revolution” and not against it (Baker 2011). Hence the rappers draw upon the values of cubanía in a most direct way. Therefore, they are neither apolitical nor driven by consumerism as postsubculture theory has argued.

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Furthermore the rappers’ protest should not be seen as dissidence, but rather as a cultural expression illustrating the gap between official discourses and everyday reality in Cuba. Hence Cuban rap is not counterhegemonic or counter-revolutionary. On the contrary, the current second generation of Cuban rappers, the one that appeared after 2004, are “hyperrevolutionaries” (Baker 2011, 51) in their discourse and values. Thus, it could be argued that their critique is always done in a constructive way, in order for the revolutionary project to be realized in practice. To investigate what issues of power and resistance arise in the case of Cuban rap, it is important to explore the relationship between the rappers and the state apparatus.

Ideology, Affects, Coercion and Local and Global Interactions Cuban underground rap is, as we have seen, revolutionary in its ideals. At the same time though, it is censored and marginalized by Cuban authorities and the media. I should stress at this point that it is not possible to generalize about Cuba’s cultural policies, as there is no consistent official policy towards cultural manifestations (Moore 2006). Nonetheless, it could be argued that the policy is based on Castro’s talk in 1961 “Words to the Intellectuals”, where he set the limits of artistic expression by saying “within the revolution, everything; against the revolution nothing” (Castro 1961, 10). He did not set, however, specific boundaries of what lies “within” or “is against the revolution” (Chomsky et al. 2003). Hence, without specific recommendations enforcement became arbitrary (Chomsky et al. 2003). Since the consolidation of the revolution, protest songs were deemed to be unnecessary (Moore 2006). Moreover, as Moore (2006) and Baker (2011) argue, there is little or no communication between institutions. Also, those that make the decisions about censorship are usually low- and mid-level bureaucrats. Thus, it falls to individual interpretation as to what cultural expression lies within or against the revolution (Moore 2006). Hence processes of censorship and labelling depend upon the individual interpretations of state administrators. They decide what “revolutionary”, “communist” and/or “counter-revolutionary” actually mean. It could be argued that Gramsci’s (1971) notion of common-sense values3 as a site of struggle, contestation and change (which could be interpreted by each person in various different ways) is of paramount importance in the labelling of subcultures in Cuba. The conflict over the

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meaning of “revolutionary, communist and counter-revolutionary” is evident in the words of another rapper I interviewed: Those that say that the rappers are counter-revolutionaries they do not know the meaning of the word revolution. Because in Cuba, being a revolutionary means to be a Communist. So revolutionary in Cuba means the guy that is in favour of the system as it is. What happened in Cuba at the beginning was a revolution. A positive and necessary change for that time, but now in Cuba we don’t live anything of that revolution (interviewed by Dimou, August 2010).

The labelling of rappers as counter-revolutionaries has, as a consequence, the censorship of their music. However the process of censorship is far from clear cut. Rather it depends on international and personalized politics, and also on negotiations between rappers and state officials. As one of the most censored rap artists explicitly stated in interview: “yeah, I am censored. The problem with censorship though, is quite a complicated one here”. For him, the government has to provide a space for rap in order to promote a good image to the international community, “but behind any kind of event there is a lot of pressure” applied by authorities and state officials on the rappers (interviewed by Dimou, August 2010).4 Similarly, another vanguard rapper said: We are and we aren’t censored. Because they say to us that we cannot sing and then they throw us three concerts. It’s a bit strange. I don’t know what to tell you [...] We did the concert in Acapulco (a cinema theatre) and then they didn’t let us sing in many places [...] so you don’t know if you are censored or not (interviewed by Dimou, September 2010).

Moreover, these processes of criminalization depend on the role of affect within Cuban culture, especially of fear and distrust towards rap. On the one hand, rap is a subculture that originates from the United States; and on the other, it manifests itself as protest and critique towards the regime. Hence the cultural global flows and their influence on, and appropriation by the local scenes that post-subculture theory has stressed, is of high value in Cuba. Equally important though is the politics in subcultures that the CCCS was interested in. A rapper I interviewed explains: The people behind the “burro” (bureaucrats) continue to view it as a foreign form of music [...] And the directors of the media still think that it’s a foreign type of music, so they stay “blind” and shut off their ears when it comes to rap (interviewed by Dimou, August 2010).

In a similar vein another rapper noted:

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13. The Case of Cuban Underground Rap But why in the television they do not broadcast what we are doing? What is the fear? What is the fear in Cuba for what we are doing? For the Cuban, to open his eyes and see what is really happening? (Interviewed by Dimou, August 2010.)

In order to understand this fear and distrust towards rap, another factor should be considered, one that has been neglected so far in the literature on this specific subculture. Cuba’s domestic cultural policy cannot be differentiated from its foreign policy and what has been termed as “siege mentality” (Kapcia 2000, 102). This emerges in feelings of constant fear of being attacked by the US, combined with feelings of distrust between Cubans, in case someone is serving the interests of counter-intelligence (Kapcia 2000). Hence, as rappers give voice to criticism of the government, many state administrators in leisure venues refuse to organize rap concerts for fear of the possible personal repercussions—loss of their job or being perceived as counter-revolutionary. This condition of distrust and fear towards rap is further exaggerated by the manipulation of the Cuban rappers by the Miami media that generally depicts them as dissidents that want to overthrow the regime. Consequently, when it comes to everyday reality, and especially the workplace, the majority of state administrators in bureaucratic positions, the media and leisure venues, are afraid of the repercussions of promoting a protest genre that boasts of revolutionary sentiments (whatever their own personal feelings about the music). As a result, the rappers need constantly to engage in a “low-level struggle” with state officials and venue administrators in order to gain space (Baker 2011). However, for the most radical, the “security of the state”5 is a constant source of pressure. There have been kidnappings, spying, arrests and emotional and psychological blackmail; not only directed at the rappers but also at their close family and friends. Thus the role of hegemony’s coercive mechanism, affects and individual choice are of paramount importance in the case of Cuba. Post-subculture theorization is important for another reason. There has been a rising demand and market for underground Cuban rap outside Cuba. Thus despite the fact that these artists have been denied space to perform in Cuba, for the last two years Cuban rappers have been able to travel outside the island to promote their music and perform in concerts. Thus an increasing commercialization of Cuban underground rap is occurring outside Cuba. This is evidence of how the global music market intersects and influences the local. However, this should not be differentiated from issues of power and politics. By allowing the rappers to travel the government releases their frustration by letting them perform, earn money and international recognition. This policy also fulfils Castro’s

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aspirations to diffuse revolutionary consciousness to the rest of the world through rap. The regime demonstrates to the international community that there is freedom of expression in Cuba and by allowing them to perform mainly outside of the island it separates the artists from their audience in Cuba. Additionally state officials entertain the hope that the rappers will choose in the end to stay outside the island, as many have done in the past. Ideology and affects, structural issues and everyday realities, global and local interactions, the hegemony’s coercive mechanism, individual choice and the informal part of life are therefore equally important in our interpretation of subcultures, power and resistance in Cuba.

Power and Resistance In terms of power it could be argued that a form of social exclusion is occurring towards rap as rappers are officially and culturally included but structurally and practically excluded. In Baker’s (2011, 97) words “inclusionary discrimination” is the most appropriate way to describe state policies towards rap: the combination of support and restriction, of discursive enthusiasm and practical obstacles, of funding and expanding an international festival and largely excluding hip-hop from the domestic media (Baker 2011, 97).

I would add to these aspects: an official discourse of support, but efforts at marginalization and oppression at the practical level and in the everyday lives of the rappers; and also the gap between officially supporting the revolutionary rap culture, but in practice promoting the money-driven dance music of another popular music genre, reggaeton.6 In terms of resistance, it could be argued that the rappers constitute a “threat” to the Cuban government because by explicitly showing the gap between official discourses and everyday reality, they challenge its legitimacy. In that way, they pose a “threat” to the goals of unity, conformity and uniformity of people to the system (Moore 2006). Moreover the rappers are resisting the feelings of fear and the culture of silence by claiming their rights to freedom of speech. Thus, Cuban rap could be interpreted as a conscious form of resistance towards the policies of the state. Hence, the CCCS’s interpretation of resistance as conscious and intentional practices and discourses, which was used to describe countercultures, is still relevant (Clarke et al 1976). However, as has been demonstrated thus far, Cuban rap is not a counterculture but rather it is an explicit reflection of Cuba’s revolutionary culture and history.

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Arguably, the resistive nature of Cuban underground rap could be interpreted as “loyal opposition” (Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo 2000, 31). According to Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo (2000, 31) the rappers are “aware that they are a part of a social experiment that has provided both opportunities and hardships [and that their criticism] is made with love”. Their conscious discourse stays loyal to cubanía and their criticism and actions are always expressed in positive and constructive terms to make Cuba a better place to live for Cubans. At the same time though they challenge how meanings, beliefs, symbols, emotions and values are constructed and disseminated by the government. Moreover their resistance does not reside only on the cultural (micro-political) realm but extends to the macro-political through mobilization and action. Consequently it could be argued that conscious practices and discourses combined with emotions, dreams and individual choices are equally important in our interpretation of the resistive nature of Cuban rap.

Conclusion The complex and overt manifestation of power in the Cuban context ask us to rethink the way we theorize about subcultures, power and resistance. The traditional issues of subcultural theory, in which hegemony and ideology function in multiple layers in civil society, appear side by side with the issues of affect and personal choice that post-subcultural theory has stressed. Structural issues and the state’s coercive mechanism go hand in hand with the influence of global media and global music industries on local scenes. We have seen that the term “counter-culture”, that was used by the Birmingham School to describe conscious forms of resistance, is not adequate to describe the resistive nature of Cuban underground rap. The coexistence of a highly political subculture, such as rap, with a highly apolitical, hedonistic subculture such as reggaeton, creates a really fertile ground for further research that develops a bridge between subcultural and post-subcultural perspectives. Whilst the specific case of Cuban rap demonstrates that elements of both perspectives are necessary to understand the interplay of power and resistance, a fuller consideration of Cuba’s case can provide opportunities to reconcile these perspectives on a more general, global basis.

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Notes 1. Jose Marti has been one of the most important intellectual figures of Cuba’s history. He lost his life in battle fighting for Cuba’s independence against Spain (Kapcia 2000). 2. Currently 23 Cuban pesos approximately equal one CUC (US$1.10). The average Cuban salary, which is paid in Cuban pesos ranges from 15– 20 CUC per month and does not cover even basic needs. 3. For Gramsci (see 1971, 419) common sense is not something monolithic, coherent and univocal but an amalgam of fragmented historical ideologies, residues from previous hegemonies, values, traditions, social mythologies and scientific principles. 4. It should be noted that the rap songs of these artists are not heard in any official public space and there have been arrests of young people listening specifically to the duo Los Aldeanos (it comprises El Andeano and El B). Also there have been expulsions by universities of students who are listening to these artists. 5. Special police force in civilian clothes that is assigned to track and combat counter-revolutionary movements in the island. 6. Reggaeton is the most popular music genre currently in Cuba. Its stress on hedonism, drunkenness, vulgarity, “senseless” discourse, sexuality and consumerism arguably poses a threat to the established morality and culture of Cuban society. If reggaeton actually forms a counterculture is an issue that I am currently exploring. However, it could be stated at this point that post-subcultural interpretations of subcultures are of high importance when we seek to understand reggaeton.

