Subculture: The Meaning of Style
Subculture: The Meaning of Style
`Hebdige`s Subculture: The Meaning of Style is so important: complex and remarkably lucid, it`s the first book dealing with punk to offer intellectual content. Hebdige […] is concerned with the UK`s postwar, music-centred, white working-class subcultures, from teddy boys to mods and rockers to skinheads and punks.` - Rolling Stone
With enviable precision and wit Hebdige has addressed himself to a complex topic - the meanings behind the fashionable exteriors of working-class youth subcultures - approaching them with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus that combines semiotics, the sociology of devience and Marxism and come up with a very stimulating short book - Time Out
This book is an attempt to subject the various youth-protest movements of Britain in the last 15 years to the sort of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic analytical techniques propagated by, above all, Roland Barthes. The book is recommended whole-heartedly to anyone who would like fresh ideas about some of the most stimulating music of the rock era - The New York Times
Contents:
Introduction: Subculture and Style
ONE
From Culture to Hegemony
PART ONE: SOME CASE STUDIES
TWO
Holiday in the Sun: Mister Rotten Makes the Grade
Boredom in Babylon
THREE
Back to Africa
The Rastafarian
Solution
Reggae and Rastafarianism
Exodus: A Double Crossing
FOUR
Hipsters, Beats and Teddy Boys
Home-grown Cool: The Style of the Mods
White Skins, Black Masks
Glam and Glitter Rock: Albino Camp and Other Diversions
Bleached Roots: Punks and White
"Ethnicity"
PART TWO: A READING
FIVE
The Function of Subculture
Specificity: Two Types of Teddy Boy
The Sources of Style
The Sources of Style
SIX
Subculture: The Unnatural Break
Two Forms of Incorporation
SEVEN
Style as Intentional Communication
Style as bricolage
Style in Revolt: Revolting Style
EIGHT
Style as Homology
Style as Signifying Practice
NINE
O.K., it`s Culture, but is it Art?
Conclusion