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Cultural Studies & Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style
Shawn PitreTendences dans l’étude de la musique populaire
Philip Tagg07/12/03
Hebdige’s 1979 Subculture: The Meaning of Style is now considered a classic in
several disciplines. Associated with Cultural Studies and the Birmingham school,
Hebdige’s book has been widely read by popular music scholars, all manner of social
scientists, and fans of punk music and style alike. His work is basically a study of
working class youth in 1970s England juxtaposed to their parents’ generation as well as
immigrants from former or soon-to-be independent colonies, in particular Jamaicans.
Hebdige’s work was a result of the need to understand a growing number of visible
subcultures in Britain. In the following pages, I shall provide a summary of the work’s
main points and proceed to highlight its importance of as well as its shortcomings. I begin
with an initial examination of the academic, vocational and ideological currents that
constitute Cultural Studies.
One cannot fully grasp Hebdige’s ideas and arguments without at least a basic
understanding of the schools of thought in which he was educated. Cultural Studies, also
known as the Birmingham School, was conceived in a Britain emerging from the
industrial revolution. The School drew on a combination of anthropology, history, literary
criticism and theory, Marxism, media studies, semiotics, structuralism, as well as
sociology, especially the Chicago and Frankfurt Schools (Mattelart & Neveu, 9). The
Chicago School had its beginnings in the creation of the first department of sociology in
the U.S. at the University of Chicago in 1892. The scholars associated with the
department were primarily interested in urban social behavior, deviance, and subcultures.
Using the city of Chicago as their laboratory, they developed theories that drew upon
participant-observation and took both individuals and social groups to be products of both
2
their natural and social environments. The school came to dominate U.S. sociological
thought until WWII. The Frankfurt School “offered a refuge for the leftist intellectuals
during the years prior to Hitler’s takeover of Germany. It was the home of critical theory,
a complex blend of sophisticated Marxist thought, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary
speculation, and social research” (Barfield, 206). Scholars associated with the school
included Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse.
The Frankfurt School reacted against positivistic scientific approaches by drawing upon
Marx’s views of materialism and upon the critical philosophy of Kant.
The work of several scholars with common interests drawing from the particular
combination of disciplines mentioned above soon crystalized into what would become
Cultural Studies. The New Left Review, begun in 1960, became the forum in which their
ideas were most often articulated. Then, in 1964, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS) was founded at the University of Birmingham. The Centre’s areas of
research included popular cultures, media studies, urban subcultures, and ethnic and
sexual identity. The main goal of the Centre was to study cultural institutions and their
interaction with and interrelation to society and social change (Mattelart & Neveu, 5).
Thus the study of subcultures, ethnic groups and the question of race was intrinsic to
Cultural Studies, especially in the 1970s (i.e. Stuart Hall’s 1976 Resistance Through
Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain, to which Hebdige’s often refers in
Subculture). Their research was done mostly on western capitalist industrial societies in
Western Europe and North America, especially the U.S.
Postwar England had become a hotbed of immigration from former colonies. A
growing South Asian and West Indian minority was making its presence felt, especially
3
in urban centers. It was the general policy of the British government that individuals born
in a colony had the option of immigrating to Britain. Even after many colonies had been
given independence, those who were born in a country while it had colonial status were
given this option to immigrate. However, in practice, this presented no potential
demographic problem to England as many colonial citizens were simply too
economically disadvantaged to consider a move to such a faraway place as the British
Isles. On the other hand, beginning around the period of Indian and Pakistani
independence in 1949 and throughout the sixties, British industry began growing steadily
and this required an increased work force. By the time of Jamaican and Trini (this is an
emic adjective for Trinidad) independence in 1962, Britain was in need of labor. The
promise of jobs became the incentive for many Pakistanis and Jamaicans to immigrate.
This brought many changes to urban English society for various reasons, not the least of
which the collective fear, among the mostly homogeneous citizenry, of an incoming
workforce that was markedly different culturally from themselves.
