Page 258 - Cultural Theory

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••• Popular Music •••

CCCS themes to explore the relationships between race and class in contemporary
Britain and includes an extensive discussion of how black music contributes to a cultural
diaspora. As he puts it, the task is ‘to suggest why Afrika Bambaataa and Jah Shaka, lead-
ing representatives of hip-hop and reggae culture respectively, find it appropriate to take
the names of African chiefs distinguished in anti-colonial struggle, or why young black
people in places as different as Hayes and Harlem choose to style themselves the Zulu
Nation’ (Gilroy, 1987: 156). In Gilroy’s (1993) later work he examines how the Black
Atlantic, his term for the African diaspora, binds together the black people of Africa, the
Americas, the Caribbean and Europe in a long history of intercultural connection to
develop an alternative account of modernity.
Gilroy’s arguments have also been taken up by scholars concerned with how new
forms of cultural identity are sustained in metropolitan contexts. One influential
study is Steve Jones’s (1988) discussion of Black Youth, White Culture, which contains
a rich ethnography of young people’s identity formation in Birmingham. Particularly
significant is the way in which reggae provides a site where dialogues between black
and white youth can occur. He argues that:

They are visible everywhere in a whole range of cross-racial affiliations and
shared leisure spaces; on the streets, around the games machine, in the local
chip shop, in the playgrounds and parks, right through the mixed rock and reg-
gae groups for which the area has become renowned.
(ibid.: xiv).

More recently Les Back (1996) has analysed how new identities are emerging
within hybrid forms of musical and cultural expression. Especially important to his
argument is the development of London’s jungle scene as he explains that:

Jungle demonstrates a diaspora sensitivity that renders explicit the Jamaican
traces within hip hop culture along with a radical realignment of national
images. Black, white and Asian junglists all claim that the music uniquely
belongs to Britain, or more specifically that jungle is a ‘a London somet’ing’ …
The nascent patriotism found in jungle is all the more surprising given that the
genesis of the scene was in some part due to a hardening of racism within rave,
combined with a racially exclusive door policy in London clubs.
(ibid.: 234).

Clearly much of this work continues to be influenced by the CCCS subcultural
approach, albeit through the lens of multicultural politics. Others, however, have
been much more critical of the Centre’s overall thinking.
Sarah Thornton’s (1995: 8) case study of British rave clubs in the late 1980s and early
1990s is an explicit attempt to offer a ‘post-Birmingham’ analysis of youth culture in a
number of important ways. Her definition of club cultures is based on the understand-
ing that clubbers form specific ‘taste cultures’, which enables her to examine the role of
‘distinction’ in three spheres: ‘the authentic versus the phoney, the “hip” versus the

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