Youth & Subculture Summary

Youth Culture:
- Sexuality and Gender
- Class, Gender, Race
- Popular Music
- Example: Jamaican Dancehall

2016 Nobel Prize for Literature: Bob Dylan
- Tim Parks: Art is not about attachment to form.
- Geographical and linguistic division: Dylan's greatness is evident in English-speaking countries.
- Paradox: Dylan is known worldwide but not understood, due to the cultural setting.
Dylan in syllabus
- Dylan entered syllabi in English departments in US ca. 1970.
- literary analysis, close reading of his lyrics alongside Whitman and Ginsberg.
- Dylan as bridging gap between high and low culture
- songs as part of political culture (Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War protests)
- Dylan’s is the most carefully studied body of work in all of American popular music” (Dettmar)

Birmingham Centre: youth culture was ‘their’ culture
Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, Resistance Through Rituals (1976)
- youth as a social category – class, race, gender
- space, style, taste, media, consumption, resistance

youth as age: start/end?
- biological or cultural reasons for transitional period (childhood to adulthood)?
- youth: age of trouble (gangs etc.) and/or fun (fashion etc.)
Subculture
- subculture as binary opposite of dominant culture (hegemonic, inauthentic, normal, average, mass-produced, mainstream)
- subculture: resistant, deviant, collective, ‘other’
- rejection of middle-class values (work, success, money, leisure)

Dick Hebdige, Subculture (1979) (Birmingham Centre)
- contrast to Resistance Through Rituals (based on class structures) examination of style as autonomous play of signifiers
- style as group identity
- ‘noise’: Punk as interference in social order
- Punk as favored example: not only answer to joblessness etc., but appropriation of media, spectacular dramatization of anger, ironic recycling of language, fashion etc.

Critique of youth culture studies: girls being ignored in research (blind spots, generalization)
Paul Willis, Learning to Labour (1977)
- ethnographic fieldwork with twelve working-class British male students
- counter-school culture plays a vital role in leading working-class students into subordinate, low-wage labor positions in adult life
Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (1991) (Birmingham Centre)
- girls’ consumption of magazines, romances, fashion
- consumption is active and creative, invention of bricolage of fashion style e.g.
- also productive role of fantasy  self-confident sexuality
Riot Grrrls
- 1990s, desire to address sexism in punk music
- zines (self published fanzines via photocopier): discussing taboo subjects (rape, incest, eating disorders)
Teddy Boys: black R&B and aristocratic Edwardian (“Teddy”) style, involved in attacks on West Indians
1970s punk bands e.g. The Clash incorporated reggae as part of their resistant attitude against British authority
Reggae
- resistance to white culture and racial subordination
- hair: afro and dreadlock styles as natural black hair styles (not ‘cultivated’ i.e. straightened) – symbolic link with Africa – suggests anti-colonialism, anti-racism
Marley: “first truly global pop star”
- platform Marley occupied as the first truly global pop star was created not only by the protest music of Bob Dylan and the Beatles

global market of Reggae also includes and exports the massive homophobic politics of Jamaica
Jamaican Dancehall
- Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that originated in the late 1970s
- the shift away from the more internationally oriented roots reggae towards a style geared more towards local consumption
- lyrics about dancing, violence and sexuality
Mista Majah P known as The Maverick/King of Tolerance