Subcultures: Popular Culture and Cultural Capital
To What extent are subcultures such as Goth, Dance or Hip Hop, types of consumption of media popular culture, rather than styles of resistance?
One problem in analysing a type of youth culture is measuring the extent to witch it is a response to a culture deliberately manufactured for marketing and consumption of cultural products. I would say to some extent all subcultures consume part of popular culture, but it does vary from which culture a person is apart of, E.G you can look at the Goth type of culture and think it not to be very commercialised at all. But I would argue differently, because Goth is one of the most commercialised types of culture in the world. The Director Tim Burton makes huge blockbuster films that have been filmed in a gothic style. So why is Goth not popular culture? The Hip Hop culture was discovered in 1970 's America, It involved a very unique form of dancing called break dancing, and was based on the genre of music called Hip Hop. Most people would argue that Hip Hop became commercial when the Sugar Hill Gang released a single called Rappers Delight, but I would argue that the Hip Hop style of clothing consisted of high street clothing, which in a way made the subculture commercial even when it was deemed not to be. My argument is that all of the subcultures we have are commercial but within the subcultures there is a sense of resistance towards commercialisation.
The types of subcultures in Britain today are vast in quantity. You can look around on a busy weekend shopping and see lots of different styles of clothing, and lots of different tastes of music and attitudes towards life in one city. Subculture can be dated back to the 1950 's, where people were first frightened of the Teddy boy look. The public then became swamped with what they thought were bizarre street styles. There came the Mods and Rockers in the 1960 's, then in the 1970 's came the skinheads and punks. These sub cultural groups were a product of a modern global
One problem in analysing a type of youth culture is measuring the extent to witch it is a response to a culture deliberately manufactured for marketing and consumption of cultural products. I would say to some extent all subcultures consume part of popular culture, but it does vary from which culture a person is apart of, E.G you can look at the Goth type of culture and think it not to be very commercialised at all. But I would argue differently, because Goth is one of the most commercialised types of culture in the world. The Director Tim Burton makes huge blockbuster films that have been filmed in a gothic style. So why is Goth not popular culture? The Hip Hop culture was discovered in 1970 's America, It involved a very unique form of dancing called break dancing, and was based on the genre of music called Hip Hop. Most people would argue that Hip Hop became commercial when the Sugar Hill Gang released a single called Rappers Delight, but I would argue that the Hip Hop style of clothing consisted of high street clothing, which in a way made the subculture commercial even when it was deemed not to be. My argument is that all of the subcultures we have are commercial but within the subcultures there is a sense of resistance towards commercialisation.
The types of subcultures in Britain today are vast in quantity. You can look around on a busy weekend shopping and see lots of different styles of clothing, and lots of different tastes of music and attitudes towards life in one city. Subculture can be dated back to the 1950 's, where people were first frightened of the Teddy boy look. The public then became swamped with what they thought were bizarre street styles. There came the Mods and Rockers in the 1960 's, then in the 1970 's came the skinheads and punks. These sub cultural groups were a product of a modern global
Bibliography: Brake, M. (1980), ‘The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures ' ‘The Concept of Culture ' London, Routledge pp7 Brake, M. (1980), ‘The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures ' ‘Subcultures, manufactured culture and the economy. Some considerations of the future ' London, Routledge pp158 Garnham, Nicholas and Williams, Raymond (1986) ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Culture ', in R. Collins et al. (eds) Media Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, London: Sage