This is a test
- 208 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Subculture
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. 'New Accents' is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.
Frequently asked questions
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access Subculture by Dick Hebdige in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
PART ONE:
SOME CASE STUDIES
TWO
April 3, 1989, Marrakech
The chic thing is to dress in expensive tailor-made rags and all the queens are camping about in wild-boy drag. There are Bowery suits that appear to be stained with urine and vomit which on closer inspection turn out to be intricate embroideries of fine gold thread. There are clochard suits of the finest linen, shabby gentility suits ⊠felt hats seasoned by old junkies ⊠loud cheap pimp suits that turn out to be not so cheap the loudness is a subtle harmony of colours only the very best Poor Boy shops can turn out.⊠It is the double take and many carry it much further to as many as six takes (William Burroughs, 1969)
The chic thing is to dress in expensive tailor-made rags and all the queens are camping about in wild-boy drag. There are Bowery suits that appear to be stained with urine and vomit which on closer inspection turn out to be intricate embroideries of fine gold thread. There are clochard suits of the finest linen, shabby gentility suits ⊠felt hats seasoned by old junkies ⊠loud cheap pimp suits that turn out to be not so cheap the loudness is a subtle harmony of colours only the very best Poor Boy shops can turn out.⊠It is the double take and many carry it much further to as many as six takes (William Burroughs, 1969)
Holiday in the sun: Mister Rotten makes the grade
THE British summer of 1976 was extraordinarily hot and dry: there were no recorded precedents. From May through to August, London parched and sweltered under luminous skies and the inevitable fog of exhaust fumes. Initially hailed as a Godsend, and a national âtonicâ in the press and television (was Britainâs âcurseâ finally broken?) the sun provided seasonal relief from the dreary cycle of doom-laden headlines which had dominated the front pages of the tabloids throughout the winter. Nature performed its statutory ideological function and âstood inâ for all the other âbad newsâ, provided tangible proof of âimprovementâ and pushed aside the strikes and the dissension. With predictable regularity, âbright young thingsâ were shown flouncing along Oxford Street in harem bags and beach shorts, bikini tops and polaroids in that last uplifting item for the News at Ten. The sun served as a âcheekyâ postscript to the crisis: a lighthearted addendum filled with tropical promise. The crisis, too, could have its holiday. But as the weeks and months passed and the heatwave continued, the old mythology of doom and disaster was reasserted with a vengeance. The âmiracleâ rapidly became a commonplace, an everyday affair, until one morning in mid-July it was suddenly re-christened a âfreak disorderâ: a dreadful, last, unlooked-for factor in Britainâs decline.
The heatwave was officially declared a drought in August, water was rationed, crops were failing, and Hyde Parkâs grass burned into a delicate shade of raw sienna. The end was at hand and Last Days imagery began to figure once more in the press. Economic categories, cultural and natural phenomena were confounded with more than customary abandon until the drought took on an almost metaphysical significance. A Minister for Drought was appointed, Nature had now been officially declared âunnaturalâ, and all the age-old inferences were drawn with an obligatory modicum of irony to keep within the bounds of common sense. In late August, two events of completely different mythical stature coincided to confirm the worst forebodings: it was demonstrated that the excessive heat was threatening the very structure of the nationâs houses (cracking the foundations) and the Notting Hill Carnival, traditionally a paradigm of racial harmony, exploded into violence. The Caribbean festival, with all its Cookâs Tours connotations of happy, dancing coloured folk, of jaunty bright calypsos and exotic costumes, was suddenly, unaccountably, transformed into a menacing congregation of angry black youths and embattled police. Hordes of young black Britons did the Soweto dash across the nationâs television screens and conjured up fearful images of other Negroes, other confrontations, other âlong, hot summersâ. The humble dustbin lid, the staple of every steel band, the symbol of the âcarnival spiritâ, of Negro ingenuity and the resilience of ghetto culture, took on an altogether more ominous significance when used by white-faced policemen as a desperate shield against an angry rain of bricks.