It was also becoming increasingly difficult for the existing English working class
to subscribe to traditional colonial notions of supremacy over formerly colonized peoples
because these newly naturalized migrant workers were becoming an intrinsic part of the
British work force. However, paradoxically existing alongside this ethnocentrism and
racism, was a simultaneous fascination among large sections of the English population
for blacks and for West Indians in which an exoticization of the Other had been ascribed
in the early days of colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean (Erlmann, 108; Mattelart &
Neveu, 13). Indeed, it is one reviewer’s opinion that “what makes [Hebdige’s] study
important is the way it highlights the increasing vulnerability of the ‘West’ to ideological
4
currents once easily dismissed as distant illusions belonging to foreign lands and peoples”
(Bilby, 211). In short,
When Black Jamaicans displayed their distinctive music, clothing, gestures, etc on the street and
thereby took possession of a social space, white working-class youth were implicitly challenged to
forge an equally “dense” style of their own. The mediations of this style were complex, because it
embodied a fourfold signification: similarities and differences between white youth and blacks,
similarities and differences between youth and their parents (Delaney, 182).
At the same time, the British economy was showing signs of decline in the 1960s after
having been successfully reformed by the Labour party after WWII. Rising
unemployment also contributed to conflicts based on class and race. Several Cultural
Studies scholars such as Hebdige and Hall recognized a growing need to study these
phenomena in an objective manner. In Subculture, Hebdige approaches youth subcultures
as authentic bastions of counter-hegemony and resistance to the social injustices of the
working class world. Delaney interprets these youth subcultures “as a vehicle of
collective self-defense for working-class teenagers” (Delaney, 182). Hebdige thus
considers style to be the most semiotically impregnated domain of subcultures and the
arena, par excellence, for the negotiation of identity and power relations.
Early Cultural Studies scholars had specific agendas. Part of their ideological,
methodological, and theoretical motivation came from outside academia, that is, “a
tradition in adult education and vocational training whose basic philosophy was
egalitarian” (Tagg & Clarida, 89). Indeed beginning in 1946, part of the labor party’s
social agenda was to balance material wealth among, and even eliminate, classes in
Britain. For the underlying motivation and philosophy of, what Tagg calls, “cult stud[s]”
(Cultural Studies scholars), it is worth quoting him at length here:
5
To put it simply, if material wealth should be fairly distributed then so should access to culture
and education. […] The original democratic educational agenda of cultural studies [was] to help
empower the majority to understand, criticize and change their own conditions […] by making the
cultural treasures and aesthetic values of the privileged classes available to the populace at large
[as well as putting] the culture of the majority under the academic spotlight by documenting its
everyday practices and by focusing discussion of its functions on matters of survival, subversion,
resistance and opposition. (Tagg & Clarida, 89-93)
Before a closer look at Cultural Studies and how Hebdige’s book typifies this discipline,
as well as a critique of both book and discipline, I present the following summary.
Summary
The book is divided into two parts. The first includes chapters 1 through 4 and is
devoted to his particular use of terms such as culture, Cultural Studies, ideology,
hegemony, subculture, and style. The first part of the book also includes an historical
summary or chronological timeline of the postwar subcultural and musical styles of
hipsters, beats (beatniks), teds (teddy boys), mods, skinheads, rude boys, glam and glitter
rockers (especially David Bowie and Roxy Music fans), punks, and dreads (Rastafarians).
The second part of the book is a more in-depth examination of different facets of style,
especially punk subculture. In chapter 5, the author examines working-class subculture as
resistance and sources of style. In the following chapter, it’s the commodification,
defusion, and diffusion of style by the media that is explored. The rest of the book
Hebdige devotes to the concept of “style as”. That is to say, he engages into an inquiry
into style as intentional communication, bricolage, confrontation, homology (as
conceived by Lévi-Strauss), and art. He concludes the entire endeavor by attempting to
redefine the concept of subculture according to the information he has presented.
