Page 255 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-12.qxd 5/9/2007 6:08 PM Page 244

••• Eamonn Carrabine •••

Birmingham in the 1970s. For theorists working at the CCCS, the music and style of
the various spectacular youth subcultures, such as teddy boys, mods, rockers, skin-
heads and punks, signified fractions of working-class resistance to the structural
changes occurring in post-war Britain. In particular, a Gramscian understanding of
class domination and opposition is mobilized in an effort to assess whether subordi-
nate groups are incorporated into the dominant ideology.
Phil Cohen’s (1972) article was an early instance of this work and proved to be a
highly influential account of the emergence of ‘mods’ and ‘skinheads’ in the East
End of London during the 1960s, as he offered a distinctive class analysis of the
destruction of working-class community as a consequence of economic changes that
were drastically restructuring social relations in the area. The Birmingham Centre
refined this approach by explicitly drawing on Gramsci’s (1971) work to locate sub-
cultures not just in relation to parent cultures, but in a fully theorized understand-
ing of class conflict. The conceptual framework is detailed in the chapter
‘Subcultures, cultures and class’ (Clarke et al., 1976) from the collection Resistance
through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 1976). The various post-war working-class youth
subcultures discussed in the book are seen as movements that win back space,
through issuing challenges to the status quo. However, these are not political solu-
tions. Resistance is played out in the fields of leisure and consumption, rather than
in the workplace. For Clarke et al. (1976), a key consequence of resistance through
rituals and symbols is that they ultimately fail to challenge the broader structures of
power. However, few of the essays in the collection explicitly address how music is
used by subcultures, partly because the concept itself has its roots in the sociology of
deviance and studies of youth delinquency. Instead the most detailed accounts from
the Birmingham Centre on this question can be found in the work of Paul Willis
(1978) and Dick Hebdige (1979).
In Paul Willis’s (1978) study of hippies and motor-bike boys in his book, Profane
Culture, he develops a class-based analysis of popular music’s social significance. He
interprets the different ways music is used by working-class motorcycle boys and
middle-class hippies in terms of their contrasting structural locations. In constructing
these arguments he draws on the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) concept
of homology to describe the symbolic fit between the values and life-styles of a group,
its subjective experiences and the musical forms it uses to express its primary concerns.
What he demonstrates is that, contrary to popular images, which present subcultures
as lawless mobs, the internal structure of any subculture is characterized by extreme
orderliness. The key implication is that subcultures are structured so that different
aspects of the lifestyle fit together to form a whole. For example, he argues that it was
no accident that the motor-bike boys liked early rock ‘n’ roll singles, whereas the hip-
pies preferred album-based progressive rock. Rock ‘n’ roll music matched the restless-
ness and mobility of the motor-bike boys. In contrast, there is a different homology in
the hippie subculture, which is expressed in the fit between an alternative value sys-
tem, hallucinogenic drugs and progressive rock albums.
Dick Hebdige’s (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style is essentially a textual read-
ing of various post-war youth subcultures using the methods of structuralism and
• 244 •