thereisafuture

Objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in the punks’ ensembles: lavatory chains were draped in graceful arcs across their chests encased in plastic bin-liners. Safety pins were taken out of their domestic ‘utility’ context and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip. ‘Cheap’ trashy fabrics (PVC, plastic, lurex, etc.) in vulgar designs (e.g. mock leopard skin) and ‘nasty’ colours, long discarded by the quality end of the fashion industry as obsolete kitsch, were salvaged by the punks and turned into garments (fly boy drainpipes, ‘common’ miniskirts) which offered self-conscious commentaries on the notions of modernity and taste (Hebdige 1979: 107).

In the late 80s the (stereotypical) dress sense of the original raver, both male and female, was baggy, oversized T-shirts, baggy shorts, track suit bottoms, baggy jeans, even baggy (shapeless) haircuts. Apart from being comfortable, the clothes were brightly coloured and relatively cheap. It could even be said that there was no ‘style’ at all, in the sense that no one really cared how they looked; it just had to feel good (Rietveld 1993: 52).

There is nothing so fascinating as a spectacle, and there is nothing so spectacular as a revolution. To many, punk music and culture in Britain in the 1970s was just such a revolution. Rock’n’roll, having reached dizzying heights of experimentation in the 60s and the “progressive rock” that followed, was downsized by the punks to ‘one-chord wonders’ and singers screaming to the point of unintelligibility. Punk’s adherents took street style to new levels of shock value, perhaps best signified by the colored, straight-as-an-axe-blade mohawk haircut. For some music critics, punk was a return to rock’n’roll’s original mission of rebellion. For some academics, punk was the sign--or, perhaps, set of signs--that youth were standing up to the status quo, the ‘hegemony’ to use Gramsci’s oft-used term, by totally confronting the aesthetics--and thus morals--of society. Punks became heroes.

No one scholar is more responsible for raising the punk to the level of antiestablishment crusader than Dick Hebdige in his book Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). The British punk was a warrior, engaging in “semiotic guerilla warfare,” a phrase Hebdige borrows from Umberto Eco (Hebdige 1979: 105). Yet more than just being the individual against society, the punk was part of a revolutionary subculture. The term “subculture” had been in use for decades before Hebdige, but he propelled it into the limelight. Since then scholars and culture observers have looked for the next great subculture, the next great revolution. With the model being punk, that revolution was to come from the intersection of music and style, and thus it has been scholars of popular music and culture that have been the most hawkish about finding the next ‘punk.’ As the 80s became the 90s, some in Britain thought they had found it in rave, a musical scene that combined electronic dance music, especially the genres known as House and Techno, with the drug Ecstasy in huge parties that could run into the thousands. Yet as rave and its analysis both evolved, it became unclear whether it was a “subculture.” Indeed, the question came to be asked, what is a subculture after all, and does it matter anymore?

This paper will explore the definitions of subculture as they most closely relate to the study of popular music. There are two intersecting concerns. On one hand, the seminal role of Dick Hebdige’s work must be closely examined to see exactly what his version of subcultural theory is, and how it became the approach which nearly every popular music scholar after him must answer to. On the other hand, the responses and critiques to Hebdige must be surveyed as new musical cultures and generations of scholars have arrived. To this end, my essay is in four parts. In the first part, the term “subculture” will be traced in a brief history, from its origins in sociology in Chicago to its flowering under Cultural Studies at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. In the second part, the main themes of Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style will be enumerated, followed by the immediate extension of the meanings of British punk by other scholars and the critiques of Hebdige these contain. In the third part, I will directly address how the rise of rave and its analysis have either continued or disintegrated academic discourse on subculture. In the fourth part, the latest approaches, going under the intentionally referential heading “Post-Subcultural Studies,” will be examined. In the end, my goal is to find a way forward for ‘popsters’ like myself to both acknowledge Dick Hebdige’s ideas about subculture and create new directions for scholarship that address issues--and styles--that Hebdige does not.

In the introduction to the compendium The Subcultures Reader, Sarah Thornton offers what is probably the broadest possible definition of “subculture:” “All of our contributors would probably agree that subcultures are groups of people that have something in common with each other (i.e. they share a problem, an interest, a practice) which distinguishes them in a significant way from the members of other social groups” (Thornton, in Gelder and Thornton 1996: 1). This is, of course, so inclusive that it is nearly meaningless. What distinguishes “subculture” from such terms as “community” or “ethnicity”? Thornton raises several points, but four seem to me essential to the definition of “subculture” as a distinct theoretical idea. First, subcultures are different from what could be labeled, broadly, “culture;” that is, they are deviant in some sort of way from culture writ-large, what is sometimes called either the “parent culture” or “mass culture.” Second, the “sub-” in “subculture” implies that these groups are under the larger culture, “subordinate, subaltern or subterranean” (Thornton, in Gelder and Thornton 1996: 4). Subcultural deviance is not one of equal relation to mass culture but a deviance that is socially, politically, or morally loaded--or some or all of these. Thus, subcultures are frequently united by some factors of race, age, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and even crime. Third, members of subcultures are distinguished as “Other.” Subcultures always have signs to mark them as different, whether they be aural signs such as music or speech, visual signs such as fashion or skin color, or others. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, subcultures are labeled as such. In Thornton’s words, “in the process of portraying social groups, scholars inevitably construct them....‘Subcultures,’ like ‘communities’ or ‘masses,’ do not just exist out there, waiting for their patterns to be perceived by the diligent researcher” (in Gelder and Thornton 1996: 5). A “subculture”--like “culture” itself”--lies somewhere on the spectrum of identification between the emic and the etic. Indeed, the study of “subculture” could be described as the identification of ‘outsiders’ by ‘outsiders,’ of scholars preoccupied with the power of perversion and radicalism.

The idea, if not the term, is almost as old as sociology itself and weighed with the baggage of social science. In 1892 the Department of Sociology and Anthropology was established at the University of Chicago, the first of its kind in the world. The scholars to emerge, from Robert E. Park to Howard Becker, came to be identified as the “Chicago school.” If one single issue could be said to define the Chicago school, it was the “urban.” Beginning especially with Park, the initial mission of Chicago researchers was to map out the social groups of the city and their beliefs and practices. In essence, this was the birth of urban ethnography, and it was from this ground that the issues of subcultural studies first sprouted.

