The spectacular nature of youth subcultures can easily lead to the creation of myths that become deeply ingrained in popular memory.1 Punk, for example, is commonly held to have originated from rebellious and deviant youths, while hip hop is usually regarded as the voice of marginalized people from US American ghettos. These myths may or may not be true, but they inherently provide a limited yet authoritative understanding of what a subculture entails, how it emerged, and how it developed. Myths essentialize âtheâ history and origins of a subculture and reduce it to a limited set of characteristic features that get ascribed with certain meanings, shrouded in collective norms and values, sometimes on the basis of prejudice.2 And because they are retold by subcultural actors and observers alike, through various channels of communicationâmost notably through word-of-mouth and popular media formats such as newspaper interviews, documentary films, and memoirsâthey significantly influence popular understandings of what subcultures are and how they develop. Even more so, these myths influence many of the sources that researchers of youth subcultures draw onâfor example, media reports, policy debates, and memoirs of subcultural actors.3 This situation raises the question of how researchers are to deal with these myths. Is it possible to move beyond them in order to understand what youth subcultures âreallyâ entail, or is it rather the process of myth-making itself that should be central in scholarly investigations? This volume collects contributions that analyze how subcultural myths develop, what they mean to people, and how they can be studied.
Subcultures appeal to the imagination due to their outspoken and elusive nature. The term itself implies a division between âinsidersâ and âoutsidersâ, those who are âin the knowâ and those who are not. Subcultures thus provide people with a sense of identity and belonging, whether they belong to a subculture or not.4 As people try to relate and grasp what subcultures entail, various outspoken images, ideas, and narratives emerge. When conceptions about youth subcultures are wholeheartedly embraced and shared by a larger group of people, they are, in a way, elevated from the reservoir of popular imagination, and gain a powerful and convincing mythical status.5
This is especially the case when the conceptions of subcultural actors and those of others collide, which can lead to the emergence of various conflicting myths. Punks, for example, can be seen as socially degraded and parasitical youths, or as the moral conscious of decadent societies. Hip hop adherents, for that matter, can be seen as petty criminals, acting out frustrations about their marginalized position in society, or as peopleâs champions, addressing and protesting social marginalization. In both cases, the identities of punk and hip hop are essentialized through historical narratives and specifically chosen sets of characteristic features. These are representations people get invested in, and sometimes embrace wholeheartedly. When these representations are deemed to reflect the âtrue natureâ of punk or hip hop, they become mythicized.
Since researchers base their work in part on sources that are influenced by subcultural mythsâthat is: sensationalized accounts, (unintentional) faulty retellings or deliberately constructed renditions of the past and present of subculturesâ, they have to be especially careful of contributing to these mythical representations of subcultures, and instead need to critically engage with them. This volume aims not so much to critique the validity of subcultural myths, as to move beyond them and analyze the process of myth-making in order to critically engage with the memory and meaning of youth subcultures. It thus asks how subcultural identities and representations are constructed and change over time. In doing so, this volume draws on subcultural theories, myth studies, and memory studies.
This volume takes as its starting point that an analysis of subcultural myths and myth-making can contribute valuable insights to subcultural studies. In the past decades, memory studies has grown into a prominent and innovative field of research, and as part of this development, the study of myths has recently gained more prominence as well. Memory studies investigates the ways in which past and present phenomena are remembered, commemorated, and imagined. Myth studies analyzes the processes through which certain representations of past and present events are elevated or âsacralizedâ by groups of people and infused with powerful meaning. What connects memory studies and myth studies is the importance of shared representations for individual and collective identities. As subcultural studies finds itself at a crossroads, this notion can open new avenues for research, for subcultures are not only built around shared passions and interestsâeither for music, politics, board games or anything elseâbut also around shared imaginations and memories. For quite some time now, prominent scholars question the very existence of subcultures.6 Especially the concept of clearly demarcated âsubâcultures acting within a more encompassing mainstream culture has become contested. Some researchers therefore prefer to talk about leisure-based youth cultures. Others argue not to throw away the baby with the bathwater, and instead hold that although subcultures may not be ârealâ social phenomena, they become real when people believe in them.