It was during this strange apocalyptic summer that punk made its sensational debut in the music press.1 In London, especially in the south west and more specifically in the vicinity of the Kingâs Road, a new style was being generated combining elements drawn from a whole range of heterogeneous youth styles. In fact punk claimed a dubious parentage. Strands from David Bowie and glitter-rock were woven together with elements from American proto-punk (the Ramones, the Heartbreakers, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell), from that faction within London pub-rock (the 101-ers, the Gorillas, etc.) inspired by the mod subculture of the 60s, from the Canvey Island 40s revival and the Southend r & b bands (Dr Feelgood, Lew Lewis, etc.), from northern soul and from reggae.
Not surprisingly, the resulting mix was somewhat unstable: all these elements constantly threatened to separate and return to their original sources. Glam rock contributed narcissism, nihilism and gender confusion. American punk offered a minimalist aesthetic (e.g. the Ramonesâ âPinheadâ or Crimeâs âI Stupidâ), the cult of the Street and a penchant for self-laceration. Northern Soul (a genuinely secret subculture of working-class youngsters dedicated to acrobatic dancing and fast American soul of the 60s, which centres on clubs like the Wigan Casino) brought its subterranean tradition of fast, jerky rhythms, solo dance styles and amphetamines; reggae its exotic and dangerous aura of forbidden identity, its conscience, its dread and its cool. Native rhythm ân blues reinforced the brashness and the speed of Northern Soul, took rock back to the basics and contributed a highly developed iconoclasm, a thoroughly British persona and an extremely selective appropriation of the rock ân roll heritage.
This unlikely alliance of diverse and superficially incompatible musical traditions, mysteriously accomplished under punk, found ratification in an equally eclectic clothing style which reproduced the same kind of cacophony on the visual level. The whole ensemble, literally safety-pinned together, became the celebrated and highly photogenic phenomenon known as punk which throughout 1977 provided the tabloids with a fund of predictably sensational copy and the quality press with a welcome catalogue of beautifully broken codes. Punk reproduced the entire sartorial history of post-war working-class youth cultures in âcut upâ form, combining elements which had originally belonged to completely different epochs. There was a chaos of quiffs and leather jackets, brothel creepers and winkle pickers, plimsolls and paka macs, moddy crops and skinhead strides, drainpipes and vivid socks, bum freezers and bower boots â all kept âin placeâ and âout of timeâ by the spectacular adhesives: the safety pins and plastic clothes pegs, the bondage straps and bits of string which attracted so much horrified and fascinated attention. Punk is therefore a singularly appropriate point of departure for a study of this kind because punk style contained distorted reflections of all the major post-war subcultures. But before we can interpret the significance of these subcultures, we must first unscramble the sequence in which they occurred.
Boredom in Babylon
Ordinary life is so dull that I get out of it as much as possible. (Steve Jones, a Sex Pistol, quoted in Melody Maker)
It seems entirely appropriate that punkâs âunnaturalâ synthesis should have hit the London streets during that bizarre summer. Apocalypse was in the air and the rhetoric of punk was drenched in apocalypse: in the stock imagery of crisis and sudden change. Indeed, even punkâs epiphanies were hybrid affairs, representing the awkward and unsteady confluence of the two radically dissimilar languages of reggae and rock. As the shock-haired punks began to gather in a shop called Sex on a corner of the Kingâs Road, aptly named the Worlds End, David Bowieâs day of the Diamond Dogs (R.C.A. Victor, 1974) and the triumph of the âsuper-alienated humanoidâ was somehow made to coincide with reggaeâs Day of Judgement, with the overthrow of Babylon and the end of alienation altogether.
