Youth Subculture

Subcultures are seen as groups which have traditionally occupied an underground or marginal status in society. Subculture can be identified as a set of cultural arrays of behaviour conceded by a segment of the population in one country. This paper seeks to answer the question of whether subculture is relevant to understanding the youth in contemporary British Society. It will look at two theoretical studies around the youth subculture and how they were perceived and their criticism. In an attempt to answer the question, this will look back in time where subculture as a concept was first envisaged and how it was presented and if it was relevant to understanding youth then and use that to access how youth subculture is perceived in contemporary
According to post subculture theories, the CCCS studies are either outdated to the current postmodern condition of social life. They argue that CCCS perspective are too structural, static and modernist, whereas contemporary youth inhabit social worlds that are more complex, constantly shifting and flexible. According to post subculture theories, CCCS neglects the other important elements of life, such as age, gender and ethnicity and solely rely on the role of social class, or see it as the most important determinant in the creation of subcultures and the form they take (Blackman, 2005; Mueller,
In the 1960’s and 70’s, the article about Cohen’s folks devils and moral panic marked the emergence of a new and highly influential approach to youth and their behaviours in society, which was then referred to as youth subculture. The concept of subculture is important for people to understand the social lives of young people and what kind of message they want to convey in society and how they want to be understood. Over time, these subcultures acquired names and identities such as punks, skinheads, Goths and hipsters. They had a particular way of addressing the ideology the group go with and each member of the group had to stick to this ideology and style. This group of subculture helped to illustrate the many ways in which young people can be observed and understood in society. It was argued that structures of society such as social class inequality and power within this structure aided young people to negotiate and augment their own distinctive way to face those structures through symbolic of the group or ideology that the group shared within