This volume will use these notions interchangeably, sometimes through the combination of âyouth subculturesâ. In fact, the process of myth-making fits well with all these three conceptions. First, subcultural myths can be intentionally or unintentionally created by self-proclaimed âinsidersâ or âoutsidersâ, as to differentiate and demarcate themselves from each other. Secondly, the process of myth-making can foster representations that are shared across different groups and cultures and thus become deeply ingrained in cultural memory. Lastly, believing in the validity of subcultural phenomena can result in the making of subcultural myths. Analyzing the narratives, imaginations, myths, and memory of youth subcultures can thus offer a valuable contribution to the study of sub- or youth cultures. However, it is not enough to solely analyze the contents of subcultural myths. In order to understand how subcultural myths emerge and develop it is just as important to investigate which processes and actors are central to myth-making.
By combining concepts and approaches from subcultural studies, myth studies, and memory studies, this volume aims to establish (i) how representations of subcultures emerge, develop, and become canonized through the process of mythification; (ii) which developments and actors are crucial to this process; (iii) what these myths mean to people, both to subcultural actors as well as others; and finally (iv) how researchers like historians, sociologists, and anthropologists should deal with these myths and myth-making processes. By considering these questions, we aim to provide new insights on how to research the identity, history, and memory of youth subcultures.
Subcultural Studies
The term âsubcultureâ was first introduced around 1900 by sociologists and ethnographic researchers of the Chicago School to explain deviant and criminal group behavior of (mainly European) immigrants in fast growing and industrializing US American cities such as Chicago.7 These scholars argued that people who did not have the possibility to partake in the dominant or mainstream culture formed their own subcultures, with their own norms and values, to survive in a hostile world.
This notion of countercultural subgroups, opposed or in some way inferior to a more encompassing dominant mainstream culture, would prove to be very influential for the study of youth cultures. Around 1970, the term subculture was adopted and reformulated by scholars of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in order to explain the rise of youth cultures out of the British working class after the Second World War. CCCS scholars such as Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, and John Clarke were fascinated by the styles and rituals of subcultural youths such as punks, skinheads, and Teddy Boys. Drawing from a combination of neo-Marxism, semiotics, and structuralism, CCCS scholars set out to âdecipherâ for themselves the meanings of subcultural styles. Envisioning these youths as working class and with meager social prospects, CCCS scholars interpreted their alternative clothing styles and deviant behavior as a form of resistance and class struggle. Being unable to improve their social and political situation in any real or material way, working class youths were left with cultural refusal as their last option for resistance, especially against the growing dominance of middle class culture. John Clarke thus held that the subcultural strategy solved âin an imaginary way, problems which at the concrete material level remain[ed] unresolvedâ. In this volume, J. Patrick Williams takes the example of the Teddy Boys, who according to CCCS scholars, âtook the upper-class Edwardian suit and the Western bootlace tie out of their original consumer context and rearticulated, subculturally, the demands of young lower-working-class men to become visible and taken seriously by the rest of societyâ. The fact that subcultural youths took styles and apparel from past and current fashions, and rearranged them to imbue them with new meanings was not only creative, but also subversive. Conceived as spectacular if ultimately futile attempts to resist, the rituals and styles of subcultural youths were elevated to heroic forms of refusal and resistance. Although the definitions of subcultures and research methods favored by CCCS scholar have come under ever greater scrutiny, they have nevertheless had a lasting impact on subcultural studies as some researchers still view youth cultures predominantly in terms of defiance or resistance.8
As groundbreaking and sophisticated as the CCCS concepts and methods were, they soon drew criticism from various angles. A central one among them was that CCCS scholars projected meanings onto subcultural styles without focusing much on the experiences, values or narratives of the youths themselves. This l...