n Subcultures can be
distinctive because of the age, race, ethnicity, class, location, and/or gender
of the members. The qualities that determine a subculture as distinct may be
linguistic, aesthetic, religious, political, sexual, geographical, or a combination
of factors.
n
Members of a subculture often signal their membership
through a distinctive and symbolic use of style,
which includes fashions, mannerisms. They also live out particular relations
to places.
n The study of subcultures
often consists of the study of symbolism attached to clothing,
music
and other visible affectations by members of subcultures, and also the ways in
which these same symbols are interpreted by members of the dominant culture.
n It may be difficult to
identify certain subcultures because their style (particularly clothing and
music) may be adopted by mass culture for commercial purposes. Businesses often
seek to capitalize on the subversive allure of subcultures in search of cool, which remains valuable in the selling of
any product.
n This process of cultural appropriation may often result in
the death or evolution of the subculture, as its members adopt new styles that
appear alien to mainstream society. This process provides a constant stream of
styles which may be commercially adopted.
n Music-based subcultures
are particularly vulnerable to this process, and so what may be considered a
subculture at one stage in its history—such as jazz, goth, punk, hip hop and rave cultures—may represent mainstream taste within a
short period of time.
n Some subcultures reject
or modify the importance of style, stressing membership through the adoption of
an ideology which may be much more resistant to commercial
exploitation.
n The punk subculture's distinctive (and initially
shocking) style of clothing was adopted by mass-market fashion companies once
the subculture became a media interest.
n Street fashion is a term used to
describe fashion that is considered to have emerged not from studios,
but from the grassroots. Street fashion is generally associated with youth culture, and is most often seen in major urban
centres.
Most major youth subcultures have had an
associated street fashion. Examples include:
 Hippies
(denim, T-shirts, long
hair, flower power and psychedelic imagery, flared trousers)
Teddy
Boys
(drape jackets, drainpipe
trousers, crepe shoes)
Punk fashion
(ripped clothing, safety pins, bondage,
provocative T-shirt slogans)
Skinheads
(short-cropped hair, fitted jeans, Ben Sherman button-up shirts, Fred Perry polo shirts, Harrington jackets, Dr. Martens boots)
Gothic fashion
(black clothing, heavy
coats, big boots, makeup).
Hip hop fashion
n As American rock
and roll arrived in Great
Britain a subculture grew around it. These
youths were called Teddy boys. They wore drape suit with a country style
tie, winklepicker shoes, drainpipe trousers, and Elvis Presley style slicked
hair.
n British youth
divided into factions. There were the modern jazz kids, the trad jazz kids, the
rock and roll teenagers and the skiffle craze. Coffee bars were a meeting place
for all the types of youth and the coolest ones were in Soho, London, England.
n In the 1960s
subcultures in Great Britain
included Mods, Rockers,
Bikers, hippies
n In the 60s there
was the Vietnam
war to protest about, rebel against and avoid getting drafted into. The
hippies' big year was 1967, the so called summer of love.
n University students
around the world had always been a minor subculture but, by the mid-60s, had
become a major one.
n Also during the 60s
was the beginning of Hacker culture from the increased usage of computers at
colleges. Students who were fascinated by the possibilities of computers, the
telephone and technology in general began figuring out ways to make the
technology more freely available or accessible.
n In the 1970s the
hippie, mod and rocker cultures were in a process of transformation which
temporarily took on the name of freaks (openly embracing the image of strangeness
and otherlyness).
n there emerged a new
subculture called skinheads. The "skins" or skinheads
were anti-aesthetic, pro-basic, fiercely working class tough youths. They had
the image of homophobia
and racism
and this image was often true although, paradoxically, they loved black Jamaican reggae, ska, and bluebeat.
n
Skinheads mainly began from 1969, as a development
from the hard, headcase type of mods but, by the mid-70s, some crossover was
happening between skins and the freak scene. This developed into the punk rock culture
which became apparent from about 1975 onward. Punks managed to be both
hardcases and tongue-in-cheek at the same time. The concept of Anarchism
became fashionable.
n Disco became a
really significant centre of subculture from about 1975 onward.
n in Great Britain urban environments a form of street culture using freeform
and semi-stacatto poetry combined with athletic break dancing
was developing as the Hip hop and Rap subculture. In jazz jargon the word rap had always
meant speech
and conversation.
n Rappers could
attempt to outdo each other with their skillful rhymes. Rapping is also known
as MCing, which
is one of the four main elements of Hip hop: MCing, DJing, graffiti art,
and breakdancing.
n At the beginning of
the 1980s one thing which actually became a real subculture was Goth. Gothic
culture developed naturally enough, without too much media forcing. The goths
are a culture of gloomy romanticism
. They have continued from the mid-80s to the 21st century
with their roots reaching backward to the gothic-romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
n The 1990s saw
mostly a continuation of existing subcultures from the 80s. The music and
clothes changed more than the sense of identity associated with the cultures. Dance music
continued. Raves continued. Pop continued. Hip hop continued. Rock continued.
Goth continued. Punks and Hippies were back. Sixties styles like Mod bands and
psychedelia were revived and recycled.
n The main new
development of the 90s was on the internet As the 1980s ended and the 90s began Tim Berners
Lee created HTML which made possible the World Wide Web.
The web allowed internet subcultures to grow from tiny numbers of geeks, to big
global online communities. These communities are as diverse in their
preoccupations as any other subcultures. There are online gaming communities,
online forums, online projects of all kinds, serious or frivolous.
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