By the 1940s, “subculture” had entered the sociological lexicon. Chicago scholar Milton M. Gordon was one of the first to champion the term and offers one of its first definitions, arguing that “a great deal could be gained by a more extensive use of the concept of sub-culture--a concept used here to a sub-division of a national culture, composed of a combination of factorable social situations such as class status, ethnic background, regional or urban residence, and religious affiliation, but forming in their combination a functioning unity which has an integrated impact on the participating individual” (Gordon 1947(1996): 40-41; emph orig.). Two aspects of this definition deserve emphasis. First, “sub-culture” at this early juncture did not imply position so much as division, a perspective emphasized by the use of the hyphen at this point in history. Subculture as subaltern had yet to be devised. Second, the “unity” of identity provided by sub-culture may come from class, ethnicity, or morality, but more often than not comes from a unique cross section of all of these; sub-culture is synthetic, or perhaps syncretic. In 1955, Albert K. Cohen offered “A General Theory of Subcultures,” in which he argues that the function of subculture is to solve the social problems of individuals in a common milieu by creating new frames of reference. Gone was the hyphen. Instead “subculture” was the realm of the gang, of delinquency, and of adjustment to challenges. When, in 1963, Howard Becker published the presciently-titled Outsiders, the solutions of subculture were overtly tied to deviancy. By then it could be argued, as Becker has later done (1999), that the Chicago School was not a unified theory so much as a community of researchers with a diverse set of approaches. What remains in common is what Thornton calls “a specific kind of urban micro-sociology which gave particular attention to the interaction of people’s perceptions of themselves with others’ views of them” (in Gelder and Thornton 1996: 11). More concisely, the Chicago School’s version of sociology introduced the dialogue of “Us” vs. “Them,” the dialectic that lies at the core of subcultural studies to Hebdige and beyond.

When Richard Hoggart established the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University (CCCS) in 1964, however, not only was a new model--Cultural Studies--created, but a true “school” was established. A whole new body of theorists became canonical: Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson. The approach of CCCS researchers was a combination of “Continental” thinking and decidedly British experience. From late Marxism--Althusser, Gramsci--the CCCS became concerned with power relations, ideology, and how the two related in culture, particularly in Gramsci’s influential idea of “hegemony,” the idea of a moveable, all-encompassing dominance. From semioticians--Saussure, Barthes--the CCCS came to focus on signs and thus on the appearance of culture. If these were the European influences, Williams and Thompson made the CCCS British. One of Williams’ chief concerns was a neo-Marxist interpretation of the revolutions that defined British culture. Thompson focused attention on the British working class. Hoggart, at the head of the CCCS itself, perhaps made the boldest claim by posing that working-class, “popular” culture is ‘authentic,’ while while media-controlled “mass” culture is ‘inauthentic.’ All of this unfolded against a backdrop of rapid social transformation in Britain as well as the dissolution of the global British Empire. As “class,” in either a Marxist or historically British sense, became disrupted, the struggle for cultural identity became strongest among “youth,” a construction of the CCCS researchers as “a transitional moment, a somewhat fragile point of mediation between the class-located identity of the ‘parent culture’ and the increasingly attractive commercialized world of mass culture” (Gelder, in Gelder and Thornton: 84).

When all of these elements came together, CCCS “Cultural Studies” often became subcultural studies, but with a limited definition of subculture. Subcultures had to be both youth and working-class to be truly ‘authentic.’ Subcultures could thus be interpreted as symptoms of both British class in decline and the central contradictions of British culture at the time. Once all of these conditions were met, the signs and dialogues of working-class youth subcultures could be read semiotically as struggling to create a solution, in the sense of Cohen, to the pull between the identity of the young individual/group and the mores of the dominant/parent culture. What is of course obvious is that a subculture was defined from the outside according to a model. Subcultures had to pose a challenge to the hegemony; if they did not, they were simply not subcultures. Agenda was essential, although what the agenda was was determined by the scholar via ‘textual’ analysis, not by the members of the subculture itself.

“Sub-culture” was first put into use by sociologists in Chicago. This first definition, while especially useful in urban settings, was inclusive. Any form of group identity that was distinguishable from big “culture” counted. In this way, the Chicago approach might not be a “school” at all. As the hyphen was dropped, however, and the term came to be used by scholars of Cultural Studies in Britain, subculture became a mission of sorts, and the CCCS at Birmingham was “school” in the paradigmatic sense. The mission of subculture was to create a space for itself and its members between old classes and new consumerism, and thus to challenge hegemony. The mission of the subcultural researcher was to find subcultures wherever they might be delineated. It was from this “school” of thought that Dick Hebdige set forth.

The greatest irony of Subculture: The Meaning of Style is that, in spite of being probably the most important academic text ever about punk, it is not really about punk music. This fact is both what makes it part of the CCCS approach and what makes it so exemplary of that approach’s Achilles heel: Any given subculture is studied as a case example the CCCS definition of subculture, not as a group with practices to be appreciated on their own terms. This is an academic problem by no means limited to Cultural Studies. What makes the CCCS approach unique, and especially its application by Hebdige, is that subculture not only is a selffulfilling prophesy but also is raised to the level of revolutionary heroism. The subculture itself is left behind. It is this version of subcultural studies that after Hebdige became the paradigmatic status quo. What is Hebdige’s approach to subculture, and how did it come to dominate the field?

The first chapter of Subculture certainly reads like a primer to Cultural Studies. Pretty much all the big names are dropped, starting with Raymond Williams and his definition of culture as “a whole way of life” (cited in Hebdige 1979: 7). Via Hoggart--and him indebted to Saussure and Barthes--Hebdige defines the “basic premise” of Cultural Studies as the idea that “literary critical analysis can be applied to certain social phenomena other than ‘academically respectable’ literature” (Hoggart, cited in Hebdige 1979: 8). In Hebdige’s own words, “all aspects of culture possess a semiotic value, and the most taken-for-granted phenomena can function as signs” (1979: 13). Hebdige progresses from Marxian ideology to Gramscian dominance and finally to youth. He offers what is quite possibly the thesis statement of the book: “The emergence of (youth subcultures) has signaled in a spectacular fashion the breakdown of consensus in the post-war period....However, the challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is expressed obliquely, in style” (1979: 17).

