2. Definitions by David Reisman in 1950
Mainstream: audiences who “passively accept
commercially provided styles and meanings”
Subcultures: audiences who “actively sought a
minority style (hot jazz at the time) and
interpreted it in accordance with subversive
values. Thus the audience...manipulates the
product to symbolise their values.
3. Key Thinkers and Ideas
• Stuart Hall
• Wrote ‘Resistance through Ritual’
• Main idea: young people who feel
alienated from society or cut off
from opportunities (because of
class, age or ethnicity) will
attempt to ‘resist’ the mainstream
through ‘rituals’: crime, dress,
music, art etc.
4. Phil Cohen
• Applied Marxism to subcultural theory
• Studied young men in 1970s East End
• Said that subcultures form in reaction to social divisions and
loss of community
• Skinheads: exaggeration of working class values and style…
5. Dick Hebdige ‘The Meaning of Style’
• Responded to criticism that Cohen and Hall had only looked at
white men.
• Hebdige developed Cohen and Hall’s ideas about subcultures
being based around alienated youth.
• But concentrated on how subcultures rebel not through
crime, but through STYLE
6. ‘Subculture – the meaning of style’
• Style as ‘cultural crime’ – something to disturb the status quo,
upset the norm.
• The ‘silent majority’ conform to the dominant values/styles,
and assume everyone else in society does, too.
• Subcultures upset the mainstream because they confront it
with difference.
7. Punks and Dreads
Hebdige focused on the origins of punk – and oddly located the roots in
Rastafarian culture!
His theory:
•white working class youth, feeling the loss of community (through rising
unemployment)
•the ‘invasion’ of Asian and Caribbean immigrants (and their culture)
•White youth feels need for separate identity.
8. Punks and Dreads
“When Black Jamaicans displayed their distinctive
music, clothing, gestures, etc on the street and
thereby took possession of a social space, white
working-class youth were implicitly challenged to
forge an equally "dense" style of their own.”
- Dick Hebdige Subculture: the meaning of style
9. What does this mean?
• Despite huge differences in values
and style, ‘Dreads’ set a template
for cultural identity;
• Disempowered whites were to
use the same template: forge a
new identity using dress-codes,
music, slang, gestures,
behaviours.
10. So…
• Subcultures aren’t that different from their
‘parent’ culture. Mostly they react against or
continue some of the values or styles of the
parent culture – even if that ‘parent’ is actually a
foreign culture (e.g. American beatnik’s love of
French culture…)
11. Commidification = the death
of a subculture?
• Hebdige is especially relevant today as he was the first to look
at how subcultures are absorbed into the mainstream
• A typical Marxist, he blamed this ‘selling out’ on capitalism
and consumerism.
12. He said that subcultures emerge by replacing a previous culture
that has been assimilated into the mainstream.
Because subcultures express their ‘resistance’ through style –
material things – capitalism can manufacture these ‘things’
and make a profit from them.
Rituals of resistance end up making money for the very people
they were originally rebelling against!
13. Or, as Hebdige puts it:
“the conversion of subcultural signs (dress, music
etc.) into mass-produced objects (i.e. the
commodity form)”
As one subculture gets assimilated – punk dress
style used by Vivienne Westwood to make
expensive designer clothes – another rises to
‘resist’ the mainstream in a similar way and
fulfilling the same need.
The need to resist the mainstream.