References Baker, Geoffrey. 2011. Buena Vista in the Club: Rap, Reggaeton, and Revolution in Cuba. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bataille, Georges. 1992. “Sacrifice, the Festival and the Principles of the Sacred World”, trans. Robert Hurley. In The Bataille Reader, edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, 210–19. Oxford: Blackwell. Beasley-Murray, Jon. 1999. “On Posthegemony”. Bulletin of Latin American Research 22(1): 117–25. Bennett, Andy. 1999. “Subcultures or Neo-tribes? Rethinking the Relationships between Youth, Style and Musical Taste”. Sociology, 33(3): 599–617. Blackman, Shane. 2005. “Youth Subcultural Theory: A Critical Engagement with the Concept, its Origins and Politics, from the

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Chicago School to Postmodernism”. Journal of Youth Studies, 8(1): 1– 20. Brenner, Philip, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirk, and William M. LeoGrande, eds. 2008. A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution. Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield. Castro, Fidel. 1961. “Palabras a los Intelectuales- Words to the Intellectuals”, Ministerio de Cultura de la Republica Cubana. Accessed 10 February 2011. www.min.cult.cu/historia/palabras.doc. Chomsky, Aviva., Barry Carr and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, eds. 2003. The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Clarke, John, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts. 1976. “Subcultures, Cultures and Class”. In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 5–74. London: Routledge. de la Fuente, Alejandro. 2001. A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth Century Cuba. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. Downes, David M. and Paul Elliott Rock. 2007. Understanding Deviance: A Guide to the Sociology of Crime and Rule Breaking, 5th edn. Oxford: Oxford Polity Press. Eckstein, Susan. 2008. “Dollarization and its Discontents in the PostSoviet Era”. In A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, edited by Brenner, Philip, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirk, and William M. LeoGrande, 179–92. Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield. Fernandes, Sujatha. 2006. Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Fernandez, Damián J. 2000. Cuba and the Politics of Passion. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gott, Richard. 2004. Cuba: A New History, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Gramsci, Antonio.1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Quintin Hoare. New York: International Publishers. Greener, Tracey and Robert Hollands, 2006. “Beyond Subculture and Post-Subculture? The Case of Virtual Psytrance”. Journal of Youth Studies, 9(4): 393–418. Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson, T. 2006. “Once More Around Resistance Through Rituals”. In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in

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Post-War Britain, 2nd edn., edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, vii–xxxiii. Abingdon: Routledge. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subcultures: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Henken, Ted. 2008. “Vale Todo: In Cuba’s Paladares, Everything is Prohibited but Everything Goes”. In A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, edited by Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirk, and William M. LeoGrande, 168–78. Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield. Jiménez, Marguerite Rose. 2008. “The Political Economy of Leisure”. In A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, edited by Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirk, and William M. LeoGrande, 146–55. Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield. Kapcia, Antoni. 2000. Cuba: The Island of Dreams, Oxford: Berg. —. 2008. Cuba in Revolution: A History Since the Fifties. London: Reaktion Books. Kirk, John and Leonardo Padura Fuentes, 2001. Culture and Cuban Resolution: Conversations in Havana. Gainesville: University Press Florida. Lash, Scott. 2007. “Power After Hegemony: Cultural Studies in Mutation?”. Theory Culture and Society 24(3): 55–78. Maffesoli, Michel. 1996. The Time of The Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. Paris: Sage. Marchant, Oliver. 2003. “Bridging the Micro-Macro Gap: Is There Such a Thing as a Post-subcultural Politics?” In The Post-Subcultures Reader, edited by David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl, 83–97. Oxford: Berg. Melechi, Antonio. 1993. “The Ecstasy of Disappearance”. In Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture, edited by Steve Redhead, 29–40. Aldershot: Avebury Press. Mignolo, Walter. D. 2000. Global Histories/Local Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Chichester: Princeton University Press. Muggleton, David. 2000. Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford: Berg. Muggleton, David and Rupert Weinzierl. 2003. The Post-Subcultures Reader. Oxford: Berg. Pacini Hernandez, Deborah and Reebee Garofalo. 2000, “Hip Hop in Havana: Rap, Race and National Identity in Contemporary Cuba”. Journal of Popular Music Studies, 12: 18–47.

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Pérez Sarduy, Pedro and Jean Stubbs. 2000. Afro-Cuban Voices: On Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba. Florida: University Press of Florida. Raby, Rebecca. 2005. “What is Resistance?” Journal of Youth Studies 8(2): 151–71. Redhead, Steve. 1990. The End of the Century Party: Youth and Pop Towards 2000. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. —. 1993. Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture, Aldershot: Avebury Press. Rietveld, Hillegonda. 1993. “Living the Dream”. In Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture, edited by Steve Redhead, 41–78. Aldershot: Avebury Press. Rodríguez Gala, Bian Óscar (El B). 2010. “Viva Cuba Libre”, on Viva Cuba Libre, lyrics Bian Óscar Rodríguez Gala, (El B), music composition by Aldo Roberto Rodríguez Baquero (El Aldeano or AL2), Havana: Los Aldeanos, 26 Musas/Real 70. All rights reserved. Sharpley, Richard and Martin Knight. 2009. “Tourism and the State in Cuba: From the Past to the Future”. International Journal of Tourism Research, 11: 241–54. Shildrick, Tracy and Robert MacDonald. 2006. “In Defence of Subculture: Young People, Leisure and Social Divisions”. Journal of Youth Studies, 9(2): 125–40. Thoburn, Nicholas. 2007. “Patterns of Production: Cultural Studies after Hegemony”. Theory Culture and Society, 24(3): 79–94. Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, Farnborough: Saxon House. Wirtz, Kristin. 2004. “Santeria in Cuban National Consciousness: A Religious Case of the Doble Moral”. The Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 9(2): 409–38.

AFTERWORD AFTER SHOCK: FROM PUNK TO PORNETRATION TO “LET’S BE FACEBOOK FRENDZ!!” DICK HEBDIGE

“We were searching for real sincerity and simplicity, and we found these qualities in the holy foolishness of punk.” Nadezhda Tolokinnova1

This essay represents a substantial reworking of a paper given at the Inaugural Conference of the Subcultures Network: The Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change at London Metropolitan University in 2011. Using multiple images, sound and video clips, I set out in the original presentation (to quote from the blurb) to: … scan contemporary art and media culture to see how far ideas about and attitudes towards youth and youth subculture, consumerism, embodiment and bonding, the power of perversion, the politics of insubordination, friendship, secession, sex and love have changed in the three decades since punk first exploded on the scene.

Inevitably I only touched upon a fraction of the topics listed in the time available, and much of what I did touch upon is lost or gets abducted in the translation from the live-projection context to the monochromic silence of the printed page.2 What I hope survives is the logic and the rhythm of the rupture and the cut—perhaps punk’s one true abiding legacy; the war it waged on behalf of awkward syntax and the principle of dislocation against seamless flows, settled truths and closure: Punk took a lot of the old ideological apparatuses—the family, work, religious and political allegiance—and stripped them down and held them up to see if there was anything worth keeping, and it did the same with sex and sexual relations. In the 60s the old utopian idea was that power and power relations polluted the human potential for love; whereas, under punk, they began to examine the possibility that power and power relations

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Afterword actually produce desire. So if sexual desire operated like a machine you could fiddle with the knobs, change the positions, and perhaps that’s how punk moved into this whole dialogue with S&M, the language of tops and bottoms, fetishism and so on. ... I remember asking a punk girl to dance and she looked at me like it was the most ridiculous suggestion. It was even more disconcerting as she had no eyebrows. Punk wasn’t about dancing in twos ... Dancing became a kind of manic, sometimes solipsistic aerobics exercise. Either that or you formed a violent, amoebic mass at the front of the stage and slammed into each other so that bodies became indistinguishable …3

I won’t waste time going over old arguments or reassessing the theoretical terms in which what is now called “the Birmingham School of cultural studies” talked about youth subcultures back in the 1970s. The readings we came up with then worked well enough for their time and, more importantly, they helped spark debate on the politics of cultural forms. In the process we found ways of thinking more concretely about the plasticity of social identity—about how social groups use commodities expressively to project attitude, to mark boundaries and embody aspirations. Nonetheless it’s worth pointing out, in the face of frequent assertions made over the intervening years to the contrary, that some things—e.g. the patterns of systematic inequality of opportunity that underpinned our analysis of class back in the day—haven’t changed that much. It’s no coincidence, for instance, that no less than thirty branches of JD Sports, purveyors of sports-brand-focused “danger wear” and gangster chic, got hit in the smash-and-grab riots that flared across England in August 2011 in what appeared, at first glance, to be a blow-by-blow reprise of the BrixtonToxteth riots thirty years before, when the politics of subcultural consumption, at least for inner-city youth, seemed, then as now, “to be converging on a single point of tension, a simple opposition: desire and the absence of means, a brick and a shop window” (Hebdige 1982, 18). But what was new was the way in which the 2011 riots went suddenly viral. What was new was the speed with which they spread far beyond the immediate catalyst (the fatal shooting by police of Mark Duggan, a 29year-old mixed-race Londoner) and location (Tottenham, one of London’s poorest, most racially diverse boroughs), to places like suburban Chingford in the far north of London and Croydon in the south—places not traditionally equated with inner-city deprivation—before taking off in all directions across the English (sub)urban landscape in the following days. In August 2011, flashmobs made up of kids as young as eight descended on Wood Green shopping centre, a few miles east of Tottenham. The looters were reportedly summonsed and directed by one-to-many pins sent on Blackberry Messenger—this being the system, according to market-

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research sources, statistically favoured at that time by British youth. (Unlike Twitter and texting, Messenger pins could, at least until the riots, be rendered untraceable.) There are continuities, then, but as the flashmob phenomenon suggests, there are also significant differences between the modes of affiliation, transmission and assembly available now and in the pre-Internet era. We’ve come a long way from “My Generation” and punk—from 1977 when the insurgent shock of the No Future new came hobbling like a runaway infant in its bondage pants down the Road to Nowhere. That particular version of British underclass semiotic insurgency is now old hat. Today the signature tropes of vintage punk look positively cuddly and quaint. And with long-term jobless figures rising in tandem with the prohibitive cost of higher education, with financial insecurity, political instability and governmental dysfunction epidemic on a global scale, with a growing chasm separating the über-haves from the have-nothing-much-tospeak-of underclass, with ever more dire predictions concerning the future of the planet and the non-viability of our modus operandi as a species, the kids today are clearly not all right. What Larry Grossberg (1997, 16–17) calls the classic “rock formation” of the late 1960s/early 1970s—that assemblage of emotional alliances, progressive political commitments and an essentialized image of Youth on which the baby-boomers built a short-lived counterculture and a rather more enduring ideology of the transformative power of unregulated pleasures—has been eroding now for decades. Rock, we know now, is like any other cultural form in that it has no intrinsic social or political belonging. It can be shifted left or right or scrolled right off the page, consigned to the grab bag of history: buried, then exhumed, redeemed, museumized. It can be annexed to any ideology or commodity. In the era of file sharing, rock itself is broken down into an endlessly bifurcating list of sub-genres and becomes just another set of downloadable algorithmic options virally encoded with signature affects. Nonetheless, I’d isolate two moments in the intervening period when something like the early 70s countercultural youth-rock formation was reassembled and brought back, albeit in mutated form, with enough force and energy to produce a critical moment of contestation in the wider culture. First-wave punk is one of those moments; the other is the rave movement in the 1990s: Rave wasn’t about being rooted, organic, squatting in the mud like at Woodstock. In the 60s counter-culture the metaphors for alliance and bonding were all based around the family—brotherhoods, sisterhoods

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Afterword etc.—whereas rave and dance culture seem to be more about networking, being mobile and on the move. It’s more about casual temporary alliances with strangers.4

