Page 256 - Cultural Theory

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••• Popular Music •••

semiotics to account for the meanings of youth style. For instance, he uses Barthes’s
(1977a) discussion, ‘The rhetoric of the image’ to analyse the meaning of style. In
this essay, Barthes draws a contrast between the ‘intentional’ advertising image and
the apparently ‘innocent’ news photograph. Both are, in fact, complex articulations
of specific codes and practices, but the news photo appears more ‘natural’ and less
loaded than an advertisement. Hebdige (1979: 100–1) uses this distinction to point
out the difference between subcultural and normal styles. For example, the conven-
tional outfits worn by the ‘average man and woman in the street’ contain a whole
range of messages that display such matters as class, status, and so forth. But the cru-
cial point is that they appear natural or normal in contrast to the spectacular subcul-
tural styles. Moreover, these are obviously fabricated and display their own codes, for
example, the punk’s ripped t-shirt demonstrates that such matters have been thought
about rather than just thrown together. In this they go against the grain of the main-
stream culture. Hebdige (ibid.: 102) argues that the ‘point’ of all the spectacular sub-
cultural styles is to communicate difference from the mainstream while sustaining a
common group identity.
One especially important defining feature of subcultural groups, which distin-
guishes them from other cultural formations, is the way in which commodities are
used. They are all cultures of conspicuous consumption. Hebdige uses the anthropo-
logical concept of bricolage to indicate how various commodities are subverted
through processes of improvisation and innovation. For example, he indicates how
the Mods transformed the motor scooter from an ultra-respectable means of trans-
port into a menacing symbol of group solidarity. In the same manner of improvisa-
tion, Union Jacks were cut up and turned into tailored jackets, or put in the back of
parkas. Nevertheless, while Hebdige argues that subcultures resist the dominant
order, they do so only indirectly. Often, however, forms of subcultural expression are
incorporated back into the dominant social order through two main routes. First,
there is the ‘commodity form’, which involves the ‘conversion of subcultural signs
(dress, music, etc.) into mass-produced objects’ (ibid.: 94). It is the means by which
‘the Other can be trivialized, naturalized, domesticated’ or ‘transformed into mean-
ingless exotica’ (ibid.: 97). Second, there is the ‘ideological form’ of incorporation
through ‘the “labelling” and re-definition of deviant behaviour by dominant groups –
the police, media, the judiciary’ (Hebdige, 1979: 94), which involves the social
control of subcultural groups.
Although difficulties in the CCCS approach were quickly realized, it is important
to emphasize that it has cast an influential spell over subsequent work in the field.
Much of the writing on rave culture, for instance, in the 1990s clearly remained com-
mitted to analysing the more spectacular dimensions of youth consumption and to
use this as the means of commenting on the situation of young people in general
(see, for example, Melechi, 1993). Nevertheless, an early and very useful critique is
contained in Gary Clarke’s (1981) discussion, in which three specific problems are
identified. First, there is no consideration of the dynamic nature of subcultural mem-
bership as ‘we are given little sense of what subcultures actually do, and we do not
know whether their commitment is fulltime or just, say, a weekend phenomenon’.

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