OUGD501 Research - Subculture - The Meaning of Style by Dick Hebdige
Punk Ideology
• 'punk aesthetic can be read in part as a white 'translation' of black 'ethnicity'
• Punk groups for instance, figured prominently in the rock against racism
• The clash and The slits in particular wove reggae slogans and themes into their material
• certain features were lifted directly from the West Indian rude and Rasta styles
• punk music, like every other aspect of punk, tended to develop in direct antithesis to its apparent sources
• punk launched frontal assaults on the established meaning systems
• rigid demarcation of the line between punk rock and reggae is symptomatic not only of an 'identity crisis'
• indirectly influenced by the subcultural styles of the black immigrant community...in order to find a music which reflected more adequately their sense of frustration and oppression
• objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in the punks' ensembles...which offered self-conscious commentaries on the notions of modernity and taste p.107
• reflected the tendency towards wilful desecration and the voluntary assumption of outcast status which characterised the whole punk movement
(info on aesthetic of publication p.111-p112)
• Sniffiin Glue (highest circulation) the definitive statement of punk's do-it-yourself philosophy e.g 'Here's one chord, here's two more, now form your own band'.
Subcultural Theory
(clothes)
• barthes - 'the signification of the image is certainly intentional...the advertising image is clear, or at least emphatic'
• expressive of 'normality' as opposed to 'deviance'
• (intentional communication and visible constriction) distinguishes the visual ensembles of spectacular subcultures. They display their own codes(punks ripped t-shirts)
• they have been thought about rather than thrown together
• goes against the mainstream - according to barthes, is a tendency to masquerade as nature, to substitute 'normalised' for historical forms, to translate the reality of the world into an image of the world which in turn presents itself as if composed according to 'the evident laws of the natural order' (Barthes, 1972)
• ensembles are 'obviously fabricated'
• could provide an attractive alternative the drudgery of manual labour, office work or a youth on the dole
• made to reflect, express and resonate...aspects of group life
• punk culture signified chaos, hebdige argues that it was 'extremely orderly,' explaining this paradox with the concept of homology.
• punk subculture grew up partly as an antithetical response to the re-emergence of racism in the mid-70s
• the key to punk style remains elusive
• punk 'escape the principle of identity'
• refusal to cohere around a readily identifiable set of central values. `it cohered, instead, elliptically through a chain of conspicuous absences.
• deliberately used to signify working-classness