Yet while Hebdige appears to be a good student of the CCCS, as soon as he presents his own research he introduces a fresh element to Cultural Studies: race. Rather than immediately defining punk style, Hebdige instead turns to reggae. He poses that punk’s unique melange is the “nihilist aesthetic” of rock and the “righteous imperatives” of reggae (1979: 28). The key to understanding British subculture for Hebdige is race relations. While the subculture itself may be an “Other,” it defines itself not just in relation to the parent culture but to the Other of black immigrants: “The succession of white subcultural forms can be read as a series of deep-structural adaptations which symbolically accommodate or expunge the black presence of the host community” (1979: 44). It is with this thesis that Hebdige traces the history of post-War British subcultures--hipsters, teddy boys, mods, and finally punks. For Hebdige, punk can be read as a “white ‘translation’ of black ‘ethnicity’” of which the key component is a mimesis of of the alienation of the Rastafarian (1979: 64-65). Even when the relationship between punk and reggae is not direct, as it was in the famous Rock Against Racism campaign and especially in bands like The Clash, reggae is always there as a referent. “To use a term from semiotics,” Hebdige writes, “we could say that punk includes reggae as a ‘present absence’’--a black hole around which punk composes itself” (1979: 68). One could even argue that Hebdige cares more about a reggae music than punk music, a point certainly evidenced by Hebdige’s second most famous book, Cut 'n' Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (1987), in which Hebdige turns off the cultural critique and instead reveals a fan’s care for musical history. True or not, it can be said that the bulk of the “case studies” in Subculture are less concerned with youth culture than with race, an approach unique among CCCS scholars and often overlooked in readings of Hebdige.

The elements of Subculture that launched a thousand analyses lie in his “reading.” Here we return to “youth,” the decline of Britain, and the idea of subculture as “solution” via both old Albert Cohen and new Phil Cohen (1972). Although class is an element, it is largely what Hebdige calls a “contradictory mythology of class” in which the working class is simultaneously withering away to joblessness in modern Britain and romanticized by the media, not to mention the CCCS (Hebdige 1979: 86). The key skill of subculture was to dramatize the contradiction:

The punks were not directly responding to increasing joblessness, changing moral standards, the rediscovery of poverty, the Depression, etc., they were dramatizing what had come to be called ‘Britain’s decline’ by constructing a language which was, in contrast to the prevailing rhetoric of the Rock Establishment, unmistakably relevant and down to earth (1979: 87; emph, orig.).

Subculture’s ability to dramatize contradiction, exemplified through punk, is based on what I will label the four central tenets of Hebdige’s analysis. First, punk is an act of meaning, a process that reveals ideas rather than a set of ideas. This is the difference between punk and the teddy boys, the subculture that exists both as punk’s predecessor and its binary opposite. The signs of the ‘teds,’ posits Hebdige, are “static, expressive, and concentrate attention on the objects-in-themselves.” The signs of the punks, on the other hand, are “kinetic, transitive and concentrate attention on the act of transformations.” (1979: 124; emph. orig.). Put another way, the Teds emphasize the signifier, while the punks emphasize significance, the motion of signifying. Borrowing from Claude Levi-Strauss, Hebdige identifies the specific style of punk signification as “bricolage,” an act of “structured improvisation” that takes already existing signs and by putting them in a new relationship creates a new discourse out of those signs. The safety-pin piercing, for instance, is a punk sign because it has been removed from its original context and used in juxtaposition to other stylistic signs in an new context, fashion.
The result of the punk act of significance is Hebdige’s second tenet: punk subculture does not create consonance but dissonance, not music but noise. He spells this out succinctly:

Subcultures represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media. We should therefore not underestimate the signifying power of the spectacular subculture not only as a metaphor for potential anarchy ‘out there’ but as an actual mechanism of semantic disorder: a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation (1979: 90).

To an (outside) listener, describing punk music as ‘noisy’ sounds pretty accurate--the yelling vocals, the distorted guitars, the thrashing drums, the raw volume. For Hebdige, noise has ideological import. Semantic noise, or rather the act of making noise, reveals the arbitrary assumptions of the dominant culture, and since aesthetics and ethics are perhaps one and the same, noise is a paradigmatic challenge. Stylistic “deviance” becomes legal deviance and thence moral deviance. At the point that the subculture becomes a “moral panic,” the dominant culture may choose to integrate subcultural signs by changing them into commodities, or it may choose to label it simply as an Other, sweeping it under the rug by denying its significance or exoticizing it. In the case of punk, the status quo seems to have responded in almost all of these ways. Noise represents an implicit affront to things as they are, an aesthetic choice that, by not being ‘pretty,’ calls into question the foundations of the ethical/aesthetic system.

Describing punk as potentially ‘exotic’ emphasizes the third tenet of Hebdige’s picture of punk: We are dealing with spectacular subcultures. This is the second heaviest piece of baggage in Hebdige’s book; if the CCCS required subcultures to challenge hegemony, Hebdige’s subcultures are required to be extravagant. Subcultural styles are meant to be “intentional communication,” are meant to be “obviously fabricated,” are meant to be displayed (1979: 100-101). Simply put, subcultures are not subtle but in your face. In the case of punk the point is pretty moot, but does it hold for all subcultures, or is it another qualification in the definition? For Hebdige, remember, the punk is engaged in “semiotic guerilla warfare.” And thus we come full circle to the CCCS, Hebdige’s fourth tenet, and the heaviest baggage: subculture stands for resistance. Hebdige sums it up nicely: “Throughout this book, I have interpreted subculture as a form of resistance in which experienced contradictions and objections this ruling ideology are obliquely represented in style. Specifically I have used the term ‘noise’ to describe the challenge to symbolic order that such styles are seen to constitute” (1979: 133).