6
Hebdige introduces his work by citing Jean Genet, a French author who was
motivated by his experience in prison. Writing in the mid- to late sixties, Genet explored
“the status and meaning of revolt, the idea of style as a form of Refusal, [and] the
elevation of crime into art.” (Hebdige, 2). Hebdige believes that Genet’s insights and
explorations as a criminal are particularly relevant to subcultures, especially punk.
Through a metaphorical substitution, Hebdige equates Genet’s crimes (themselves a
revolt against norms, a refusal of the status quo) with punks’ “crime” of revolt against
and refusal of the socio-economic conditions they lived in. From the point of view of the
dominant society in 1970s England, such breaking of norms was considered socially
deviant, a social crime of sorts. And just like Genet, according to Hebdige, this “crime”
of refusal and revolt was committed through style (both material and musical in the case
of punks) as a weapon of choice, thereby elevating crime into art (Helb, see
bibliography).
Realizing that subculture cannot be understood without a clear conception of
culture, Hebdige demarcates the two basic definitions of culture in chapter 1. One
definition, taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, is equated with cultivation,
refinement and a standard of excellence. The other notion of culture is more generally
based on it being a “whole way of life”. Following T.S. Eliot and Barthes, Hebdige
subscribes to the more anthropologically-oriented “notion of culture [as extending]
beyond the library, the opera-house and the theatre to encompass the whole of everyday
life” permeated with its ideologies and mediations of power (Hebdige, 9). He also spends
a few pages discussing Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. For Hebdige, subcultures
represent a challenge to hegemony not through direct means, but rather “obliquely”
7
through style. He proceeds to write the basic thesis underlying his study of subculture and
style:
Style in subculture is, then, pregnant with significance. Its transformations go ‘against nature’,
interrupting the process of ‘normalization’. As such, they are gestures, movements towards a
speech which offends the ‘silent majority’, which challenges the principle of unity and cohesion,
which contradicts the myth of consensus. Our task becomes […] to discern the hidden messages
inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces of style, to trace them out as ‘maps of meaning’ which
obscurely re-present the very contradictions they are designed to resolve or conceal (Hebdige, 18).
The rest of the first part is an historical summary of subcultural styles culminating with
an analysis of punk style, to which Hebdige devotes the second part of his book.
The chapters 5 through 9 that constitute the second part are devoted to a more in-
depth examination of different facets of style, especially punk subculture. Thus, chapter 5
is a study of working-class subculture as resistance. It also includes a closer look at the
raw materials used as sources of style (Hebdige, 84). In chapter 6, Hebdige introduces his
notion of the way subcultures evolve. According to him, subcultures form out of their
replacement of one or several previous subcultures which disappear through a process
which includes commodification by the establishment and media and eventual
assimilation into the larger mainstream culture. This process is accomplished through a
combination of “the conversion of subcultural signs (dress, music, etc.) into mass-
produced objects (i.e. the commodity form)”, and “the ‘labeling’ and re-definition of
deviant behavior by dominant groups – the police, the media, the judiciary (i.e. the
ideological form)” (Hebdige, 94). Finally, chapters 7 through 9 are an exploration of the
semiotic potential of style by examining it as art, a bricolage of communication and
confrontation.
8
Critique
Hebdige’s pioneering work in subcultures was without a doubt sorely needed at
the time and place of its writing after such an influx of peoples from former colonies
immigrated to Britain. Immigration from Jamaica and Trinidad, for example, resulted in
major demographic shifts from the West Indies to England in the fifties and well into the
sixties even after these countries had gained independence in 1962. It should be pointed
out that, prior to work done by Hebdige and others such as Hall, subculture had been
defined as “a set of people with distinct behavior and beliefs within a larger culture”
(http://www.jahsonic.com/Subculture.html). One of Hebdige’s major contributions was
to demonstrate that, far from being indecipherable foreign entities, subcultures were
actually very similar to the parent or dominant cultures of which they were part, by virtue
of the fact subcultures were indeed a reworking of the larger cultures’ styles and values
(Hebdige, 76). By reconfiguring existing styles and values, youth subcultures in 1970s
Britain for example, resisted worsening socio-economic conditions by using these
appropriated styles and values against their parents’ generation and the parent culture of
which they were part. In other words, “subcultures cobble together (or hybridize) styles
out of the images and material culture available to them in the effort to construct
identities which will confer on them ‘relative autonomy’ within a social order fractured
by class, generational differences, work etc…” (During, 441). Simply put, subcultures
fight fire with fire. Other useful features of Hebdige’s study include his historical
summary of postwar styles, fads, and fashions in Britain. As well, his assessment that
expressive forms such as style are semiotically permeated with a plethora of cultural
information are now generally accepted as a truism.