Rave and dance culture were the West’s weak echo of what was called in Eastern Europe during the late 1980s “people power”; as the crowds gathered in the public squares of Leipzig, Dresden, Prague not just to witness the dying days of Soviet communism but to accelerate that process through the agency, the action of their collective witness. Rave and dance culture were a collective movement which reaffirmed the right to congregate in public. It was a movement against the domestic archipelago, against the conservative assertion of family values and the accompanying logic of containment and lockdown. It was a movement against the homogenized interior: the gating of communities, zero-tolerance lawenforcement policies, the securitization of national borders: the cleansing closure of the community or nation state against the holy dirt of otherness. It was a movement against the subtraction of risk from pleasure, against the privatization and malling (as in “shopping malling”) of public space. It was about finding safety in numbers. It was about finding comfort in strangers. But rave also marked a shift with regard to celebrity and visibility based, in part, on the recognition in a hyperwired world of the potentially lethal implications of renown. It marked a new recognition of the dangers of the promiscuity of contact that the fatal combination of digital technologies and the culture of celebrity entails: a recognition of the inferno formed out of incessant visibility, the unbearable killing weight of mass projection. Celebrity is now revealed to be, in part at least, quite toxic—a veritable curse. Perhaps the most prophetic innovation in terms of identity politics debuted at the anti-globalization protests at the 1999 WTO summit in Seattle. This had less to do with the photogenic carnival of difference and difference-transcended (much remarked on at the time, with those photographs of eco-pagans marching arm in arm with workers in hard hats) than with the widespread erasure of the dissident face as more and more protestors opted, Black Bloc fashion, not for coming out—the radical 70s rite of passage—but for staying out of range, choosing masking-and-cloaking strategies (refined in cyberspace) over selfdisclosure: the DJ in the shadows not the rock star lit up like a target centre stage. Resistance to identity rather than resistance through identity. This will to disappearance and masking, facilitated and enabled by the Internet, might be construed not as flight but as commitment (or, perhaps more accurately, as both)—disappearance as a logical and principled response to an environment marked, on the one hand, by the catastrophic

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merger of the cult of celebrity, neoliberal economics and professional politics, and, on the other, by the unremitting surveillance by any means available of a fractal mass of citizen-consumers by state and corporate interests. This assertion of the right to stay out of range (“the right to be forgotten”) is the flipside of the institutionalization throughout civil society in the period since 1979 of neoliberal corporate norms and values— the attempted installation on a global scale of corporate normativity: the implosion, accelerated exponentially since the end of the Cold War, of margins into markets. To take the twenty-first century contemporary art scene as an example, with more than 250 biennials and art fairs spaced out cannily across the calendar in major cities on every continent, contemporary art now plays a key role in the place-making and place-marking strategies cities and regions resort to as they vie with each other to build economic and cultural capital, to attract bourgeois-bohemian residents, tourist revenue and corporate investment. As a result, art is now positioned very differently in relation to fashion, popular culture and a massively expanded multiplatform media-sphere from what and where it was just a few decades ago. It’s no longer sequestered exclusively in galleries, museums, high-concept journals, high-end glossy publications or alternative small distribution zines. Instead it’s plastered virally across the face of the internet and signsavvy retail culture. At Sotheby’s in London on 15 September 2008, the same day that Lehman Brothers went bust and stock values globally went through the floor, British artist Damien Hirst auctioned off in a 48-hour period $170 millionworth of his trademark pickled animals, spot paintings, dead butterfly collages and jewel-encrusted skulls, with bids called in from—in addition to the usual suspects (including White Cube, the gallery that represented him in London)—new collectors from locations as dispersed as Russia, China, India and the Middle East. Though Hirst’s roguish persona and splashy, PR-savvy “Lucky Kunst”5 approach to art-as-provo-cation link him in direct line of succession to the Sex Pistols, such an overexposed contest of value and inflated scale of return is beyond anything imaginable in 1970s punk, even in the hypercapitalist “cash from chaos” version championed by Malcolm McLaren. Some of you will remember a time in the 60s, 70s and before, when the art and edgy culture scenes didn’t operate virally on a global scale quite like that. To take an example from my own experience, when I wasn’t writing about youth subculture or teaching part-time in UK art schools, I spent much of the 1970s helping to run a sound system called the Shoop— then a fixture on Birmingham’s underground circuit, with a weekly gig

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every Thurssday night oveer a long-ago demolished d puub on Hill Strreet in the city centre.

Shoop Sound d System, 1977 ((photo: Bernard d G. Mills)

This, by thee way, was 19972, the Jurasssic Age in thee evolution off DJing as an art form: with two turnntables, the vinyl stored inn crates, a LEA AK valve amplifier annd coffin speakkers. Mike Ho orseman, the D DJ, relied on hand–eye h coordinationn to cue up thee tracks witho out the benefitt of headphon nes. There was no mixiing or scratchiing (at least no o intentional sscratching). We W played a combinatioon of classic rock, early gllam, funk, souul, ska, rockstteady and heavy-dub rreggae bringiing together a mixed croowd that mattched the eclecticism oof the play lisst.

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DJ, Mike M Horseman ((photo: Bernard d G. Mills)

This was inn the era of Poolicing the Crrisis and the “suss” laws, when the police operaated a policy of o de facto ap partheid after dark in Birm mingham’s city centre. At the Shoopp, where a staate of exceptiion had been declared, the Handsw worth massivee, hardcore drreads and ruddies from the northern end of the city stood walll to wall, hugg ger-mugger, w with second-g generation working-claass townies annd proto-punk k, gender-bennding glam an nd glitter rockers from m the nearby art a school. Under pressure ffrom the locall CID, the Irish landlord insisted thhat we play “no “ more thaan 10% black k music”. Turning a deaf ear, Horseeman dutifully y nodded andd went on play ying what he always pllayed.

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Shoop Sound d System, 1977 ((photo: Bernard d G. Mills)

But thanks tto the cool coollective vibe— —the tacit unnderstanding shared s by everybody inn the room thhat this space was w ours and had to be pro otected by the people w who owned it— —I don’t recaall one fight innside the Shoo op during the six yearrs I got to paarticipate in its operation (1972–8), deespite the differences in social/ethnnic backgroun nd, musical ppreferences and a tribal allegiance thhat so markedd the various constituencies c s that packed the place to breakingg point weekk after week. Handbags w would go miissing on occasion. Poound notes would move steeadily from ppalm to palm one way, while drugss of various kinds—mainly k y “sleepers”, weed and sp peed (referred to locaally as “Billy Whiz” W or “dodgy”)—wouldd travel in thee opposite direction. Tw wice the speaakers blew beccause someonne urinated on n the electrical outletss. And it’s truue, we had to shut down eaarly on the night of 21

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November 11974, when thhe basement bar b at the Tavvern in the Town T was blown up byy the IRA. Ass the smoke began b to curl in from the open o door downstairs, I remember Mike playing g David Bow wie’s “Diamon nd Dogs” over and ovver until the police p swarmeed in and cleaared the room. But, for the most paart, the Shoopp was about moving m to thee music, seein ng, being seen, makinng eye contactt, drinking and d sweating it oout on the dan nce floor, flirting, gettting connecteed or, to usee the current piscatorial metaphor, m hooking up.

Shoop Soundd System, Golden Eagle, 1976 ((photo: Bernard d G. Mills)

went on in thhe later 70s and a 80s to prromote bandss like the Horseman w Clash, the E English Beat and the Speciaals when they first formed as a Special AKA, togethher with locall Birmingham m-based reggaae band, Steel Pulse, at clubs like B Barbarella’s, thhe Holy City Zoo and the R Rum Runner, the postpunk New R Romantic millieu whose mo ore extravagaantly exhibitio onist denizens were dressed, or raather costumeed, by local, D Digbeth-based d fashion designers (Jane) Kahn and (Patti) Bell. Examples off Kahn and Beell’s work are now partt of the permaanent collectio on at the Victooria & Albert Museum, though whenn I wrote the following f retrrospective porrtrait in 1988 they t were still a strictlyy second-city outré, underg ground phenom menon: Kahn annd Bell had particular p (visu ual) impact. H Holding court at the i leopard skin n and padded shoulders, drripping Zanzibar,, resplendent in

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Afterword diamanté with leather devils’ tails hanging down between their legs, they looked on good nights like Egyptian Queens, like Ancient Babylonians. On not so good nights, they resembled Brassai’s “Moma Bijou”—“fugitives from Baudelaire’s bad dreams”—and even then they looked magnificent. For Kahn and Bell and those who followed their lead, identity wasn't something you nailed yourself into in late adolescence. It was a trick of the light, and if you were to avoid burning yourself out (a real risk this, when you sold clothes all day and promoted them all night), then you simply let the flames lick over you and turned the ashes into kohl (Hebdige 1989, 82).

What I’m seeking to establish in this long anecdotal aside is the circumscribed nature of this subcultural milieu—the scene was small and very local. It was heterogeneous but intimate, both exotic and provincial, intensely grounded and territorially based. It was visually flamboyant but underground; the transmitting media—the looks, sounds and posters lowtech, DIY and rough-hewn. It was image-conscious, even image-obsessed, but these were the days when Polaroid and hulking reel-to-reel Sony video Portapaks counted as cutting-edge recording technologies, and digital downloads weren’t even on the horizon. The milieu was, in a word, the very opposite of corporate. Any branding that took place was more like horse or cattle branding: the herd’s common identity was marked viscerally—hot metal applied direct to naked hide. One of the arguments I made in Subculture, the book that came out of all of this in 1979, was about the co-optation and domestication of otherness. Subcultures, I argued, may start out nano-scale, marginal, in opposition to the projected “mainstream”, but they get extruded, processed and reframed by the market and the media. That is how they travel, get disseminated, rendered comprehensible and, at the same time, neutralized: absorbed into the vernacular of “common culture”. But what I can say now, thirty-some years on, is that what I could not foresee when I was writing Subculture was the spectral durability, the abiding legacy and afterlife of punk. Like the cockroach, punk is a pre-eminent survivor. What I hadn’t anticipated was the stabilization to permanence of punk not just as fashion statement (or as anti-fashion statement), as cliché Halloween costume kit (now merged with Zombie Goth), as (minimally) marketable music genre, casual leisure option and secessionist lifestyle choice, but as indelible graphic inscription. To take a mundane example, consider the logo for the UK branch of the international French Connection fashion and accessories chain—FCUK. When it made its debut in 1997, the logo mimicked the letters made on an old manual typewriter, and thus served to link an otherwise unremarkable high-street fashion line visually, as well as semantically, to

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the terrorist ransom-note tradition in graphics pioneered in the UK by graphic designer Jamie Reid, with his cut-up letter designs for the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks and “God Save the Queen” record covers. But there it is still: FCUK on bottles, t-shirts, deodorant sticks and advertising hoardings, a head-turning anagram of a blunt, crude, AngloSaxon four-letter-word. A typically cheeky, Anglo-hip piece of advertising which, I’d argue, would have been unthinkable in the UK before punk, and before the late punk impresario Malcolm McLaren and his fellow Seditionary, Vivienne Westwood, Anglicized “punk”—another blunt, crude Anglo-Saxon four-letter word—at SEX, the boutique they ran on the King’s Road in Chelsea throughout the 1970s. “FCUK” would have been unthinkable as a corporate logo before McLaren and Westwood hijacked the word “punk” from the New York CBGB indie scene, and rearranged the letters to spell PNUK by adding rubber, speed and weed and stirring in English class antagonism, traditional English fetishism and S&M bondage, together with French Situationist aesthetics. FCUK, a rude joke makes sense graphically, rhetorically, culturally, gesturally, tonally only in the context of punk; in the context of what punk made possible, thinkable, doable, sayable more than three decades ago. If I were to try to catalogue other phenomena that might have stayed unthinkable without punk, my list would include reality TV shows like Jackass and The Only Way is Essex, along with indiscriminate public disclosure and what I call “pornetration”—the penetration of the public sphere by pornography via the Internet. Future historians investigating the histrionic character of early twentyfirst century global media culture are likely to be struck by the collision of the chronic boredom and epidemic wanderlust engendered by our entrenched commitment to commitment—to monogamy, the pair and the couple—jamming up against the absolute promiscuity of contact enabled by the Web: an endemic historical contradiction which accounts for what, if Internet economics add up in any way at all (a question yet to be definitively decided), amounts to nothing less than the universally ineluctable pull of porn. In fact I would argue that some of the most profound and contradictory transformations of twenty-first-century global culture effected by the digital revolution can be attributed to the sudden accessibility for the technologically literate masses, in formerly unimaginable variety and volume, of porn and its associated spin-offs (e.g. hook-up sex sites). A comprehensive list of such transformations would include, in turn, the reaction against porn and pornetration: the exponentially connected

