Subculture and Style COP

Lecture 5 - Subculture and Style

Helen Clarke – 15/11/2012

Definition of Subculture:

-       in sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture (whether distinct or hidden) which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong

this lecture will look at:

-       skateboarding/parkour and free running/graffiti as a performance of the city

-       the riot grrrl movement as a feminine and feminist subculture

-       the portrayal of youth subculture in film and photography

Dogtown and z boys (2001)

Skater Peggy Oki

Ian Borden ‘Performing the City’

Urban street skating is more political than 1970s skateboarding use of found terrains: street skating generates new uses that at once work within (in time and space) and negate the original ones

Lords of Dogtown (2005)

“Skateboarders do not so much temporarily escape from the routinized world of school family and social conventions as replace it with a whole new way of life” (Borden 2001)

Parkour – a method of movement focused on moving around obstacles with speed and efficience

Free running – a form of urban acrobatics in which participants knows as free runners use the city and rural landscape to perform movements through its structures

Yamakasi (2001)

Jump London (2005)

Nancy Mcdonald The gradditi subculture

On the street real life and the issues which may divide and incluence it, are put on pause. On this liminal terrain you are not black, white rich or poor. Unless you are female ‘you are what you write’

Your graffiti speaks for you,you are not bound by your identiy

A freak can be a king, you could be four foot tall with four eyes, buch teeth and a lump but if you rocked lines and produced fresh cars, you were king “prime” Graphotism, Magazine 3.

Black graffiti write prime says:

I mean I’ve met people that I would never have met, people like skinheads who are blatently racist or whatever. I can see it in them and they know we know, but when you’re dealing on a graffiti level, everything’s cool and I go yard with them, they’d come round my house, I’d give them dinner or something.

Miss Van

Mcdonald suggested that women come to the subculture laden with the baggage of gender in that her physicality (her looks) and her sexuality will be commented on critically in a way that male writes to not experience

Swoon (US)

“In the meantime there was a lot of attention coming my way for being female, and it just made me feel alienated and objectified, not to mention patronized. ‘Look at what girls can do – aren’t they cute?’ To hell with that shit. I don’t want it.”

Angela Mc Robbie and Jenny Garber

Girl subcultures may have become more invisible because the very term ‘subculture’ has acquired such strong masculine overtones (1977)

The authors choose to look at where girls do appear historically in subcultures and to see if these appearances indicate that cultural subordination is retained

Motorbike girl

Brigitte Bardot 1960’s

Suggests sexual deviance which is a fantasy not reflective of most conventional real life femininity at the time

Hells Angels

In rocker and motorbike culture girl usually rode pillion

Wills 1978: girls did not enter the camaraderie competition and knowledge of the machine

In this subculture women were either girlfriend of… or ‘mama’ figure.

Mod girl

Mod culture springs from working class teenage consumerism in the 1960’s in the UK

Teenage girls worked in cities in service industries for example, or in clothing shops where they are encouraged to model the boutique clothing

This meant they had money for socializing and mod rallies

Quadrophenia (1979)

Hebdige outlines the hierarchies within the mod subculture where “the ‘faces’ or ‘stylists’ who made up the original coterie were defined against the unimaginative majority… who were accused or trivializing the mod style”

Hippy girl

Subculture arises through universities of the late 60’s and early 70s

Middle class girl therefore has the space to explore subculture for longer before family etc.

Space for leisure without work: encourages ‘persona expression’

‘Bad’ hippy – Janis Joplin

‘good’ hippy – peace and ‘flower power’

Overdose of herioin and alcohol in 1970 . Joplin is used as a figure who represents a warning against overindulgence in subculture.

However Mc Robbie and Garber point out that this remains the decade in which feminism is born.

Riot Grrrl – mid 1990’s onwards

Underground punk movement based in Washington DC, Olympia, Portland, Oregon and the greater Pacific Northwest

Bands

Bikini kill,Bratmobil, Excuse 17, Heavens to Betsy, Fifth Column, Calamity Jane, Huggy Bear, Adickdid, Emily’s Sassy Lime, The Frumpies, The Butchies, Sleater – Kinney, Bangs and also queercore like Team Dresch

Riot Grrl???

Mount pleasant Race Riots in 1991

Bratmobile member Jen Smith (later of Rastro and the Quails), reacted to the violence by prophetically writing in a letter to Allison Wolfe: “This summers going to be a girl riot”.

What makes this a true subculture

Zines revived from 1970’s DIY punk ethic

In turn this was influenced by posters and graphic design from the Dadaists in the 1920s/30’s

Women self publishing their own music

Raoul Hausmann – Dada

ABCD self portrait (1923-24)

“Like the author of the surrealist college typically juxtaposes two apparently incompatible realities” (Hebdige 1979)

Media attention turns to Grunge scene

Courtney Love and Hole

Style without the subculture

Distorts even further as the 90’s continue into the more media friendly Spice Girls use of phrase “girl power”.

Spice Girls

Band styling presents set of visual ‘types’ that are easily consumable by the target audience

There is no empowerment for young women as there is nothing but the reduction of young women to cartoon representations.

Dick Hebdige Subculture: the meaning of style

“subcultures represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media”

Offence cause by lyrics and behavior is important as it leads to questions about ‘the parent culture’

Hebdige looks at the punk subculture of 1970’s Britain and stresses the importance of subculture in the visual world.

Youth subculture separate from the way it is represented on TV, by record companies, in marketing.

Live music experience is the phenomena, the youth groups are the lived experience

The commodity form

Subculture signs like dress styles and music are turned into mass produced object

Eg. clothing which is ripped as an anarchic anti fashion statement becomes mass produced with rips as part of the design.

Although punk seems to challenge eventually and surprisingly quickly it goes mainstream/ high end and is turned into “To shock chic” which marks the end of the movement as a subculture

21^st century demonization

“style in particular provokes a double response (in the media) it is alternately celebrated (in the fashion page) and ridiculed or reviled (in those articles which define subcultures as social problems”

Roger Mayne (1956)

Teddy boy culture was an escape from the claustrophobia of the family, into the street and ‘caff’. While many girls might adopt the approptiate way of dressing, they would be much less likely to spend the same amount of time hanging about on the streets. Girls had to be careful not to ‘get into trouble’. (Mc Robbie Garber)

This is England (2006) Shane Meadows

The new kid on the estate transforms into a British Skin

His dad has been killed in the Falklands War and his new friends become a surrogate family

The film explores the difference between the skinhead style and the politics of the National Front skins as they infiltrate the working class estate in the UK in the 1980’s