9
However, Hebdige’s monograph has several shortcomings. The first of these is
that the title of the book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, suggests a certain breadth of
information to be presented in the book and so sets up a certain expectation on the part of
the reader. Indeed, there is nothing to explicitly negate this expectation throughout the
first part of the book. However, by the second part, one realizes that Hebdige deals
specifically with postwar youth-oriented subcultural styles within the confines of
England. Specifically, punk style as it occured in the mid- to late-seventies is given the
lion’s share of attention. At first glance, both the title and the school from which it was
produced (Birmingham Cultural Studies) would seem to imply a cross-cultural dimension
but such is not the case in Hebdige’s book. Needless to say, a different title might have
avoided this.
Some critiques of Hebdige’s study have also been articulated in Mattelart &
Neveu. According to them, the studies of Hebdige and other Cultural Studies scholars
treat subcultures as homogeneous entities in a fixed temporal and geographical
framework (Mattelart & Neveu, 25). This fixed view of culture can be detrimental
because it is a misrepresentation of the dynamic processes of change inherent to any
culture or subculture. Secondly, Hebdige implies that subcultures eventually and
effectively die of natural causes through their commodification by the media and
consequent incorporation into mainstream culture (Ibid). This structural approach is
indeed very rigid and does not acknowledge the complex nature of actual cultural
processes. It implies a negation of agency that contradicts Hebdige’s view of resistance to
hegemony.
10
A second problematic issue revolves around the dialectic between Hebdige’s view
of black and white culture. In his study, Hebdige states that “at the heart of punk
subculture, […] lies [a] frozen dialectic between black and white cultures” (Hebdige, 69-
70). Later, he affirms that
The subcultures introduced in the previous sections have till now been described as a series of
mediated responses to the presence in Britain of a sizeable black community. As we have seen, the
proximity of the two positions – white working-class youth and Negro – invites identification and
even when this identity is repressed or openly resisted, black cultural forms (e.g. music) continue
to exercise a major determining influence over the development of each subcultural style
(Hebdige, 73)
Finally in the last chapter he mentions that “much of this book has been based on the
assumption that the two positions ‘Negro’ and ‘white working-class youth’ can be
equated” (Hebdige, 131). He also makes passing reference specifically to short stints of
social and musical collaboration amongst black and white working-class youths
(Hebdige, 58). Historically, black and white collaborations in music have been frequent
throughout most of the twentieth century, especially in music. An example occurring
after Hebdige had written his book was the so-called “2-tone” sound of late seventies and
early eighties “third wave ska” movement. But while he uses the significant black and
West Indian population as a point of departure and acknowledges it as a major
contributor to postwar subcultural style, his study is surprisingly one-sided. This is not
only because he focuses predominantly on punk subculture and style, but because his
work lacks any comparable analysis of the blacks and West Indians to which these
subcultures and styles are a response. In this sense, it is as though he is perpetuating a
colonial mentality that continues to dismiss “ideological currents once easily dismissed as
11
distant illusions belonging to foreign lands and peoples” (Bilby, 211) by simply sweeping
West Indians under the rug so to speak.