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rise of reactive religious fundamentalisms and the documentation and circulation on an unprecedented scale (if we bracket images of Jesus-onthe-Cross) of sadistically eroticized humiliation rituals (e.g. reality TV shows, broadcast footage of bound and kneeling hostages videotaped by kidnapper jihadists and posted on the web, the US National Guard’s Abu Ghraib jpeg picture gallery, etc). When cosmopolitanism was fêted by utopian postmodernists in the 1980s as an emergent value in a borderless world, it seems unlikely that what they had in mind was this steady pornetration of the public sphere that so conspicuously marks postmillennial visual culture—from downloadable celebrity sex videos to the display, more or less ubiquitous throughout the western world, of lowerback tattoos and “I’m a Porn Star” t-shirt slogans. To track the putative transnational impact of 70s punk across the hyperwired media-sphere that has emerged in its wake since the advent of the Internet is clearly way beyond the range of either this essay or its author. Instead, what I aim to do in the second half of this paper is to hypostasize some of the contradictory vectors immanent within punk’s legacy by comparing the appropriation and secessionist strategies associated respectively with (a) contemporary Japanese otaku (as framed within the work of Takashi Murakami); and (b) the scavenge and survival cultures of the Californian Mojave desert.

Otaku, Superflat and Sado-Cute: Monsters vs. Humans. “o·ta·ku ǀ‫ޖ‬täkoଲ o/ n. 1. (in Japan) a young person who is obsessed with computers or particular aspects of popular culture to the detriment of their social skills. (otaku—literally translated = ‘your house’, alluding to the reluctance of such young people to leave the home.)” (Web Dictionary) “It has become clear now, in light of the current global situation, that the notion of ‘human’ that informs high art and nationalism was invented in modern times to conceal the fact that humans themselves are a kind of ‘monster’ or ‘cyborg’ … Art is, at its root, made by these ‘demons’ and is at odds with the everyday life we live. In this sense, art is fundamentally antagonistic to humanity. I believe that the time has come to return art to the hands of the monsters, who were here before humans.” (Murakami 2005, 161)

For readers unfamiliar with the name, Takashi Murakami is a hugely successful Japanese “Business Art” star famous for his prolific series of hyperstylized, sinister but decorative acrylics and prints, his glossy installation work and mega-sexual cartoon figurative sculptures that

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appear in exhibitions cavorting on their pedestals like combination fashion model-porn stars. Murakami’s work is widely reproduced in magazines and on the Web and is available for view in three dimensions at blue-chip galleries and major metropolitan museums around the world, though he is equally renowned for his ubiquitous product lines—his mass-produced, collectible shokugan (food toy) figurines given away with processed food snacks, and for his high-end fashion accessories, including the bestselling Panda bag designed for Louis Vuitton in 2003 which was estimated, just three years later, to have topped $300 million in worldwide sales. Murakami is an influential interpreter-promoter of the anime- and mangamediated Japanese digital imaginary and the introverted otaku taste formation associated with it that, together, have helped fix the distinctive look and feel of the contemporary youth-and-fashion fixated mediascape and the emergent “structure(s) of feeling” articulated through it. The international spread of the Japanese digital dreamscape and its attendant dispositions and affects point up the different conditions under which youth subcultural fashion memes circulate now, as opposed to thirty years ago, in the electronically wireless but politically wired neoliberal exchange environment we’re all operating in today. That environment is, to use a term coined by Murakami himself, “superflat” in such a way that the distinctions which effectively gave a movement like punk its momentum and its (melo)drama—the distinctions, for instance, between sacred and profane, the serious and the trivial, between the moment’s invention/ circulation/distribution, between art and design, art and fashion, art and commerce, between figure and ground—have been virtually obliterated. The post-millennium blockbuster series of exhibitions of Japanese contemporary art and media culture that Murakami curated—beginning with Superflat in 2000, Coloriage (2002) and Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (2005)—succeeded, for a time in the period immediately preceding the 2008 credit-default crash, in shifting the centre of gravity in fashion-art circles away from the Euro-US dominated art world towards a sarcastically presented hyper-Americanized Tokyo. In his sarcastic reprise of American mythologies of freedom, in his mimicking of corporate monopoly and market-swamping tactics, Murakami tackles the cultural, economic and political hegemony of the West head on. But, far from being either obscure or academically elitist or unequivocally banal and low-culture asinine, Murakami’s work deliberately falls between such oppositions and sets out instead to have it both ways. The subliminally critical work it performs is, as it were, always candy-coated or, as I call it, “sado cute”—and, at the same time, it is wildly accessible, attractive and popular.

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If Murakami out-Warhols Warhol, he also out-Disneys Disney. One aspect of his work addresses Americanization and Americanization as infantilization. Murakami’s totalizing approach to branding and fashion accessorizing might be said simultaneously to mimic and subvert the Disney corporation’s super-aggressive business and brand-and-copyrightprotection strategies: to diss the hypercute Disney style. This act of reversal/sabotage is accomplished, in the first instance, through the auspices of a Murakami character-avatar called DOB, who more or less figures as Mickey Mouse’s Asiatic cousin. By dragging the instantly recognizable Mickey Mouse silhouette through a series of alternately ecstatic, carnivorous, expectorating, lobotomized, sublime, vulnerable and super-cute permutations, Murakami mangles the Disney corporation’s copyright-protected rodent DNA and the presumption of eternal innocence encoded at its core, waiving its immunity to foreign infection, exposing it to the disfiguring fallout from the Little Boy and Fat Man detonations that super-flattened parts of the Japanese archipelago and its civilian population in August 1945. DIS-GNOSIS 1. (neologism) combining dis- prefix, meaning opposite of, lack (when placed before a noun), and gnosis, of or pertaining to knowledge. Hence, dis-gnosis means the opposite of knowledge, positively lacking in knowledge or a commitment to a state of denial. See also disingenuousness, which refers to simulated candour, calculated frankness. Hence dis-gnosis can also be used to connote simulated innocence (Hebdige 2007, 32).6

Another aspect of Murakami’s work is invested in and complicit with the process of pornuscopic immersion and perversion associated with anime erotica and digital porn. It is the symbiosis between pornuscopic immersion (overexposure), sadistic voyeurism, emotional regression and simulated innocence that forms the crux of Murakami’s later work. His concern is to track—to analyse, accelerate, expose—the converging vectors of perversion and dis-gnosis as they play out across the meticulously crafted surfaces of otaku’s digital imaginary. In their immaculate narcissism, their ecstatic porno exhibitionism and vacuous super-cute facial expressions, Murakami’s anime-inspired sculptural figurines with names like Hiropon, Miss KO2 and Lonesome Cowboy epitomize one hormonally supercharged variant of the sado-cute, psychosexual habitus where Murakami’s Superflat formation feels most embodied and at home. Rooted in the hyperperverse but disarmingly cute-and-creepy iconography associated with Japanese anime, and the “freaky geeky” otaku subculture that grew up alongside it, the sado-cute matrix has been

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translated along with the software on which it is inscribed into an exportable passive-aggressive structure of feeling; the defining tactic of which is the tease: the simultaneously calculated stimulation and baffling of desire. Sado-cute is part of a larger techno-cultural formation that mobilizes ambivalence as weapon and as scalpel; creating in the process new pathologies and pandemics (spikes in both male and female eating disorders, breakdowns in boundary maintenance, stalking, botox- and plastic surgery-addictions), new bodies (supersized and obese; or hypergendered and worked out/worked on; or super-flattened and androgynous), a new vocabulary of ambivalence (e.g. “frenemies”, “bromance”, Facebook “frendz”, etc.). Linked structurally to long-term changes in the workplace—including the decline in the role and status of manual labour in the West, the mass entry from the late 60s of women into the full-time workforce and the rise of the female corporate executive—sado-cute signals the apotheosis of “girl power” and the emergence of what Laura Kipnis (2006, 31) has described as a new and more equitable “distribution of vulnerability” (i.e. femininity) across the sexes. In other words (some of) the boys are now the new girls. Prefiguratively identified thirty years ago in punk rock’s rhetoric of male abjection, the feminization of the male psyche is registered culturally in trends like the invention and floating of the “metrosexual” as a marketing category, and in accelerating spikes in the incidence of male eating disorders and cosmetic surgery. In Japan, the US-imposed constitutional ban on militarized masculinity after 1945, together with the collapse in the late 80s of the bubble economy and jobs-for-life salariman positions, has accentuated these patterns. The inversion of the traditional gender hierarchy is now so advanced there that, according to Japanese folklorist Eiji Otuka, kawaii (cute) shojo (adolescent girls) have displaced alternative figures (e.g. the farmer, the soldier or the corporate male office worker) as the representative surrogate for the jomin (the common people). If, as I posited in Subculture, resistance was the leading vector around which the youth subcultures of the late industrial and early post-industrial period were organized emotionally, rhetorically and stylistically (i.e. the masculinized teenage rebel cluster); then sado-cute may be part of a broader societal shift toward a less openly antagonistic, more ambivalent, accommodated disposition towards authority, commodification and selfobjectification: one that is more in keeping with the deferential norms of a corporate service economy. By stressing the exportability and viral impact of otaku, anime and manga—together with the passive-aggressive, sado cute emotional formations that underpin and drive them—Murakami puts

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his hyperstylized version of lower-case “japan” in inverted commas and presents it as a metonym for the decline of the West (a zone that, since the US occupation in 1945, includes, of course, Japan itself.). After twenty years of stagnation, Japan, once dubbed “the Asian economic miracle”, tends to be regarded today as dysfunctional and maladaptive; its faltering corporations overshadowed by the surging Chinese dragon, its ageing population afflicted by multiple pathologies, paralysed by a general ambient unease. Whereas Japan’s birthrate now ranks among the lowest in the world, it has the highest suicide rate among wealthy industrial nations. It is also home to an estimated one million hikikomori (literally “pulling away and retiring”) domestic-space dropouts, the majority of them young(ish) men who subsist, sometimes for decades at a stretch, barricaded in their bedrooms in the parental apartment, traumatized by academic failure or bullying at school or the prospect of abandoning the parental cocoon. In the catalogue essay on Murakami published in 2007 from which this section of my essay is, in part, extracted I wrote the following: Framed and animated by the twin delivery systems of the globalizing process—the flat screen and the Box, by digital technologies and the shipping container—the sign-manipulating citizen-consumers of the affluent debtor nations appear not so much “de-centered” as out-sourced: stoked in the short term on internet libido and cheap imported goods, yet aware at some level that the present set-up cannot last. Anxiously resigned to some impending planetary eclipse yet at the same time in denial, we sit with one ear open, hunched inside the babble of our cell phones and our iPods, waiting for the other shoe to drop (Hebdige 2007, 44).

