Hebdige — Subculture

Author: Dick Hebdige
Title: Subculture: The Meaning of Style
Year: 1979
Type: Academic book (Methuen)

Subculture: The Meaning of Style is a book by Dick Hebdige, published by Methuen in London in 1979 in its New Accents series. It builds on the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ reading of postwar youth styles as “symbolic forms of resistance,” and it argues that subcultures challenge hegemony obliquely, through style, and that the mainstream recuperates each subculture by turning its signs into mass-produced commodities and by labeling and redefining its behavior as deviant. Its evidence is a set of case studies of punk, of reggae and Rastafarianism, of the teddy boys and the mods, and of the white youth cultures whose succession Hebdige reads as a series of adaptations to the Black presence in Britain, followed by a reading of style as bricolage, as homology and as signifying practice. Graeme Turner, in an introduction to British cultural studies, called it possibly the most influential use of subculture studies within that field. Angela McRobbie, in a feminist critique of the subculture studies, faulted Hebdige for ignoring the oppression of female punks.

Hebdige had taken an MA at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham.¹ Methuen published the book in London in 1979 in New Accents, a series edited by Terence Hawkes.²

In the chapter “The function of subculture” Hebdige describes how the Birmingham writers, using Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, interpreted the succession of youth cultural styles “as symbolic forms of resistance,” spectacular symptoms of a wider and largely submerged dissent across the postwar period.² Hebdige writes that “the challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them,” and that it is expressed obliquely, in style.² In his account the process of recuperation takes two forms: “the conversion of subcultural signs (dress, music, etc.) into mass-produced objects,” which he calls the commodity form, and “the ‘labelling’ and re-definition of deviant behaviour by dominant groups,” the police, the media and the judiciary, which he calls the ideological form.²

The first part of the book, “Some case studies,” opens on punk in the chapter “Holiday in the sun: Mister Rotten makes the grade,” whose section “Boredom in Babylon” carries an epigraph from the Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones. The chapter “Back to Africa” has sections on reggae and Rastafarianism and “Exodus: A double crossing,” and the next chapter has sections on hipsters, beats and teddy boys, on the style of the mods (“Home-grown cool”), on “White skins, black masks,” on glam and glitter rock, and on punks and white “ethnicity.”² There Hebdige writes that “the succession of white subcultural forms can be read as a series of deep-structural adaptations which symbolically accommodate or expunge the black presence from the host community.”² The second part, “A reading,” sets out the theory in chapters and sections on the function of subculture, on “Two forms of incorporation,” and on style as intentional communication, as bricolage, in revolt, as homology and as signifying practice.²

Graeme Turner, in British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (1990), called the book “possibly the most influential deployment of subculture studies” within the mainstream of cultural studies.³ In the historian Dennis Dworkin’s account, Angela McRobbie’s “Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique” (1980) found that the Birmingham subculture studies attended only to what happened on the streets, and McRobbie was particularly disappointed with Hebdige, who, despite his close reading of punk style, ignored the oppression of female punks as revealed in fashion and dance.⁴

Key contributions

• Subcultural style read as an oblique challenge to hegemony.
• Two forms of recuperation: the commodity form, which turns subcultural signs into mass-produced objects, and the ideological form, which labels and redefines subcultural behavior as deviant.
• Style read as bricolage, as homology and as signifying practice.
• The succession of white British youth cultures read as adaptations to the Black presence in Britain, alongside case studies of reggae and Rastafarianism.

See also

• The transatlantic feedback loop — music carried between Britain and the United States
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music