To recapitulate: Punk is a spectacular subculture that resists cultural hegemony through the semiotic process of making existing signifiers into noise. Two questions must then arise: Is it an accurate portrayal of punk as a subculture, and is it an accurate portrayal of punk music? For Simon Frith (1980 (1996)), there are two problems with Hebdige’s picture. One, by setting up a dichotomy between subcultural, ‘authentic’ punk and commercialized, ‘inauthentic’ punk, the role of the media in constructing the image of the punk is underplayed. Two, by emphasizing punk as resistance, the conventions that define punk from inside are not explored. Frith feels that there are three key aspects of punk. The audience--the subculture itself--is in fact the most concerned with authenticity, viewing punk as “a folk music and as a subcultural movement” in which signs are given ideological value and conventions are defended (Frith 1980 (1996): 166). The production of punk creates it as a commodity. Yet production also has its own revolutionary role as the “Do It Yourself” (DiY) aesthetic posed a challenge to the hegemony of the major record companies, creating the model of the “independent.” The meaning of punk, most importantly, is contested. Within punk music, populists cling to the original signs and conventions, while an avant-garde is more expressly interested in pushing both the sound and significance of punk. For Frith, punk is not a unified subculture standing up to the man but a body of people with ongoing discourses within the subculture about its meaning.

Frith brings us closer to punk music without directly discussing it. Hebdige certainly doesn’t have much to say about it: After all the pages on clothes and makeup, music gets two paragraphs of attention (Hebdige 1979: 109-110). This gap is partially filled by Dave Laing (1985 (1996)) by actually looking at the punk song. Extending an idea of Roland Barthes, who borrows a metaphor from biology, Laing distinguishes between the “pheno-song” and the “geno-song” (Laing 1985 (1996): 407). The former is the surface level, the level of literal text, the level at which meaning can be analyzed and “resistance” posited. The latter is the deep song, the level at which aesthetics overtake overt signification. It is at this latter level that the fan of punk listens and appreciates. This distinction creates a gap, not a “rupture” in meaning as Hebdige would like, but a schism between enjoying music and enjoying its phenotypic meaning. The shock of punk music, the obscenity whether lyrical or musical, may be integrated into a structure of resistance, but it may also be left at the individual level where shock is pleasure. In short, the importance placed on punk etically may bear no relation to what gives the punk listener aural gratification emically.

Lawrence Grossberg (1984 (1996)) contextualizes punk not within a series of subcultures but within the history of rock and roll. Grossberg credits both Hebdige and Frith for analyzing punk as “representation” but says that “neither one is able to account for the reality and generality of the affective power of music” (1984 (1996): 477). He in essence creates a matrix by which to compare the different strains of rock and roll, rock and roll vs. “Them” being one axis and internal distinction being the the second axis. On the first axis, punk is not overtly oppositional but “alternative,” an implicit politics in which “‘We want the world but on our terms’” (Laing 1985 (1996): 486). On the second axis, punk is “critical,” affirming only its own negativity instead of striving for a utopia or affirming pleasure. Laing’s analysis not only calls Hebdige’s “resistance” further into question but also puts punk into a wider frame. Hebdige’s picture of punk clearly is only one “version,” to use the reggae term he writes about in Cut ‘n’ Mix.

Gelder argues that Hebdige later took punk down from its pedestal. Hebdige’s article “Posing...Threats, Striking...Poses” (1983 (1996)), according to Gelder “comes after the phenomenon of punk--his earlier work had celebrated it as it was unfolding--and is less up-beat as a consequence, responding especially to the commodification of punk’s ‘bizarre poses’” (Gelder, in Gelder and Thornton 1996: 375). I give this a different reading; even though Hebdige has turned to Foucault, it’s still the same as it ever was. Hebdige’s 1983 article boils down, even in Hebdige’s words, to three propositions. First, “youth is present only when its presence is a problem, or rather when its presence is regarded as a problem” (1983 (1996)): 402). This to my mind is simply a gasp for breath for the CCCS paradigm and its emphasis on youth culture, if also a look back at the “problem” approach of Cohen. The second and third propositions are closely related. The second states that “the politics of pleasure in which youth subcultures habitually engage cannot be collapsed into existing forms of organized political activity” (1983 (1996): 402-403). The third states that “the politics of youth subculture is a politics of gesture, symbol, and metaphor, that it deals in the currency of signs and that the subcultural response is, thus, essentially ambiguous” (1983 (1996)): 403). Although ambiguity may imply weakness, or at least complexity, Hebdige is still positing that subcultures are implicitly confrontational, precisely the same semiotic point that drives Subculture: The Meaning of Style.

It is entirely unclear whether Dick Hebdige likes punk music. Yet he raised the punk to the status of hero. The working-class youth with no future screams into the mic, destroys his guitar, wears bad fashion, curses on television, and flips off the Queen. Punk was, for Hebdige, a revolution played out in the field of signifiers. It’s a powerful picture, and at the time punk was a new, powerful kind of rock and roll that did scare authorities and create moral panic. Yet, as an academic, and as a student of the CCCS, Hebdige created the punk as a model. The real power of Subculture: The Meaning of Style is that it is, in its own way, as “spectacular” as the scene it analyzes. Its combination of semiotics and rebellion opened a door that social scientists in Britain (and elsewhere) were quick to run through. Hebdige’s approach gave scholars a broad canvas for painting popular music as culturally significant. Although it had its critics--Frith, Laing, Grossberg, and others--those same critics prove the point that writing on musical subcultures after Hebdige had to address Hebdige. While “subculture” had been in scholarly usage for decades, it was Hebdige and his heroic punks that set the stage for subcultural studies to come.

In the late 1980’s, a grand thing happened in Britain. House music, the rebirth of disco in the black, gay clubs of Chicago, took hold in the UK, especially the style soon known as “Acid House” for the squiggly “acid” basslines produced by the Roland TB-303 synthesizer. At the same time, MDMA, or “Ecstasy,” became a popular recreational drug, quite probably reaching the burgeoning Acid House scene along the same paths as the music. Affluent British youth, having experienced the euphoria of nonstop clubbing at getaway locations like the Spanish island of Ibiza, combined Ecstasy and Acid House into a movement which soon broke the bounds of the exclusive nightclubs. As a means to escape both the perceived banality of mainstream popular music and the strict moralism of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Acid House exploded into “rave,” with thousands of kids gathering at underground, illegal parties. Fueled by tabloid-magazine accounts, rave became labeled as a culture and as a threat. For academics trained in the CCCS tradition, it seemed like Hebdige’s prophesy come true: Here was the next ‘punk,’ a new subculture challenging hegemony, creating both a legal challenge and a moral panic. Literature on Acid House and rave flourished, both academic and otherwise. Yet rather than being simply a continuation of the Hebdige approach, Acid House and rave became a testing ground for that approach, and it turned out that it didn’t always work. Rave begat dozens of genres and subgenres, umbrella'ed alternately under the labels “electronic dance music” (EDM) or, at the point when the record industry attempted to mainstream it, “electronica.” The study of EDM, mypreferred term, came to be the trial of Hebdige’s Subculture...possibly sounding its death knell, or possibly pointing its way forward.