In “Japan” this mounting sense of closure and foreboding is concentrated in the recurring image of the monstrous infant. Mutilated, menacing or deformed, diabolically cute or unnaturally “advanced”: sexualized or old or dead before its time, the depthless eyes of the sick or ruined child gaze and glower back at us from the pages of Katsuhiro Otomo’s sci-fi saga Akira, from the paintings and sculptural installations of Izumi Kato, Chiho Aoshima, Yoshitomo Nara and the rest. As a metonym for the end not just of an irradiated postwar lineage but of the myth-of-new-beginnings period, the inhuman gaze of the uncannily detached infant—like a cold reprise of Johnny Rotten’s mad “No Future” glare, only infinitely creepier—signals a deepening crisis in (social) reproduction in the West. It suggests not just the repeal of the parenting “instinct” (some Japanese towns now offer cash incentives for couples willing to have children) or a reluctance on the part of generations X and Y to “grow up” and follow their parents into rigidly gendered salariman-

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homemaker roles, insofar as those options still exist. It also suggests the lifting of the bar between fantasy and prohibition, the incursion into the Real of the eternally malleable, digitally generated model to such a degree that “the world of the living is no longer secure” from the shadows of the monstrous, the unformed and the deformed, the dead and disavowed that silently surround it, stand over and sustain it: A father complained about his 29-year-old hikikomori son, whose only communication over the past 5 years was through written notes left on the kitchen table with instructions such as “Get me a video game magazine” or “Do something about the dog that keeps barking” … Attacking a parent is among the most common forms of domestic violence in Japan (Zielenziger 2006, 48).

At a time when the return of the murdered child as angry or avenging ghost forms a persistent motif in contemporary Japanese horror films like Tomie: Rebirth (2001), Ju-On (2000) and Ju-Rei (2004), the parents of the reclusive hikikomori, the pathologically dysfunctional embodiment of otaku, subsist alongside their invisible offspring, haunted by the living ghosts, the poltergeists and demons they themselves have brought into the world. In November, 2004 a twenty-eight-year-old man who had been a hikikomori for eight years, admitted killing his parents and older sister with a hammer and a kitchen knife. He had committed this crime after his father, a city worker, had demanded that he find a job: “My father and my sister robbed me of my space to live in”, Masaru Iijima told the police. “I thought I’d kill them before they killed me” (Zielenziger 2006, 43).

Deserting Other Options: The Back to Square One Factor “In a landscape where nothing officially exists (otherwise it would not be ‘desert’), absolutely anything becomes thinkable, and may consequently happen …” (Banham 1989, 44). “More from less than zero” (UCIRA Desert Studies motto).

Murakami’s otaku-inspired cyborg-monster mash-up of the remnants of the Western-“modern” era represent one hyperbolic vector that could legitimately claim lineage with punk. However, I want to conclude these speculative remarks on punk’s legacy by turning to another tendency rooted in punk—one which, while no less reliant on the Internet and social-networking technologies, appears headed in directions diametrically

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opposed to either a passive-aggressive accommodation with globalized capital or compliance by default with the subjectivizing dictates of state and corporate power. After the collapse in 2008 on a global scale of the fiction of “securities”—financial, ontological or otherwise—punk’s tropology of crisis begins to look more cogent, more timely and prophetic (i.e. pre-figurative) than it did when it first appeared in the UK and the States at the height of the recession in the 70s. The “holy foolishness of punk” invoked at the beginning of this paper by Nadezhda Tolokinnova continues to inspire radical autonomist, secessionist and/or fringe and protest movements as spatially dispersed and as distinct in their agendas as Moscow’s Pussy Riot, elements within the anti-immigration European ultra-right, the US Tea Party, the international Occupy movement and libertarian factions within the popular insurgencies that have ripped across the Middle East since late 2010. The urge to dismantle traditional institutions, to break down power concentrates and start again from scratch is, at once, a binding and disaggregating factor. Today the “legitimation crisis” extends everywhere in all directions to implicate the very principle of government and the protocols of consent, coercion and control that underwrite the system’s— any system’s—operational viability. The chronological designation “Anthropocene”—an avowal of the overwhelming evidence for human geological agency—ratchets up the stakes exponentially. In the era of Monsanto, bioengineering and genetic patents, of melting ice caps and a repositioned jet stream, the very nature of Nature, and our relation to it, is changing. And, with it, not just the relations between culture, power and communications but the very art of the possible: the absolute horizon, conceivably, of what can or can’t conceivably be fixed. That readjusted focus is ultimately what lies behind the work I and many others are doing now in the American South West, and, specifically, the work we’re involved in at the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) in and through the Desert Studies Project— an interdisciplinary, arts-centred research initiative focused on the Mojave and Sonoran deserts where the Desert (capital “D”—understood as “empty, barren place”), when approached bi-focally in tandem with the actually existing lower-case, populated deserts we study and immerse ourselves in, can serve as a conceptual and practical boot camp (or reboot camp) giving us the Back to Square One add-on value that enables us to review and revise fundamental principles and modes of operation. It is our contention that widespread public concern with issues as apparently diverse and unconnected as global population growth, suburban sprawl and climate change, natural-resource management, aquifer depletion,

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wildlife-habitat protection and escalating political tensions and border conflicts in regions as disjunct as the American South West and the Middle East, have pushed the desert from the margins to the forefront of attention in debates on the future of the planet. We also strongly believe that artists need to figure proactively in the debates currently being joined around these issues and that the reputation artists have for approaching entrenched problems from new and untried angles may be fruitfully tested in the context of collaborative research on the desert, not just as a physical biome, but as an imagined and imaginary space—as a loaded site of conflicting and contradictory human projections. It seems natural, for example, at least for Westerners (and not just people in the American West) to think of the Desert both as Origin (birth place of cuneiform writing and the major monotheistic religions) and Ending (Armageddon). The spirit in which this experimental project of revision and review has been conceived and undertaken owes a lot to 70s punk. The spatial and temporal distances that separate a room above a pub in Birmingham and the Palms Bar & Restaurant in Wonder Valley (the remote location epicentre and partnering HQ for the Desert Studies project) more than thirty years later may appear at first glance insurmountable; but, on closer inspection, the distances aren’t so great at all. On the face of it, it would be hard to imagine an environment more remote from the Californian high desert—topographically, demographically, climactically—than the lateindustrial English West Midlands, where Subculture was largely put together. Birmingham, for instance, with an average annual rainfall of 26.4 inches has a population density of 9,451 per sq mile; while the equivalent statistics for Wonder Valley are 4.06 and 5.7.7 Yet the two environments share common characteristics. While they get routinely positioned outside and against the metropolitan imaginary, they are both physically located on the edges of major metropolitan hubs. Wonder Valley, for all its apparent isolation, is less than 150 miles from LA’s downtown and can be reached with relative ease via the uninterrupted arterial sprawl of Interstate 10 and Hwy 62; while Birmingham, alternately dubbed Britain’s “second city” and its one-time “Motown”—the Anglo version of Detroit, centre, until the late 1970s, of the UK’s car industry—is only 118 miles north of London (driving time: two hours). As regional hinterlands, the Mojave and the West Midlands are, in effect, the literally overlooked outer-rim components of transnationally networked metropolitan ecologies. They remain separate from, yet connected to, the cosmopolitan world cities against which they get defined as marginal, provincial spaces (for instance, many artists who exhibit regularly in LA and/or New York have first or second homes in the desert). Classified as either pre- or post-historical, as

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“rural boondocks”, or “post-industrial rust belt” they are, at the same time, accorded compensatory status as weekend getaway destinations for intrepid metropolitans. In a rehabilitative spirit, Birmingham’s hollowed-out city centre and network of canals have, in recent years, been made-over and repackaged, Richard Florida-style, as a business, retail and leisure hub complete with green space, a “historic core” and al fresco towpath dining; while the Palms Bar & Restaurant, way out on the Amboy Road in Wonder Valley, serves as a gathering point and performance and exhibition centre in the Hi-Desert Test Site series that, every two years, succeeds in drawing contemporary-art aficionados from as far afield as New York, Europe and the Pacific Rim. To further complicate any facile opposition between pristine desert and polluted urban wasteland, the 925-square mile Twentynine Palms Marine base, immediately north of Wonder Valley, serves as a test site for military ordnance and as a rehearsal stage for wars in other deserts, while the few native tribes in the region without casinos subsist as economy expedients by resorting to toxic e-garbage disposal, tyre burning and unregulated shantytown trailer-park housing developments for undocumented agricultural labourers from across the border (e.g. Duraville on the Torres-Martinez reservation next to the Salton sea in the Imperial Valley). Meanwhile, the nitrogen-heavy carbon emissions from “down below” (e.g. via the I-10 from East LA to the Coachella Valley) that periodically affect high-desert air quality and general visibility, especially in the summer, serve as fertilizer for the nonnative grasses that provide the articulating tinder which can turn an isolated dry lightning strike into a major conflagration, as in the Sawtooth Complex Fire, which burned 62,000 acres around Pioneertown and Yucca valley in July 2006. So there are structural parallels in the way both projects—Desert Studies and Subculture—set out to question the standard geometry of centre-margin relationships by inverting the terms—making the subordinate term in the dyad—youth subculture/dominant culture, desert/ metropolis—central, while highlighting points of tension and commonality in the tangled symbiosis that binds each dyad together. Both projects take the crisis trope literally—in Subculture, 70s punk is presented as a histrionic acting out of the UK-in-decline (the decline of Britain as a world power, the end of consensus politics, economic recession, “no future” etc.), while the Desert/desert is presented as the “empty” stage and screen on which intimations of spiritual and environ-mental crisis, the law of unintended consequences and the catastrophic fallout from the prevailing modes of human habitation are visibly and palpably played out, and thus

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become available for systematic monitoring and analysis. The desert is where both the buck and the bucks stop in terms of the vision of human perfectibility and progress, and the ideology of unlimited growth, consumption and consumerism that underpins and drives it. In a way, the two projects—Subculture and Desert Studies—representing, as they do, an accommodation with a sense of end-game crisis as the coming human universal, form a kind of circle. The recycling bricolage economy of 70s punk is standard mainstream practice in the high desert where there’s very little industry beyond the military and mining, hence very little money, and where regularized forms of barter and the swapmeet model of exchange figure as the norm, in tandem with big-box stores like WalMart and strip-mall chains like Food-4-Less. The cost of bringing spare parts up from Palm Springs “down below” is, in general, so prohibitive that mechanics—like their counterparts in countries such as Cuba, forced to adapt to long-term trade embargos—become expert at patching and repurposing; extending the life of manufactured goods way beyond their built-in-obsolescence retirement dates. At the same time, the ongoing war of attrition between opposing tribes in residence (e.g. recreational-vehicle users and peace-and-quiet conservationists) can take on a Mad Max aspect in a place like Wonder Valley and sometimes approach a pitch of raw intensity reminiscent of the lifestyle aspirational spats fought out between British mods and rockers or skinheads and hippies in the 1960s.8 And it’s worth remembering—particularly at a time when punk style is being recuperated as pure fashion history in big-splash exhibitions in museums in London and New York9— that the “desert rat” as combination hoarder/scavenger/“human vermin” is not just terminologically kissing cousin to the “punk”. Punk was never just about repurposing utilitarian designs as some kind of purely decorative arts project: making safety pins and garbage bags into shock-and-awe fashion statements. It was also always about the politics of consumption and consumerism. Seventies punk, as a prophetic End Time discourse, always involved an ethically-based critique of, and resistance to, late capitalist spend-and-burn disposability and waste. It staked its claim in the dirty unwanted and unwashed remainder of hippy Utopianism—in everything the organic movement defined itself against—in mass-production plastic, toxic gunk and industrial detritus; and, just as I’m forced to confront what my own contribution to overconsumption looks like when I haul my garbage to the landfill in Joshua Tree, so punk practice made it impossible to forget that the ground we’re all standing on is always, ultimately, made out of dirt. As the deserts of the US South West continue to draw and bind together in their isolation, and their interlocking cliques,

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voluntary and involuntary marginaux of every stripe—welfare recipients, fixed-income retirees, Burners, boulderers, alienated military personnel, eco-warriors, tweakers, religious secessionists, off-roaders, artists, freelance programmers, data analysts and musicians—it becomes harder and harder to draw the line between utopianism, resistance, escapology and survivalism. Once they are seen as modalities of action rather than as objects, texts or styles, the punk vs. hippy/subculture vs. counterculture dichotomy—which I’ve come to think has always been more rhetorical than real—begins to blur and buckle.