According to Hebdige, subcultures are actually a reworking and reconfiguration
of their parent cultures. In addition, his all-too-brief references to black and West Indian
cultures seem to suggest that he considers these cultures to be transplanted parent cultures
within British society. If this is so, then Hebdige has completely forgone any exploration
of the punk subculture’s “parental” black/West Indian sources. This misrepresentation
begs the question of whether ethnic groups or minorities fit into Hebdige’s notion of what
constitutes either a parent culture or subculture. His almost complete omission of women
or gay/lesbian issues further narrows the potential and usefulness of his analyses.
Another potential obstacle in Hebdige’s work lies in the fact that readers must
have knowledge of concepts put forth by a series of authors in order to effectively grasp
his arguments. Some of these, Jean Genet and T.S. Eliot for example, are literary figures.
Gramsci was a political scientist and sociologist with revolutionary leanings who
developed the concept of hegemony. Lévi-Strauss was also a sociologist who also
pioneered structural anthropology and developed the concept of homology. Barthes was a
social and literary critic. Given the fact that Cultural Studies authors drew from many
different sources, it not surprising that the reader should be familiar with the work of
these figures and such a vast array disciplines. I have mentioned these already
(anthropology, history, literary criticism and theory, Marxism, media studies, semiotics,
structuralism, as well as sociology, the Chicago and Frankfurt schools). The plethora of
works in which the reader must be well-versed is not my complaint as such. In fact, I
welcome the educational opportunity this provides. My quarrel with cult studs lies within
12
what I believe to be a larger context of academic double standards and is part of a more
general critique of Cultural Studies that I would like to discuss.
My critique is actually twofold and parallels some issues discussed by Tagg &
Clarida: Hebdige’s study as well as many others that fall under the Cultural Studies rubric
typically engage in an overabundance of “metacontextual discourse” (Tagg & Clarida,
83), while completely omitting any discussion or treatment of music as text. When music
is referenced at all, it is done so only in passing. There is a prioritization among cult studs
of context over music as text. Music is treated as a given. According to the author, music
seems to be something that needs no examination because of its omnipresence in society.
There also seems to be the intrinsic assumption that the workings of music are so simple
and self-evident that it requires no attention. It suggests that Hebdige and cult studs in
general unconsciously consider music to be devoid of any interpretive or semiotic
potential. An examination of four articles published in the journal Cultural Studies further
demonstrates cult studs’ attitude toward music. Some titles include: “Funk Music as
Genre: Black Aesthetics, Apocalyptic Thinking and Urban Protest in Post-1965 African-
American Pop”, “Babylon’s ‘Natural Mystic’: The North American Music Industry, the
Legend of Bob Marley, and the Incorporation of Transnationalism”, “Globalization and
Trinidad Carnival: Diaspora, Hybridity and Identity in Global Culture”, and “’Becoming
Cajun’”. Although significant to our understanding of paramusical elements and contexts,
these articles are devoid of any analysis and discussion of the actual music intrinsic to the
subjects that are examined. Anthropologists of music, ethnomusicologists, popular music
scholars, and other musicologists have repeatedly demonstrated that any given musical
excerpt contains an abundance of cultural and semiotic information. It is thus surprising
13
and disappointing that an examination of subcultural styles and expressive forms should
devote so little effort in the analysis of the music that inevitably permeates all aspects of
these very styles, forms and subcultures.
From a musicological point of view, even a superficial examination of any
musical excerpt suggests several avenues of inquiry intrinsic to punk music and its 2-tone
cousin. It’s indeed a shame that neither Hebdige nor most cult studs explore these
extremely rich musical sources. To be sure, cult studs’ avoidance of analyses and
discussions of music as text have precedence. The political and social circumstances
under which both Cultural Studies and popular music studies came to be disciplines, as
well as the lack and quality of relevant literature on musics of the populace in existence
prior to 1980, are important factors (Tagg & Clarida, 80-3). The absolutist and elitist
ideologies, the “academic logocentrism and scopocentrism” endemic to our educational
system, and “the largely unchallenged notion that music belongs to the world of art or
entertainment, not to the realm of ‘real’ knowledge” (Tagg & Clarida, 83) are paramount.
