Subculture theory and Subcultures in Music

Subcultures upset the mainstream because they don't conform with their views, and ultimately confront the mainstream with their own VERY different views!

-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.

Phil Cohen: subcultures form in reaction to social divisions and loss of community. E.g. Skinheads: exaggeration of working class values and style.
  

David Reisman: Subcultures - Audiences who actively sought a minority style and interpreted it in accordance with subversive values.

Dick Hebdige - Subcultures express their ‘resistance’ through style – material things – capitalism can manufacture these ‘things’ and make a profit from them. 

          - looked at how subcultures are absorbed into the mainstream.

           – “the conversion of subcultural signs (dress, music etc.) into mass-produced objects (i.e. the commodity form).”

Backgrounds:	Subculture:
Poor background and proud of it – adopts and exaggerates working class (or ghetto) style.	‘Old Skool’ hip hop and  Skinheads looked back to the more traditional working class community.
Poor background but anxious to show they have transcended this in terms of lifestyle and wealth.	‘Rude boyz/hip-hoppers’. Use dress to either reinforce their class origins or to exaggeratedly display they are not bound by these roots. Wealth element represented through tracksuit & ‘Bling-bling’. Mods - Dick Hebdige claims that the progenitors of the mod subculture "appear to have been a group of working-class dandies, possibly descended from the devotees of the Italianite [fashion] style."
Middle class background and rejecting parents’ ‘suburban’ values and lifestyle.	Punk/Goths Education taught the young to strive for social status through academic achievement but, when most of the working class failed, this promoted "status frustration" or reaction formation, inverting middle-class values to strike back at the system that had let them down.
Resistance is in short bursts (parties, gigs, festivals, weekenders and clubs) of extreme dress/behaviour, before returning to the mainstream (jobs, school etc.)	Ravers - Only reverted to their background, mostly at the weekend, when they would go to clubs and parties before returning to their daily routine at weekdays.

Sub-cultures:

Ravers

‘Rude Boyz’ / ‘Bling-bling’ hip-hoppers

Punks

Goths

Rockers/ bikers/ ‘grunge’ kids

‘Old Skool’ hip hop

Hippies

Mods

Sub culture theory by Matthew Hall

In post-war period, as the "teenager" began to emerge, and fears about juvenile delinquency rose, sociologists and other theorists began to investigate sub-cultures (mainly criminal or deviant) in attempt to understand how they were formed.

The main ideas came from the centre for contemporary cultural studies in Birmingham (often refferred to as CCCS). they included social scientists like Stuart Hall, Dick hebdige and Albert Cohen who made the following conclusions about youth subcultures:

• They are formed by reaction to mainstream ideology, mostly of the wealthier or more privileged culture.
• They are usually formed amongst young people from lower middle to working class backgrounds, people who feel they have no access to, or kinship with the mainstream society. in other words, sub-cultures are socially constructed.
• Some react by completely rejecting the values of the mainstream as being "fake"..so they create values which contradict these in their own way.
• others-though from working class backgrounds-use dress to either re-inforce their class origins or to exaggeratedly display they are not bound by these roots.
• "subcultures develop in response to 'dominant meaning systems.' they are acts of resistance, protest, refusal which seek to differentiate themselves from the mainstream."

This view of sub-cultures does not see them as youth culture overall, but rather as small, organised groups who are all reacting to mainstream culture and society in specific rituals of behaviour, dress and taste. they aren't even "counter-cultures" as they NEED mainstream to react to; plus the resistance is in short, intense bursts before the members re-enter the mainstream.

The Mainstream:

Mainstream is, generally, the common current thought of the majority. However, the mainstream is far from cohesive; rather the concept is often considered a cultural construct. This includes:

• something that is available to the general public.
• something that has ties to corporate or commercial entities.

As such, the mainstream includes all popular culture, typically disseminated by mass media. The opposite of the mainstream are subcultures, countercultures, cult followings, and genre. Additionally, mainstream is sometimes a codeword used for an actual ethnocentric or hegemonic subculture point of view, especially when delivered in a culture war speech. It is often used as a pejorative term by subcultures who view ostensibly mainstream culture as not only exclusive but artistically and aesthetically inferior.

Mainstream music denotes music that is familiar and unthreatening to the masses, as for example popular music, pop music, middle of the road music, pop rap or soft rock; Mainstream jazz is generally seen as an evolution of be-bop, which was originally regarded as radical


Sub Cultures and Their Backgrounds

Each sub-culture consists of people who come from varying backgrounds which heavily influences the music they compose, below are all the subcultures with the backgrounds they originated from;

A poor background and they're proud of it, they adopt and exaggerate working class (or ghetto) style

• "old skool" hip hop - describes the earliest commercially recorded hip hop music (approximately from 1979–1984),and the music in the period preceding it from which it was directly descended (see Roots of hip hop). Old school hip hop is said to end around 1983 or 1984 with the emergence of Run–D.M.C., the first new school hip hop group.However, some old school rap stations cover 1980s hip hop in general, occasionally extending even into the 1990s.