Wonder Valley Noise Festival, the Palms Bar and Restaurant, August 2009 (photo: Nadine Fraczkowski)

We take our cue in our Desert Studies field trip “dry immersions” from the geographical or “spatial” turn within critical thinking.10 In our case, this means articulating the legacy of 60s and 70s Land Art to the digitalscape opened up by tools like GPS and Google Earth, while revising the political-critical agenda, intervention strategies and the scale of operations in accordance with a more contemporary, collaborative and politically and environmentally savvy ethos and practice. That means substituting tactical media interventions, site visits, “roaming workshops”, walking pieces (after the likes of Hamish Fulton and Francis Alyss) and temporary installations that rest lightly on the landscape for grandiose big-footprint

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works like Double Negative, Michael Heizer’s monumental excavation completed in 1969 in Nevada’s Moapa Valley, or Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty at Rozell Point in Utah completed one year later. On an altogether more gargantuan scale than our piecemeal “dry immersions”, the insistence (and communal enforcement) of the “leave no trace” rule at the Burning Man Festival—the temporary (annual) installation “city” built directly on the desert playa at Black Rock, Nevada—indicates just how far the libertarian spirit of “Woodstock ’69” (where waste disposal appeared to be an afterthought) has been modulated and proscribed by legally mandated environmental concerns. The safety procedures implemented round the ritual Burning of the Man which forms the spiritual/spectacular core of the festival, the ban on fireworks, and the stipulated use of burn pads to protect the desert floor for anyone wishing to incinerate their art work at the weeklong event, together represent an enlightened update/advance on the treat-the-desert-as-a-dustbin approach. So, clearly we are not alone in conducting a salvage-and-review of 60s and 70s radical experimental practice. Burning Man itself is a testament to the power, popularity and resilience of communitarian and New Age forms of thinking and lifestyle politics that were first debuted on a mass scale, more often than not, in the state of California during the 1960s. Today there is a renewed interest in mid-twentieth-century counterculture (particularly Californian counterculture) across the arts, humanities and social sciences; though it’s especially marked in the contemporary-art world in, for instance, the growing body of work in Europe and Asia as well as the States that sets out, in a recuperative spirit, to engage with the “Whole Earth Catalog” archive, and with thinkers like Gregory Bateson, Stewart Brand and Buckminster Fuller.11 It’s conceivable that the conditions of hyperconnectivity under which information circulates in the digital era (a revolution that Brand himself helped inaugurate12) have made the kind of horizontally-oriented, eye-(I)-centred holistic and systemic thinking associated with what (for want of a better word) we still call “hippy” not so much an “alternative” as a mainstream epistemology in the twenty-first century (though I’d also suggest that the appeal of the 60s and 70s counterculture for “free radicals” today resides in the way it countered not just the fundamental tenets of the control culture against which it defined itself—the work ethic, private property, the nuclear family etc.— but the very idea of culture per se as unconscious coercion to the norm. As is often noted, this latter expansion of the field of the political implies a repudiation of gregariousness—including the compulsory gregariousness of the Internet—traceable within American letters to the tradition of

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secession, civil disobedience and nature writing begun by Henry David Thoreau13). That said, we strive to make the experience of the desert socially as well as environmentally immersive—to challenge the idealized view of the Desert/desert as empty space and tabula rasa, as a pure uncluttered landscape conveniently suitable for guerrilla-art installations, or as a preferably people-free, biomic litmus test. In practical terms this involves hanging out at the Palms; interacting with, listening to and learning from the Wonder Valley residents who live along the very edges of habitable space, who, like the hardscrabble regulars who patronized the Shoop back in the day—make something vital, i.e. a culture out of next to nothing, a culture in which the conditions of extreme precarity, to which more and more people on the planet are now exposed, is nothing new—is how things simply are.

Notes 1. Closing statement given 8 August 2012 by 22-year-old Nadezhda Tolokinnova, at her trial together with fellow Pussy Riot members, Maria Alekhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, on charges of blasphemy and hooliganism for a performance of an anti-Putin “punk prayer” at the Christ the Saviour Cathedral on 21 February 2012. 2. The present essay mimics DJ/mash-up/sampling practices common in contemporary music production, and, in addition to specifically footnoted references, incorporates passages from the following published or aboutto-be-published texts by the author: Hebdige, 2001; 2007; 2008; 2012a; 2012b; 2014 (forthcoming). 3. Author interviewed in Land of 1000 Dances: A Short History of Club Culture (dir. Rotraut Pape broadcast on French/German ARTE TV channel, October 1999). 4. Author interviewed in Land of 1000 Dances op. cit. 1999. 5. Like the French Connection UK logo, the title of Gregor Muir’s book on the rise of Hirst and his “Cool Britannia” YBA contemporaries, Lucky Kunst: The Story of Young British Art (Muir 2009) is a quintessentially UK piece of post-punk branding: a mnemonic cunning stunt. 6. See also Hebdige 2005, 42–3. 7. For population density and rainfall for Wonder Valley, see http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Wonder-Valley-TwentyninePalms-CA.html (accessed 25 October 2013); for Birmingham see “Population in Birmingham”,

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http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename= Planning-and-Regeneration%2FPageLayout&cid=1223096353755&page name=BCC%2FCommon%2FWrapper%2FWrapper (accessed 25 October 2013). 8. Tensions between off-road vehicle users and their conservation-minded opponents in the Wonder Valley area have escalated to the point of open hostility; see “Two ways of life collide in wonder valley” http://the guzzler.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/two-ways-of-life-collide-in-wonder.html (accessed 25 October 2013). 9. See, for instance, “Punk: Chaos to Couture Exhibition Metropolitan Museum of Art”, New York 9 May–13 Aug. 2013 and catalogue (Bolton 2013). 10. See, for instance, Coolidge and Simons 2006; Thompson 2009; Bhagat and Mogel 2008. For new land art, see http://www.landartnm.org/abqmuseum.html (accessed 25 October 2013). 11. See e.g. Diederichsen and Franke 2013; and the exhibition “The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside”, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 2013 and conference “California- From EcoPsychedelia to Internet Neo-Liberalism”, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2013. For programme, see http://hkw.de/en/programm/2013/the_ whole_earth/veranstaltungen_83124/veranstaltungsdetail_87732.php (accessed 25 October 2013). See also Beck 2012; Beck 2013. 12. Polymath, cyber theorist and former Merry Prankster, Brand, as most readers will no doubt know, campaigned successfully to secure the release of NASA’s “Blue Marble” photograph of planet earth in 1967, before going on one year later to edit the Whole Earth Catalog and to collaborate with electrical engineer, Douglas Engelbart on “The Mother of all Demos”, a presentation which introduced key technological innovations including the computer mouse, teleconferencing, hypertext, dynamic file linking and collaborative real-time editing at the Fall Joint Computer Conference at Brooks Hall in San Francisco in 1968. 13. For more on Thoreau, Theodor Kaczyinski, secret sharing and countering culture, see e.g. Ault 2012.

References Ault, Julie. ed. 2012. Two Cabins by JB. New York: A.R.T Press. Banham, Reyner. 1982. Scenes in American Deserta. London: Thames and Hudson. Beck, Martin, ed. 2012. The Aspen Complex. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

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Beck, Martin. 2013. “This time we’ll keep it a secret. What is the alternative to established America? A documentary study of certain living arrangements”. Triple Canopy, 18. http://canopycanopycanopy. com/18/this_time_we_ll_keep_it_a_secret. Accessed 25 October 2013. Bhagat, Alexis and Lize Mogel, eds. 2008. An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press. Bolton, Andrew, ed. 2013. Punk: Chaos to Couture. New Haven, CT: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press. Coolidge, Matt and Sarah Simons, eds. 2006. Overlook: Exploring the External Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation. New York: Thames and Hudson. Diederichsen, Diedrich and Anselm Franke, eds. 2012. The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Grossberg, Lawrence. 1997. Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hebdige, Dick. 1988. [1982]. “Hiding in the Light: Youth surveillance and display.” In Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things, 17–36. London and New York: Routledge. —. 1989. “Dressing and Dreaming: Surrealism and Fashion”. In Deyan Sudjic, From Matt-Black to Memphis and Back Again, 81–2. London: Architecture: Design and Technology Press. —. 2001. “Even unto Death. Improvisation, Edging and Enframement”, Critical Inquiry, 27(2): 333–53. —. 2005. “Dis-gnosis: Disney and the Re-tooling of Art, Culture, Life etc.”. In Re-Thinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions, edited by Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch, 37–52. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. —. 2007. “Flat Boy vs. Skinny: Takashi Murakami and the Battle for ‘Japan’”. In Murakami, edited by Paul Schimmel, 14–51. New York: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art/Rizzoli. —. 2008. “Un-imagining Utopia”. In Sound Unbound: Sampling Music and Digital Culture, edited by Paul D. Miller, 83–90. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. —. 2012a. “Contemporizing ‘Subculture’: 30 Years to Life”, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(3): 399–424. —. 2012b. “The Desert Studies Project: More from Less than Zero”, Arid: A Journal of Desert Art and Ecology, 1. Accessed 25 October 2013. http://aridjournal.com/desert-studies-hebdige/

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—. 2014 (forthcoming). “On Crisis”, Resilience: A Journal of Environmental Humanities, 1. Accessed 25 October 2013. http://www. resiliencejournal.org/ Kipnis, Laura. 2007. The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability. London: Serpent’s Tail. Muir, Gregor. 2009. Lucky Kunst: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art. London: Aurum Press. Murakami, Takashi. 2005. “Superflat Trilogy: Greetings You are Alive”. In Little Boy: The Art of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, edited by Takashi Murakami, 151–61. Exhibition Catalogue. New York: Japan Society and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thompson, Nato and Independent Curators International. 2009. Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism. New York: Melville House. Zielenziger, Michael. 2006. Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created its Own Lost Generation. New York: Nan A Talese/Doubleday.

