Subcultures and Scenes

This book is an attempt to subject the various youth-protest movements of Britain in the last 15 years to the sort of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic analytical techniques propagated by, above all, Roland Barthes. The book is recommended whole-heartedly to anyone who would like fresh ideas about some of the most stimulating music of the rock era - The New York Times

Introducing new, contemporary essays and critique to sit alongside classic and canonical texts on subculture, The Subcultures Reader is the only collected work of its kind in the field, bringing together the most valuable and stimulating writings from the Chicago School to the present day.

What is 'Arab' about Arab subcultures? This is the first book to set out to delineate different ways of studying and theorizing Arab subcultural groups and practices, including film, graffiti, music, live art performances, Arab techies and youth cultures. Contributors tackle a number of questions including: How is the study of Arab subcultures to be theorized? How are we to analyse such creative processes in a new worldliness characterized by trans-temporality and trans-subjectivity? Arab Subcultures effectively opens up a critical and interdisciplinary dialogue about Arab subcultures with different fields of enquiry - including anthropology, philosophy, art criticism and cultural studies - at the heart of which lies the key intellectual task of re-imagining the uneasy relation between aesthetics and politics in anage of revolutions.

Queercore is a queer and punk transmedia movement that was instigated in 1980s Toronto via the pages of the underground fanzine ("zine") J.D.s. Authored by G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce, J.D.s. declared "civil war" on the punk and gay and lesbian mainstreams, consolidating a subculture of likeminded filmmakers, zinesters, musicans and performers situated in pointed opposition to the homophobia of mainline punk and the lifeless sexual politics and exclusionary tendencies of dominant gay and lesbian society. More than thirty years later, queercore and its troublemaking productions remain under the radar, but still culturally and politically resonant. This book brings renewed attention to queercore, exploring the homology between queer theory/practice and punk theory/practice at the heart of queercore mediamaking. Through analysis of key queercore texts, this book also elucidates the tropes central to queercore's subcultural distinction: unashamed sexual representation, confrontational politics and "shocking" embodiments, including those related to size, ability and gender variance. An exploration of a specific transmedia subculture grounded in archival research, ethnographic interviews, theoretical argumentation and close analysis, ultimately, Queercore proffers a provocative, and tangible, new answer to the long-debated question, "What does it mean to be queer?"

A highly identifiable topic of discussion among scholars and practitioners alike is police culture. Unfortunately, a large degree of vagueness and confusion also comes with this concept, as a variety of definitions, perspectives, and levels of aggregation are used to describe the ways in which officers cope with the problems and conditions faced out on the street and inside the police department.

This study uses two particular subcultures, skinheads and punks, to explore how constructions of subcultures in time, language, space, body practice, and identity offer alternative ways of understanding youth-adult relationships.

Today's students access a variety of media to keep abreast of new and up-and-coming musical artists. Where the Music Takes You: The Social Psychology of Music Subcultures turns this interest into a successful vehicle for educating readers about some of the most fundamental sociological and methodological concepts, including rituals, symbols, ethnography, participant observation, and symbolic interactionist theory.

This book presents a cultural history of subcultures, covering a remarkable range of subcultural forms and practices. It begins with London’s ‘Elizabethan underworld’, taking the rogue and vagabond as subcultural prototypes: the basis for Marx’s later view of subcultures as the lumpenproletariat, and Henry Mayhew’s view of subcultures as ‘those that will not work’. Subcultures are always in some way non-conforming or dissenting. They are social - with their own shared conventions, values, rituals, and so on – but they can also seem ‘immersed’ or self-absorbed.

The Psychology of Sub-Culture in Sport and Physical Activity will be ideal reading for sport and exercise academics and practitioners, advanced students of applied sport psychology, and related fields such as sport science, critical studies, sociology, cultural studies and social anthropology.

The concept of "subculture" has long been of significant importance in research on youth, style, deviance and popular culture. Although in more recent years subculture has been the subject of sustained critique, it still provides a valuable point of reference for study and research. This text offers students an up-to-date and wide-ranging account of new developments in youth culture research that reject, refine or reinvent the concept of subculture. Bringing together key theoretical statements with illuminating analyses of particular aspects of youth culture - popular music, clubbing, body modification, the internet, etc. - this is an ideal introduction to a diverse and wide-ranging field.

Thornton paints a picture of of club cultures as “taste cultures” brought together by micro-media (such as flyers and listings), transformed into self-conscious “subcultures” by niche media (like the music and style press), and sometimes recast as “movements” with the aid of mass media (like tabloid front pages). She also analyses the changing status of the medium of recording, from a marginal, second-class entertainment in the 1950s to the much celebrated, dominant form of clubs and raves in the 1990s. Drawing from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Thornton coins the term “subcultural capital” to make sense to the distinctions made by “cool” youth, paying particular attention to their disparagement of the “mainstream” against which they measure their alternative cultural worth.

Once it was just Mods and Rockers or Hippies and Skinheads. Now we have Riot Grrls and Rappers; Modern Primitives and Metalheads; Goths, Clubcultures and Fetishists; Urban Tribes, New Age Travellers and Internet fan groups. In a global society with a rapid proliferation of images, fashions and lifestyles, it is -unsurprisingly - becoming increasingly difficult to pinpoint what 'subculture' actually means. Enthusiastically adopted by the media and academia, 'subculture' may be a convenient way to describe more unconventional aspects of youth culture, but it does little to help us comprehend the diverse range of youth groups in today's so-called 'postmodern' world. How can we begin to rethink, reformulate and replace outdated notions of 'subcultures' to make them applicable to the experiences of youth in the twenty-first century? And to what extent does this involve the challenging of past orthodoxies about spectacular subcultural styles?