It is here that we encounter the first of punkâs endemic contradictions, for the visions of apocalypse superficially fused in punk came from essentially antagonistic sources. David Bowie and the New York punk bands had pieced together from a variety of acknowledged âartisticâ sources â from the literary avant-garde and the underground cinema â a self-consciously profane and terminal aesthetic. Patti Smith, an American punk and ex-art student, claimed to have invented a new form, ârock poetryâ, and incorporated readings from Rimbaud and William Burroughs into her act. Bowie, too, cited Burroughs as an influence and used his famous cut-up technique of random juxtapositions to âcomposeâ lyrics. Richard Hell drew on the writings of LautrĂ©amont and Huysmans. British punk bands, generally younger and more self-consciously proletarian, remained largely innocent of literature. However, for better or worse, the literary sources turned out to be firmly although implicitly inscribed in the aesthetics of British punk too. Similarly, there were connections (via Warhol and Wayne County in America, via the art school bands like the Who and the Clash in Britain) with underground cinema and avant-garde art.
By the early 70s, these tendencies had begun to cohere into a fully fledged nihilist aesthetic and the emergence of this aesthetic together with its characteristic focal concerns (polymorphous, often wilfully perverse sexuality, obsessive individualism, fragmented sense of self, etc.) generated a good deal of controversy amongst those interested in rock culture (see Melly, 1972; Taylor and Wall, 1976). From Jagger in Performance (Warner Bros, 1969) to Bowie as the âthin white dukeâ, the spectre of the dandy âdrowning in his own operaâ (Sartre, 1968) has haunted rock from the wings as it were, and in the words of Ian Taylor and Dave Wall âplays back the alienation of youth onto itselfâ (1976). Punk represents the most recent phase in this process. In punk, alienation assumed an almost tangible quality. It could almost be grasped. It gave itself up to the cameras in âblanknessâ, the removal of expression (see any photograph of any punk group), the refusal to speak and be positioned. This trajectory â the solipsism, the neurosis, the cosmetic rage â had its origins in rock.
But at almost every turn the dictates of this profane aesthetic were countermanded by the righteous imperatives of another musical form: reggae. Reggae occupies the other end of that wide spectrum of influences which bore upon punk. As early as May 1977 Jordan, the famous punk shop assistant of Sex and Seditionaries was expressing a preference for reggae over ânew waveâ on the pages of the New Musical Express (7 May 1977). âItâs the only music we [i.e. Jordan and J. Rotten] dance toâ. Although Rotten himself insisted on the relative autonomy of punk and reggae, he displayed a detailed knowledge of the more esoteric reggae numbers in a series of interviews throughout 1977. Most conspicuously amongst punk groups, the Clash were heavily influenced not only by the music, but also by the visual iconography of black Jamaican street style. Khaki battle dress stencilled with the Caribbean legends DUB and HEAVY MANNERS, narrow âsta-prestâ trousers, black brogues and slip ons, even the pork pie hat, were all adopted at different times by various members of the group. In addition, the group played âWhite Riotâ, a song inspired directly by the â76 Carnival, against a screen-printed backdrop of the Notting Hill disturbances, and they toured with a reggae discotheque presided over by Don Letts, the black Rastafarian d-j who shot the documentary film Punk while working at the Roxy Club in Covent Garden.
As we shall see, although apparently separate and autonomous, punk and the black British subcultures with which reggae is associated were connected at a deep structural level. But the dialogue between the two forms cannot properly be decoded until the internal composition and significance of both reggae and the British working-class youth cultures which preceded punk are fully understood. This involves two major tasks. First reggae must be traced back to its roots in the West Indies, and second the history of post-war British youth culture must be reinterpreted as a succession of differential responses to the black immigrant presence in Britain from the 1950s onwards. Such a reassessment demands a shift of emphasis away from the normal areas of interest â the school, police, media and parent culture (which have anyway been fairly exhaustively treated by other writers, see, e.g. Hall et al., 1976) â to what I feel to be the largely neglected dimension of race and race relations.