Although it was not the first book on Acid House, Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures (1996) became canonical in the study of EDM much as Subculture had became canonical for punk before it. Thornton, however, strives to create a version of “subculture” beyond that of the CCCS and calls into question its applicability to EDM:

This book doesn’t adopt [the CCCS’] theoretical definitions of of ‘subcultures’ for the main reason that I found them to be empirically unworkable. Instead I use the term ‘subcultures’ to identify those taste cultures which are labeled by the media as subcultures and the word ‘subcultural’ as a synonym for those practices that clubbers call ‘underground’ (Thornton 1996: 8).

Thornton’s new vision of subculture contains two main elements. One is a direct challenge to the CCCS paradigm and directly to Hebdige. Thornton takes the CCCS approach to task for its tendency to “banish media and commerce from their definitions of authentic culture” (1996: 9), which as we have seen is a direct result of the CCCS’ emphasis on the “working class” especially under Hoggart. In Hebdige’s case, the media becomes important to subculture only at the point of incorporation, “swallowing them up and effectively dismantling them” (Thornton 1996: 9). Media incorporation, in other words, is ‘selling out,’ when the Us/Them line is crossed and subcultural signs undergo ideological conversion. Thornton’s view of the relationship between subculture and media is more complex. On one hand, the mass media is integral to the process of constructing a subculture. Thornton writes, with a nod to Bourdieu, “media and other culture industries are there and effective right from the start. They are central to the process of subcultural formation, integral to the way we ‘create groups with words’” (1996: 117). In the case of EDM, it was the tabloids and their claims of moral outrages that turned the Acid House scene into the rave ‘movement.’ The media made rave politically and morally relevant. Indeed, Thornton goes so far as to state that “I am forced to conclude that subcultures are best defined as social groups that have been labeled as such” (1996: 162). On the other hand, EDM has its own media, one might say the DiY of punk taken to a new level. EDM has what Thornton calls “micromedia” to relay subcultural information--flyers, listings, zines, pirate radio--and “niche media” that report on the subculture--magazines such as The Face and i-D (1996: 137, 151). Thus for Thornton the media is an active force in both the definition of a subculture and its functioning.
The existence of explicitly subcultural media is integral to Thornton’s second key point, an idea that changed the direction of subcultural research. Thornton draws heavily upon the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu and his notion of “distinction.” Bourdieu speaks of “cultural capital,” “the lynchpin in a system of distinction in which cultural hierarchies correspond to social ones and people’s tastes are predominantly a marker of class” (Thornton 1996: 10). Rather than capital used to distinguish class from class, Thornton conceives of a “subspecies of capital operating within other less privileged domains. In thinking through Bourdieu’s theories in relation to the terrain of youth culture, I’ve come to conceive of ‘hipness’ as a form of subcultural capital” (1996: 11; emph. orig.). In short, the possession of subcultural capital both distinguishes a person as a member of a given subculture and distinguishes the position of a person within the hierarchy of the subculture. Subcultural capital can be objectified--and thus commodified--through exclusive recordings (e.g., “white-label” vinyl) or personified through knowledge (e.g., scenesters “in the know”). By emphasizing the forms and use of subcultural capital, Thornton shifts the study of subculture away from dominance and subversion to ideologies, meaning, and power within the group. Subcultural capital at once acknowledges, and puts in further relief, “Us vs. Them” and peers into the workings of subculture as a set of practices with its own internal set of rules and codes.

At the same time, another scholar, Steve Redhead, was independently arguing for a switch from “subculture” to “clubculture,” as one of Redhead’s book is indeed titled (Redhead 1997b). In his book, Redhead spends a short chapter paying respect to Thornton, especially for pointing out that the increasing fragmentation of popular music has conflated subculture and market niche. “The explanatory force of Hebdige’s theory of subcultures was always debatable pre-1979,” Redhead writes. “After 1979 it no longer worked well” (Redhead 197b: 103). In contrast to Thornton, Redhead did not move beyond Hebdige just with a seminal book but with a whole new “school.” In 1992, Redhead founded the Manchester Institute for the Study of Popular Culture at Manchester Metropolitan University--an auspicious location, given that Manchester is legendary as an entry point for Acid House and a birthplace for early rave. The new unit was purposefully interdisciplinary, drawing from (and shifting between) the School of Law and the Department of Social Science. Not content to just establish a new program, Redhead wanted to create a new paradigm with the specific mission of moving beyond the approach of the CCCS. According to Redhead, “neither 60s deviancy theory or 70s versions of Cultural Studies can satisfactorily account for global changes in youth and youth subcultures since the punk era” (1993a: 4). Then: Contemporary Cultural Studies. Now: Popular Cultural Studies.

Is Redhead’s Popular Cultural Studies new, and is it truly a “school?” To the latter question, only time can really tell, but Redhead certainly had a group of students who have joined him in his mission and created something that is just about a paradigm. Three things appear to distinguish the “Manchester school:” approach, subject, and area. The approach is one of play, in the post-modern sense, and especially playing with the rulebook of the CCCS. In the introduction to Subcultures to Clubcultures (subtitled “An Introduction to Popular Cultural Studies”), Redhead states that “‘Popular Cultural Studies’ consists of a critical homage to cultural theory of the past--through pastiche, parody, plunder, irony--just as popular music culture replays and reworks its own past in order to invent and create a new modern art form” (1997b: ix). This playful approach is most obvious in Redhead’s own writing. Subcultures to Cultures moves from one to the other in choppy, short chapters, mixing commentary on soccer and various strains of popular music with occasional bits of theory and chapter titles adopted from the names of pop songs. What is most striking about the Manchester approach is its centering of law as its subject. This is the result of the program’s interdisciplinary pedigree but more importantly of the times. Redhead summarized law’s centrality in this way in 1993:

As the end-of-the-century approaches a ‘hedonism in hard times’ is perhaps the best way to describe a sea of youth styles circulating and re-circulating in a harsh economic and political climate where youth is increasingly seen once again (after Margaret Thatcher in Britain at least) as a source of fear for employed, respectable society and a ‘law and order’ problem for the police” (Redhead 1993a: 4).

