Punk's safety pins and the long academic argument over what subcultures mean
Studying British punk in the late 1970s, Dick Hebdige compared its style to Duchamp's ready-mades, ordinary objects turned into art simply by being chosen. Clothes pegs, safety pins, television parts and lavatory chains became fashion. His point was that subcultures speak through style, repurposing everyday goods to announce that their members refuse the mainstream.
A subculture is a group inside a larger society that sets itself apart from the dominant culture's values while still living within it, developing its own norms on matters from politics to sex. Scholars in North America and Britain began studying the idea in the 1940s and 1950s. Examples range from Teddy Boys, mods and rockers to bikers, punks, hip-hoppers and furries. As early as 1950 David Riesman contrasted a passive majority consuming commercial styles with a minority actively seeking its own.
Interpretations have passed through three phases. The Chicago School, including Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth, first treated subcultures as deviance born of weak ties to mainstream society, and Howard Becker added that society labels such groups as outsiders. At Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall, John Clarke, Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts recast them as resistance through rituals, a working-class response to dominant middle-class culture. Hebdige and Paul Willis emphasised bricolage, remixing mass-produced goods to express conflict. The latest view treats subcultures as forms of distinction; Sarah Thornton, drawing on Bourdieu, described subcultural capital in 1995, the insider knowledge and possessions that raise status within a group.
Ken Gelder offered six markers in 2007, including an often negative stance toward work, ties to territory such as the street or club rather than property, belonging found outside the family, a taste for excess, and refusal of mass-produced ordinariness. Gary Alan Fine and Sherryl Kleinman argued in 1979 that subcultures motivate would-be members to adopt their artefacts, norms and values.
Success can be fatal. Businesses chasing cool borrow subcultural clothing and music, and the originals often mutate or die as members move on to stranger styles. Jazz, goth, punk, hip hop and rave each moved from fringe to mainstream within a short span, and British youth subcultures were at times treated as moral problems to be managed.
Source: Subculture
