Once it was just Mods and Rockers or Hippies and
Skinheads. Now we have Riot Grrls and Rappers; Modern
Primitives and Metalheads; Goths, Clubcultures and
Fetishists; Urban Tribes, New Age Travellers and
Internet fan groups. In a global society with a rapid
proliferation of images, fashions and lifestyles, it is
-unsurprisingly - becoming increasingly difficult to
pinpoint what 'subculture actually means.
Enthusiastically adopted by the media and academia,
subculture may be a convenient way to describe more
unconventional aspects of youth culture, but it does
little to help us comprehend the diverse range of youth
groups in todays so-called postmodern world. How can we
begin to rethink, reformulate and replace outdated
notions of subcultures to make them applicable to the
experiences of youth in the twenty-first century? And to
what extent does this involve the challenging of past
orthodoxies about spectacular subcultural styles?From
Seattle anarchist punks to UK Asian underground music,
Canadian female X-Files fans to Australian dance
cultures, this groundbreaking book draws on a wide
variety of international case studies to investigate the
new relationships among youth subcultural music,
politics and taste. Is it possible to work within the
existing limitations of subculture, or has the concept
exhausted its usefulness? Can attempts at
re-conceptualization, such as neo-tribes, sub-streams
and micro-networks, adequately capture the experience of
fragmentation, flux and fluidity that is central to
contemporary youth culture? This timely book is the
first to challenge and reconsider the use of subculture.
In doing so, it questions the possibility and relevance
of what might be termed post-subcultural studies and
helps to chart the emergence of a new paradigm for the
study of youth subculture. |
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