INDEX

1968 (year of “global rebellion”) 219–32 1in12 Club (Bradford) 157, 169, 170 4-Skins 187 A Clockwork Orange (Burgess) 75, 175 Abbott, Oliver 74, 80 Abrams, Mark 5 Absolute Beginners (MacInnes) 175, 177, 188 acid-house scene 13 Adolescent Society, The (Coleman) 4 Adorno, Theodor 226 Adrenaline OD 163 Agit 883 229, 230 Aguilera, Cristina 128 Aitkin, Laurel 187–8 Akira (Otomo) 281 Alamar hip-hop festival 252 Albarn, Damon 71 Ali, Monica 176 Allen, Richard (James Moffatt) 175, 185, 188 Althusser, Louis 9 Alvarez, Luis 30 Alyss, Francis 287 America’s Got Talent 124 Amis, Martin 175 Anderson, Elijah 239, 246 Andes, Linda 158–9 Antisect 163 Aoshima, Chiba 281 Arab Spring xv Arnett, Jeffrey 30–1 Attridge, Derek 177 Attwood, Feona 123

Austin, Joe 5 Back, Les 28, 207 Bailey, Peter 105–6 Baker, Andrea J. 94–5 Baker, Sarah 13 Bakhtin, Mikhail 141 Banks, Iain 175 Barbarella’s (Birmingham club) 274 Barthes, Roland 49, 52, 199–200 Bassett, Caroline 92 Bateson, Gregory 288 Bazin, Hugues 59 Beasley-Murray, Jon 254 Beat Club (TV programme) 221 Beatles, the 146, 221 beatniks 224 beats 11 Beck, Ulrich 20 Becker, Howard 3, 6 bedroom culture 13–14 Bell, Patti 274–5 Bennett, Andy 12, 21, 22, 23, 25, 31–2, 91, 95–6, 97, 197 Berry, Chuck 199 bhangra 28, 182 Biermann, Wolf 228 Bikini Kill 1 Bild Zeitung 224 Billy Liar (Waterhouse) 175 Birmingham School see Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy) 50 Black Metal (Venom) 162 Black Tie, White Noise (Bowie) 149 Blackman, Shane 23 Blaize, Immodesty 133 Blincoe, Nicholas 175

296 Blue Note (club) 209 Blur 71 Bolan, Marc 144 Bolton (“Worktown”) 106–16 Bombshell Betty 129 Booker T. and the MGs 195, 196, 200 border thinking 253 Bouazizi, Mohammed xvi Boucher, Manuel 59 Bourdieu, Pierre 16–17, 32, 53, 56– 8, 59, 65–6, 67–8, 69, 70, 71, 73–4, 80, 156, 181–2 Bowie, David 144, 146, 149, 274 Bowman, Rob 195 boy racers (Scottish) 14 Bradley-Eagen, Mindy 126–7 Brah, Avtar 27 Brand, Stewart 288 Brando, Marlon 221 Bratmobile 1 Bravo, Bunny 124–5, 127, 129 Breivik, Anders 147 Breton, André 49 Brick Lane (Ali) 176 bricolage 11–12, 33, 155, 253, 286; Morrissey as bricoleur 139–52 Brighton Rock (Greene) 145 Brixton Rock (Wheatle) 176, 188 British Blondes 122 Broad, Tim 139 Brontë, Charlotte 179 Brötzmann, Peter 227 Brown, James 200, 204 Buddha of Suburbia (Kureishi) 175 Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) 146 Burlesque (2010) 122, 128–9 Burlesque Daily (blog) 128 Burlesque Handbook, The (Weldon) 128, 133 Burgess, Anthony 175 Burke, Solomon 202 Burning Man festival 287–8 Bushell, Garry 170 Business, the 186, 187 Butler, Judith 15, 181

Index Buzzcocks 165 Bynner, John 31 Cab 227 Cameron, Keith 140 Canterbury Sound 21 Capital (Marx) 231 Capote, Truman 143 Carey, John 70 Carter Family, the 141 Cash, Johnny 121 Castro, Fidel 252, 257, 260–1 CBGB (New York club) 276 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 8–17, 49, 51, 52–3, 56–7, 66–8, 69, 73, 90–1, 94, 155–6, 170, 176, 177, 179– 80, 183, 188–9, 220, 251–5, 259–62, 268 Chalkey, Dean 74, 77 Chaney, David 91 Charlie Bubbles (1967) 143 Cher 128 Chicago School 3, 55, 176, 179–80 Chron Gen 164 Chronic Generation (Chron Gen) 164 Chumbawamba 169 civil-rights movement (1960s) 201, 207, 209, 210–11 Clarke, Gary 13, 17 Clarke, John 15 Clash, the 274 class and suburban youth 65–81 Clecak, Paul 12, 93 Code of the Street (Anderson) 239 Coe, Jonathan 175 Cohen, Albert 3, 6, 7–8, 236 Cohen, Phil 9–10, 66 Cohen, Stanley 7, 12, 15, 29, 50 Cohn, Nik 175 Coloriage (Murakami exhibition) 278 Collector, The (1965) 143 Collins, Randall 236, 238 Colombianos 2

Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change Commitments, The (Doyle) 204 Common Culture (Willis) 17 Complete Picture, The (Smiths) 140 concert-going 165, 169 Conflict 162 Conley, Arthur 195 Cooke, Sam 201 Cookies, the 141–2 Coronation Street 149–50 Covay, Don 199 Coward, Noel 111 Crass 169 Cropper, Steve 210 Crucifix 163 Cuban Rap Agency (CRA) 252 Cuban underground rap 251–62 Cubanía 255–8 Cunningham, Chris 77 Cupcakes, Clara 125 D’Lish, Catherine 133–4 dada and surrealism 144, 221 Dagnasty 163 Daily Mail 187 Damned, the 161, 165 dance-music scene 14, 19, 22 Darling, Candy 143 David Copperfield (Dickens) 179 Davis, Mike 246 de Certeau, Michel 53–4 de la Fuente, Alejandro 255–6 de Nora, Tia 113 Dead Boys, the 165 Dead Kennedys, the 166, 168 Deagan, Nicole 132, 134 Dean, James 143, 146 Defiance of Power (Ripcord) 169 Degenhardt, Franz Joseph 227 Deleuze, Gilles 178–9 desert studies 282–9 desis 180, 182 Diawara, Manthia 200 Dickens, Charles 179 Dirty Martini 133 Dis-Orienting Rhythms (anthology) 28–9

297

Disc 203 Discharge 163 Disney 278–9 Disraeli, Benjamin 179 DMX 183 Dollar, Millie 133 Douglas, Mary 110 Down Beat (magazine) 205 Doyle, Roddy 204 Driscoll, Julie 227 Driver, Susan 15 drum‘n’bass 28 Dubet, François 54–6, 58, 59 Duggan, Mark 268 Duke and Leonard 211 Dutschke, Rudi 223, 224, 226, 228 Düüt, Amon 227 dykecore 15 Dyhouse, Carol 30 Dylan, Bob 201 Dyson, Michael 26 East of Acre Lane (Wheatle) 176 Eisenstadt, S. N. 4 El B (rapper) 257 English Beat, the 274 Erikson, Erik 4 Essen Song Days (festival) 226–7 Ethiopians, the 186 Exploited 170 F Word, The (radio programme) 132, 134 Factory Records 210 Fass, Paula 30 Fatale, Fifi 133 Fear 170 Featherstone, Mike 76 Fernandez, Damián J. 256, 257 Ferreday, Debra 121, 126, 133 Finnegan, Ruth 106, 112 Fizz 229 Flamingo, the (club) 208 Flesh (1968) 143 Floh de Cologne 228 Floyd, Eddie 196, 198

298 folk music 199 Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Cohen) 7–8 Foucault, Michel 15 Four Tops, the 198 Fowler, David 29 Fox, Kathryn J. 158–9 Frank, Thomas 30 Franklin, Aretha 201 Friemund, Wayne 92 Frith, Simon 17, 70, 111–12 Fugs, the 227, 228 Fuller, Buckminster 288 Fulton, Hamish 287 Furlong, Andy 31 Gammler 221–6 Garofalo, Reebee 262 Garber, Jenny 13, 67 Garratt, Sheryl 13 Gaskell, Elizabeth 179 Gekeler, Rolf 225 Gelder, Ken 123 Genet, Jean 49 Genette, Gérard 178 Gibson, Andrew 178 Gibson, Chris 92 Giddens, Anthony 19–20, 92 Gilbert, James 5 Gilroy, Paul 27–8, 50, 67 girl power xvii Girls Gone Wild 123 glam rockers 144 Goddard, Simon 148, 149 Godin, Dave 204 Good Die Young, The (1957) 146 Goodman, Benny 112 goths 22, 31, 93, 96, 242 Gramsci, Antonio 9, 10, 51, 90 Grand Funk Railroad 229 Great Ziegfield, The 111 Greener, Tracey 251 Griffin, Christine 23–4, 25 Griffiths, Niall 176 Griffiths, Peter 211 Gross, Alex 223

Index Grossberg, Larry 269 Guardian 148 Guattari, Félix 178–9 Guerilla: Theory and Method (Guevara) 231 Guevara, Che 231 Guralnick, Peter 195, 201 Guthrie, Woody 141 Gypsy Rose Lee 127 Hair 230 Halberstam, Judith 15, 31 Hall, G. Stanley 4 Hall, Stuart 8, 24, 50, 66, 251, 253, 254 Hall, Tony 203, 205 Hampel, Gunter 227 Happy Stripper, The (Willson) 123 hardcore 96, 160, 161–2, 163, 166– 7 Hash Rebels (“the Blues”) 222, 230 Hatherley, Owen 70 Healy, Dave 92 heavy metal 21, 96, 161–2, 163, 167 Hebdige, Dick 11–12, 34, 49–50, 52, 67, 144–5, 149, 150–1, 183, 201 Heizer, Michael 287 Hendrix, Jimi 229 Herman’s Hermits 211 Hesmondhalgh, David 110 Hesmondhalgh, Desmond 21, 23 Hesse, Barnor 247 Hill, Chris (DJ) 75 hip-hop 15, 26, 28, 220; in France 52, 58–61 Hippen, Reinhard 225 hippies 7, 8, 11 Hirst, Damien 271 Hit Parader 196 Hodkinson, Paul 22, 31–2, 93 Hoggart, Richard 5–6, 8 Hollands, Robert 251 Hollies, the 202 Holy City Zoo (Birmingham) 274

Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change Home, Stewart 176 homo-hop 15 homology 11–12, 155 Hooker, John Lee 199 Horn, Adrian 30 Horrors, the 65, 70, 73, 74, 76 Horseman, Mike (DJ) 272, 274 indie 94, 164 International Times 223 Isherwood, Christopher 76 It’s a Bombshell’s World (blog) 129 It’s Time to See Who’s Who (Conflict) 162 Jackass 276 Jackson, Chuck 204 Jagger, Mick 199 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 179 jazz 175, 225 Jefferson, Tony 15, 24, 251, 253, 254 Jenkins, Henry 18, 141, 145, 150 Jopling, Norman 203–4 Juggy D 180, 181 Ju-On (2000) 282 Ju-Rei (2004) 282 Junk Club (Southend-on-Sea) 32, 65, 66, 70, 73–81 K-Gruppen 229 Kafka, Franz 178 Kahn, Jane 274–5 Kahn, Richard 92 Kahn-Harris, Keith 21 Kaiser, Rolf Ulrich 226, 230 karaoke 112 Kato, Izumi 281 Kehily, Mary Jane 14 Kellner, Douglas 93 Kelly, Danny 146 Kerrang 161 Kinks, the 221 King, John 33, 175–80, 185–9 Kingsley, Charles 179 Kipnis, Laura 280

299

Kosel, Margret 221 Kristeva, Julia 49 Kureishi, Hanif 175 Kursbuch 224 L’amour, Michelle 124 L’Invention du quotidien (de Certeau) 54 La Distinction (Bourdieu) 56 La Galère (Dubet) 56, 59 La Misère du Monde (Bourdieu) 57, 59 La Production de l’espace (Lefebvre) 54 Laclau, Ernesto 186 Langhamer, Claire 105 Lapassade, George 59 Lash, Scott 254 LCD Soundsystem 77 Learning to Labour (Willis) 50, 56 Leblanc, Lauraine 14 LeBoff, Gary 148 Leicester Mercury 206 Lemke-Santangelo, Gretchen 14 Lefebvre, Henri 49, 54 Lettau, Reinhard 224 Level 4 (magazine) 72–3 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 11, 49, 52, 142, 143–4 Levy, Ariel 123 Lincoln, Siân 13 Lipsitz, George 204 Litt, Toby 175 Little Boy (Murakami exhibition) 278 Londonstani (Malkani) 33, 175–85, 187, 188 Long, Pat 146 Lord of the Flies (Golding) 181, 182 Lull, James 26 Lumsden, Karen 14 Luther King, Jr., Martin 200, 210 Luxe, DeeDee 129 Lydon, John 146