THREE
Are you there Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars; but I call you back this evening to attend a secret revel. (Jean Genet, 1966b)
Back to Africa
THE differences between rock and reggae should be sufficiently obvious to render exhaustive documentation unnecessary. It is simply explained here by Mark Kidel: âWhereas jazz and rock often reflect an amphetamine frenzy, reggae tunes in to the slowness of ganjaâ (review of a Bob Marley concert, New Statesman, 8 July 1977). Reggae draws on a quite specific experience (the experience of black people in Jamaica and Great Britain â a whole generation of young Black Britons have formed reggae bands in the last few years, e.g. the Cimarons, Steel Pulse, Matumbi, Black Slate, Aswaad). It is cast in a unique style, in a language of its own â Jamaican patois, that shadow-form, âstolenâ from the Master1 and mysteriously inflected, âdecomposedâ and reassembled in the passage from Africa to the West Indies. It moves to more ponderous and moody rhythms. It ârocks steadyâ2 around a bass-line which is both more prominent and more austere. Its rhetoric is more densely constructed, and less diverse in origin; emanating in large part from two related sources â a distinctively Jamaican oral culture and an equally distinctive appropriation of the Bible. There are strong elements of Jamaican pentecostal, of âpossession by the Wordâ, and the call and response pattern which binds the preacher to his congregation, is reproduced in reggae.3 Reggae addresses a community in transit through a series of retrospective frames (the Rastafarian movement (see pp. 33â9), the Back to Africa theme) which reverse the historical sequence of migrations (AfricaâJamaicaâGreat Britain). It is the living record of a peopleâs journey â of the passage from slavery to servitude â and that journey can be mapped along the lines of reggaeâs unique structure.
Africa finds an echo inside reggae in its distinctive percussion. The voice of Africa in the West Indies has traditionally been identified with insurrection and silenced wherever possible (see Hall, 1975). In particular, the preservation of African traditions, like drumming, has in the past been construed by the authorities (the Church, the colonial and even some âpost-colonialâ governments) as being intrinsically subversive, posing a symbolic threat to law and order. These outlawed traditions were not only considered anti-social and unchristian, they were positively, triumphantly pagan. They suggested unspeakable alien rites, they made possible illicit and rancorous allegiances which smacked of future discord. They hinted at that darkest of rebellions: a celebration of Negritude. They restored âdeported Africaâ, that âdrifting continentâ to a privileged place within the black mythology. And the very existence of that mythology was enough to inspire an immense dread in the hearts of some white slave owners.
Africa thus came to represent for blacks in the Caribbean forbidden territory, a Lost World, a History abandoned to the contradictory Western myths of childhood innocence and manâs inherent evil. It became a massive Out of Bounds on the other side of slavery. But beyond this continent of negatives there lay a place where all the utopian and anti-European values available to the dispossessed black could begin to congregate. And paradoxically it was from the Bible â the civilizing agent par excellence â that alternative values and dreams of a better life were drawn. It was in Rastafarianism that these two symbolic clusters (Black Africa and the White manâs Bible) so ostensibly antithetical, were most effectively integrated. To understand how such a heretical convergence was possible, and how the meta-message in the Christian faith (submission to the Master) was so dramatically transcended, one must first understand how that faith was mediated to the Jamaican black.
The Bible is a central determining force in both reggae music and popular West Indian consciousness in general. In the past, the scriptures had been used by the colonial authorities to inculcate Western values and to introduce the African to European notions of culture, repression, the soul, etc. It was under their sacred auspices that civilization itself was to be achieved: that Western culture was to fulfil its divinely ordained mission of conquest. Underpinned by the persistent dualism of Biblical rhetoric (âBlac...
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Half Title page
- Series page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- General Editorâs Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Subculture and Style
- One
- Part One: Some Case Studies
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Part Two: A Reading
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Conclusion
- References
- Bibliography
- Suggested Further Reading
- Index