Many thanks to Dr. Chris Kennett for this guest post: The idea of subcultures as homogeneous, internally consistent and spectacularly defined signifying practices has taken a knock over the last fifteen years or so. When Dick Hebdige and his Birmingham chums first mapped the socio-anthropological and ethnographic terrain of the spectacular subculture in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), a whole new area of research emerged at the junction-points of several disciplines (social psychology, semiotics, human geography, politics and ethnomusicology among them); and in those days, subcultures were defined by two opposite tropes: similarity of world-view within each subculture and defiant distance from hegemonic models of living in the wider world: you knew you were in a subculture because everyone outside the group was suspicious of you, and everyone inside realised that you and they were on the same wavelength, not least because of your similar taste patterns in clothes, private language, dance, political attitude and so on. However, by the time Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures book hit the common-rooms in 1995, the simple us/them dialectic was being challenged by something altogether more complex, more fluid and less overtly political in its habitus. Since then, the tendency in the literature is to assume that subcultures nowadays are far more self-aware, far more post-modern, far more problematic, all round. Andy Bennett’s ‘neo-tribes’ concept, dating from an article published in 1999, takes this fluidity further: no subculture is as certain of its spectacular distance and internal homogeneity as they were in the days of Hebdige’s Mods, Punk and Skins, surely?
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