300 Macdonald, Dwight 4 Macdonald, Nancy 14 MacDonald, Robert 23, 24–5 MacInnes, Colin 175, 177, 178 Maceo, Antonio 257 Mad Max (1980) 286 Madness 144 Madonna 139 Maffesoli, Michel 21, 188 Maira, Sunaina 26, 29 Malbon, Ben 22 Malcolm X 206, 207, 208 Malkani, Guatam 33, 175–85, 187, 188 Manchester Institute of Popular Culture 19 Marcuse, Herbert 224, 226 Martha and the Vandellas 198 Marti, Jose 255 Martin, Gavin 144 Marx, Karl 69, 230 Mass Observation and interwar pubs 33, 105–16 May, Kirse 30 MC-5 229 McCartney, Paul 146 McGuigan, Jim 18 McKay, George 30 McLaren, Malcolm 271, 276 McLuhan, Marshall 227 McRobbie, Angela 13, 24, 50, 67 Medhurst, Andy 66 Mega-Metal Kerang 161 Melly, George 199 Melody Inn (record shop) 199 Melody Maker 148, 203 Metal Orizon 2 Mignolo, Walter D. 253 Miles, Steven 18–19, 20, 91, 95, 97 Milner, Ryan M. 94 Mimms, Garnet 202 Miss La-Vida 131 Mitchell, Gillian 199 mods 6–8, 10, 11, 16, 17, 72, 75, 90, 175, 187, 204, 207, 208, 211, 220

Index Mojo (magazine) 140 Monterey Pop Festival (1967) 196, 227 Morrissey (Brooks) 145 Morrissey, Steven 33, 139–52 morrissey-solo.com 146, 147, 148 Morton, Samantha 77 Moscow youth networks 33–4 Mothers of Invention, the 227, 228 Motown 198, 199, 202, 203, 204, 205 Mouffe, Chantal 186 Moulin Rouge! (2001) 122 Mozipedia (Goddard) 148 Mr Go (Berlin) 230 MTV Base 180, 181 Muggleton, David 19, 22, 91, 95, 97, 180 Murakami, Takashi 277–81 Murphy, Meghan 134 music hall 105, 106, 110, 112, 115 Mythologies (Barthes) 52 Nally, Claire 130 Napalm Death 163 Nara, Yoshitomo 281 Natalia, Madame 127 National Deviancy Conference (NDC) 6 National Front 206 Nationwide 161 Naughton, Bill 175 Nayak, Anoop 14, 69 Nelson, Ricky 196 neoburlesque scene 33, 121–34 Never Mind the Bollocks … (Sex Pistols) 164, 275 New Musical Express 144, 146, 203 New York Dolls, the 146 Newland, Courttia 176 Nirumand, Bahman 225 Nirvana 164 No U Turn 2 NOFX 163 Noisy Mothers 162 northern soul 31

Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change Nott, James 105, 111 Nussbaum, Martha 110 O’Connor, Paul 29 O’Shea, Ciaran 74–5 Obituary 163 Occupy movement xv, xvi, 283 Oi! scene 2, 186, 187, 188 Oliver Twist (Dickens) 179 On Beauty (Smith) 176 Only Way is Essex, The 71, 276 Otis Blue (Otis Redding) 201 otaku 277–82 Otomo, Katsuhiro 281 Otuku, Eiji 280 Overthrust 2 Pacini Hernandez, Deborah 262 Palms Bar & Restaurant (Wonder Valley) 284, 285 Panjabi Hit Squad 182, 183 Panjabi MC 182 Parsons, Talcott 4 Peel, John 161 Penetration 165 Pilkington, Hilary 27, 97 Pini, Maria 14 Pink Floyd, the 227 Pohl, Gunter 223 Policing the Crisis (Hall et al.) 273 Poole, Matthew 71–2 pornetration (Hebdige neologism) 276–7 Postsubcultures Reader 180 Potter, Russell 26 Practice of Everyday Life, The (de Certeau) 54 Preminger, Otto 146 Presley, Elvis 196 Prince 139 Proust, Marcel 226 provos (Dutch movement) 220 Pub and the People, The (Mass Observation) 107 pub music-making (interwar period) 33, 105–16

301

punk 14, 15, 17, 22, 31, 33, 75, 76, 96, 144, 145, 220, 242; entrance practices in UK 155– 71; its legacy 267–89 Punk Lives 170 Punk’s Not Dead 170 Pussy Cat Dolls 122 Pussy Riot 1–2, 267, 283 Queen, Lloyd 92 queercore 15 Questions of Cultural Identity (Hall) 50 Race Relations Act 1965 206 Radano, Ronald 198, 200 Radio Luxembourg 202–3 Ramirez, Catherine 30 Ramones, the 161 Rank (Smiths) 143 rap 25–6, 28, 182, 183; in Cuba 34, 251–62; in France 58–61 raunch culture 33, 123–34 rave 16, 72, 92, 269–70 Ravens, Mike 202 Ray, Johnnie 148 RDP 182 Rebel Riot 2 Record Mirror 203, 204, 205 Red Army Faction 230 Redding, Otis 195, 196, 201, 203, 210 Redhead, Steve 17, 19 Reed, Lou 80 Reid, Jamie 275 Reimer, Bo 20 Reisman, David 4 Release (hippy welfare group) xvi, xvii Resistance Through Rituals (CCCS) 10, 12, 24, 66–7 Ripcord 169 riot dykes 15 riot-grrrl movement 1–2, 14 rockers 6–8, 16, 90, 221 Robards, Brady 97

302 Rolling Stones, the 199, 221, 222, 226 Rogan, Johnny 147 Ronson, Mick 144, 149 Rose, George 146 Rose, Tricia 26 Rosko, Emperor 196 Rotten, Johnny 281 Rotters Club, The (Coe) 175 Rourke, Andy 140, 141 Ruffin, Jimmy 198 Rum Runner (Birmingham) 274 Sam and Dave 195, 196, 210, 211 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Sillitoe) 175 Saturday Night Live Show, The 161 Savage, Jon 30, 70 Scheuch, Fritz 227 Schroeder, Brian (“Pushead”) 162 Schroeder, Tom 225 Schwendter, Rolf 225 Searchers, the 202 Sex Pistols, the 161, 164, 271, 275 Shank, Barry 21 Shildrick, Tracy 23, 24–5 Shoop, the (Birmingham club) 271– 3, 289 Shteir, Rachel 132, 134 Sillitoe, Alan 175 situationists 276 Skeggs, Beverley 66, 67, 77 skateboarding 162, 165 skinheads 8, 10, 11, 22, 72, 90, 144, 145, 220 Skinheads (King) 33 Slade 186 Smith, Zadie 175, 176 Smiths, the 139–43, 147–9 Smiths Indeed (fanzine) 139 Smithson, Robert 287 Snapcase 165 Snowsell, Colin 147–8, 151 social media xvi Social Movement (school of thought) see Touraine School

Index Socialist German Student’s League (SDS) 220–1, 229 Society Within (Newland) 176 Soep, Elisabeth 26 Song 225, 226 soul music 195–211 Sounds 161, 170 Southend-on-Sea 71–3 Sparks 146 Spears, Britney 77 Special AKA 274 Specials, the 274 Spencer Davis Group 199 Spinoza, Baruch 254 Stamp, Terence 143 Stax/Volt Revue (1967) 33, 195– 211 Steel Pulse 275 Storey, John 197, 201–2 Straw, Will 20–1, 93 straightedge 93, 165, 167–8 Strangelove, Eva 125, 133 Stranglers, the 165 striptease and neoburlesque 121–34 Structural School 56 Stupids, the 163 subcultural theory: roots, history and development 3–32; limits 12–19; ethnographic turn 18; post-subcultural turn 19–25, 91–2, 156; notion of lifestyle 19–20, 32, 91–2, 225, 230–1; concept of scenes and neo-tribes 20–1, 79, 93, 97; the risk society 20; global flows and new ethnicities 25–9, 33; youthscapes 26; the Black Atlantic 27–8; teenagers and emergent adulthood 30–1; reception in France 32, 49–61; social class and subcultural practice 32; theorizing the Internet 89–98; “lads’ groups” in Russia 235–48; (post-) subcultural theory and Cuba 251–62

Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change subcultures: social significance 1– 2; queer subcultures 15, 31; cross-generational 29–32; impact of the Internet on youth culture 32, 89–98; representations in fiction 33, 175–89; entrance practices in UK punk culture 155–71; and political practice of W. German radicals 219–32 Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Hebdige) 11–12, 34, 49–50, 144–5, 275, 280, 284, 285–6 Subhumans 163 Suicidal Tendencies 163 Sullivan, Chris 76 Superflat (Murakami exhibition) 278 Supremes, the 198 Suttles, Gerald 235 Süverkrüp, Dieter 227 Tainted Love (Home) 176 Tamla-Motown Appreciation Society 204 Tandy, Sharon 196, 200 Tangerine Dream 227 tape trading 162, 163, 165, 169 Tate, Greg 68 Tavern in the Town (Birmingham pub) 273–4 Teddy boys 6, 8, 10, 11, 72, 90, 175, 220 Thames Delta (exhibition) 72 Theory of Subculture (Schwendter) 226 These New Puritans 74, 76, 77 Thoburn, Nicholas 254 Thomas, Carla 196 Thompson, John 26 Thompson, Lydia 122 Thoreau, Henry David 288 Thornton, Sarah 15, 67–8, 79, 130, 181–2 Thrasher (magazine) 162, 163 Thrasher, Frederic 3

303

Thunders, Johnny 146 Till Death Us Do Part 206 Tolokinnova, Nadezhda 267, 283 Tomie (2001) 282 Ton Steine Scherben 229–30 Top of the Pops 146, 148 Torchy Taboo 128 Touraine School 54, 56, 58 Turner, Victor Witter 241 Twisted Wheel (nightclub) 199, 210 van Gogh, Vincent 226 vegetarianism 169 Venom 162 Visconti, Tony 149 von Teese, Dita 122, 127–8, 129– 30, 131–2, 133, 134 Vulbeau, Alain 59 Walden, George 78 Walden, Phil 196, 201 Walter, Natasha 123 Walters, Jake 146 Warhol, Andy 278 Warner, Alan 175 Waterhouse, Keith 175 Waugh, Evelyn 76 Webb, Rhys 74, 76 Weinzierl, Rupert 180 Weldon, Jo 128, 129, 133 Welsh, Irvine 175 West German protest movements 33, 219–32 Weber, Max 19, 236 Weinzierl, Rupert 19 Westwood, Vivienne 276 Wheatle, Alex 176, 188 White Teeth (Smith) 176 White, Russell 26 Whitelaw, Billie 143 Who, the 221 Whyte, William Foote 3 Wieviorka, Michael 54 Wild One, The (1953) 221 Willard, Michael 5

304 Williams, Raymond 8–9 Willis, Paul 11, 12, 17–18, 50, 56 Willson, Jackie 123, 130 Women in Revolt (1971) 143 Woodstock ’69 288 X Ray Spex 165 Yalom, Marilyn 132

Index Young, Jock 6–7 Your Arsenal (Morrissey) 144, 149 youth culture and the Internet 89– 98 Zahl, Peter Paul 230 Zanzibar (Birmingham club) 274 Zodiac (Berlin) 230