Instead of subculture being an aesthetic and implicit threat, subculture--or, rather, “clubculture”--is a physical and moral threat requiring legal action. Leisure, and especially youth leisure, has become a matter of governmental regulation under the moral imperatives of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. At no time was this made clearer than in 1994 when the British Parliament passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (often abbreviated as the CJA), which criminalized for the first time in British history a form of music, namely rave, with its infamous definition as ‘sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.’ Thus, if the intersection of popular culture and law is the subject of the Manchester school, its studies have been dominated by two areas: British football, and its notorious “soccer hooliganism,” and EDM.
When the Manchester approach is put into practice, more tropes emerge. The first is again a direct rejoinder of Hebdige, the replacement of the spectacular with disappearance. This is clearest in Antonio Melechi’s chapter in Rave Off (edited by Redhead), “The Ecstasy of Disappearance” (Melechi 1993). Two debts are paid. Rave culture owns up to Ibiza and its ‘Balearic vibe’ that, in Melechi’s view, were so integral to Acid House that it belongs to the “definitively postmodern experience of self....attempting to relive the jouissance of the Mediterranean holiday in the pleasures of dance, music and drugs” (Melechi 1993: 30). Melechi owns up to Baudrillard’s “hyperreal.” Ibiza offers a subcultural equivalent to the simulacra that drive American pop culture, “a cultural void, a seductive absence and enticing void where one can partake in the ecstasy of disappearance” (Melechi 1993: 32). Punk was spectacular; Acid House is a “non-spectacle...where the body is neither the subject of self-expression nor the object of the gaze” (1993: 34). Rave is Ibiza domesticated and nostalgized, “a place where nobody is, but everybody belongs” (1993: 37).

The second trope is a reemphasis on fieldwork. Hebdige was critical of ethnography and and participant observation, arguing that “the absence of any analytical or explanatory framework has guaranteed such work a marginal status in the predominantly positivist tradition of mainstream sociology” (1979: 75-76). Hebdige was really a semiotician, and by at least historical connection a sociologist (tho’ the Chicago school was very much based on fieldwork), not an anthropologist. Although students of the Manchester school may not be anthropologists either, they do seem to care more for what members of a subculture have to say. For example, Sarah Champion’s chapter in Redhead’s The Clubcultures Reader, “Fear and Loathing in Wisconsin” (Champion 1997), attempts to survey and explain the importation and translation of rave to the United States. She argues that rave in the U.S. has borrowed from existing subcultural referents in that country, from Deadheads to heavy metal. Unlike Hebdige--or many other CCCS-style researchers--Champion actually went to the places she discusses, describes them, and includes statements by informants. In her book This is Our House, Hillegonda Rietveld goes one further by undertaking a “comparative ethnographic research project” on the development an reinterpretation of House music based on research in Chicago, New York, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Manchester, and London (Rietveld 1998b: 5). Again, the Manchester school is not a school of anthropology. Yet it is, in my view, a refreshing and worthwhile step beyond the etic approach of the CCCS and Hebdige to actually talk to people, and one of the important aspects to emerge from Popular Cultural Studies.

The third trope is the most obvious to emerge from the Manchester dual focus on law and social science. Nearly every piece of writing written under Manchester auspices at least acknowledges the aforementioned CJA (at least the ones I’ve found), as well as the efforts of some members of the EDM community to protest the Bright Bill and Criminal Justice Bill (CJB) that preceded the CJB’s passage, and some focus explicitly on the topic. For instance, Adam Brown’s chapter in Redhead’s The Clubcultures Reader, “Let’s All Have A Disco?: Football, Popular Music, and Democratization” (1997) bears all the hallmarks of the Manchester approach, not the least evidence of which is its simultaneous focus on EDM and soccer. Its central thesis is that “participants in both popular music and football...have, in different ways, challenged the control of their industry, their popular culture” (Brown 1997: 79); by standing up both to industry and legislative control of soccer and EDM, a kind of democracy, or at least potential democracy, has grown up among respective fan communities. In the case of EDM, the CJB and its predecessors “forced politicization on a musical scene which, in its hedonism, was almost completely removed from established politics” (Brown 1997: 99). Rupa Huq (2002) has cataloged the the academic writing on the CJB and also contributed it to it (Huq 1999), although this literature is by no means limited to “Manchester” scholars. She also downplays the importance of anti-CJB protests in the rave community, stating that academic attention to anti-rave legislation is “out of proportion” to its impact on the culture itself. There was, in Huq’s personal experience, “widespread ignorance” of the cause within the EDM community, and “as a whole the campaign excited the radical left but went largely unnoticed by wider society” (Huq 2002: 93). Nevertheless, for popular cultural studies, the CJA is the apogee of EDM’s direct involvement with law.