A poor background but anxious to show they have transcended this in terms of lifestyle and wealth

• "Rude Boyz" - rudeboy, rudie, rudi or rudy are common terms used in Jamaica. In the 1960s it was also used for juvenile delinquents and criminals in Jamaica, and has since been used in other contexts. During the late-1970s 2 Tone ska revival in England, the terms rude boy, rude girl and other variations were often used to describe fans of that genre, and this new definition continued to be used in the third wave ska subculture. In the United Kingdom in the 2000s, the terms rude boy and rude girl have become slang which mainly refer to people (largely youths) who are involved in street culture, similar to gangsta or badman. 

• "hip-hoppers" -  is a form of musical expression and artistic culture that originated in African-American communities during the late 1970s in New York City.DJ Afrika Bambaataa outlined the four pillars of Hip-hop culture: MCing, DJing, breaking and graffiti writing. Other elements include beatboxing.
  
  Since its emergence in the South Bronx, Hip-hop culture has spread around the world.Hip-hop music first emerged with disc jockeys creating rhythmic beats by looping breaks (small portions of songs emphasizing a percussive pattern) on two turntables, more commonly referred to as sampling. This was later accompanied by "rap", a rhythmic style of chanting or poetry presented in 16 bar measures or time frames, and beatboxing, a vocal technique mainly used to imitate percussive elements of the music and various technical effects of hip hop DJ's. An original form of dancing and particular styles of dress arose among fans of this new music. These elements experienced considerable refinement and development over the course of the history of the culture.
  The relationship between graffiti and hip-hop culture arises from the appearance of new and increasingly elaborate and pervasive forms of the practice in areas where other elements of hip hop were evolving as art forms, with a heavy overlap between those who wrote graffiti and those who practiced other elements of the culture.

• "Modz" -is a subculture that originated in London, England in the late 1950s and peaked in the early-to-mid 1960s.
  
  Significant elements of the mod subculture include: fashion (often tailor-made suits); pop music, including African American soul, Jamaican ska, and British beat music and R&B; and Italian motor scooters. The original mod scene was also associated with amphetamine-fuelled all-night dancing at clubs.From the mid-to-late 1960s onwards, the mass media often used the term mod in a wider sense to describe anything that was believed to be popular, fashionable or modern.

Middle class background and rejecting parents "suburban" values and lifestyles

• "punks" -The punk subculture is centered around listening to recordings or live concerts of a loud, aggressive genre of rock music called punk rock, usually shortened to punk. While most punk rock uses the distorted guitars and noisy drumming that is derived from 1960s garage rock and 1970s pub rock, some punk bands incorporate elements from other subgenres, such as metal (e.g., mid-1980s-era Discharge) or folk rock (Billy Bragg). Different punk subcultures often distinguish themselves by having a unique style of punk rock, although not every style of punk rock has its own associated subculture. Most punk rock songs are short, have simple and somewhat basic arrangements using relatively few chords, and they use lyrics that express punk values and ideologies ranging from the nihilism of the Sex Pistols' "No Future" to the anti-drug message of Minor Threat's "Straight Edge". Punk rock is usually played in small bands rather than by solo artists. Punk bands usually consist of a singer, one or two overdriven electric guitars, an electric bass player, and a drummer (the singer may be one of the musicians). In some bands, the band members may do backup vocals, but these typically consist of shouted slogans, choruses, or football(soccer)-style chants, rather than the arranged harmony vocals of pop bands. 

Above: a female goth.

• "goths" - is a musical subgenre of post-punk and alternative rock that formed during the late 1970s. Gothic rock bands grew from the strong ties they had to the English punk rock and emerging post-punk scenes. The genre itself was defined as a separate movement from punk rock during the early 1980s largely due to the significant stylistic divergences of the movement; gothic rock, as opposed to punk, combines dark, often keyboard-heavy music with introspective and depressing lyrics. Notable gothic rock bands include Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Cocteau Twins, The Cure, The Sisters of Mercy, Virgin Prunes, Sex Gang Children, Christian Death, , This Mortal Coil,, UK Decay, The Mission, Specimen, Theatre of Hate, Theatre of Ice, Xmal Deutschland, The Danse Society, Dead Can Dance, Clan of Xymox, The Bolshoi, 45 Grave, , Kommunity FK and Alien Sex Fiend, among many others. Gothic rock gave rise to a broader goth subculture that includes clubs, fashion and numerous publications that grew in popularity in the 1980s.

• "hippies" - The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s, swiftly spreading to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and similar urban areas. The early hippie ideology included the countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Some created their own social groups and communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as marijuana and LSD to explore alternative states of consciousness.

Resistance is in short bursts ( parties, gigs, festivals, weekenders, clubs) of extreme dress/behaviour, before returning to the mainstream (jobs,school etc.)

• "ravers" - Rave, rave dance, and rave party are terms with first documented use on April 4, 1970 to describe RAVE Dances, and later in 1980 for Acid house parties with fast-paced electronic music and light shows.At these parties people dance to dance music played by DJs and occasionally live performers. The genres of electronic dance music played include House, Trance, Electro House, Hardstyle, Drum and bass, Dubstep, Breakbeat, Hardcore techno, Funktronica, and Jungle with the accompaniment of laser light shows, projected images and artificial fog.
• Ravers were people that just wanted to let off some steam at night after their week of work, then return to their normal schedule over the next week, they weren't a counter-culture, they just wanted to have wreckless fun!