But this does not forgive the “lack of reciprocity” that the omission of music implies
(Ibid).
This brings me back to my comments regarding the plethora of literature and
concepts one must readily be able to grasp while reading Cultural Studies. “To put it
simply, while we musos must be familiar with Bourdieu and ‘embeddedness’ in order to
communicate with cult-stud colleagues, very few of the latter make the effort to talk to us
musos in terms of presets or pentatonicism” (Ibid). Almost predictably, Cultural Studies
have suffered an identity crisis of sorts in recent years. Tagg & Clarida write that if
Cultural Studies
14
had to accommodate an expanding range of topics and approaches covered by an increasing
number of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds who identified different aspects of its
theory as potential ways of understanding different aspects of contemporary mass culture, then
what on earth was cultural studies? How could it identify itself and how could its followers
identify with it? It does not seem that cultural studies as an academic institution developed any
explicit strategy for solving the problem but rather that its acolytes, perhaps through fear of losing
a valued sense of intellectual community, felt obliged to find levels of discourse that could, at least
theoretically, be seen to unite a quite disparate range of ideas under the same umbrella. Thus, for
example, texts published in the late eighties and early nineties by popular music scholars of the
cultural studies persuasion tended to include disproportionate amounts of metatheory. All too
often those texts read more like a mantra of intellectually canonic terms and personalities to which
fellow acolytes could relate than honest attempts to demystify the complexity of music’s meanings
and uses in society (Tagg & Clarida, 88).
Conclusion
For all his insightful and pioneering observations on punk and postwar
subcultures in Britain, styles and their meanings, and paramusical contexts, Hebdige’s
work has some significant limitations. Some of these limitations can be justified given the
historical circumstances revolving around the institutionalization of Cultural Studies.
Since 1979 however, Subcultures has become a widely read classic in several disciplines,
most notably popular music studies. The reader must be advised however, that some of
the approaches and information presented (or lack thereof!) must be taken with a grain of
salt and contextualized historically.
15
Bibliography
Barfield, Thomas, ed. The Dictionary of Anthropology, 1996, Oxford: Blackwell.
Bilby, Kenneth. Review of Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style in New West Indian Guide, 57(3/4): 201-214 1983, Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague.
Brown, Matthew P. “Funk Music as Genre: Black Aesthetics, Apocalyptic Thinking and Urban Protest in Post-1965 African-American Pop”, Cultural Studies, 8(3): 484-508, 1994, London: Routledge.
Delaney, Paul. Review of Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style in Queen’s Quarterly, vol. 89, #1, Spring 1982, Kingston: Queen’s University.
During, Simon, ed. The Cultural Studies Reader. 2nd ed., 1999, New York: Routledge.
Erlmann, Veit. Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West, 1999, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hall, Stuart. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain, 1976, London: Routlegde.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979, London: Methuen.
Helb, Colin. “I Dub Thee Punk: Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: the Meaning of Style” (http://www.ifnor.com/papers/subculture.htm)
Mattelart, Armand & Neveu, Erik. ‘Cultural Studies Stories. La domestication d'une pensée sauvage?’ 1996, Paris: Réseaux no. 80.
Nurse, Keith. “Globalization and Trinidad Carnival: Diaspora, Hybridity and Identity in Global Culture”, Cultural Studies, 13(4): 661-90, 1999, London: Routlegde.
Stephens, Michelle A. “Babylon’s ‘Natural Mystic’: The North American Music Industry, the Legend of Bob Marley, and the Incorporation of Transnationalism”, Cultural Studies, 12(2): 139-67, 1998, London: Routlegde.
Stivale, Charles J. and “’Becoming Cajun’”, Cultural Studies, 14(2): 147-76, 2000, London: Routlegde.
Tagg, Philip & Bob Clarida. Ten Little Tunes, 2003, New York: The Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press, Inc.
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