The fourth and final trope is not what could be called a ‘tenet’ of the Manchester school so much as a tendency, and an unfortunate one at that. Because so-called “rave,” potentially conflated with Acid House, created the moral panic and the resultant legal actions, nearly all of Manchester’s attention is focused on this early phase and style of EDM. Other substyles, whether for instance earlier Techno or later Jungle/Drum’n’Bass, do not appear to merit the attention of popular cultural studies, since they do not fit that school’s rubric, just as some groupings did not merit the title “subculture” under the rubric of the CCCS. Indeed, post-rave styles are accused of ‘killing rave.’ Simon Reynolds is best known for his essential history of EDM, known in the UK as Energy Flash and in the US as Generation Ecstasy (Reynolds 1998a). Though essential, Reynolds’ history is distinctly biased towards a particular version of EDM, grounded in early rave. “I still believe,” Reynolds writes, “that the essence of rave resides with ‘hardcore pressure,’ the rave audience’s demand for a soundtrack to going mental and getting fucked up” (1998a: 8). In a chapter of The Clubcultures Reader, Reynolds declares that rave culture is an oxymoron and rave itself is “alive, but dead; more popular than ever, but a cultural cul-de-sac” (Reynolds 1998b: 102). With the voice of a critic, Reynolds indicts each of the post-rave genres as “preserving one aspect of rave culture at the expense of others;” Techno, Ambient, and electronica, for instance, “strip rave of its, well, raveyness, to fit a white studentey sensibility” (1998b: 103). Most egregiously, Reynolds points at Jungle/Drum’n’Bass as “the post-rave offshoot that has most thoroughly severed itself from rave’s premises” (1998b: 103), an “unfriendly society,” “more a case of of ‘get a life’ than ‘way of life’” (1998b: 110). Reynolds’ vitriol might be dismissed, but there’s an important message here. Just as critics proclaim that ‘rave is dead’ (and those same critics have said the same about jungle/Drum’n’Bass umpteen times), the Manchester school has stopped its interest in EDM with rave’s supposed death. The musical and cultural diversity of modern EDM has not furthered its interest in popular cultural studies; it appears to have killed it.

So, perhaps, Redhead’s Manchester Institute isn’t a “school” after all, because popular cultural studies appears to have eliminated its applicability in the future. Perhaps Redhead and his students, together with Sarah Thornton, are just two big nails in the coffin of Hebdige’s Subculture. In the same article in which she catalogs academic literature on the CJA, Rupa Huq also neatly spells out why “subculture” does not apply to EDM. First, “club culture, like acid house and rave before it, has always been more about having a good time than challenging the dominant order” (Huq 2002: 96). Second, and this is where Redhead enters the picture, ‘authentic subcultures’ are labeled as such by subculturalists not the other way round; the CCCS did not grant authenticity to EDM, and popular cultural studies under Redhead, with its emphasis on play and law, downplayed authenticity. Third--Thornton’s point--EDM (and Acid House/rave) does not necessarily engender long-term commitment; EDM’s communities are based on taste and fluid internal distinctions. Fourth, a point also made by Thornton, followers of EDM are not necessarily ‘youth.’ Finally, nodding now to Melechi, EDM is ‘faceless,’ not ‘spectacular.’ Does the unworkability of Hebdige’s Subculture mean that it can no longer be applied at all? Now this is where a new “school” might be born.

In yet another chapter of Redhead’s Clubcultures Reader, there’s something that’s just about a manifesto. David Muggleton identifies “The Post-subculturalist” (1997). Hebdige, for Muggleton, is just an old-fashioned Enlightenment modernist, as concerned with neo-Marxism as bricolage, stuck on binary oppositions like mainstream/subculture. As an exercise in conjecture, Muggleton wants to “explore the implications of the postmodern for ‘spectacular’ subcultural style” (1997: 185). This takes the critique of Hebdige both backwards and forwards: It returns ‘style’ and the ‘spectacular’ to the dialogue while also propelling that dialogue into the realm of theorists like Fredric Jameson. In the postmodern, “the absolute power of the image” is privileged at the same time that signifiers are set free of any restraints of authentic context. Subcultural reproduction is replaced by reproduction, use-value and exchange value are usurped by sign-value, and “subcultural simulacra not only take on the qualities of the real, but become hyperreal as reality is eclipsed” (1997: 197). There are no rules, only choice: “Post-subculturalists revel in the availability of subcultural choice” (1997: 198). Out goes the sequence of subcultures. In comes “subcultural fragmentation and proliferation, with a glut of revivals, hybrids and transformations, and the co-existence of myriad styles at any one point in time and individual subculturalists moving quickly and freely from one style to another as they wish; indeed, this high degree of sartorial mobility is the source of playfulness and pleasure” (1997: 198). In short, if identity is fragmented in the postmodern, can Us/Them oppositions hold, and if so can there be subcultures?

Six years later, Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl published The Post-Subcultures Reader (2003), an effort to gather the strands of this potential ‘school.’ What makes the post-subculturalist? First, it is clear that we are post-Redhead, post-Thornton, and most decidedly post-Hebdige. Target one: heroes; “the era seems long gone of working-class youth subcultures ‘heroically’ resisting subordination through ‘semiotic guerilla warfare’” (Weinzierl and Muggleton 2003: 4). Second target: essentialization and the “clichéed” notion that “both ‘subculture’ and the parent culture against which it is defined are coherent and homogeneous formations that can be clearly demarcated” (2003: 7). Third, a new body of theory rises to the top, led by Bourdieu (with due credit given to Thornton for going there first), Judith Butler and her concept of performativity, and Michel Maffesoli and his concept of fluid ‘tribal’ formations. Fourth, new terms are proposed and debated to replace “subculture,” including “clubculture” after both Thornton and Redhead--“a designated set of ‘tastes’ that are consumed within specific spatial locations”--and “neo-tribe,” “to capture the sense of fluidity and hybridity in the contemporary urban club-scene, with all the theoretical post-modern implications that this carries” (2003: 6). Fifth, again following up on Thornton and Redhead, is a further emphasis on some nature of ethnography. Sixth, in the wake of the widespread (and global) protests of globalization, such as the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle, the collapsing of “subculture” and radical “counterculture” within an explicitly political context becomes a special topic of interest, often labeled--with a knowing wink to punk--as “DiY culture” (McKay 1998). Lastly, taking all of these points together, EDM, or at least various versions of it, is resuscitated as an area worth attention.

Clearly, “post-subcultural studies” is an evolutionary step. Tracing the writings of Hillegonda Rietveld is a helpful means of explaining the bridges between “subculture,” “clubculture,” and “post-subculture.” Her contribution to Redhead’s Rave Off, “Living the Dream” (Rietveld 1993) falls squarely into the Manchester approach but with a twist. Like Melechi, Rietveld argues that rave is “escape” more than “resistance,” but this escape has ramifications: “It is possible therefore to argue, that a (political) critique was never posed. Rather, a threat to symbolic order was made by the attempt to avoid it altogether (Rietveld 1993: 43). She concludes that rave is “‘amoral’ rather than immoral; “when one escapes rather instead of opposes, no alternative moral values are proposed at all,” essentially removing rave from any sort of dialectical discourse (1993: 66). “The House Sound of Chicago” (Rietveld 1997), published in Redhead’s Clubcultures Reader, eschews subcultural analysis altogether in favor of a socio-historical placement of House music in the black and gay community of the style’s hometown. This is Our House (Rietveld 1998b) has already been discussed for its use of comparative ethnography, integrating the racial/sexual politics of Chicago House, the “panic” of UK Acid House, and the distinct case of “Gabber” in the Netherlands. This book must also be noted for actually talking about the music: Rietveld poses that distinguishing technique of the House DJ, regardless of substyle, is the “slow mix,” a methodology that can be directly traced to avant-garde New York disco and that thus grounds House music in all of its various locations (1998b: 9-10). Yet in the same year Rietveld also contributed a piece to McKay’s DiY Culture entitled “Repetitive beats: free parties and the politics of contemporary DiY dance culture in Britain” (Rietveld 1998a). Although riffing off of the famous language of the CJA, the central concern here is that confluence of EDM and political activism labeled as “DiY,” what McKay defines as “a youth-centred and -directed cluster of interests and practices around green radicalism, direct action politics, new musical sounds and experiences [and] a kind of 1990s counterculture” (McKay 1998: 2). Rietveld’s focus is on “DiY sound systems” and what happens when party and demonstration are one and the same. She focuses on a particular version of dance music culture--the Crusties, Spiral Tribe, and so forth. There are still echoes of Manchester: Her description of rave as a sort of ‘Surrealist weekend’ (my phrase, combining two of Rietveld’s terms) sounds like Melechi, and her conclusion that EDM is political because it has been tightly regulated goes right back to the CJB. Yet Rietveld has come far from being Redhead’s research assistant in Birmingham, following the evolution of EDM and the discussion of it to become at least a de facto post-subculturalist.

Again, the true nature of post-subcultural studies is revealed by its application. Three chapters in the Post-Subcultures Reader deal expressly with EDM. Toshiyo Ueno’s “ Unlearning to Raver” begins by again spelling out how the CCCS approach is inappropriate for the study of rave: Rave is not working-class and neither symbolically nor politically resistant. Instead Ueno uses the term “urban tribes,” “small or subsocial groups based on urban (youth) subculture, which consist of shared choices of styles, tastes, fashions, behaviours and rituals” (Ueno 2003: 102). What distinguishes urban tribes from CCCS-style subcultures is that tribes exist in fluid relationship with each other; they negotiate and communicate, people, traits, and ideas moving between them. In other words, there is no ‘versus.’ “The subcultural tribes intersect, contact and conflict with each other in ‘archipelagos’ and constellations weaved by and around themselves” (2003: 108). Ueno extends the dearth of ‘versus’ in EDM to its study. Bringing the ethnography of subculture in line with modern anthropology, Ueno draws upon James Clifford and George Marcus to collapse the emic/etic boundary and introduce cultural poetics. “There is no external position for the researcher or meta-level of knowledge in subcultural ethnography,” Ueno claims (2003: 109). This is especially true in EDM, where researchers are at the very least also dancers and often DJ’s or event organizers. Graham St. John’s “Post-Rave Technotribalism and the Carnival of Protest” studies the intersection of rave and political DiY culture in-depth. St. John protests the dismissal of Generation X as ‘slackers’ who “submit en masse to cynicism, irony, and modes of escape” (2003: 69). Instead, via the Internet and EDM, ‘neo-tribes’ represent a new kind of activism fighting against new kinds of institutions, shadowy groups like the IMF and the WTO. These post-subcultures can be both spectacular and activist: “While the technoculturalists and the post-rave posses explored here may be spectacular stylists, engaging in theatrical excess, their digitalized images, sounds, and performances are data-streamed in the service of new activist causes” (St. John 200378). Lastly, Rupa Huq joins the post-subcultural party by comparing two realms of popular music that are global in both inspiration and appeal, the ‘New Asian Dance Music (NADM)’ of British artists like Cornershop and Talvin Singh, and French rapper MC Solaar. “Unlike the CCCS paradigm of fixed pre-determined lifecycles and cultures rooted in the territorialized physical space of street corners, NADM and French rap operate in undeniably globalized conditions where ideas, music, technology and people can circulate on a scale unseen before” (Huq 2003: 204). What, Huq asks, does “subculture” have to say about the global postmodern?

Perhaps a more pertinent and potent question might be, bluntly, ‘is ‘subculture’ as a workable academic approach dead?’ To this I would say a qualified ‘no;’ though definitions change as new ideas and cultural formations arise, scholarly concepts do not die so much as get reworked. This is sort of an epistemological version of the post-subculturalist position; there is not a fixed series of subcultures, from punk to rave, but a panoply of subcultures that may at any point overlap in personnel and practices. Nevertheless, it is worth recapping how the definition of ‘subculture’ has changed over time. At the beginning of the century, more-or-less in Chicago, “sub-culture” (remember that hyphen) was a social grouping, perhaps urban and perhaps not, that gave an individual a unified sense of identity within culture at large. This definition evolved to increasingly focus on deviancy and ‘problems’ solved by subcultural identity. In the CCCS in Britain in the 1960s, scholars in a specific historical, theoretical, and political milieu created a specific paradigmatic definition of subculture that privileged working-class youth and semiotic resistance. This approach reached its climax--if not in theoretical complexity at least in influence--with Dick Hebdige’s Subculture in 1979, painting the British punk as a heroic ‘semiotic guerilla warrior’ challenging hegemony by making spectacular noise. A decade later, as Acid House and rave created a new ‘moral panic’ in Britain, scholars led by Steve Redhead and Sarah Thornton found that the strict boundaries of the CCCS’ definition could no longer be directly applied and introduced new concepts, from Bourdieu’s ‘capital’ to the legal control of leisure. ‘Subculture’ became, tentatively, ‘clubculture.’ Then, as the globe was shrunken by electronic media and rave exploded into the diversity of electronic dance music, yet more inspirations, models, and terms became necessary, to the point that theory was supposedly so far removed from the original source that some writers spoke of ‘post-subcultures.’ This does not mean that subculture is ‘dead;’ it has simply evolved to keep up with the times. To use a broad metaphor, the House DJ bears very little resemblance to medieval minstrel, but that does not mean that music is dead.

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